YMMV / Doctor Who 2007 CS "Voyage of the Damned"

• Awesome Music: "The Stowaway," with its orchestral folk flavour and smooth, strong vocal, has a full-blooded Christmas jollity.
• Base-Breaking Character: Many fans dislike Rickston because he's a smug jackass and one of two survivors who lasts to the end, along with being a Karma Houdini. Among others, though, he's the only tolerable character in the group, who at least snarks at the intolerable ones and gets a few Jerkass Has a Point moments. It doesn't hurt that upon close examination, he doesn't make the situation worse for anyone, or that the conclusion to his story arc (or more specifically the Doctor's reaction to his survival) nods towards where the Doctor will be going in about a season's time. (Or, indeed, two episodes' time.)
• Complete Monster: Max Capricorn is a businessman who founded a space cruiseliner company. When his own board of directors votes him out of the company, he attempts to frame them for genocide. Bribing the terminally ill captain of one of the cruise liners to lower shields and allow the ship to be critically damaged by a meteor storm, he causes the deaths of most of the two thousand crew and passengers, with Capricorn reprogramming the ship's robot servants to wipe out any survivors. Capricorn's plan is to have the ship crash into Earth, where the explosion of its engines will wipe out the entire population. The board will be blamed and Capricorn can retire quietly with money he has hidden away. To top it all off he ensures he himself is hidden aboard the ship, so he can watch as his plan comes into fruition. Possessing perhaps the pettiest reasons to commit mass murder in entire franchise, the Doctor rightfully views Capricorn with the disgust and contempt he deserves.
• Faux Symbolism: The Doctor gets carried upwards by the Heavenly Hosts, which are designed to look like biblical angels. This scene has been openly criticized by some religious authorities, but there are also people encouraging teachers to use it as an example of resurrection imagery in Religious Studies classes.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Near the end of the episode, Mr. Copper notes that if the Doctor could have chosen any one person to survive it would not have been Rickston Slade, but he also points out to the Doctor that if he could choose who lives and who dies, "that would make you a monster." Fast forward to "The Waters of Mars" and this observation proves heartbreakingly accurate when the Doctor's defying a Fixed Point in Time very quickly leads to him getting Drunk On Power; Mr. Copper was right to be wary of an all-powerful Doctor.
  • Even sooner than that, just two episodes later in "The Fires of Pompeii", the Doctor will initially refuse to save anyone in Pompeii from their predetermined fate, eventually leave in the TARDIS as the volcano erupts, then go back, save the one family he got to know and leave everyone else to their fate, very much choosing who lives and who dies. He really didn't listen to that warning at all...
    • It gets worse as Word of God states that Forbisher is a descendant of Caecilus, and Forbisher committing murder suicide with and his family is time reasserting itself.
  • Astrid's fate, being "killed" before being transformed into a likely immortal being roaming the stars, has been called unintended foreshadowing of the fates of later companions Clara Oswald and Bill Potts, both of whom die, are revived in a new form, and then go on to roam the universe; both also express a desire to see the stars much like Astrid does.
  • This also won't be the last time a teleportation machine is shown to be capable of recreating a deceased person the way they entered it, with tragic consequences.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • At one point, Midshipman Frame ends up trapped on the bridge, the only thing between him and killer robots being a door, not to mention the faulty power system the ship is running on. Sound familiar?
  • The Doctor gets a thanks from Queen Elizabeth for saving Buckingham Palace. The next Doctor would play her husband, Prince Phillip, the Duke of Edinburgh in The Crown.
• Jerks Are Worse Than Villains: Rickston Slade gets quite a lot of hate from the audience, even moreso than Capricorn who is a Complete Monster and the instigator of the disaster. Rickston's worst crimes are outright refusing to help other survivors — particularly Morvin and Foon — even in a minor capacity, on top of being extremely rude to them and disrespectful of the recently-deceased; compared to the charmingly slimy and witty Max Capricorn's plans to commit mass murder at best, planet-wide genocide at worst all for petty reasons.
• Just Here for Godzilla: The main reason it became the most watched Doctor Who episode since the show's revival is Kylie Minogue fans watching it just for her appearance in the episode.
• Narm: Every character who falls to their death does so while staring straight up and reaching out.

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