YMMV / Doctor Who S11 E3 "Death to the Daleks"

• Awesome Music: As the pyramidal city looms above the sunlit wastes, the gently lilting score has an ominously serene awe. The recurrent bwwwoongg is the icing on the cake. The softly booming Exxilon chanting has an eerie, Gregorian exoticism.
• Badass Decay: If you ever feel like the Daleks are too intimidating for you, watch this serial to cheer yourself up; with the possible exception of "Destiny of the Daleks", which goes out of its way to ridicule them, it is easily their most humiliating moment in the entire series.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The Third Doctor's comment to a Dalek, demanding to know "How does it feel?" to be deprived of the power to kill, becomes this in light of the episode "Dalek", in which the Ninth Doctor repeats the sentiment in a much darker context.
  Nine: (voice dripping with malicious satisfaction) Fantastic! Oh, fantastic! Powerless! Look at you. The great space dustbin. How does it feel?!
• Narm:
  • The story is set on a planet where a mysterious city drains all electric power. The story's composer Carey Blyton decided to reflect this in his incidental music by only using acoustic instruments. Sounds like a good idea, but the resulting wind-instrument fanfare that accompanies the first appearance of the Daleks at the cliffhanger of episode 1 turns it into a moment of completely unintended comedy.
  • Two of the story's cliffhangers suffer badly from timing issues. Part 1 ends on a supposedly tense scene of the Daleks opening fire, but it goes on just long enough that the audience will figure out that its weapon isn't working (which is confirmed at the start of Part 2). More infamously, Part 3 ends with the Doctor and Belal making their way through the Exillon city when... Oh no! Stop! It's a bit of floor with a pretty pattern on it! This one was meant to end on a different scene entirely.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Many fans seem to agree that the story would have worked better had the Daleks not been involved, probably in no small part because they actually weren't involved in Terry Nation's first draft, which only had the Exxilons as the villains.
• Values Dissonance: Back when Ancient Astronauts was in style, the Doctor says that "no primitive man could possibly have built such a structure" as the Peruvian temples. These were the "primitives" who developed everything from terraced farming to brain surgery, let alone stone-working and architecture.
• Visual Effects of Awesome:
  • The trippy scene in which the city messes with the Doctor's hair.
  • The city collapsing is haunting.

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