YMMV / Doctor Who S13 E1 "Terror of the Zygons"

• Ensemble Dark Horse: This was the only serial in the classic series to feature the Zygons, yet they have remained one of the series' most popular villains with fans, with David Tennant even calling them as his favourite out of all the villains. They later returned in the 50th anniversary special and in Series 9 during the revival.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The Scotland setting and the Doctor wearing Scottish garb became this when four future Doctors were Scottish.
  • The Brigadier is on the phone to a female Prime Minister. Four years before Margaret Thatcher was elected. This, of course, feeds into the UNIT dating controversy, as the Brigadier was later said to have retired from UNIT in 1976, three years before the election of the UK's first female Prime Minister.
• Narm: The scene where Broton kills a UNIT soldier is particularly laughable, since he barely touches him. Apparently, the script emphasized that Zygons have poisonous stingers in their fingers, but this isn't mentioned in the actual serial. Author Stephen Cole, in the foreword to his book Sting of the Zygons, refers to this incident as the "soldier shake" and muses on whether his book (or the serial, one) should've actually been called Shoulder Massage of the Zygons.
• Special Effects Failure: The Skarasen is so bad that the director made a point of avoiding showing it except when absolutely unavoidable. (It doesn't help.)
• Values Resonance: The Doctor's speech in the first episode about how it doesn't make sense for mankind to be dependant on a "mineral slime" struck a chord with viewers in the mid-late 2000s, when there were increasingly dire predictions of socio-economic disaster that would be caused when Peak Oil was hit, before the widespread adoption of hydraulic fracturing put the issue on the back burner for a little while longer.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The Zygon masters are among THE most striking, convincing and memorable aliens ever seen in the classic series, which went a long way towards their Ensemble Dark Horse status.

---