YMMV / Doctor Who S17 E1 "Destiny of the Daleks"

• Accidental Innuendo: "I want to get a closer look at that body."
• Badass Decay: The Daleks get hit hard with this in this story, which with the possible exception of the scene where the Daleks exterminate prisoners one by one to try and get the Doctor to surrender, goes out of its way to demonstrate them as not being a serious threat, almost to the point where it comes across as a Stealth Parody that's actively trying to play into the stereotypes about how ungainly and unthreatening the Daleks should be. Between this and their increasingly taking a backseat to Davros, the Daleks' reputation would arguably never recover for the rest of the Classic Era, taking until the 2005 relaunch to make them an undoubtedly serious threat again.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: Zig-zagged with Romana's regeneration. It's obviously significant since it introduces Romana II, but the way it happens, with her seemingly choosing to swap between multiple bodies at will with no fatigue or side effects, is very different from what the show had established about regeneration to that time and still has yet to be directly addressed onscreen. It's also played for laughs and has no real bearing on the story. However, the revived version of the show would later establish that Time Lords can discharge regeneration energy at will, so there is at least the potential for an in-universe explanation (along with massive Fanfic Fuel).
  • There's also a strong hint at the Classic Doctor's speculated asexuality as the Doctor looks terrified at the overtly sexual Lee Richards Romana.
• Fashion-Victim Villain: The Movellans' sparkly silver dreadlocks can make them hard to take seriously as a dangerous race of androids.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The Doctor mocks the Daleks about not climbing up after them, which would bite him back in the ass nine years and three regenerations later.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The Fourth Doctor criticizing Romana for using someone else's face becomes funnier when the Sixth and Twelfth Doctors adopted Maxil's and Caecilius' faces respectively.
  • Romana already starts out looking like Lalla Ward before going through various other appearances, before returning back to her Lalla Ward appearance. Later on, the same thing would end up happening with the Doctor, as the Fourteenth Doctor would end up looking like the Tenth Doctor.
• Memetic Mutation: The Fourth Doctor's lines "Oh, look, rocks!" and "Spack off!" are probably the ones best remembered from this story, along with his taunting a Dalek for not being able to fly up after him.
• Narm: The whole serial is rife with it, much of it resulting from the immense quantities of Special Effects Failure. One instance of narm not caused by the shoddy effects comes from a moment where the Doctor offers Davros a jelly baby, to which the fascist raisin responds by slapping the bag out of the Doctor's hand. For whatever reason, the sound engineer decided to play the sound effect of the door to Davros' room opening— which sounds like a deep boom— right after that moment, leading many a viewer to misinterpret the sound as the bag of jelly babies dramatically hitting the floor. What was intended as a one-off gag accidentally becomes an inappropriately bombastic bit even by Who standards.
  • And then there's the incredibly stiff acting from the two prisoners who get exterminated to make The Doctor surrender.
• Replacement Scrappy: David Gooderson as Davros doesn't come close to capturing the magic of Michael Wisher's performance. To be fair, he is not helped by the bland lines he's given and being stuck wearing Wisher's Davros mask, which fits Gooderson about as well as a corset on an elephant; he was cast too late in production for the staff to make a new mask specifically for him. He manages to do a better received job when reprising the role several decades later for a tie-in webcast, though, since he was dubbing over a double who actually fitted into the costume.
• Signature Scene: The opening scene, in which Romana chooses her new regeneration’s appearence, is more famous than anything that happens in the main plot.
• Special Effects Failure:
  • The Dalek costumes were unsuited to the BBC Quarry set, and so cheap, lightweight fibreglass shells without bumpers were made for the actors to 'walk' across in. This had the benefit of allowing the series to use more than three convincing-looking Dalek props on screen for the first time ever, but the effect is ruined by the wobbly walking gait. The actual Dalek props had been kept in storage for years and treated very poorly— they all have dented gunsticks, one Dalek has a split hemisphere on its side (revealing it to just be thin plastic) and some have noticeable bits of gaffer tape holding them together. The cheap suicide Daleks were made with Off Model flat back parts to save money and should not have been shot from the front, but were, for really long times. On top of this, Davros was recast and the mask from "Genesis of the Daleks" (a very good effect in that story) obviously doesn't fit him, bulging horribly when he moves his face to talk and visibly coming off in some shots. Dalek enthusiast and voice actor Nicholas Briggs cited it as his personal low point for the Daleks.
  • The most tragic part is that, to make the moulds for the hollow props, they cut up the last remaining original Dalek prop from 1963. This had the additional effect of requiring a replacement skirt to be sourced, resulting in the infamous "oddball" Dalek which they found at an exhibition, whose lower half was completely the wrong shape. It reappeared in "Resurrection of the Daleks" as the Dalek Supreme, who tended not to move very much and to only be filmed from the shoulders up.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Considering the story revolves around two logical-thinking robotic races locked in combat, the Cybermen could have easily filled the role that the Movellans do in the story, giving us a Cybermen vs Daleks storyline years before one would occur in the Revival series.
• Unexpected Character: Davros returns, despite seemingly being killed in his first appearance (his final scene in "Genesis of the Daleks" was shot with a light on his chair blinking to indicate that he had survived, but this part was ultimately cut from the serial).
• Visual Effects of Awesome: Say what you will about the plot and props, but the laser beams are well ahead of 1979 for being usually accurate as to where the gun is pointing and a general improvement in style from the first light blue ray of "Genesis of the Daleks".

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