YMMV / Doctor Who S21 E4 "Resurrection of the Daleks"

• Awesome Music: Malcolm Clarke's score; the creeping, pounding Leitmotif has a very effective sense of inevitable menace.
• Badass Decay: This story doesn't treat the Daleks a lot better than "Destiny of the Daleks" did. While their weaker status is actually explained and justified in this story, and they do at least turn on Davros when it becomes clear that he isn't going to co-operate with them, it's still hard to take them seriously as a threat when they retreat in a panic after several of them get blown up in the initial assault, then need Lytton and his men to actually take over the space station. Also not helping is a bunch of 1980s Earth soldiers easily shooting out a Dalek's eyestalk and then destroying it by shoving it out of a window, and both the Doctor and Davros slaughtering them en masse with the Movellan virus.
• Memetic Mutation: "I can't stand the confusion in my mind!"
• Narm:
  • The super-deadly virus with which the Movellans all but wiped out the Daleks causes them to spurt white fluid out of their cases. At best it looks like they're coughing up shaving foam, and at worst, well, let's not even go there.
  • The Dalek trooper helmets◊ have their own eyestalk and bumps.
• Retroactive Recognition: Dirty Den is one of Lytton's troopers.
• Special Effect Failure: Most of the Dalek lasers are not at all accurate for where the gun is pointing (something that "Destiny of the Daleks" of all serials got right long before) and many of the deaths are overracted.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Tegan's farewell is infamously cold. Janet Fielding was one of the longest-running cast members and in spite of the character's argumentative nature, Tegan was Team Mom aboard the TARDIS, looking after the Doctor and Nyssa and even Turlough, eventually. After Nyssa's warm departure in "Terminus" (where she kissed the Doctor goodbye on the cheek), all Tegan gets is a distant, cold handshake.^note This was thanks to Executive Meddling - John Nathan-Turner had a policy that Peter Davison was not allowed to touch his female co-stars onscreen; Nyssa's goodbye kiss on the cheek was improvised on the spot and was likely met with a reprimand from Nathan-Turner. Furthermore, as a result of Sarah Sutton's goodbye, Nathan-Turner was reportedly present during the shooting of Tegan's farewell scene specifically to avoid anything similar happening. The Doctor Who Expanded Universe (and eventually, the TV series itself) naturally couldn't leave this alone, and a couple of stories reunite the Doctor and Tegan to have a proper goodbye.
• Visual Effects of Awesome:
  • The space station sets and props are impressively slick and detailed.
  • The escaped Dalek mutant.
  • The shattered Dalek casing, with visible gooey green bits.
• WTH, Costuming Department?:
  • The Dalek Trooper helmets, which have their own little eyestalk and bumps. Even John Nathan-Turner thought they looked silly.

---