YMMV / Doctor Who S25 E1 "Remembrance of the Daleks"

• Awesome Music: Keff McCulloch's score. The fluting, electronic lilt has a consistent air of energy, tension and solemnity.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • The Special Weapons Dalek is one of the most popular Dalek designs, despite appearing in this one story, plus a cameo in "Asylum of the Daleks", for being pure badass.
  • Much like Jago and Litefoot, Group Captain Gilmore, Professor Rachel Jensen and Allison Williams were deemed interesting enough for Big Finish to give them their own audio series, Counter Measures.
• Epileptic Trees: Skaro is seen very much intact several times after this story, leading to many theories about how the planet was un-destroyed. While a few fans take the explanation given in the Eighth Doctor Adventures — that the Daleks actually duped the Doctor into destroying a completely different planet which Davros was using as his base and whose native population had already been wiped out by them — as being canonical, the more common opinion is that it probably has something to do with the Timey-Wimey Ball. Asylum of the Daleks demonstrates that the Daleks are capable of outright rebuilding Skaro.
• Growing the Beard: After finding his feet the previous season, this is the point where Andrew Cartmel's incarnation of the show really gets going. Even John Nathan-Turner seems creatively re-energised, more aggressively pushing money into the show to make it look, sound and feel better than it had in years, and Cartmel encouraged genuinely ambitious, complex writing that was actually about things and not just retreads of Doctor Who's own mythology - even more impressive because they did it while developing the show's mythology and not just revisiting it. It's easy to believe that if only the BBC had believed in them more and given it as a publicity push as a new era for the series, Doctor Who might never have been cancelled.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • The Doctor convinces the last Dalek that it's the Last of His Kind and has no purpose. Three incarnations and one Time War later...
  "You're trapped, a trillion miles and a thousand years from a disintegrated home."
  • The Expanded Universe reveals the poor little girl who was brainwashed by the Renegade Daleks went insane and was committed for the rest of her life, forgotten and wasting away in the loony bin. And the Doctor didn't even have the courtesy to send her a "Get Well" card.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The Doctor takes up the Coal Hill headmaster's offer for the position of caretaker decades later.
• Like You Would Really Do It: Considering that the Daleks had already met with at least two "final ends" (one of which was in their first story) during the show's run, no-one really believed that the Daleks had been wiped out for good here... at least, not until the show got cancelled the following year, leaving open the possibility that this really would be the end of the line for them. The TV Movie would briefly show Skaro unexploded and the Daleks alive and well (if off-screen and slightly more chipmunk-sounding than usual) without any explanation. When the show eventually full-on returned in 2005, it side-stepped the issue by confirming that while the Daleks were (apparently) extinct, it wasn't because of the Doctor's actions in this story.
• Narm: Even though The Reveal that the Renegade Dalek Battle Computer is the little girl is genuinely shocking, Ratcliffe's face is still impossible not to laugh at.
• Older Than They Think: The subversion of the "Daleks can't go upstairs" joke with the revelation that they can actually fly originates with this story, not 2005's "Dalek". Likewise, the "x-ray" extermination effect and the Dalek POV shots with the computerized overlay also originated here (albeit not filmed with a fisheye lens, like they would be in the new series).
• Retroactive Recognition: Joseph Marcell is one of the show's few guest stars who'll be readily recognizable to American viewers due to his role as Geoffrey in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.
• Sacred Cow: It is unanimously considered by critics and fans as one of the best stories in the classic series, and as one of the best, if not the best story of the Seventh Doctor (usually being cited along with "The Curse of Fenric"). It also helps that it was the first story to be met with acclaim since "The Caves of Androzani" after the mixed reception of the previous three seasons.
• Signature Scene: The cliffhanger to Part One, where an Imperial Dalek ascends a staircase to confront the Doctor, remains the serial's best-remembered moment thanks to it finally and unambiguously squashing the longstanding joke that Daleks can't climb stairs. When the Revival Series episode "Dalek" had to reintroduce the species to a general audience that'd missed out on the last two seasons of the Classic Series, it featured a homage to this scene to reiterate the point that yes, Daleks can go up stairs after all.
• Special Effect Failure: The bit with the Imperial Dalek shuttlecraft flying back to the mothership does NOT look pretty.
• Unexpected Character: The Dalek Emperor is really Davros!
• Visual Effects of Awesome:
  • The Special Weapons Dalek's lasers and the regular Dalek laser are mostly on-target for the where the gunsticks are pointing. It's also the serial that invents the great "X-Ray effect" Dalek ray, instead of looking like a photonegative.
  • The Mother Ship and Shuttle Craft, with their smooth, squared bulk and ponderous motion are superb models; they convey both a sense of enormously powerful machinery and of something distinctly alien.
  • The exploded Renegade Dalek, a scorched mechanical wreck, naturally convinces as a futuristic, battle-damaged war machine. The green goo of its occupant is an eerie contrast.
  • The Renegade and Imperial Daleks are gorgeously smooth and bulky. The dark grey pincer that lurches out of a damaged one makes great use of the "brr, what's inside those things?" Dalek mystique.
  • The Imperial Dalek Transmat, another great prop, when in action, shows a gradually materialising, briefly transparent Dalek, with all its mechanical and organic innards on stunningly detailed display.
• Win Back the Crowd: For many fans, this is where Doctor Who finally started getting good again after an on-and-off Audience-Alienating Era for most of the Eighties. It also made the Daleks take a level in badass, returning them to their former status as a force to be reckoned with.
• The Woobie: The unnamed young girl whom the Renegade Daleks wire up to their Battle Computer. Though she initially seems like a Creepy Child, it's clear that none of what she did or goes through was her own choice; the Renegades kidnapped and used her as a Wetware CPU on the basis of being young and having a creative mind. The Expanded Universe goes on to reveal that what happened traumatized her to the point that she was driven insane and had to be committed for the rest of her life. It's hard not to want to give the poor girl a hug after that.

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