YMMV / Doctor Who S5 E2 "The Abominable Snowmen"

• Faux Symbolism: The story uses most of its Buddhist symbolism reasonably considering it's set in a Buddhist monastery - like paralleling the Doctor's use of time travel to the monks' understanding of astral projection, or how the Doctor teaches Victoria to chant 'om mani padme hum' to resist Brainwashing. Not all of it joins up, though - significantly, the main antagonist (actually just a puppet of the Intelligence) is named Padmasambhava, the writer of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, a book known about at the time due to its recent appropriation by Timothy Leary for his writings about LSD - making it random drugs symbolism as well as random Buddhist symbolism. You'd think they wouldn't have had a character called Padmasambhava in the story if it wasn't necessary to the story they were trying to tell, yet neither the drugs nor the religious allusion seems to have any significance. As far as we know today, Lincoln and Haisman were just picking famous Tibetan names out of a hat. (When the story was novelised by Terrance Dicks in 1974, at the request of then-incumbent producer Barry Letts — who was a practising Buddhist — several of the names were changed slightly, as he felt the originals risked causing offence.)
• Values Dissonance: This serial is full of white actors in Yellowface.

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