YMMV / Doctor Who S7 E2 "Doctor Who and the Silurians"

• Angst? What Angst?: At the end of the story, hundreds of humans are dead from the Silurian plague, and the Brigadier's misguided attempts to protect humanity from further warfare led him to simply murder all of the defenceless Silurians in suspended animation, metaphorically stabbing the Doctor in the back in order to do so. The final image of the story is the Doctor looking down at the explosion in horror, declaring that the Brigadier had committed murder. The following story opens with the Doctor in a new house making the TARDIS console do Timey-Wimey Ball tricks and still working for the Brigadier like nothing has happened, with the exception of one throwaway barbed comment about the Brigadier being bored because he can't find more Silurians to shoot.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: During the otherwise bleak Episode 6, we get a brief comedic scene wherein the Brigadier receives a phone call from a newspaper journalist (“The Daily WHAT?”), before hanging up.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The subplot involving the Silurian plague hit much harder after the COVID-19 outbreak, particuarly Dr. Lawrence insistently refusing a vaccine due to his insistence that he's fine, that the vaccine is useless and that the plague is not real, only to die later, which rings harder with the anti-vax movement becoming a major problem in the UK and even more in the US. The plague spreading due to Masters deciding to take the train to London does bear resemblance to various high-profile figures in Britain breaking Lockdown restrictions, such as the Prime Minister's Chief Advisor Dominic Cummings rather notoriously driving to Barnard Castle at the height of the pandemic and the Health Secretary Matt Hancock being forced to resign when it turned out he had broken social distancing rules (in the process of cheating on his wife with an aide), not to mention Margaret Ferrier, a lesser-known MP, who decided to take a train to Scotland the day after testing positive. Additionally, Lawrence is angry at having to quarantine due to it halting his business, an argument used by many anti-lockdown advocates during the pandemic.
• Moral Event Horizon: While Dr. Quinn comes across as a genial Reasonable Authority Figure at first, and even his subsequent actions in dealing with the Silurians make him seem no worse than a Well-Intentioned Extremist, the moment when his actions cross the threshold into being truly irredeemable is when he threatens to let his captive, wounded Silurian die unless it gives up all its scientific knowledge, even after Dawson points out that he has no idea whether the Silurian even knows anything that would be of any use to him. Quinn subsequently gets a (presumably very literal) dose of Laser-Guided Karma and dies at the hands of that Silurian prior to the end of the episode.
• Narm: The Silurians get a Leitmotif using a crumhorn - a rare medieval instrument. The composer's idea was that it would sound primitive and ancient. The viewers tend to find it sounds almost exactly like a kazoo.
• Padding: The Silurian virus doesn't become a plot element until the fifth episode, to which it then stretches out the plot until the beginning of the final episode. Hulke even admitted on the DVD features that the whole subplot was added late into the script in order to lengthen the serial to the seven episodes required.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Paul Darrow (Avon) is Captain Hawkins.
  • Fulton Mackay (Mr. Mackay) is Dr. Quinn.
  • Geoffrey Palmer (Lionel) is Frederick Masters.
• Special Effects Failure: The Silurians' conspicuously wobbly heads on their rubber suits.

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