YMMV / Doctor Who S8 E2 "The Mind of Evil"

• Harsher in Hindsight: The reveal that the Doctor's greatest fear is watching a world burn becomes a lot harsher when three decades and many Doctors later, it would be revealed that he would one day watch Gallifrey, his own homeworld, be burned by the Daleks. It certainly explains how Eleven would be able to convince all of his prior regenerations to work together in a desperate plan to change that moment in history.
• Ho Yay: The Master caring for the Doctor after the Keller machine nearly kills him is straight out of a Hurt/Comfort Fic. This starts a trend in which while he continually tries to kill him, the Master always believes the Doctor will survive and doesn't actually want him gone.
• Padding: Don Houghton added the subplot of the peace conference, with the Master hypnotising Chinese delegate Chin Lee to stir up tension with the United States, at the suggestion of his wife (who played Chin Lee) because his initial story outline (focused on the Keller machine in the prison) didn't have enough plot to sustain six episodes. It tacked-on nature shows in the televised story; it goes nowhere, has no impact on the overall plot, and is dropped completely after Episode Three.
• Special Effect Failure: The 'dragon' looks laughable, even for the time.
• Unintentional Period Piece: One winceworthy moment for modern viewers is when the Doctor claims to be a good friend of Chairman Mao. In 1971, the reality of conditions under Mao were not widely known in the West. Needless to say, there's been a lot of backpedaling and retconning in Doctor Who tie-in media since. These days, it's said that they met back when Mao was just a Beijing university librarian and not the mass-murdering, culturally genocidal megalomaniac he ended up becoming (essentially the equivalent of being classmates with Adolf Hitler in art school).
• Values Dissonance: The Doctor claims to have been a friend of Chairman Mao. Oh dear. Later stories would clarify that he’d known Mao when he was a simple university librarian in the 20s, but the serial was written at a time when the full effects of the Cultural Revolution were unknown and Maoists were, if not exactly mainstream, still a presence in British Left circles.
  • Even then, there apparently was angst over Mao's tactics in the West ^note remember that it had been only a couple of years earlier that John Lennon had sung "And if you go carryin' pictures of Chairman Mao/You ain't gonna make it with anyone, anyhow" in "Revolution", and this angst apparently was keenly felt in the writers' room at Doctor Who over just how chummy the Doctor ought to have been with Mao. Earlier drafts of the story even go so far as to say that the Mao that the Doctor knew was actually Mao Zedong's grandfather.
• Vindicated by History: While it got a solid enough reception on its first transmission, it sunk into obscurity for a while thanks to its being one of the last Third Doctor stories to get any kind of home video release - and even its VHS release was almost totally in black-and-white, discouraging some fans from checking it out. The release of a fully-colourised version on the DVD saw its reputation really improve, with fans now appreciating the scale of the story, the script giving both the Third Doctor and the Master some of their best characterisation from this entire era, and the Master being truly integral to the story instead of it feeling like a pre-existing script that had the Master crowbarred in. As a result, the story is now widely considered a strong contender (with "The Dæmons") for the best story of Season 8, and among the very best of the entire Third Doctor era.

---