YMMV / Doctor Who S9 E5 "The Time Monster"

• Accidental Innuendo: When they're left alone together in the lab, Stu says to Ruth, "Let's do it!" He's referring to having a trial run of the TOMTIT, although Ruth says "What?" in a way which seems to imply she thought he might have meant something else.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The Brigadier berates the Doctor: "One moment you're talking about the whole universe blowing up, and the next you're going on about tea!" This sums up one of the Doctor's most famous monologues at the end of the last story of the classic era, "Survival": "Somewhere there's danger, somewhere there's injustice, somewhere else the tea is getting cold."
  • The scene where the Doctor and the Master talk to each other remotely from their TARDISes feels uncannily similar to modern Zoom and Skype calls, such as when the Doctor essentially complains he's been put on "mute."
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: One of the bigger criticisms that fans have of the story is that it's essentially an inferior remake of "The Daemons", which was likewise written by Robert Sloman. He had originally been commissioned to write a story involving the Daleks, but it ended up being rejected at a late stage in favour of inserting the Daleks into the originally-unrelated season opener. The production team asked Sloman to write a different story, and without much time to work on it, he fell back on the formula he had used for "The Dæmons", hoping that lightning would strike twice.
• Retroactive Recognition: A pre-Star Wars David Prowse as the Minotaur.
• Special Effect Failure: Having the immensely powerful Kronos depicted as a glowing winged humanoid may have seemed like a good idea at script time, but the actual effect is less "I am an uncontrolled primal force of nature" and more "I am a man dressed in a chicken suit flapping my arms while dangling unconvincingly from wires" instead. A shame, since the Atlantean costumes are very much what you'd expect, and presumably drew on BBC Wardrobe's historical drama department.
• Strawman Has a Point: Ruth Ingram is supposed to be an obnoxious Straw Feminist who treats men the way sexist men treat women. However, her initial complaint about her boss banging on about his 'male superiority' is bang on the money, since her boss goes around calling himself The Master. The Master also treats her in a sexist way (inexplicably), saying things to her that are wildly inappropriate by anyone's standards and treating her less experienced male colleague like the boss rather than her. Her one sexist line to Benton ("Just stand over there and look pretty") is also played by both actors involved as being mutually enjoyed flirting rather than an insult. All in all, she comes off as being a reasonable feminist, if perhaps a bit prone to hyperbole when talking about legitimate grievances.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: The redesigned TARDIS interior was met with disdain from audiences, who saw the "washbowl" roundels as garish and goofy. Because of this, the set was immediately scrapped, with a new one being designed for the next season that simply modernized the '60s interior.

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