YMMV / Doctor Who: The Curse of Fatal Death

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• Fridge Brilliance: Although nobody ever actually follows up when they say "I'll explain later", circumstances usually lead to the answer. For instance, Emma asks the Doctor why the Daleks didn't kill them, why there's a chair prepared, and how Zektronic energy will allow them to take over the universe in a matter of minutes.
  • The answer for the first one and the second are that the Daleks need the Doctor there to help in case something goes wrong, which it does. Their justification for keeping him alive and compliant is quite sound.
  • Zektronic energy allows the Daleks to kill the Doctor and the Master in such a way that they can't regenerate or resurrect. Since the Doctor is their biggest obstacle, they have a lot of investment in this ability, which would allow them to steamroll Gallifrey and change the timeline so that they're unopposed.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The canonical Tenth Doctor also likes to lick things. He can also be easily described by his fans as "Cute, sexy and lick-the-mirror handsome".
  • Richard E. Grant would later go on to play not only another alternate version of the Doctor, but also the re-imagined Great Intelligence in Series 7 of NuWho, who functions as an Evil Counterpart to the Doctor.
  • The Twelfth Doctor tells the Master and his companion to keep an eye on the universe, "I've put a lot of work into it." Steven Moffat later put that exact same line into the prologue of Series 9, spoken by the actual Twelfth Doctor.
  • The Doctor falling in love with and then marrying a companion.
  • "The Doctor's Wife" confirms that regeneration gender-bending is possible. "Dark Water" reveals the Master has regenerated into a Time Lady. Her attraction to the Doctor has also escalated.
  • The Doctor reaching the end of his regeneration cycle, before being granted more.
  • At the closing of the story, the Master pulls a Heel–Face Turn and vows to follow the path of goodness, much like Missy does in Peter Capaldi's third season.
  • The new series even has farting aliens, albeit not as their primary method of communication.
  • A later Moffat script for the series, "The Witch's Familiar", not only features the Doctor facing the Master and Daleks, but also has the former wandering in a sewer and a discussion about Daleks having chairs ("The only other chair on Skaro").
  • Rowan Atkinson playing with a toy Dalek in the Mr. Bean Christmas special seems mildly prophetic of his role as the Doctor.
  • The Thirteenth Doctor being female would eventually happen in 2017 when Jodie Whittaker was confirmed to be the first official female Doctor. Funny enough, she's blonde, just like Joanna Lumley! The Master's sudden attraction to the Doctor at the end also becomes this, as some male fans admitted that they now fancied the Doctor.
  • The Master having a plan backfire on him in a way that gets him stuck on The Slow Path in a humiliating fashion actually happens to the main series Master in "Spyfall". It’s only 77 years and there’s no sewage involved (probably), but still. He even returns complaining about how long it took to get back to the Doctor’s time, in a very similar way to how he complained about in this special, and remembering this episode while watching that one is hilarious!
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Not that it's really this story's fault, given it was a non-canonical charity special, but Richard E. Grant's brief-but-memorable performance here still makes more than a few fans annoyed that he never got the chance to play an official incarnation of the Doctor (Scream of the Shalka aside).
• Values Dissonance: It can now be pretty off-putting that the Doctor becoming a woman is presented as such an inherently ridiculous idea that it can stand as a joke without her even doing anything, especially with some of the nasty sexist attacks the show endured when it really did happen.

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