6. "There should have been another way"
Warriors of the Deep comes in for its fair share of criticism. A lot of it is - to be fair - justified. What is not justified however is the often repeated claim that the magic reptile killing gas is a dramatic twist to save the day in episode Four that is badly blundered by being clumsily shoehorned into episode one, thus killing the surprise. If you believe that you have completely failed to understand the entire point of the episode. (Although you're in good company there, as the director and a lot of the production staff clearly didn't either.) The fact that there is a neat and easy way to commit genocide available pretty much from the word go is the entire point of the story. The next three episodes and a bit are Peter Davison's Doctor
desperately trying to find a way
not to use it. It is always the easy route to take the weapons of your enemy and turn them against. It's
always the easy route to fight monsters by becoming a monster. That's the point. And in the end, the 5th Doctor does it. Because his only other choice is to let all of humanity die. So he becomes a monster and uses the monsters tools. His final line isn't the lame lip-service to morality that a lot of fandom has written it off as. It is The 5th Doctor wanting desperately to apologize for what he has become and
having no one left who cares. The 5th Doctor did not win this story. He lost. And he knows it.