‘I eat danger for breakfast. I don’t, I prefer cereal. Or croissants! Or those little fried Portuguese … never mind, it’s not important!’ -The Doctor
If you have not seen this episode of Doctor Who, please note that this article is very spoilerific and I will give away plot points to not only this episode but the entire Series 11. If you do not want to be spoiled please do not read further or read at your own risk. Enjoy!
We have now moved onto episode four of the Series 11 of Doctor Who. I approached the episode with trepidation because quite simply, I do not like spiders. Well, I am sure I am not in the minority otherwise an episode like “Arachnids in the UK” or even “Planet of the Spiders” would never have been made. Clearly many of us do not like spiders. Otherwise they would have done an episode like of “Attack of the Squirrels” or something. Anyway, I avoided watching anything to do with spiders at all costs but because it’s Doctor Who, I am willing to make the exception in this case.
The plot for “Arachnids in the UK” is about as basic and inline with the title as you could get. The story centers around arachnids and they are in the UK. The story starts off very atmospheric. Throughout the set pieces, there are cob webs and as we get deeper into the episode we find out that these spiders are not normal garden spiders but massive spiders that are surviving off killing people. A massive spider to me would be 2 inches but the first one we see in the episode may be about two foot and as we will see, that is a small one.
To step back beyond the spider aspect of this episode, we start off at a hotel/resort that will be opening soon. What we are about to learn is that the general manager is supposed to be Najia Kahn who is Yas’ mum. The hotel is owned by a man named Jack Robertson, who is an American major property owner operating many vacation destinations around the world and is planning on running for President of the United States. He is clearly molded after the current President but says he “hates Trump” yet is clearly a caricature of him. But where is the Doctor and her friends?
In a wonderful visual segment early in the episode, we hone in on the Doctor and her friends in the TARDIS. The Doctor and her friends land on Earth in the UK just about a half an hour after they left 3 episodes earlier. You gotta love time travel! The Doctor’s intention was to bring her friends back to Earth and she has done that. Now, she assumes they will return to their life and leave her behind. This is a wonderful segment as the Doctor is genuinely sad to see them go and, in a way, it shows how lonely she can be. To me, this is a welcome change from the Doctor being all moody and not wanting to be around anyone because of what he has done during the Time War. Admittedly that had toned down especially in the Capaldi era but this new incarnation of the Doctor is more than happy to be around her friends and also her friend’s family.
What this leads to is a little more background into the main characters. For example, it’s Yas that asked the Doctor to tea. What it feels like to me is that Yas is a bit of a loner herself or doesn’t make friends easily. Maybe that is due to her work as a police officer or things are just difficult for her. Yas noted after they landed that she had no messages on her phone now that she had a signal again. Although it is stated that they were away for only 30 minutes, it feels like this is not unusual for her. Especially when we see the reaction of Yas’ family when they see her bringing in friends to the flat. It sounds like it is very rare for her to bring friends home.
The one absent from the Tea Party is Graham. All the running around, he hardly had any time to mourn Grace’s death. I think we got some nice moments with Graham at his old house with a vision of Grace appearing to him. Trust me, I know Grace was not appearing as a “force ghost” or anything. I know it was just a manifestation of what Graham would think Grace would say to him but it was nice. He would sit there and smell her clothes which in writing sounds quite weird but anyone who had lost someone who meant a lot to them, seeing it you could easily understand what he was doing and mourn with him.
After the Doctor runs into Dr Jade McIntyre who works at an institute that does studies on spiders and after Graham runs into a massive discarded spider skin in his attic they all end up at the hotel Yas’ mum was going to work at until she was fired. At the hotel they run into spiders the same size from earlier and maybe some a little bigger and then they run into a massive spider. The “mother of all spiders” is in fact the mother spider and she is mammoth! The Doctor has a plan to get all of the spiders into Robertson’s secret panic room in the hotel where they will be humanely killed and they have a plan to dispatch the mother spider too. Except, when they meet up with the mother spider, they realise she is growing too big and is basically suffocating in her own body. That’s when Robertson comes in, with a gun he acquired from his dead security guard Kevin, and shoots the mother spider and kills her basically in cold blood. She was more afraid of them than they were of her which makes the death sad and unnecessary. Chibnall has done this before and I don’t like it. I’m thinking of “Dinosaurs on a Spaceship”! As for the other spiders, Ryan uses the power of rap to lure the other spiders to the panic room where they will be killed humanely. The vibrations from the rap will lure them. It is finished. Or is it?
I struggle to understand what happened. I really don’t understand it. Did I miss something? First of all, what does it mean for the other spiders when they go into the panic room to die humanely? Because what I thought that meant (and I saw a couple of other people online who thought the same) was that meant they go into the panic room to starve or eat each other. That’s humane? I personally would rather have a bullet in the head than starve to death. That’s not an invitation or a request but an observation.
The story just ends. It is not resolved. The reason the spiders were supposedly there in the first place was because of the land the hotel is built on was a landfill with toxic waste and coincidentally that is where the institution studying the spiders would drop off the dead spiders. Apparently not all spiders were dead. Through the same vein of science that created Spider-Man (in the sense it makes no sense), we have these massive man eating spiders. It is clear that these new nasty big spiders made it around Sheffield. It is also clear that even though Ryan’s rap music may have lured all the spiders in the hotel, which I even doubt that, it would not have lured the rest of them from around the city. It is more than likely that these killer spiders are still around. Also, Robertson seems to have gotten away with what he has done. Him being an American possible politician who only wants to solve problems with guns is too morbid as this episode airs during a bloody violent weekend with a mass deadly shooting in the US. Story and plot wise, this story was a real disappointment to me. I read a lot of fans who loved it based on some scary moments but there are some glaring plot holes bigger than these spiders!
The spiders themselves looked great! Before the episode started, I assumed that they were intelligent and would be speaking to the other characters. I didn’t expect them to be from Metebellis 3 but something more intelligent and did not expect them to be a bio-hazard mistake. I am happy to see what we ended up with for this episode. I think that fits the story better than being an alien species or something. I hate small spiders but something that big was actually kind of cute. Like a little pet or something.
It’s nice to see our regular characters develop more including the Doctor. That being said, her rapid fire dialogue of small talk and awkwardness was just that…awkward but also annoying. I hope we get less of that and more of the other powerful characteristics that Jodie has put into the character. All of the rapid-fire speaking is very Tennant/Smith to me and I just want to see her develop her own style. I know it’s coming and honestly, a lot of it is already here.
I find week after week, Graham is the standout character for me. I didn’t expect that. In fact, he was the character I was least looking forward to before the series started and I find myself really liking him. Graham is very down to Earth. He is well-realized and well-acted. This isn’t a slight to the other characters because I have been really been impressed with the dynamic of everyone.
I really enjoyed the end of the episode when Ryan, Yas, and Graham decide to join the TARDIS. The Doctor truly treats everyone as equal and invited them to pull the “inaugural switch” as they officially begin to travel with the Doctor. What a great (re)start! What I think have been utter crap are the “Next Time” teasers. They give me no clue about anything that is going to happen in the next episode which I know is sometimes good but the teaser for next week’s episode “The Tsuranga Conundrum” looks like a generic spaceship episode with no clue about what’s going on. It was really boring looking to me. Of course, I will watch and I hope that it’s great but I think these could be greatly improved!
I feel we had an episode with great acting, effects, atmosphere, direction and production values let down by the story. Not every story can be a cracker but I hope this is the exception and not the rule going forward because too much amazing groundwork has already been laid!
Respectfully the political sanctimony was unnecessary.