Doctor Who (2005) 11-04: Arachnids in the UK (Quick Review)

Episode:

844

|

Serial:

280

|

Writer:

Chris Chibnall

|

Air Date:

28-Oct-2018

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This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, it's Arachnids in the UK: the fourth episode of Doctor Who's 11th season to be written by showrunner Chris Chibnall. In a row.

Everyone knows that the title's a play on the Sex Pistols song Anarchy in the U.K. but there's also a subtle clue in there that the episode's about spiders. By an interesting coincidence the fourth serial of the classic show's 11th season, Planet of the Spiders, was also about evil spiders! Well okay it was the sixth serial, but close enough.

This is a spooky story just in time for Halloween, but I have to admit that I wasn't overly hyped for it. Mostly because I was worried it'd put me off my food. Writers should be more considerate of people who watch TV while they're eating their dinner!

There will be SPOILERS below this point, for this episode and perhaps even earlier ones, but no SPIDERS. I realise that most people reading this would've watched the episode already and have no problem with scrolling down to a surprise spider screencap, but I figured I'd play it safe. 

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Arachnids in the UK isn't about the characters walking around picturesque Sheffield locations, but the director definitely didn't shy away from using location shots to make the episode more interesting to look at. So I'm going to nick the idea for my review.

Nice scenery, decent production values, great character scenes, underdeveloped villain, anti-climatic ending... seems like I can just copy and paste this line every time I review a Chris Chibnall episode and save myself some time. Every time I watch one of his episodes I come away thinking that the bad guy has to be coming back in a later story, because they're dealt with so abruptly and literally vanish without giving us any proper closure. Tim Shaw teleported away with his head melting so we don't know if he survived. We never learned why Ilin was so keen on putting people through a race that would likely get them all killed. And Krasko was blasted back to the Stone Age before he could develop a trait beyond 'is racist'.

To be fair the antagonist of Arachnids was actually pretty fleshed out by comparison. The problem I had this time was that he was so eccentric that I felt like Chibnall was building him up to be a recurring character. Plus he didn't literally vanish like the others, but we still missed out on the closure, as he suffered no consequences for anything he did. He shot a regular (giant) household spider, got told off, and that was it for him. As far as he's concerned he's still going to be running for US president after this, despite the fact that he failed to buy off the witnesses to his shady business practices and he's got dead bodies in the basement strung up next to the landfill. In fact he thinks that stepping up and shooting harmless dying spiders is the kind of thing that'll get him into the White House.

I'm not sure I can really call him the antagonist though, as for most of the episode he was in the same boat as everyone else and the most evil thing he does around them is fire Yaz's mum. Well that and lock Kevin in a room with a giant spider, but to be fair that was a snap decision made in absolute terror and he was expecting him to win. He had a gun, how could he not? For a while it seemed like he was locking Yaz and Najia in the hotel room to die too, but it turns out that he was genuinely annoyed with the comically giant cobwebs and wanted Yaz to see how negligent her mother had been. He was still the biggest monster in the story though.

The guy was quick to fire people when he caught them doing something he didn't like, but he wasn't all that quick to catch his company dumping unprocessed waste under his hotel, and when he did find out he tried to keep it quiet. When I heard the title I was thinking of the Third Doctor story Planet of the Spiders, when it's more like The Green Death with its mutated bugs, shady corporation, and ecological message. It's even got a coal mine and a friendly scientist in it!

The giant spiders are really just a side effect of corporate negligence, due to Robertson being a heartless git who doesn't take enough of an interest in, or responsibility for, what his organisation is doing. Often in these kinds of stories the scientists will be blamed for meddling with nature, but this is 100% pointing the finger at the business that cut corners. Robertson covers up what happened and only cares about how things are going to affect him. Dr McIntyre, on the other hand, is remorseful and determined to fix the problem, to the point of allowing a group of weird strangers into her lab and revealing the whole thing to them.

This led to the absolute best scene in the episode and perhaps even the season, where Ryan is making shadow puppets with his hands in the background during the dramatic exposition. It never cuts to what he's doing, no one ever comments on it, it's just there out of focus in the background. Ryan's got a long way to go if he wants to unseat Graham as my favourite of the companions Team Tardis, but he's going about it the right way.

There's a surprisingly amount of comedy in the episode, for a spooky spider story about a bad businessman, and the director knows how to pull it off. She also likes to play around with the visuals I noticed.

Like when she showed that the hotel was at the centre of the web on the map with this weird transition. Can't say I've ever seen that on TV before. This is Sallie Aprahamian's first time directing Doctor Who, but they should get her back for more.

Of course I don't know how much of this was written into the script. For all I know it said something like "The episode begins with lots of low shots from around and inside a hotel, reminiscent of The Shining," and she just filmed what it said. I imagine they were supposed to be what a giant spider would see while scurrying around.

They're not literally a giant spider's POV though, unless there's a spider in this scene just hanging out and watching these two talk.

Man I'm glad I'm not an arachnophobe, and I can say that with certainty now after watching this, because there were a bloody lot of a spiders in it. And they were some beautiful looking spiders too, or beautifully realised at least. The CGI looked fantastic to me, especially when they were scurrying over reflective surfaces. Turns out that DNEG are pretty good at visual effects!

The episode even got the science of super spiders right... well, they got closer than you'd expect anyway. They were still running across ceilings despite being way too heavy for it, but they eventually grew too big to breathe, and that's something I've never seen in a giant spider story before. They even explained the un-spiderlike behaviour, or at least hung a lampshade on it. And thankfully the Doctor didn't reveal she could speak spider and translate for them!

Though one thing that wasn't very realistic was how half of Yaz's family stumbled onto the spider problem independently. Plus they just happened to live next door to a scientist working on the project, and the other spider that got loose went to Graham's house! And like the coincidences in The Woman Who Fell to Earth, none of this had anything to do with the Doctor's presence at all.

It reminded me a little of Tegan's family being a magnet for alien weirdness in the Fifth Doctor era. Or how Remembrance of the Daleks revealed that if Ian and Barbara hadn't been kidnapped by the Doctor in An Unearthly Child they would've met the Daleks that month anyway because they'd invaded Coal Hill School. I have zero issues with the Tardis bringing Team Tardis into adventures because it's been outright stated by this point that it can tell the future and does it deliberately, but having the companions running into multiple sci-fi situations on their own by pure chance is a bit much.

Speaking of companions getting into trouble, I found this scene where Yaz is held at gunpoint to be a little strange, especially in retrospect now that I know Robertson isn't a super villain. Holding a gun in Britain isn't exactly legal and holding someone at gunpoint is even worse, but the guy is apparently trying to avoid causing bad publicity and legal problems. And no one questions it afterwards! I can understand why Yaz wouldn't want to escalate things when she's being threatened, but I kept expecting her to give Robertson crap about it later and she didn't. In fact she didn't do a whole lot in this story at all, which is strange seeing as it features her whole family. I figured we'd see more of her police officer training come out now she's back home, but nope.

The story was continually interrupted by other aspects of her life though, like her mother trying to figure out which of her friends she's dating. Ryan and Graham also got some scenes of them dealing with things, with Ryan getting a letter from his dad and Graham because metaphorically (or maybe literally) haunted by his out of focus dead wife. But the character interaction was definitely the episode's strength and all the time spent on them being faced with non-spider issues was justified by the ending, as it gives us their motivations for leaving with the Doctor. And the Doctor actually gave her companions a proper warning before taking them on board this time! One that they'd fully comprehend due to their four previous adventures stranding them in the cold vacuum of space, the most hostile alien world in the galaxy, and 50s Alabama. So that was cool... even if they still didn't think to pack anything before leaving.

I also liked the shot near the start with the camera following the Tardis down the time vortex and then zooming through the hull into the console room. At first I thought it might the other new vortex we saw in Twice Upon a Time, updated slightly so that it's lit up like a Christmas tree, but after comparing the two it's pretty clear that it is not. That was a one-off time vortex. It's a bit strange that the Tardis has to fly to a nexus and to switch tunnels and take a different path now, but then the idea of a time vortex is strange already.

Overall I thought it was a fairly decent episode, though a bit of a step down from the last one. I think it was Robertson's eccentricity that bothered me the most, at least at first when I didn't know that the episode was more about him than the spiders. He's too weird for one episode I reckon; he needs to show up more so I can get used to him. I also didn't like that the resolution of the spider problem was a three step process involving a: playing music, and b: that's it, that solved it, c: seriously, it's done. It was such a 'wait, they saved the day already?' moment. And Chibnall didn't do a good job of giving the Doctor a good explanation for why Robertson was wrong to shoot the poor suffocating spider. Best she could come up with was 'you didn't do it for the right reasons', which kind of restricts her righteousness. It's not great when the Doctor can't properly criticise Robertson's choices and immorality, seeing as his terrible choices (and by extension, the behaviour of Donald Trump and greedy businessmen in general) are the whole point of the episode.

But it gets bonus points for bringing the psychic paper back. Gives me hope that we'll one day see the return of the sonic sunglasses.

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