Rule number one for being a Doctor Who Companion: The Doctor lies.
Rule number one for being a Doctor Who fan: They can’t all be winners.
Despite intriguing ideas and some very solid set-pieces and imagery, the pieces fail to align in “Arachnids in the UK” resulting in the new season’s weakest entry so far. After the lovely, low-key stop over in “Rosa”, “Arachnids” returns to the breakneck pace and exposition-heavy energy that defined the first two episodes in the run of Jodie Whittaker as The Thirteenth Doctor and Chris Chibnall as showrunner and head writer. But whereas the first two episodes of the season built to payoffs that made the somewhat convoluted journeys worth it, “Arachnids” fails to earn its big narrative and dramatic climaxes.
Maybe the biggest sticking point (get it? Because spiders? Get it?) is Chris Sex and the City Noth as this episode’s human villain, Robertson. An obvious Donald Trump analogue (which the episode distracts from/underlines by establishing that Robertson is a rival of Trump), Robertson is every bit the grating, hateful irritant that the actual orange fucker is, and that mean streak proves wearying during an episode that is otherwise occupied with chills and thrills cheerfully pulled from classic B-movies. It’s the straw that breaks the camel’s back in terms of plotting, and while I certainly don’t begrudge Chibnall or Doctor Who for being explicitly political, I’m not sure why this episode was the one that needed to have a Trump-y turd running around, unless Chibnall thought he needed some kind of ripped from the headlines edge to offset the inherent silliness of giant spiders going around killing people.
Oh yeah, there are giant spiders going around killinh people. But, before we know that, all we know is that large webs are lingering ominously all over the habitations of our heroes once they finally return to Sheffield after a couple episodes’ worth of adventures bouncing around the time vortex. Yaz (Mandip Gill) invites everyone for a yay-we-didn’t-die cup of tea, but while 13 and Ryan (Tosin Cole) excitedly take her up on the offer, Graham (Bradley Walsh) instead heads back home, now without any timey-wimey adventures to distract him from putting the house he shared with Grace (Sharon D. Clarke) to rights after her passing.
But Grace isn’t gone for Graham, instead lingering just on his periphery as he moves through their home and picks through her things. Director Sallie Aprahamian leaves Clarke just out of focus as her words haunt Graham, a small but wildly effective way to portray the way that the people who leave us still linger, there but not, gone but not. Walsh continues to be the quiet MVP of the new Companions, his grief visible yet unspoken as he struggles through this process. It’s almost a relief when he discovers a giant spider in the apartment.
Oh yeah, the giant spiders. We’ll get to those, I swear.
But first we spend a little time with Yaz’s family, including her dad Hakim (Ravin J Ganatra) and her sister Sonya (Bhavnisha Parmar), the lived-in and messy spaces of their apartment and similarly lived-in, similarly messy dynamics between the characters recalling the Russell T. Davies’ era willingness to dig into the lives of the Companions outside the TARDIS. Stephen Moffat tended to treat each successive Companion as a puzzle box for The Doctor to solve, and so characters like Amy Pond and Clara Oswald weren’t allowed to have parents, friends, or outside lives of any real clarity, at least not until deep in their runs. But here, we understand right away both why Yaz would feel a deep and profound connection to her family, while also being driven up the wall by all their tics and habits.
Anyway…what was I talking about? Oh yeah, spiders. Let’s talk about the giant spiders.
By coincidence, the TARDIS team all almost simultaneously stumble over arachnid infestations. Yaz is called to the new Robertson hotel to pick up her mother Najia (Shobna Gulati) who has just been fired by the man himself because she walked into a room while Robertson was ordering an underling to clean up some kind of mess. While Robertson continues to harangue Najia and Yaz, it’s discovered that some of the rooms in the hotel are overrun with massive webs. At the same time that Graham is having his own close encounter with the furry-legged behemoths, The Doctor and Ryan stumble across another lady doctor, Jade McIntyre (Tanya Fear) concerned over the sudden absence of her colleague, a neighbor of Yaz’s family. When The Doctor sonics open the door, the other woman is discovered suffocated in a web, and the dog-sized creeper is still slinking around the apartment.
After the group escapes, McIntyre reveals that she has actually been experimenting on spiders (in a science-to-expand-human-knowledge way, not in a bwahaha-I-shall-conquer-all sort of way) in the hopes of increasing spider’s longevity and silk strength. The experiments have been suspended, but a rash of bizarre spider activity throughout the city had McIntyre worried. When The Doctor maps out the spiders’ activities on a map, one place sits at the center of the web: Robertson’s hotel.
And it’s right about then that Robertson goes to take his scheduled bathroom break (ugh), only for the bathroom sink to explode and a humongous spider, we’re talking something fucking Shelob-sized comes tearing out. Robertson escapes (ugh) but loses his bodyguard to the spider’s mandibles. It’s at this point that 13 arrives, and it’s immediately after that that the spiders web up the exterior of the building, trapping everyone inside.
Here’s the main problem with the mysteries that drive the action in “Arachnids”: the answer to every single one is known by Robertson, so the episode has to make Robertson as big a prick as possible to justify why he doesn’t just tell The Doctor and company what’s up. When The Doctor is trying to solve a puzzle, that’s engaging and exciting. When The Doctor is perpetually running into a brick wall that is just one guy being an obstinate Toad-dicked prick, that’s just frustrating. Noth hams up his each and every scene, with gestures and details obviously intended to put you in mind of the bumblefuck currently in the White House (Robertson, we learn, has designs on running in 2020), and if that works for you, great. But I very quickly reached the limits of my patience with this character and performance, yet he continued to dominate the hour.
After a bunch of shoe leather, it’s discovered that Robertson’s hotel was built over an unsafe coal mine, and that said coal mine was also used as a place to dump toxic waste, as you do. McIntyre, who hangs out for the entire episode despite having something between jack and shit to do, notes that the company that did waste removal for her lab was one of the dumpers, meaning there’s no alien or supernatural threat to what’s happened here. A spider that wasn’t quite dead (“I feeeeeel happy!”) was taken to the dump, ate the waste, grew huge, and is now spawning big-but-not-as-big babies and throwing the entire arachnid eco-system into chaos.
Robertson nabs a gun off his bodyguard’s corpse and suggests direct action, but The Doctor continues to be stridently anti-gun. Instead, the group use Ryan’s music to lure the spiders to Robertson’s panic room so they can be dealt with safely and humanely. The group then tracks down the queen spider to the ballroom, where they discover the thing has literally grown too big to live and is slowly dying. As The Doctor and her team empathize with the mutated, ruined lifeform, Robertson enters and guns the spider down. Unrepentant, he declares that men like him are needed to shape the world and swaggers off, leaving The Doctor aghast and her team disheartened.
(Sidenote: There’s a lovely, haunting wideshot of The Doctor watching the queen spider die, it’s legs slowly folding together while the episode fades to black. Understated, surprisingly moving.)
Things seemed to have calmed down, which means it is time for The Doctor to be off. But when Yaz, Ryan, and Graham approach her in the TARDIS, it’s not to say goodbye, but to ask if they might come along wherever she might go.
Graham needs to get away from that house filled with Grace so he might heal from her loss, Yaz needs an out from her loving but exhausting family, and Ryan, well, Ryan’s just up for anything. 13 cautions them that it’s not all fun and games tripping through the time-space continuum, but is all-too happy to let them climb aboard once each Companion insists they are sure about taking the risks involved in such wandering.
That settled, the newly-affirmed TARDIS team join hands and throw the lever together, heading onwards to all new adventures…which will hopefully be better than this one.
Episode Thoughts:
-As the above makes clear, I didn’t especially enjoy this episode, and writing out its plot points here has only soured me on it further. There’s too many characters with too little to do, especially once everyone piles into the hotel for the episode’s second half. After last week really let her stretch and shine, Whittaker is once more given nothing to do besides speed through exposition. The only juicy material on hand is The Doctor’s interactions with Robertson, but Noth bullies his way through these scenes and Chibnall’s script bafflingly leaves The Doctor tongue-tied in the face of this dope’s dopiness. Speaking truth to power is one of the keys things that The Doctor does, but 13 seems oddly cowed by a moronic real estate exec. But mostly the biggest whiff in “Arachnids in the UK” is in establishing why this mission of the week would inspire these three people to sign up for more TARDIS rides. With Graham it makes sense, but if you want to drive home that Yaz needs an escape from her home life, why does she barely interact with her father and sister before leaving? And what about Ryan? It’s a solid enough conclusion, but the episode never earns it.
-While the main story is something of a bust, there are good bits in the margins. 13’s loopiness takes on a Matt Smith-ian tone with this stopover, between marveling over a sofa, not knowing who Ed Sheeran is, and referring to Najia exclusively as “Yaz’s Mom”.
-That said, the episode’s comic highlight is Ryan, unneeded and unnoticed, making shadow-puppets off a projector while the lady doctors discuss spiders.
-Yaz doesn’t have very many friends, and the ones she does have are “weird”, according to her family.
– Aprahamian sure directs the hell out of the episode, especially in the first half before the spiders take over and before things get confined to one location. The early stalking/attacking scenes are all very well done, with effective jump scare moments and strong special effects on the spiders. It’s not Aprahamian’s fault that the script just kind of peters out.
-Aprahamian gets at least one great creepy image in, as a giant spider moves against the same wall that Yaz has placed her ear to. Can only imagine anyone with arachnophobia must’ve been miserable throughout this one.
-The shadow puppet bit really did make me laugh, I just want to bring it up one more time.
-The Doctor really, really, really likes Yaz. We’re bordering on Leslie Knope/Ann Perkins levels of one-sided devotion here. Hell, I ship it.
-I am totally fine with The Doctor being loudly anti-gun, but so far she has been outspoken against their use against 1) Killer robots and B) Giant spiders. Doesn’t exactly compel you to see her side of things, does it?
The Weekly Timey Wimey: Despite being gone for days and days, 13 drops her “fam” off only a half hour after they got zapped into space at the end of the premiere.
Arc Alert: Ryan’s absentee father writes him a note of condolence for the loss of Grace, and invites him to come stay with his “proper” family. Ryan admits to Graham that he felt disgusted by this idea, but spiders attack before they can talk about it further. Doubt we’ve seen or heard the last of Mr. Ryan’s Dad, though.
Most Whovian Moment: Psychic paper is back!