Doctor Who: Arachnids in the UK

Not a fan of this one. Kind of the opposite of last week's, in that I think the concept is good but the execution was bad. It's basically a Captain Planet episode, except that they forgot to make the bad guy actually bad. Don't get me wrong, he's a complete arsehole, but he's not actually wrong. About anything.

The camera keeps focusing on spider webs for some reason. I'm sure it doesn't mean anything though.

Speaking of the bad guy (Robertson), we get introduced to him right away, and they do a great job of showing us that he's an arsehole whom we're supposed to dislike and disagree with. We're also introduced to a couple of minor characters who, if you've been paying attention to the series so far, you can probably guess aren't long for this world.

This is the perfect distance at which to have a conversation.

Then we cut to the outside of Yasmin's building just as the TARDIS materialises in front of it. I'm not sure why they bothered with the whole "the Doctor can't reliably control the TARDIS" thing last week as we quickly establish here that she's managed to land in the exact place and time she meant to, and obviously the episode is going to end with them all deciding to go off on more adventures. Maybe these two episodes were originally supposed to run in the opposite order? That would make more sense.

Also Ryan lives just down the road.

Yasmin invites them all in for tea and the Doctor and Ryan accept, while Graham decides to head home for a bit and catch up with them later. We then get to meet Yasmin's family, who are clearly supposed to be funny but aren't and serve absolutely no purpose that I can see. They're just tiresome and I hope we won't be seeing any more of them.

He's a bad cook and she's kind of mean to her sister.

Yasmin gets called away to pick up her mother (who was working for Robertson until he fired her at the start of the episode), but leaves Ryan and the Doctor there, giving them the opportunity to volunteer to go next door to try to recover a package that's been left with a neighbour. The neighbour seems to be missing though, and her work colleague, Jade, is here looking for her. They decide to break into the flat to see if they can figure out what's happened to her, and the Doctor uses her stupid magic wand instead of picking the lock normally. Why? That's completely unnecessary. If you tell me the Doctor carries a set of lockpicks I'm like "yeah, seems plausible". You don't really need to justify that, it fits her character. But instead she's got this magic wand that can magically open any kind of door somehow. It's really dumb.

If you're bothered by spiders, this is pretty much your last warning to stop reading.

They find that the house is full of spiderwebs, and also a giant spider. Not super-giant, just like the size of a cat. But that's still pretty big as far as spiders go. Also the woman they're looking for is dead and all webbed up. They use garlic and vinegar to make a barrier that the spider won't cross and then they leave. Graham comes back and tells them that he's got a giant spider in his house too. Jade admits that she's not super shocked by these developments because she's a spider scientist and they've been seeing some weird shit going on with spiders in this area lately.

They never actually come back to deal with this spider. Or the one in Graham's house.

So they head to Jade's lab where they figure out that the spiders are coming from Robertson's hotel, where Yasmin and her mother now are. Robertson and his bodyguard are being pointlessly mean to drive home the fact that he's supposed to be the bad guy, and there's a bunch of webs here too; I guess to raise the stakes by establishing that the spiders are already active in the hotel.

Thinking about it now, it seems a bit weird that Jade bothered to put on her lab coat for this.

So the team converge on the hotel just as Robertson is being menaced by a really big giant spider. He runs away from it and sends his bodyguard in to fight it. He's got a gun, so obviously he's doomed. We've pretty firmly established at this point that in Doctor Who, guns do not solve problems. If you try to use a gun, you're going to have a bad time.

That spider works really quickly.

Then, I can't be sure, but I think the Doctor uses the "psychic paper", which is another stupid magic prop that I hate. It's ambiguous and maybe she just flashed a random bit of paper in front of Robertson's face as a bluff. I hope so. But I'm going to talk about the psychic paper anyway because it's terrible. OK, so what it supposedly does is it shows the person looking at it whatever they expect to see. That's actually not the worst idea because there's a lot of scope there for it to not work as planned. But what it actually did/does in practice was show them exactly whatever the plot needed it to say. And like the sonic screwdriver, it just solves problems that either aren't problems or should have more interesting solutions. Like here. Robertson's just seen a giant spider and the Doctor shows up and takes charge. He doesn't exactly have time to question it. She didn't even need to pretend to show him her ID, because her supposed authority is absolutely not the reason anyone is listening to her here.

Yasmin's mum is as pointless and annoying as the rest of her family.

Anyway, the spiders seal off the exits and are running all over the place, except for the kitchen because it's too bright, so the team head there and capture a spider to study. I'm not sure why though, and I suspect that this bit of the episode may have suffered from some last-minute rewrites, because Jade asks Graham and Ryan to go find out if there are any larger spiders than the cat-sized ones - despite the fact that Robertson and the Doctor have both already seen the big giant spider. So they go out to gather information that the group already has while everyone else heads down to the caverns underneath the hotel.

I'm not sure, but I don't think you're supposed to go in there.

Here's where the Captain Planet aspect of the episode comes in. Robertson's whole deal is that he takes disused industrial sites and landfills and builds hotels on top of them, thus solving the problem of dealing with this land that no one wants and also making the area generally nicer. As he says, it's pretty much a win for everyone. So how is he the villain? Because he doesn't micro-manage every aspect of the operation and some of the contractors he's used have cut corners, and somehow this has resulted in giant spiders. If he was a Captain Planet villain he'd have done this personally and on purpose. Either one of those by itself would be enough, honestly. But no, he's just not adequately supervising the people working for him. That and he's an arsehole.

I mean, obviously this garbage shouldn't just be lying around like this, but it's not like Robertson wanted it this way.

Also, his is partly Jade's fault, because the only reason the spiders are there is because her lab apparently threw some out that they thought were dead but weren't. They are spider scientists in a spider lab studying spiders, but they can't even tell if their specimens are alive or not. This is worse than that lab that Peter Parker visited. At least that radioactive spider was only loose inside the lab, and there was only one. And again Robertson points out that the spiders are absolutely not his fault because they aren't even supposed to be there, and he's right. We're supposed to hate this guy, but he's not wrong.

I'm not sure a spider that size could still cling to the ceiling like that.

So everyone retreats to Robertson's panic room to come up with a plan. Robertson quite sensibly suggests that they all arm themselves and shoot the spiders. He has a lot of guns because he's American, you see. And here's where the episode completely lost me, because the Doctor's solution is to lure all the spiders into the panic room and lock them in there to slowly die of starvation. Or maybe she was going to poison them after she got them in there. It wasn't clear to me. Either way, it doesn't seem like a better option than shooting them. I mean, sure, lure them all into one place for easy disposal, but why is shooting them not a viable option?

This is the face of someone who's just realised he's the only sane person in the room.

But this won't work on the big one, for some reason, so they have to go hunt that one down. Again Robertson wants to shoot it but the Doctor wants to poison it. I don't understand how one is supposed to be better than the other, but the Doctor feels very strongly about it. Also it turns out that the big giant spider is already dying, so there's no need for either solution, but Robertson shoots it anyway - which is, as he points out, the merciful thing to do at this point. I mean, this guy is just right about everything and I don't know why he's the designated bad guy.

The Doctor is sad because the spider died in a different way than she wanted it to.

But the problem is solved and everyone goes home. Never mind the other giant spiders around the city, I'm sure they won't cause any problems at all. They all meet up later on to say goodbye, but of course everyone's decided that actually they'd like to stay with the Doctor for a while. Hopefully next week's episode will be better.

Obligatory picture of Bradley Walsh being the best thing about the show.

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