"Arachnids in the UK" – Doctor Who S11E04 Review

So writer and show runner Chris Chibnall has been watching seasons 10 and 11 of the original Doctor Who. Just saying. Because "Arachnids in the UK" is a combination of "The Green Death" (toxic waste mutating normal creatures into giant life-threatening beasties, corporate greed, ecological message) and "Planet of the Spiders" (giant spiders).

There are certainly worst seasons to take a cue from. Also, "Arachnids" presents a more-or-less "normal" Doctor. Yes, she's still getting used to her new body and personality, as she says several times. But it's basically the first "real" episode of the show. For one thing, they actually build up the companions and their decision to join the Doctor on her travels. Their aunts don't get killed, they don't mistake the TARDIS for a police box and get swept up on the Doctor's travels, they don't get assigned to him. Yes, the first three episodes were them kind of being swept up and taken along. But by the end of "Arachnids", Graham, Ryan, and Yasmin decide to join the Doctor and that's that.

Let's recap. The TARDIS arrives in Sheffield (after last week's "Rosa" detour). Yasmin invites everyone up for tea and the Doctor is clearly disappointed that they're going their separate ways. However, there are cobwebs on a lot of stuff, and Yasmin's father Hakim (Ravin J. Ganatra) collects garbage as evidence of... something. That plot point doesn't quite play out, and it makes it look like he's an eccentric hoarder/conspiracy theorist.

At a nearby fancy hotel in the countryside, Jack Robertson (Chris Noth) is harassing his two-person staff. His assistant Frankie warns that if word gets out, Robertson's chance of being elected U.S. President in 2020 are null and void. Robertson's other assistant holds a gun and threatens Yasmin's mother, Najia (Shobna Galati). Who is the hotel's general manager, and Robertson fires her for coming in when he told everyone not to come in.

It turns out a scientist living in the flat next to the Khans is dead, webbed up by spiders and suffocated. And there's a large spider running around. And Anna's friend/associate Dr. Jade McIntyre (Tanya Fear) is there to check on why Anna hasn't come into work. The Doctor and Ryan go over to the apartment and there's a bit of running around as they find the spider, run out of the apartment, and slam the door.

Where's Graham? He's gone back to his home and is haunted by hallucinations of his dead wife, Grace (Sharon D. Clarke). In a neat directorial touch, Sallie Aprahamian keeps Grace out of focus in her two earlier visits to Graham.

Najia calls Yasmin to pick her up, and the rest of the team heads out there. Frankie has wandered through a door absurdly overmarked "do not enter" into some tunnels, and is recording her denial of responsibility. But something grabs her.

Meanwhile, Robertson is attacked by a giant spider in his bathroom. He lets Kevin handle it, and Kevin isn't long for this world although he does provide a Chekhov's Gun for later in the episode. Everyone meets up and they discover the hotel is infested by giant-sized spiders. Except they're just the "babies", and the van-sized queen mother is hanging out (so to speak) in the ballroom.

Robertson, the Doctor, Najia, Yaz, and Jade eventually go into the tunnels and discover Robertson has been building on top of repurposed coal mines, and also using the mines to dispose of toxic waste on the cheap. Including the toxic waste from Jade's lab where she's been experimenting on modifying spiders' genetics. The genetic stuff mutated with other waste, and since spiders get larger the longer they live, the spiders at the hotel have grown really large. Some of those spiders got out and their pheromones confused the regular spiders in the area, causing them to do things like web up people. I guess the web at Anna's apartment was one of the spiders that got out? That isn't very clear.

Eventually the team lures the baby spiders into Robertson's panic room and trap them inside so they'll die a quiet natural death. Slowly starving to death doesn't seem that quiet and natural to me, but hey, it's Doctor Who. As for the giant queen mother, the Doctor plans to use oils from the spa to drive the mother out and do... something with it. However, it's grown so big that it can't effectively breath so it's dying anyway. Robertson uses Kevin's gun that he picked up to shoot it to death, says he did the right thing and he's what the U.S. needs, and walks out.

During this, Ryan gets a letter from his father. Which among other things says that Graham isn't "proper family". Ryan takes offense and the two of them bond. Graham's hallucination of Grace finally comes into focus for him. All three companions go to the TARDIS and tell the Doctor they want to travel with her: Yasmin to get away from her family and the piles of garbage in the corners; Ryan because he has a boring life; and Graham so he can forget his grief in the wonders of the universe. The Doctor gladly accepts them and they throw the dematerialization lever together.

"Arachnids" is pretty standard Doctor Who. It's got scary monsters, it's got the Doctor at her most... Doctorish to date. It gives the companions all something to do. It shows the Doctor is the smartest person in the room.

It also tosses in political commentary. Which isn't new to nu-Doctor Who. But it's pretty pointed here. Noth's Robertson is a mix of Howard Hughes (obsessive cleanliness), Ronald Reagan (cowboy attitude), and Donald Trump (cleanliness issues, big businessman running for President). Even if Robertson says he hates Trump, name-checking the current U.S. President. At the end Robertson gets off scot-free, having more-or-less covered up his whole toxic-waste dumping scheme and making a ton of money off of his super-hotels. And only two assistants had to die because of it, plus Anna the scientist.

The Khan family is okay, and a return to the Russell T. Davies "Companion with a family" subplotting of Rose and Jackie Tyler. None of them are particularly offensive, and there's a cute running gag of Najia complaining about Yasmin's sexuality (she's… bisexual?) while asking about Yasmin's relationship with both the Doctor and Ryan. Hakim comes across as more of a hoarder than anything, and Yasmin's sister Sonya is just there.

Jodie Whittaker doesn't really take center stage except in the early parts of the episode when she's trying to make small talk--not at all successfully--and then goes into super-scientific sleuth mode. She does do well on the sympathy for the spiders and their plight, since they're acting normally. Whittaker is upstaged by Roth in the second half of the episode. And it doesn't help that Robertson makes some good points. He claims shooting the spider mother is putting her out of her mercy. And while Robertson is doing it for self-serving reasons, he does put the spider mother out of her misery while everyone else sits around watching it slowly and painfully suffocate.

It's also a rather vague ending. Not only does Robertson get away (and probably will show up down the road), but there seem to be a lot of spiders still out there. Like the one in Anna's flat. And all the other mutated spiders that got out and were spreading the pheromones. And what about the normal spiders confused by the pheromones. Locking up a few hundred at the hotel (after luring them into the panic room via vibrations, i.e., the music on Ryan's phone) doesn't seem to deal with any of that. Much less letting them starve to death. Hint: "starving to death" is not a natural death.

But the spiders are scary, and there's an eco-message, and there's an anti-Trump message, and an anti-American message, and an anti-gun message. Even if the anti-gun message comes with a "we'll let the bad guys slowly starve or suffocate to death" message. Which is kind of a... mixed message. Robertson's a dick, and a Magnificent Bastard (tm), but he does the right thing despite that with his own form of euthanasia.

But that's just my opinion, I could be wrong. What do you think?