| Chapter The 204th, which features the ultimate in creepy crawlies: a U.S. businessman looking to go into politics. |
Plot:
Returning Graham, Ryan and Yaz to Sheffield 30 minutes after they left, the Doctor discovers giant spiders are at large in the city. Meeting up with a scientist Dr. Jade McIntyre whose research into arachnids is almost certainly involved, though she can't see how, they work out that the creatures are centred around a newly built hotel where Yaz's Mum Najia is employed. Or was employed, as the charmless owner, businessman and wannabe politician Jack Robertson, fired her when she inadvertently walked in on him having a clandestine conversation with a couple of underlings. This was about a dubious plan to bury industrial waste beneath the hotel that has backfired: chemicals plus some improperly disposed-of experimental material from McIntyre's lab have created the spider problem. Trapped inside the hotel with the rest of them, his two underlings having been killed by the spiders, Robertson begrudgingly helps the TARDIS team (plus Yaz's Mum and the scientist) to sort the situation out. The spiders are driven into Robertson's panic room and locked in so that they can have a humane death by starvation or asphyxiation (doesn't sound that humane to me, really, but talk to the Doctor - it's her plan). The largest of the spiders is still free, but is suffocating because of its excessive size. Robertson shoots it, which actually seems kinder than letting it suffer, but everyone has a go at him for being cruel, so what do I know? Yaz, Graham and Ryan decide to continue travelling with the Doctor.
Context:
I watched on my own from the disc in the series 11 Blu-ray box set on a Saturday morning. I decided not to ask the children to join me, as they have not been too enthusiastic about watching Doctor Who recently. I've seen this happen before, and it is usually in the long gaps between new series being shown on BBC that their interest in Who of any era starts to wane. It will be informative to see if the imminent series (serial?) 13 stokes things up again, or whether they - unlike their Dad - are finally growing out of it for good! [Stop press: the two youngest (boy of 12, girl of 9) happily watched the first two episodes of the newly animated The Evil of the Daleks once the Blu-ray came through the letterbox. They even chanted the excited "Next ep, next ep..." at the end of both. I shall see if they sustain this through all seven parts of that epic.]
First Time Round:
It was just before Halloween (and it was an apt scary story concept for the time of year); the family (minus one) watched this story go out live on its BBC1 broadcast on Sunday 28th October 2018. That year, the youngest (6 at the time) had refused to watch any more Who after being scared by the reveal of Tim Shaw's tooth-encrusted face in The Woman Who Fell to Earth, and wasn't tempted back until the next series. My memory of the time is that this new version of Doctor Who, four weeks in, was riding high: there were Doctor Who billboards just like for Christopher Eccleston's debut in 2005, there were Doctor Who trailers in the cinema just like there were during the years of David Tennant's imperial pomp. There was even a Doctor Who themed dance on Strictly Come Dancing the evening before Arachnids in the UK, with Stacey Dooley playing the Doctor, and Kevin Clifton dressed up as a Cyberman. People who may now be thinking that the show has lost its reach (see Deeper Thoughts below) are forgetting such 'cut through' events (and others more recently like the message Jodie Whittaker delivered in character near the start of the UK Covid lockdown where she was the perfect Doctor of that moment). Frankly, they're also forgetting that there is usually a bit of moaning regarding the show looking tired around the start of a Doctor's third year in charge; I certainly remember it happening with Capaldi.
Reaction:
Though it looked like the 2018 run was doing something very different (new Doctor, new regular cast, new directors, new writers, new music, new logo, new title and credits sequences, no returning elements from older stories) the foundational structure of the series follows a pattern set up in the very early years after its return in 2005 and reused many times since (in the preceding 2017 series for example). The first three stories of the year are a contemporary alien invasion story (often where the Doctor meets a new companion or companions), then a futuristic one on an alien planet or space station, then one set in a period of Earth history. This sets out the stall of the type of stories that the show can do for the new companions / viewers. For the fourth story, the TARDIS returns the new crew home a little changed, where they get to face another invasion or monster but this time as more experienced adventurers. In 2005, there was Rose, The End of the World, The Unquiet Dead and then Aliens of London; in 2017, there was The Pilot, Smile, Thin Ice and then Knock, Knock. Jodie Whittaker's first year pulls the same trick. Arachnids in the UK follows The Woman Who Fell to Earth, The Ghost Monument and Rosa - present, future, past, then back home. Chris Chibnall's script leans more towards Russell T Davies's 2005 approach than Steven Moffat's 2017 one. The adventure ends with the Doctor's new friends electing to rejoin the Doctor on her travels, as home seems a little smaller than it used to be (despite the giant spider infestation). There's even a couple of Davies Who preoccupations in the narrative, with a protective Mum and a slightly ineffectual Dad (two, if one counts Ryan's Dad, mentioned in passing).
The other major aspect of Doctor Who's back catalogue of tricks that Chibnall is showcasing here is horror. Despite a few moments of nastiness from Tim Shaw, Jodie's first story was more action oriented, the same goes for the second, and the third was a time-travelling moral quandary. Arachnids in the UK is the first story of the year to go all out to send any newly recruited audience members behind their metaphorical sofas. The opening creeping shots of the exteriors and interiors of the hotel are a case in point. The setting being an empty hotel is, of course, an instant giveaway of the genre - Robertson's new build is the Overlook Hotel in all but name (and Chibnall is not alone in such pilfering, the finale of the latest series of UK crime series Endeavour in September 2021 jumped through various contrived narrative hoops to trap its characters in an abandoned hotel during a snowstorm, and was all the more fun for it). This being Doctor Who, the hotel is built on top of an old mine filled with industrial slime and genetically engineered mini-beasts rather than anything more spiritual. So, Arachnids in the UK = The Shining + Jon Pertwee Doctor Who story The Green Death? Is that all there is to it? Quite frankly, that should be enough! But, no, it has a few other things to recommend it too. Firstly, there's some impeccable CGI work creating the spiders. They all look wonderfully realistic and contribute to some nice shock moments. The practical effects to cover rooms and people with thick cobwebs are excellent too, and aid the creation of the tension and dread that is punctuated with those shock moments.
There's a lot of fun in the script. It presents us with horrific versions of all the spider clichés (a spider emerging from a plughole in a bath, capturing one under a glass / cauldron, "they're more afraid of us than we are of them"). Chris Noth as Jack Robertson is great value, managing to be sometimes sinister, sometimes funny, and it's no surprise at all that the character returned to the show a few years later in Revolution of the Daleks. I think the script maybe needed a few more tweaks at the end before going in front of the cameras, though, as the Doctor's humane plan to get rid of the spiders seems cruelly inhumane, whereas the bad guy's plan just to shoot them would be quick at least. In his next appearance, Robertson is positioned much more clearly as the hiss-able Panto baddie. The TARDIS team are still fresh and new here, and their emotional arcs just starting out. Yaz's family are perfect. Graham's grief, and his imaginary conversations with Grace are touchingly performed. Ryan's letter from his Dad keeps his subplot moving along too. There's also some nice moments of the three of them with the Doctor just enjoying each other's company. A lovely throwaway moment is Ryan in the background making shadow animals on the wall when in McIntyre's lab. Jodie Whittaker as the Doctor gets some lovely moments and funny lines too: getting small talk wrong, mistaking Robertson for Ed Sheeran, "I call people dude now"...
Connectivity:
Both this story and The Evil of the Daleks start in a more urban scenario before action moves to a big building in its own grounds (hotel in Arachnids, stately home in Evil). Both see the Doctor indirectly cause the destruction of the entire monster race at the end.
Deeper Thoughts:
He's RTD2, but he's not our only hope. Social media can be positive on occasion. Earlier in September 2021, Tanya Fear, who played Dr. Jade McIntyre in Arachnids in the UK, went missing in Los Angeles where she now lives. My socials were lit up by fans putting the word out, and then very quickly again were filled with confirmation that she had been found alive and safe. Whether or not those previous social media posts had helped in the search, it was good to see such tools used for good, and definitely good to see a happy ending to that particular tale. Doctor Who fans can tend to be a grumpy and pessimistic bunch, or perhaps the grumpy and pessimistic ones tend to have the louder (virtual) voices. In the aftermath of the brief flurry of Tanya Fear related messages, I did hear that even that topic had been hijacked by someone to moan about how Chris Chibnall was ruining Doctor Who. Something along the lines of 'Tanya Fear? Never heard of her. Oh, she's from a Chibnall episode, I never watch those. Not my Doctor, etc. etc.'. If that did indeed happen, I was lucky enough not to see it. But it was no surprise to me therefore that the next time my socials lit up with message after message from Doctor Who fans about a single subject, all generally positive, that some people would use this as a stick to beat up the current production team. This was the afternoon of Friday the 24th September 2021 (and carried on through the weekend at a barely reduced rate) where the Doctor Who online massive were taken by surprise and reacted with joy and lots of speculation at the news that Russell T Davies, the first showrunner of the revived 21st century Doctor Who, is returning to run the show again in 2023.
I certainly didn't see 'RTD2' coming. What was more predictable, however, was that this would start up a conversation about the deficiencies of the outgoing regime. If they were willing to twist messages about Tanya Fear to that end, the knowledge that the old guv'nor has been tempted back - in their heads, no doubt, to save the series and clear up the mess left by the other feller - would inspire the same sort of comments. The timing probably didn't help. Chibnall's latest series and specials have yet to be shown, and already his successor has been named. It's standard, though. Chibnall's appointment was announced when Steven Moffat still had a series and two Christmas specials to broadcast, and Moffat was officially confirmed to be working away preparing his new take on the show about the same amount of time before Davies's final episodes went to air. No doubt the preparation work that has to be done means many meetings with lots of people starting almost immediately, and it would be impossible to keep a lid on it for very long had it not been announced. Anyway, no conspiracy there. Chibnall's done fewer years than his predecessor in the role, which might give the impression he wasn't as successful; but Moffat did stick around for quite an extended time, and three or four years - and one global crisis - is enough for anyone to go through before considering changing their job. Good luck to Mister Chibnall in his future endeavours, and I look forward to his remaining stories. I'm giving too much credit to the naysayers anyway, trying to look for logical reasons for how they're interpreting things. Davies posted a celebratory instagram the day after the announcement; captioned "Day One", it was a photograph of himself in a garden - I assume his own - posing with a slightly dilapidated Dalek. I saw someone online saying that they took the state of the Dalek as a coded reference to the show being broken and needing Russell to fix it.
This was all despite Davies stating in an interview quoted in the press release that Chibnall is his "friend and hero" and that Jodie is "brilliant" and that he's looking forward to seeing their remaining shows as a viewer. The naysayers online will say he's being polite or has to toe the party line or whatever. This is how conspiracy mindsets work, and we see enough of them online talking about masks and vaccines at the moment without concentrating too much on the Doctor Who ones too. Simply put: the BBC would not give Chibnall a centrepiece slot in their centenary celebrations if they thought he was failing the show, and Davies is back because they need someone for the job, and he's presumably got some interesting ideas about what to do next. What could these be, though? The naysayers stating - no word of a lie - that Doctor Who won't be "woke" any longer now Davies is in charge, and that a woman won't be cast as his new Doctor, might well be in for a surprise. But so could we all. Part of me wonders what it would have been like with someone completely new in charge. I watched with some interest J. Michael Straczynski's public bid for the job, and would have been very interested to see his take. Not to be outdone by RTD, JMS is anyway also getting to return and reboot a series for which he previously was showrunner, as he's working on a new version of Babylon 5. Just as in that case, enough time has passed that the showrunner is not the same person as before. With shows like Years and Years and It's a Sin behind him, the Davies taking over now is not the same as the one that worked on Doctor Who in 2005. Anything could happen next. Exciting!
In Summary:
Whatever your feelings now, you have to accept that in 2018, like the spiders, Chibnall's version of Doctor Who had legs.
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