Arachnids in the UK

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"...

If there's one flaw, it's that it is all about tension and brief shocks, but there's no depth to the horror. The story as a whole doesn't have much heft nor make us feel too much, as the danger never seems tangible. This can be an issue with all-CGI monsters, but it goes a bit deeper: nobody we care about dies. There are three people killed by the spiders, one we never meet who's killed before the main action starts, the other two are the big villain's accomplices and we didn't get to know them very well anyway. It needs a nice empathetic character to be killed to up the stakes. With all the regulars' subplots to cover and already quite a few guest characters around, there probably wasn't room or time to add another character. As such, it comes down to killing off Dr. Jade; sometime after they are trapped in the hotel and she's delivered the necessary exposition, the scientist needed to be eaten by a spider; that would fix it. Even without this, though, it's still an exciting story for a new crew just starting to establish themselves.

 

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.

Kill the Moon

  

Chapter The 171st, in which the Moon turns out to be a dragon egg. That's not a joke, by the way, that's really the plot. The Moon. Turns. Out. To. Be. A. Dragon. Egg.

Plot:

The Doctor for some unfathomable reason decides to take Clara and Courtney, one of Clara's Coal Hill School pupils, on a trip in the TARDIS to make up for something he'd said previously that hurt Courtney's feelings. Their dangerous destination is the moon in the year 2049. They immediately come across three ageing astronauts, who've come to the moon with lots of nuclear bombs to investigate the reason why gravity and tides are going berserk and causing death and devastation on the Earth, then use the bombs to blow up that reason, whatever it is. Giant spider-like creatures attack, and two of the three astronauts are killed. The Doctor jumps into a huge crack in the moon's surface, and discovers that a creature is incubating in the centre; the moon turns out to be a space dragon's egg, and the spider-like creatures are space germs that live on the space dragon. Yes, really.

If the creature hatches, the pieces of shell flying out and / or the sudden absence of moon could cause an extinction event on Earth (unless by a lucky coincidence neither of them do, but that would be unbelievable, wouldn't it?!). So, a choice must be made: one innocent creature's life versus all the people of Earth. The Doctor insists that the humans make this choice themselves, and goes off in the TARDIS leaving them, which makes Clara very unhappy. She broadcasts to the Earth to get them to signal their choice, and they choose to blow up the creature. Clara disregards this, though, and aborts the imminent explosion. The Doctor turns up in the TARDIS, somewhat like a god in a machine, funny that, and whisks them off to the Earth to watch as the moon egg hatches. By a lucky coincidence, neither the pieces of shell flying out, nor the sudden absence of moon, causes any extinction event on Earth. The newly hatched creature lays another egg in exactly the same place as the old one, so Earth still has a moon. Yes, really.

Context:

Watched on a Sunday afternoon  from the series 8 boxset blu-ray accompanied by all the children (boys of 14 and 11, girl of 8); I still can't tempt the Better Half to join us. Based just on the cold open flash-forward of Clara explaining the central dilemma, all the children said almost as a chorus: "It's the trolley problem". This is because in the last year they have all watched and enjoyed (and for some of them re-watched over and over) all four series of The Good Place, which has given them a decent basic knowledge of moral philosophy. Thank you Michael Schur. As the story played out, they were all quite vocal; make of that what you will. During the early sequences, they had fun second-guessing the plot with comments such as "He's going die any second" and "Those pictures will be part of the plot"; that latter comment was from the 8-year old who was pleased with herself when said pictures (the photos on the desk in the abandoned Mexican mine area) were picked up by the Doctor a few minutes after she said it. There was a long discussion from the middle child about whether Courtney had the same phone as his elder brother, or just the same case. The eldest stayed the course, but in the second half was becoming increasingly agitated with the plot, and making comments starting "But...?" and "How...?" and "That doesn't make any sense" like every other viewer of Kill the Moon over the years.

First time round:

Watched after its BBC1 debut broadcast in October 2014, timeshifted to later but still on the same evening. This was the seventh episode of Peter Capaldi's first season as the Doctor. It's unusual, given the varied nature of the series, to enjoy six episodes on the trot with no reservations, but that was my feeling at the time. I've since reviewed quite a few of those six for the blog, and nit-picked a bit, but at the time I thought the series was in rude health, and that's not too far from the truth. Then there came Kill the Moon, though. Oh dear.

Reaction:

So, I mentioned immediately above that Doctor Who is a series that relies on variety of subject matter, tone and genre. It doesn't even limit itself always to sticking to one theme or approach in a single story either. Maybe it should, but it's just not made that way. Stories can start off comedic and take a turn to tragedy, or stories can comprise any number of sub-stories leapfrogging around genres and locales within one overall title. How well this works depends on many factors, and it is not without some risk. A story that doesn't blend all its different parts together well enough will look less like a single seamless whole and more like the story equivalent of a cut and shut motor - two (or more) sections artlessly welded together. This is a big part of the problem will Kill The Moon. The first section is fairly hard sci-fi, at least as close as Doctor Who gets (see Deeper Thoughts section below). We have a realistic depiction of organised space travel, with a team brought out of retirement to do an exploratory mission to the moon to solve a crisis. The fluctuations in gravity seem plausible. The sets for the spacecraft and base on the moon are good, and the filming and treatment of the footage in Lanzarote captures the moon's surface in the most realistic fashion imaginable. We move into creature feature horror territory very quickly, but this is the slightest of genre bumps, barely perceptible.

 

Why might this be? Well, these two genres have been fused together so often in films and TV that it's a standard. Real-life space exploration involves moving into dangerous unknown environments, so we expect it to look and feel like a horror movie to a certain extent. There are also handy analogues for the monsters, so they do not seem too outre. They are some kind of spider that can exist in a vacuum, but still can spin webs. That's fine, and easily mentally digestible, and the action's moving fast anyway, so as a viewer I'm not dwelling on this. Rapidly, though, the story changes again. They aren't spiders, they're macro germs on, as we later find out, a larger creature. This is more of a jolt to the viewer. If they're germs why make them look and act like spiders in the first place? Do germs spin webs? Courtney sprays one with some household disinfectant she's contrived to carry, and this kills it. After all, as she says, it's marketed to kill "ninety-nine percent of all known germs". But this isn't a known germ, it's a very unknown giant weird spider space germ. The effectiveness of spraying a bit of Flash with Bleach bathroom spray on it is a bit of a stretch. A minute later, sunlight kills the germs too; Clara explains this using the old adage that sunlight is the best disinfectant. But that's just a phrase, and not about cleaning your kitchen, but instead about openness and transparency. Did the giant weird spider space germs know of the phrase somehow? The protagonists just got lucky twice in a row with actions only tenuously connected to the established facts of the plot so far. This dodgy logic breaks the rules of horror, let alone hard sci-fi. Bad welding.

The plot continues its metamorphosis with another violent lurch. There's a giant creature in the centre of the moon, and it, and the germs living on it, have been growing for centuries, because the moon is an egg. We're now into the territory of fairy tale or fable, and it's horribly incompatible with what has come before. A creature embedded in the centre of the moon might have just about worked, but the whole moon is an egg and always has been?! It's a hard imaginative leap to make. The moon has been surveyed and studied, in both the real world and the ongoing fiction of Doctor Who, and there's never ever been even the slightest iota of evidence that it's been an egg all this time. Maybe if a fairy tale atmosphere had been evoked from the outset, instead of pretty much the exact opposite, it might be easier to accept. Maybe not, though, as it is by any measure a very silly idea. The standard line at this point from a certain mindset would be something like "You can believe an old dude flies around in a box, why can't you believe the moon's an egg?" So, why can't I? The dude, or lady, flying around in the box idea is well bedded in, it's part of the furniture. There's also a very good rule of thumb in fantastical writing that - unless you're going full-on surrealist no-rules, then the fewer mental leaps you make your audience go through, the easier it is to get their buy in. I'm already believing that a man in a box can travel through time, and that giant germs would act like spiders, and that there's a giant creature living inside the moon. Make me believe that the moon is an egg on top of all of that, and my head might explode.

This isn't the final section to be welded on to this jalopy, though. The next part of the narrative involves a moral quandary being played out on a global scale. A minute before, alien lifeforms were fair game to kill if it ensured the characters' survival; now, everything slows down and the characters talk about whether they have the right. They didn't think twice when they were wielding the disinfectant, the hypocrites. The Doctor leaves the rest of the cast alone to make the trolley problem decision. This action has no consequence to the plot, as he quickly comes back, and stops them having to face the immediate impact of their action. There's a brief detour when those on the moon try to hold the biggest ever referendum (this story was shown in 2014, before anyone realised quite what a bad idea referenda are). The people of Earth - well, only the one half of the globe facing the moon at that point, as my eldest child did not hesitate to point out - must turn their lights off if they want the creature to be killed, leave them on if not. Imagine if you needed to get some kip at this point: I was on Team Moon Dragon, honest, I just needed to turn in for an early shift tomorrow. Anyway, this has no consequences either, as Clara disregards the vote and saves the creature. The creature hatches and this has no consequences too (I'm seeing a pattern here). The fragments of shell evaporate seemingly, there's a few seconds without a moon at all which has no impact on Earth somehow, and then the dragon lays a new moon of exactly the same size in exactly the same place, like newborns tend not to do. What was the moral of the fable that Kill the Moon has turned into? Be nice and everything will work out with no cost or pain? Pardon my French, but that's a bit of a shit moral.

There's now a final small section welded on to the end, of inter-personal conflict between the two regular cast members. There is finally a consequence to a character's actions, sort of, when Clara refuses to have anything more to do with the Doctor. She's back with him the following week, though, and then after that they keep travelling together. So, ultimately nothing had any consequence, it was just the story of two people having a row before they later made up. There's a couple of lines thrown in about Courtney becoming a more successful person because of this experience, but it's thrown away as a joke, and the character didn't have much to do with the rest of the story - she's in no way the protagonist. There's also a line in there about this being a significant moment for human space exploration, but it's again easy to miss, and it's hard to believe that the human race - just from having a lucky escape and seeing a dragon in the distance - is going to be in any way transformed. They will venture into the stars still wanting to kill anything different to them, which doesn't seem like something to celebrate. If the script had stuck to the early NASA horror story feel throughout, it would have been achievable but maybe a bit dull; if it had attempted to be a non-realistic fable from the off, it would have been braver but very hard to pull off. Trying to lump both together, and more, produces a script that no amount of efficient production (and a lot of the performances and effects work is of a very good standard) could save.

 

Connectivity: 

Two 21st century one-part stories in a row whose titles begin with the letter 'K'. Both are in the first series of a new Doctor and both are the first produced Doctor Who stories of writers new to the series called Peter. In both Kill the Moon and Kerblam! the TARDIS team investigate a working area of a private company (the Mexican mining outfit's abandoned base in Kill The Moon).

Deeper Thoughts:

Rolling along with the tumbling tumblr feeds. Science fiction isn't a story genre, nor even a single genre at all. Not only is there no set structure or structures for how a story can play out, there isn't any checklist of elements for inclusion that one could reliably apply to existing works either. Back to the Future is very different to Alien or to Blade Runner or to Star Wars or to 2001: A Space Odyssey. There isn't anything but a very high-level description that could unite them all, and the scope for stories as yet unwritten is so vast as to be almost infinite. Doctor Who is a rare instance of an incredibly successful and long-running series that was conceived in a way all the writing textbooks would say is wrong: it wasn't a red hot burst of creativity for a single person or creative team with a vision, it was designed by committee. No artistic genius woke up one day with the idea of an alien travelling around space and time in a phone box; instead, it grew out of a brief from a commissioning executive. It was a fairly loose brief too, essentially science fiction for kids to go on after Grandstand. Because of the flexibility of the supra-genre, there was a lot of scope for what the series could be, and it's stayed that way, more or less, over the years. Doctor Who can be any type of science fiction: SF horror, hard sci-fi, space opera, science fantasy. It can run the vast gamut of genres from the start of Kill the Moon all the way through to the end of Kill The Moon.

It's fair to say, though, that Doctor Who more often than not shines at the softer, fantasy end of the spectrum. It could have turned out differently; one of the earliest pitches to meet that open brief was for "The Troubleshooters", which featured a three person scientific team based on Earth, an older professor and two heroic leads, one male one female, who would investigate and fix the problems nobody else was equipt to fix. No time travel, no Bug Eyed Monsters. This was softened in development, gradually turning the three into the Doctor, Ian and Barbara, and adding Susan as a kid that was needed "to get into trouble, make mistakes" as Sydney Newman, the commissioning exec in question, put it in his handwritten notes on that pitch document. The time travel was then added, but Sydney still wanted to exclude the Bug Eyed Monsters. That rule was broken about five weeks in, and the rest is history (and science). I've always thought The Troubleshooters sounded awful, and wouldn't have endured more than a year or two, but taste is a funny old thing. I realise now that one of my favourite shows, Star Cops, is pretty hard sci-fi, and not too dissimilar to that original pitch. It is after all a series about investigators that go where nobody else can go, and has a strict rule of no alien monsters, and certainly no time travel.

I've been thinking about Star Cops recently because I've just finished reading Above The Law by Paul Watts (Miwk Publishing), the most exhaustive and interesting book on this unfairly overlooked 1987 series imaginable. Star Cops was devised by Chris Boucher who was already a genre hero for this three great scripts for Doctor Who, and his work as script editor and writer on Blake's 7. At the time (I watched from partway through the second episode on broadcast and then got the VHS releases in the early 1990s and re-watched them over and over), I don't know if I realised how different it was. Superficially, it doesn't look that different to Doctor Who of a similar vintage, but it is very restrained in comparison. The universe of the stories has been very carefully constructed, plausibly extrapolating from real science and politics. Boucher carefully laid out the early space exploration that had taken place in the 40 years from the broadcast date to the year 2027 in which the series was set: governments and multinationals have set up several orbital spacestations, a moonbase, and a colony is just starting up on Mars; a fledgling international police force is required to keep order in this new frontier. The character biogs too were worked out to the same level of detail. There are a lot of echoes with the characters at the start of Kill The Moon, in fact: spacesuit-wearing somewhat unwilling volunteers investigating mysteries on the moon.

Star Cops, though, has an unfortunate plot hole at its centre. This was not caused by the writers, mind you. The lead character Nathan Spring was written to be a whizz kid, in his early thirties at the most, promoted above anyone else in the force because of his precocious brilliance. The producers, though, decided to cast David Calder, who was over 40 at the time of filming. They were right to do so, too, as Calder is simply brilliant in the role. But it causes some anomalies, as there was not time to catch and rewrite all the details of the scripts. Nathan harbours a dark secret, that his tech salesman father was a crook that he himself ended up investigating, fumbling the case because of inexperience but ultimately having to arrest his old man. Based on evidence given on screen, this was at the beginning of Spring's career, but based on dialogue elsewhere, the company his Dad worked for, Recondite, which was destroyed by these shocking events, only folded two years before the events of the series. The change of age of the actor cast has left a ten or so year gap unaccounted. The explanation that Watts offers in his book is that the damage having been done, it took the company ten years of decline before it finally closed. This is a good stab, but is unfortunately undermined by Nathan's possession of a Recondite prototype, Box, a cross between a copy of the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Siri, given to him by his father. Box is treated as a technological marvel by everyone in the series, so it can't logically be ten year old technology. Therefore, it must have been obtained more recently by Nathan's father, somehow given to him by a contact from the company, despite that company being in decline and despite Nathan's father having been sacked for industrial espionage many years before. He then gives it as a gift to his son despite that son being the person who busted hum for industrial espionage in the first place.

In another coincidental echo, Kill The Moon's dates don't add up either. It's perhaps the one unifying factor of the otherwise sprawling and difficult to categorise science fiction canon, that stories will make mistakes about the future, and gloss over the exact progression of events in future history. The Coal Hill characters are from the year 2014, visiting the moon in 2049, 35 years after their time. Ten years before that in 2039, 25 years on from Clara and Courtney's present, the four-person Mexican mining survey sends back something of an SOS. It takes ten years for the rescue team to go to the moon, as there is no longer any space programme, only very few aged astronauts remaining, and the only shuttle in existence had to be rebuilt as it was being used as a museum attraction. This throws up the anomaly of how the Mexicans got to the moon. They can't have been there for decades just for a mining survey that didn't find anything to mine, so presumably they travelled up after the major decline in Space travel. We're told it was privately financed, and presumably that was a one-off as there aren't any private outfits available for the rescue mission. So when did NASA become a museum piece?

Based on the actor Hermione Norris's age, Lundvik is 47-ish in 2049, so around 12 years old back in Clara's time. Based on the average age of astronauts, her training must have happened around 2030 to 2035. So, the complete collapse of a space programme, and dying out of all astronauts to the point where the bumbling three-person team we see on the moon is the only remaining option, has happened in 5 - 10 years. This seems too compressed a period to me. Maybe it's the same underlying cause as Star Cops, a casting decision, this time casting Lundvik too young. But there's also a line about Lundvik's granny using tumblr, which seems a generation or two out: based on the approximate age of the character, even if a little older than the person cast, it is most likely that she herself would have been using Tumblr than anyone older. Sure, Lundvik's granny in 2014 could have been an early-adopting silver surfer, but why conjure up a less likely character just for a throwaway line. My feeling is that instead the action in an earlier draft was set in a later year then 2049, but it was hastily pulled forward, perhaps to up the stakes by making it more likely that an older Clara and Courtney are alive on the future Earth that's threatened with destruction. Or maybe, given the mess that the script is overall, it's just a mistake. To summarise, then: watch Star Cops instead of this.

In Summary:

Over egged.

Planet of the Spiders

 Chapter The Fourth, the first (and last) of the Pert.

Plot:

Washed-up salesman C. Lupton, bent on power, dabbles in Buddhist ceremonies at a meditation centre, opening a route to Earth for some giant psy-powered arachnids from Metebelis Three. They seek a blue crystal the Doctor once stole from that planet to aid them in their domination of the universe. The Doctor has to face up to his fear of bad green-screen and ends up regenerating due to radioactive 'fringing'. 

Context:

This was the longest story for the blog so far, so I watched the DVD an episode or two per day over about a week, with different members of the family joining me at different times. The idea was to give everyone a break, but my two eldest, after watching the final episodes, begged to see the ones they'd missed.

No plot holes were spotted as such, but my better half was incensed that Mike Yates got off scott free after the events of Invasion of the Dinosaurs. I can see her point: he was part of a conspiracy to wipe out almost every human being in existence; being sentenced to a couple of weeks in a hippy retreat doesn't cut it.

First-time round:

The VHS came out early in 1991 on the same day as City of Death - my first time seeing either of them, and - excitement alert - Spiders was the first double pack video case; prior to this, for longer stories, you got two single boxes Sellotaped together. From memory, I bought both stories on their first day of release at Volume One in Worthing (the very same place that nearly spoilt the TV Movie for me five years later), and raced home to put them on, probably at a time I was supposed to be at sixth form college learning something. I can't remember which of the two I watched first, but I imagine I agonised about it.

Reaction:

I thought I knew Planet of the Spiders. Before I even pressed 'Play' I had my clever-clever summing up line ready ("Eight legs = good, Two legs = bad, Six episodes = two too long"). Then, I started watching. Admittedly this was spread out a bit, but still compressed compared to how the serial was originally shown. I was waiting for the moment where it dragged or came to a standstill or went pear-shaped. And I'm still waiting. Yes, the chase in episode 2 is a bit silly, but it does sum up the Jon Pertwee era nicely (i.e. it's got a comedy tramp and a helicopter in it) and when we finally get to Metebelis Three, it's a bit cramped and drab; but these are quibbles, and neither section was as bad in reality as it was in my preconceptions.

The rest is absolutely cracking stuff: episode 1 draws together themes and plots from the last few years expertly, with just the right amount of knowing humour, and then throws the viewer into this final exciting stretch to tie it all up. The regulars are all served well by the script, and give their best. Nicholas Courtney as the Brigadier is on particularly sparkling form, eyeing up belly-dancers and getting bashful about his activities in Brighton hotels. Jon Pertwee avoids the arrogant and irritating lapses he could sometimes be guilty of in this period; he doesn't patronise his companion or any member of the mostly superb guest cast.

Of those, highest glory goes to John Kane as Tommy; there's still (perhaps deliberately as misdirection) a hint of standard-issue Pertwee comedy yokel early on, but ultimately the writing and performance go far beyond that, and create with sensitivity something rare for 20th Century Doctor Who: a true emotional centre to the narrative. One can't help but care for Tommy and what he goes through more than anyone in, say,  Arc of Infinity. His line "Tommy's learning to read, my Mum bought me a book" gets me every time.

A Buddhist theme works for a regeneration story much better than the Christian imagery of the TV Movie, with the Doctor literally being reincarnated as a new man after coming to terms with his bad karma. It also gives the story a unique visual identity, and intriguing actions and motivations for its villains. John Dearth is excellent, as are all the Spider voice artists. The scene where Lupton turns the tables on his spider, confounding our expectations, is another highlight.

As a Russell T Davies fan, it's perhaps not surprising that I enjoy this; the Barry Letts / Terrance Dicks years are the prototype for RTD's new Who. No other era in the 20th century had season finales that built on plot and character arcs, but it's all here, and young Russell was clearly watching back then and taking notes. I'm consequently led to musing idly whether K'anpo/Cho-Je was called back to Gallifrey to fight in the time war. Big Finish have probably covered it. (K'anpo/Cho-Je is an awfully clumsy way to have to refer to the character; given that he was the Doctor's teacher he should have been called The Professor or The Lecturer, or something similarly aligned to the naming convention of Time Lord academic rankings.)

I'm not saying there aren't flaws: Sarah's involvement in the plot hinges on meditation being hip enough for her to write about in Metropolitan magazine, but it's 1973 (or even 1980) and really TM's popularity had peaked in 1967 around when John Lennon and George Harrison did The Frost Programme. The cliffhangers are mostly awful - they went to great lengths in editing to keep the ending of episode 5 intact, but it's pretty humdrum, and there must have been the option to end on the much more dramatic reveal that Sarah is under the control of the Queen Spider. There are quite a lot of opportunities to play spot the unconvincing stand-in for Pertwee. And an ending with the Doctor having to react alone to a big green-screen (probably actually yellow, but you know what I mean) never works, even with New series resources (cf. The Satan Pit and The Rings of Akhaten).

Connectivity:

Another regeneration story with a big chase scene; and some more tasteful use of people's deeply held beliefs as set dressing for camp sci-fi nonsense.

Deeper Thoughts:

Does the Doctor really have a greed for knowledge? I don't have extensive awareness of Buddhism, I'm only going on what is in this story, so forgive me if I offend. While it works for Planet of the Spiders, in general it seems a lousy credo for Doctor Who. From what is presented to us, the Doctor must accept that his greed for knowledge, so called, has directly instigated the events of the story, and so he must sacrifice himself to put things right. It's neatly done, as the Doctor returns the original crystal that he 'stole', and in so doing defeats the big bad and closes the circle. Meanwhile Tommy is the only person who seems impervious to the spider zapping, because his "innocence [is] his shield".

I'm not convinced, though, that the Doctor has a greed for knowledge. Greed suggests excess, and can there be such a thing? The Doctor may have been overzealous taking the crystal in the first place, but it subsequently helped many people, and was instrumental in saving the day a couple of times. Even the death of Professor Clegg was not just research for its own sake, but part of an experiment aimed at helping him and others with latent psychic powers (poor Clegg, destroyed after communing with blue power - there's a lesson there somewhere).

And taken to it's logical conclusion, the story seems to promote something deeply anti-intellectual; according to this philosophy, Tommy would have better off as he was - a pure innocent. This goes against the grain of the programme's original educational remit and its development as a story of exploration, engagement and - unavoidably - picking sides. Staying true to the season 11 finale, season 12 would have found Tom Baker doing nothing but meditating alongside Mike Yates and The Lecturer, the Giant Robot would have nuked Earth after only 4 episodes, and that would have been terrible... imagine a season of Doctor Who only lasting four episodes. Even in the darkest of days we got 14.

In Summary:

After some meditation, I realise it transcends its reputation.