Day 193 — July 12th 2021
Planet of the Spiders Parts Five and Six
Planet of the Spiders — Part Five
I’ve sort of lost track of what’s happening in this one, and I think part of that is down to all the spiders having the same voices, and plotting against each other. I’ve already mentioned that I’d thought we were following the Spider Queen who then turned out to be just any old Spider, but now we’ve got confirmation that The Great One is also not the Spider Queen — I’d been assuming that she was going to grow to enormous size when the crystal was returned to her, but apparently not. My new theory is that The Great One must be the original spider who arrived with the Two Legs hundreds of years ago.
There’s a great sequence in which Doctor Who is drawn into the Great One’s lair, and she mentally tortures him, not unlike the way we saw Lupton treated earlier in the story. It’s an interesting enough sequence, and the spider’s taunts are genuinely scary, but once again it’s let down by being shot using CSO when there’s really no need. If you were to stick Pertwee against some rocks (heck, you could use some of the sets from The Monster of Peladon and light them blue!) I think this would be all the more effective. As it is, I’m distracted by the harsh cutting out around his hair.
I’m also not sure that his fear in this this scene is earned. The Great One forces him to spin against his will and then goads him;
The Great One: ‘Is that fear I can feel in your mind? You are not accustomed to feeling frightened, are you, Doctor? You are very wise to be afraid of me. Go now. You must hurry back and fetch the crystal. I must have it, don’t you understand? I must have it! I must! I must! I must! Go now. Go! Go! Go now!’
But… well, the spiders haven’t been all that much of a threat so far, have they? They’ve spent the entire story squabbling and trying to get their crystal back, and aside from this display of mental prowess I don’t think they’ve given Doctor Who any reason to particularly fear them. If anything it’s having the opposite effect on me — it sounds like they’re trying to big themselves up because they know they’re not his greatest foe.
And that’s sort of it from me on this one. I know, I’ve barely said a thing! But there’s not a lot to say. This one just isn’t grabbing me, which is a pity considering it’s the end of an era. Part Six shows promise, though, if only because Sarah Jane’s got something on her back…
4/10
Planet of the Spiders — Part Six
About a decade ago I interviewed several of the writers from The Sarah Jane Adventures, with the hope of putting together a fanzine devoted to the series. Elisabeth Sladen had not long passed away, and talking to all these people who got to write for her was wonderful — just to hear the love they all had for her. During my chat with Gary Russell he mentioned that they’d been planning to bring back the Metebilis Spiders to do battle with Sarah Jane again on Bannerman Road, but that they’d never been able to make it work. Gary had put together a few drafts, Gareth Roberts and Clayton Hickman did a pass at the idea, but none of them could quite make it click.
At the time, having not seen Planet of the Spiders yet myself, I offered the rather feeble suggestion that the spiders weren’t really Sarah Jane’s enemy — they were Pertwee’s foe, she just happened to share the story. Gary explained that they’d thought the link between Sarah and the Spider Queen opened up some interesting possibilities, and I had to concede because I didn’t know.
Watching again today though I can see how silly my remark was, because Sarah Jane under the conrol of the Spider Queen is the best bit of this story by a million miles! Their negotiation in Part Five was a lot of fun, but seeing Sarah possessed like this, firing the blue lightning at Doctor Who, is brilliant, and genuinely scary. I love Sarah speaking with the Spider Queen’s voice, and it just makes me long for the never-seen rematch between the two.
Shortly after our chat, Doctor Who Magazine published a lot of details regarding unmade episodes for the series, including the breakdowns for the two versions of the Metebelis story, alongside some notes from Russell T Davies about why he thought the idea never clicked;
‘In the end I was wary of lessening the status of a classic Doctor Who monster. I mean, those things killed the Third Doctor! Even he couldn’t defeat them, he had to let thre Great one destroy herself. So to take creatures that powerful, and have them defeated in good old Ealing… it just made me shiver in the end.I thought we were doing them a disservice.’
The thing is… it plays into my concerns from Part Five; I don’t think the spiders are particularly powerful. Oh sure, the Great One has designs on taking over the universe, but the rest of the spiders have spent the entire story bickering among themselves and trying to get people to do the legwork for them in tracking down the lost crystal.
I don’t even think the Great One poses that much of a threat — she’s got big ideas, but in her hubris she’s miscalculated her plan at the cost of her own life. In the end it’s not the spiders who killed Doctor Who at all, it’s the radiation in the cave where one of the spiders lives! There’s a lot of talk in this episode about fear, and how Doctor Who is more scared of the Great One than he has been of anything else in his life… and I just don’t buy it. Repeatedly telling me something is scary doesn’t make it so. You could take out the line about the radiation in the cave, thus ending this story simply with Doctor Who returning to Earth victorious, and you wouldn’t have to alter anything else about the story. It just doesn’t feel epic enough for a regeneration tale, and that’s especially noticeable when the previous one was The War Games.
So how about the regeneration itself? Well, yes, that’s well done. It’s the first time that the regeneration itself has been played as something emotional. The Tenth Planet posed it as something scary and dangerous, while The War Games made the farewell between friends sad but the regeneration a bit funny. here, though, we’re definitely supposed to feel Sarah Jane’s heart breaking at the change of her friend. It’s a lovely moment, though I do wish we’d heard Jon Pertwee say the ‘where there’s life’ line somewhere before this — it’s reported as something he says in The Monster of Peladon, but I feel like it would have even more impact if it were a recurring sentiment, even across this final season.
The one thing I could have done without when it comes to the regeneration is all the nonsense about Cho Jee and K’anpo, and his showing up to give Doctor Who’s cells ‘a little push’. It felt a bit like padding, a bit like a ham-fisted attempt to prepare the audience and a bit like a clumsy attempt to talk about Buddhism. And even though I knew what was happening, it left me a bit confused — was Cho Jee supposed to be the Watcher? Why has he been hanging around for this entire story? The decision to include Doctor Who’s old hermit friend felt more like someone saying ‘that daisiest daisy line was good, let’s reference that somewhere…’
Overall I’m sorry to say that Planet of the Spiders has been a bit of a let down. The quality is wildly inconsistent, and there’s certainly not enough material in there for a full six-part story. Even poor Tommy just sort of vanishes at the end, not integral to the resolution at all. I’m not sure if this story has a good reputation or not — though I’m sure it’s not one of the better thought-of Pertwee finales. I’m ending on a 4/10, which gives us an average score of 4.67.
I think that’s a fair assessment of Season Eleven overall, really. The TIme Warrior and Invasion of the Dinosaurs felt like a real shot in the arm for the series; fresh and vibrant after three years of very similar feeling tales. But then Death to the Daleks was rubbish (my lowest-rated Dalek tale of all), The Monster of Peladon was neither here nor there, and now this. There’s been a lot more to enjoy in the Pertwee years than I was expecting to find, but all the same I feel ready for a change and I’m excited to be moving onto Tom Baker.
