Tony welcomes the
Eight-Legs.
Confession: I have a
personal petty hatred for titles that are gratuitously quirky or that sound
like they haven’t changed since they were at the idea-pitching stage. Dinosaurs
On A Spaceship, for instance, feels like it simply doesn’t give a toss about the
audience, and makes me fume about how the impact would have been completely
lost if Earthshock had been called Cybermen On A Spaceship…
So Arachnids In The UK
immediately puts my back up, because in my mind, it translates straight from
‘Quirky Punk Reference’ to ‘We’ve really not thought this story through
enough.’
That said, what does
Arachnids In the UK give us? Well, first it gives us a slightly insecure
Doctor, preparing to let her new friends bog off back to their normal lives.
The scene of her furiously avoiding their eye makes us immediately feel like
she’s a schoolgirl who’s not bothered at all if the person she’s crushing on
wants to run off and be with someone else, honest… – but that’s a monstrously
unfair and sexist point, given similar scenes by both Eccleston (‘You could…I
dunno…come wi’ me’) and Tennant (‘Oh, don’t you wanna come? I thought, maybe,
cos I’d changed…’), so we’ll cut it right the hell out, shall we? Yes, she
overcompensates madly by skipping off to ‘Tea at Yas’s,’ but let’s not pretend
it’s a reaction unique to this still-new Doctor. Later, in dialogue, we
discover that she’s still feeling out the Time Lord that she is, which, while
it feels unusual in her fourth story, should be set against the likes of the
Twelfth Doctor, who spent a whole series wondering if he was even a good man,
went into massive Grandpa Cool overcompensation for his second series, and
finally arrived at ‘Kindly Professor’ as the ultimate interpretation of ‘What
it means to be the Doctor’ for his final run of stories. These things change,
so a Thirteenth Doctor still consciously trying on traits as she goes actually
makes a kind of sense and allows for some funny dialogue.
What the episode most
distinctly gives us of course is a rebalancing of the companion backstory
scales – so far, it’s all been about Ryan, Graham and Grace, so it’s about time
we found out who’s at home waiting for Yaz. Perhaps notably, she’s up there
with Martha Jones in terms of a full family, with their own personalities,
dramas and tones of voice, from the social campaigning and godawful cookery of
her dad to the eager beaver professionalism of her mum, going into her new job
early so she can hit the ground running, and instead simply hitting the ground,
to her sarcastic sister with her teenage spikes out. Ladies, gentlemen and all
other groovers – the Khans.
While it’s more
understated than with Graham and Ryan, a convincing case is made in this
episode that while she loves them all dearly, they’re quite enough to do Yaz’s
head in, and that time away from them all in the Tardis can genuinely give her
the room to grow into her abilities that she feels she needs.
The episode also gives us
Chris Noth as Jack Robertson, billionaire hotelier with a penchant for stamping
his initials on things, political ambitions and a wide investment portfolio.
So, Trump-Lite, in fact. This is where the episode shows a lack of finesse – if
you’re going to essentially have Donald
Trump in an episode, it feels massively too on the nose to have the real Donald Trump referred to as an
actual person in the same story. It makes all the Trumpisms of Robertson
redundant, because this is a world in which the real thing is already out
there, being that guy.
Needless to say,
Robertson’s lack of understanding of nuance and detail is the actual villain of
the piece, and the giant spiders mentioned in the title are actually just the
by-product of his dumbassery, rather than actual monsters, in much the same way
as the giant maggots in The Green Death weren’t the actual villains of that story either. Nevertheless, it’s the spiders for
which Arachnids In The UK will principally be remembered, if not perhaps
re-watched that often.
Doctor Who has a slightly
complicated track record with spiders. But for Arachnids In The UK, it feels as
though Chris Chibnall thought ‘Planet of the Spiders is a cool story, let down
by spindly spiders. Kill the Moon had great, creepy space spiders let down by
the idea that the moon was the egg of a giant frigging space-chicken. Let’s
scare the little buggers rigid and do proper, creepy-as-the-day-is-long,
hairy-legged, fast-moving giant spiders for once. Let’s be the team that puts
that right. Hm? What do you mean, plot? Oh we’ll recycle the plot of The Green
Death, it’ll be fine.’
And this is what we find –
the plot is part Spiderman, part Green Death, part allegory on modern careless
capitalism, the titans who engage in it and the unforeseen consequences that
Mother Nature is prepared to lay on our asses when we treat the planet as nothing
but an engine for making money, but the spiders themselves are Proper Creepy.
Arachnophobes up and down
the country, and doubles around the globe were genuinely watching through their fingers, behind cushions or even,
to deploy an old cliché, from behind their sofas when these creepy, hairy,
bath-destroying humungorachnids went on the march.
Which makes it sad that
that’s really…all there was to them. The plot elements involved in their
creation were fine, if a little basic and recycled. But what was actually done with them was disappointing,
nonsensical and ultimately unsatisfying, from the one left behind a barrier of
vinegar two flats from Yaz, to the frankly odd idea of driving the Big Mama
spider out of the hotel, to the
notion of locking all her offspring in a room, where they would presumably be
forced to mate and eat each other until either one survived all the others or
the room got so full of spiders that they starved or suffocated or crushed each
other to death. Personally, I quite like the idea of one giant mutant spider
out-surviving all the others, eating all the food in the room, and – because
they’re mutated and clearly that’s code for ‘Sod it, anything goes’ – absorbing
all the weapons in the room into their body. Then Robertson could begin feeding
his political enemies to it to secure its loyalty and end up riding his
SpiderTank ™ into the White House to take over the world.
This, by the way, is what
happens when you leave humungous plot-holes in your story and apparently refuse
to let the Doctor give a toss about them. You get Trump-Lite on a SpiderTank ™.
So…thanks for that.
Ultimately, Arachnids In
The UK will go down in history as a Green Death re-run with some properly scary
spiders in. Beyond that, die hard fans will point to the first time we met
Yaz’s family, and the slightly odd, earnest warning the Doctor gives her newish
friends when they ask to come along with her – a legacy perhaps of the Twelfth
Doctor’s guilt, bearing in mind that, timey-wiminess and Nardole’s period of
shepherding humans notwithstanding, he did in fact manage to get all his
companions killed or turned into Cybermen.
Whether that’s enough of a
reason to re-watch a story with some deep plot-holes and an overt Trump-parody
in it…time will tell.
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