Who Review: Arachnids in the UK

The Doctor manages to return her new friends to Sheffield. Instead of leaving, the Doctor stays for a while–and just as well. It seems the spiders have been getting restless. Unusual spider activity has been reported. When they call on one of Yaz’s neighbors, there’s no response, and no-one has seen her for a few days. The source of the mystery seems to trace to a new hotel where Yaz’s mum recently got a job–and has just lost that job. The hotel’s owner, a brash American, doesn’t seem to realize his hotel has an arachnid problem… until it becomes too big to ignore. Is this alien intervention or something a bit more down-to-earth..?

SPOILER ALERT!! My comments may (and likely will) contain spoilers for those that haven’t seen the episode. If you want to stay spoiler-free, please watch the story before you continue reading!

TRIGGER WARNING: If you suffer with intense arachnophobia DO NOT WATCH THIS EPISODE. Seriously. The CGI spiders are horribly realistic.

When the Doctor acquires new companions, there’s an almost predictable pattern to the first few stories–at least when it comes to New Who. There’s the introductory first story, then a story set in an alien world followed by one set in the past, and then back to earth. This holds somewhat for Martha and Clara, but is definitely true for Rose, Donna, Amy, and Bill. And that pattern has been repeated with the new “Team TARDIS.” Having visited an alien planet and traveled back in time, we now get the “return to Earth” story.

As I noted in the “trigger warning” above, perhaps the most impressive thing to me about this story is the CGI spider effect. These are not “Planet of the Spiders” plastic models. They move like spiders and look like them in all their many-eyed, hairy, detailed glory, which we get to appreciate up-close.

On the whole this is a good story. It takes a little while to get going since we need to deal with Yaz, Ryan, and Graham being home for the first time since Grace’s death (see “The Woman Who Fell to Earth”). And I don’t have a problem with that. Graham lost his wife in that first story and hasn’t really had time to process that fact. Returning home was going to be difficult and we see that to some extent. It’s good to show grief, but the nature of the show dictates that we can’t dwell on that. Ryan gets a letter from his Dad which he ignores for now. And Yaz invites everyone for tea.

The Khan family seem like a normal British family. Yaz’s sister has a thing for Ryan and complains about Yaz. Her Dad suspects a conspiracy about the trash in the city which he has been collecting. At first her Mum thinks he’s being silly, but later has to admit he was right since this is connected to the spider issue. Nothing strange or strained about their relationship. Unusually for New Who (and perhaps British drama), they’re a pretty stable, loving, two-parents-plus-sibling family.

We also get a bit more Doctor character development. She’s socially awkward in a kind of Eleventh Doctor way but unapologetic about it. Also, she wears a fanny-pack in which she keeps her sonic screwdriver. An interesting costume addition.

The main issue I have with the story is the too-obvious political commentary. It becomes clear early on that the bad guy is the American hotel owner, Jack Robertson. He owns multiple hotels across the world and lives for business. He’s cold and obnoxious and has presidential aspirations. They may as well have named the character Donald Trump. As it is, he explicitly mentions Trump as the one he wants to beat in 2020 since he doesn’t think Trump’s doing a enough. Jack’s not simply Donald Trump, he’s Trump+.

What’s annoying about this, regardless of your political views, is it assumes everyone sympathizes with this caricature of the current U.S. President. Perhaps many in the U.K. do, but not so everyone in the U.S. Given the current political climate here, I can imagine a lot of people being greatly offended. But more than that, I think it detracts from the story when you get too specifically referential. Who has always been left-leaning in its politics and social commentary. But the Classic series dealt with broad topics of particularly left-leaning concern: the environment, big business, dictatorial governments. It avoided making too-obvious connections to contemporary people or organizations. Not that those connections weren’t there, but you had to be paying attention to see them.

This story is about as subtle as a ballet dancing elephant. Could Jack have been an obnoxious, cold-hearted hotel owner without the Trump references? Absolutely. Did there need to be any reference to Trump or the 2020 elections? Not unless this is a plot point in a later story.

To sum up, this is a good story, very creepy with lots of good effects, but spoiled somewhat with heavy-handed political commentary. I’m still enjoying this series though.

What about you? Share your thoughts in the comments…