Well, that was distinctly average. Not that there's anything wrong with an average episode, but when there are only ten episodes in a season, an instalment that hits as mediocre as this brings the average down noticeably. It looks like some people really loved this, and fair play to them, but it just didn't do that much for me.
In fairness, part of the lack of impact is just that I'm not scared of spiders. I mean, an eight-footer coming at me out of the bathroom would give me pause for thought, but I just didn't get the creeps from this like a lot of people did. That's no fault of the episode, of course; attack of the giant spiders is about the most Doctor Who idea you could do. The spider animation was pretty spot-on, though. I actually like spiders, they're some of my favourite creatures and I appreciated that the episode didn't portray them as outright monsters, merely as animals that could potentially be very dangerous if they were to, you know, suddenly become ten feet long.
This is, though, pretty much the episode I'd most suspected we'd get when Chibnall took over. He's a writer with a broad range of genres on his CV, but his comfort zone is the procedural, or, in sf terms, the paraprocedural. Programmes were police or investigative work combine with paranormal or alien elements; for instance, Torchwood (which was Chibnall's show to begin with), Fringe, The X-Files, Sea of Souls (which actually matches his version of Doctor Who fairly well). It's also hugely derivative of Pertwee-era Who, which is not, in itself a bad thing. The Silurian two-parter from season five was tremendously derivative, but still one of Chibnall's most enjoyable Who scripts. "Arachnids" pulls a lot from 1974's Planet of the Spiders (I did wonder if we were going to get a reveal they were from Metebelis 3, in spite of the "no old monsters" writ), and also 1973's The Green Death, with its toxic waste creating mutant arthropods plotline. There's nothing wrong with this though; Doctor Who has always nicked ideas, and now it's being going long enough to nick from itself.
Still, the negative trends of Chibnall's writing are all too evident here. Extremely clunky dialogue, plotlines that go nowhere, characters that exist solely to deliver exposition. It can't be argued that the script here is seriously flawed, and the guest cast are wasted. Chris Noth - always and forever to be known as "Big" - plays a thinly-veiled Trump analogue. Well, Robertson's serious hatred of the Donald marks him out as almost the anti-Trump, and one could hope that someday they might come into contact and mutually annihilate. At the end of the day, though, although he's a complete bastard, he's nowhere near as appalling as Trump. He's the watered down kids' TV version. Building a hotel over a rubbish dump just isn't much cop in terms of villainy, and if Chibnall had wanted to make a point of attacking Trump, have his firing of Yaz's mum be because of her race, not because she turned up for work at an inconvenient time. (Also, it's actually pretty hard to just fire someone in the UK, even if you are an American oligarch. Equally, it's pretty difficult for a civilian to bring a gun into the country and wander around shooting things, something which Yaz, the police officer, should perhaps have had something to say about.)
The spectacularly-named Tanya Fear does her best with the role of Dr. McIntyre, but she has nothing much to do but deliver reams of exposition, and struggles to make this engaging. Shobna Gulati is another good actress left with very little to work with as Yaz's mum Najia. The Doctor's character suffers too, with the anti-gun rhetoric - something I'm heartily in favour of, most of the time - coming at the expense of character logic. There's a very good argument that shooting a creature to put it out of its misery is a more humane action than letting it slowly suffocate or starve to death. While this is clearly not Robertson's real intention, the sloppy dialogue makes it seem that the Doctor has lost a pretty basic moral argument with the supposed villain. Again, though, he isn't actually nearly as big a villain as nice Dr. McIntyre, who experimented on spiders, altered their nature, then threw them away without actually checking to see if they were dead. While the toxic waste in the dump apparently caused them to mutate further, Robertson's isn't directly responsible for that either.
It's not that there's nothing to love here. The subplot focusing on Graham, confronting his now empty home and the fact of Grace's death is rather beautiful. It's helped no end by Bradley Walsh's understated performance, and the "ghost" of Grace is a nice touch, if rather cliched. It's good to finally get some development for Yaz, and it's interesting to get a hint of possible romance between her and the Doctor (something that the Doctor is unable to quite deal with, unsurprisingly a little confused considering how often their female companions have fallen in love with them). After hints of chemistry between Yaz and Ryan last week, it's nice to have Yaz's sexuality be open to question, instead of simply spelled out in a character bio. I also really like that the Doctor is openly emotionally vulnerable, in a way we haven't seen much before (Matt Smith's Doctor being the most emotionally honest previously), and that her companions decisively choose to carry on travelling with her.
But it's hard to celebrate these moments much when the rest of the script is so aggravatingly poor. After the big mumma spider is disposed of, the plot simply stops, with Robertson swanning off, no resolution for McIntyre and her careless laboratory, and possibly thousands of giant spiders roaming Sheffield. There was apparently some brief dialogue that suggested they were all going to scurry into the caverns (presumably to suffocate/starve/eat each other), but given that I and everyone else I've spoken to missed that, I wouldn't call that sufficiently clearly written. At the very least, there's a whopper in Yaz's neighbour's flat, kept at bay by only a thin layer of garlic paste.
Best bit: Without question, Ryan randomly making shadow puppets in the background of the lab scene. Although that should be pretty challenging for a dyspraxic person.
Spider science: Kudos for correctly stating that a spider, expanded to the size of the big mumma, wouldn't be capable of absorbing enough oxygen through its carapace to survive. A big fat facepalm for not realising that none of the spiders in the episode would be able to breathe due to that problem. There's a reason terrestrial arthropods only get to a certain size in this era (they used to be able to get somewhat bigger when the atmosphere was denser, geological ages past).
Title Tattle: "Arachnids in the UK" is a play on Anarchy in the UK. Anyone who knows me knows how much I love a punning title, but "arachnids" and "anarchy" scan differently because of their inflection, so I'd call it a qualified success.
In fairness, part of the lack of impact is just that I'm not scared of spiders. I mean, an eight-footer coming at me out of the bathroom would give me pause for thought, but I just didn't get the creeps from this like a lot of people did. That's no fault of the episode, of course; attack of the giant spiders is about the most Doctor Who idea you could do. The spider animation was pretty spot-on, though. I actually like spiders, they're some of my favourite creatures and I appreciated that the episode didn't portray them as outright monsters, merely as animals that could potentially be very dangerous if they were to, you know, suddenly become ten feet long.
This is, though, pretty much the episode I'd most suspected we'd get when Chibnall took over. He's a writer with a broad range of genres on his CV, but his comfort zone is the procedural, or, in sf terms, the paraprocedural. Programmes were police or investigative work combine with paranormal or alien elements; for instance, Torchwood (which was Chibnall's show to begin with), Fringe, The X-Files, Sea of Souls (which actually matches his version of Doctor Who fairly well). It's also hugely derivative of Pertwee-era Who, which is not, in itself a bad thing. The Silurian two-parter from season five was tremendously derivative, but still one of Chibnall's most enjoyable Who scripts. "Arachnids" pulls a lot from 1974's Planet of the Spiders (I did wonder if we were going to get a reveal they were from Metebelis 3, in spite of the "no old monsters" writ), and also 1973's The Green Death, with its toxic waste creating mutant arthropods plotline. There's nothing wrong with this though; Doctor Who has always nicked ideas, and now it's being going long enough to nick from itself.
Still, the negative trends of Chibnall's writing are all too evident here. Extremely clunky dialogue, plotlines that go nowhere, characters that exist solely to deliver exposition. It can't be argued that the script here is seriously flawed, and the guest cast are wasted. Chris Noth - always and forever to be known as "Big" - plays a thinly-veiled Trump analogue. Well, Robertson's serious hatred of the Donald marks him out as almost the anti-Trump, and one could hope that someday they might come into contact and mutually annihilate. At the end of the day, though, although he's a complete bastard, he's nowhere near as appalling as Trump. He's the watered down kids' TV version. Building a hotel over a rubbish dump just isn't much cop in terms of villainy, and if Chibnall had wanted to make a point of attacking Trump, have his firing of Yaz's mum be because of her race, not because she turned up for work at an inconvenient time. (Also, it's actually pretty hard to just fire someone in the UK, even if you are an American oligarch. Equally, it's pretty difficult for a civilian to bring a gun into the country and wander around shooting things, something which Yaz, the police officer, should perhaps have had something to say about.)
The spectacularly-named Tanya Fear does her best with the role of Dr. McIntyre, but she has nothing much to do but deliver reams of exposition, and struggles to make this engaging. Shobna Gulati is another good actress left with very little to work with as Yaz's mum Najia. The Doctor's character suffers too, with the anti-gun rhetoric - something I'm heartily in favour of, most of the time - coming at the expense of character logic. There's a very good argument that shooting a creature to put it out of its misery is a more humane action than letting it slowly suffocate or starve to death. While this is clearly not Robertson's real intention, the sloppy dialogue makes it seem that the Doctor has lost a pretty basic moral argument with the supposed villain. Again, though, he isn't actually nearly as big a villain as nice Dr. McIntyre, who experimented on spiders, altered their nature, then threw them away without actually checking to see if they were dead. While the toxic waste in the dump apparently caused them to mutate further, Robertson's isn't directly responsible for that either.
It's not that there's nothing to love here. The subplot focusing on Graham, confronting his now empty home and the fact of Grace's death is rather beautiful. It's helped no end by Bradley Walsh's understated performance, and the "ghost" of Grace is a nice touch, if rather cliched. It's good to finally get some development for Yaz, and it's interesting to get a hint of possible romance between her and the Doctor (something that the Doctor is unable to quite deal with, unsurprisingly a little confused considering how often their female companions have fallen in love with them). After hints of chemistry between Yaz and Ryan last week, it's nice to have Yaz's sexuality be open to question, instead of simply spelled out in a character bio. I also really like that the Doctor is openly emotionally vulnerable, in a way we haven't seen much before (Matt Smith's Doctor being the most emotionally honest previously), and that her companions decisively choose to carry on travelling with her.
But it's hard to celebrate these moments much when the rest of the script is so aggravatingly poor. After the big mumma spider is disposed of, the plot simply stops, with Robertson swanning off, no resolution for McIntyre and her careless laboratory, and possibly thousands of giant spiders roaming Sheffield. There was apparently some brief dialogue that suggested they were all going to scurry into the caverns (presumably to suffocate/starve/eat each other), but given that I and everyone else I've spoken to missed that, I wouldn't call that sufficiently clearly written. At the very least, there's a whopper in Yaz's neighbour's flat, kept at bay by only a thin layer of garlic paste.
Best bit: Without question, Ryan randomly making shadow puppets in the background of the lab scene. Although that should be pretty challenging for a dyspraxic person.
Spider science: Kudos for correctly stating that a spider, expanded to the size of the big mumma, wouldn't be capable of absorbing enough oxygen through its carapace to survive. A big fat facepalm for not realising that none of the spiders in the episode would be able to breathe due to that problem. There's a reason terrestrial arthropods only get to a certain size in this era (they used to be able to get somewhat bigger when the atmosphere was denser, geological ages past).
Title Tattle: "Arachnids in the UK" is a play on Anarchy in the UK. Anyone who knows me knows how much I love a punning title, but "arachnids" and "anarchy" scan differently because of their inflection, so I'd call it a qualified success.
No comments:
Post a Comment