Doctor Who Series 37 Episode 4 - "Arachnids in the UK" Spoilers

[Crazedwraith]

Is currently airing.

Will catch it on catch up as usual.

[The Romulan Republic]

Missed it again. I hope Space does a marathon of the last season again this year at Christmas- then hopefully I can binge watch it and catch up before the Christmas special.

[Crazedwraith]

You'd like this one, guest starring (not)donald trump!

[The Romulan Republic]

So first a female Doctor and diverse companions, then Rosa Parks, and now taking the piss out of Trump? Well, good on the BBC for realizing that there's no point in trying to win brownie points with the Alt. Reich- they lost those people the moment they cast a woman, if they hadn't already.

[Crazedwraith]

That said I think this is the weakest episode so far.


The Trump parody is actually kind of low key. Trump himself is just too ott to be satirised effectively. He gets away at the end scott-free, gunning down the monster of the week and Thirteen just scolds him impotently.

Despite meeting Yaz's family she continues to be underused. Graham and Ryan's character arc is the strongest thing at the moment.

[madd0ct0r]

I enjoyed "kaz's mum" patiently trying to claim her own identity, as well as embarrassingly prying into her daughter's sex (?) life.

I felt the logic of the episode was weak. Cant shoot spiders but can lock them in a room to starve? Can watch a giant spider slowly suffocate to death but wrong to mercy kill it?

Weirdly off.

[The Romulan Republic]

That said I think this is the weakest episode so far.


The Trump parody is actually kind of low key. Trump himself is just too ott to be satirised effectively. He gets away at the end scott-free, gunning down the monster of the week and Thirteen just scolds him impotently.

Ugg. Maybe they are trying to score brownie points with the Alt. Reich. Well, I'll have to wait and see.

Despite meeting Yaz's family she continues to be underused. Graham and Ryan's character arc is the strongest thing at the moment.

Its always going to be a bit of a juggling act trying to give a larger ensemble equal focus. Hopefully they'll give her more of a role later.

[Crazedwraith]

I felt the logic of the episode was weak. Cant shoot spiders but can lock them in a room to starve? Can watch a giant spider slowly suffocate to death but wrong to mercy kill it?

Yeah, my assumption of where the gathering spiders thing was going was that she'd heard them into the TARDIS and take them to a nice very oxygen rich world to live on safely.

Ugg. Maybe they are trying to score brownie points with the Alt. Reich. Well, I'll have to wait and see.

I don't think it's that exactly. He's clearly an arse and a bad guy in the story, they just really fumbled the ending. It was quite abrupt as they need to finish the plot and get the the character denouement of the team deciding to travel on the TARDIS permanently.

[Broomstick]

It was a relatively weak episode, but then, not all episodes will be equally great. It's especially noticeable after "Rosa", though, which I thought was really well done.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Yeah the ending left much to be desired. For instance, what happened to those people kept cocooned as food, were they definitely dead?

Definitely not as strong as the previous episodes but it still fulfilled its purpose of being sufficiently entertaining, downright creepy in places and showing some good character work with the new TARDIS crew. But as Broomstick said, not every episode will be an outstanding success. I'm reminded of SFDebris' comments on Star Trek 3 actually, in any given set of episodes/films/books etc, some will be good, some will be be bad and some will be average when compared to the rest of the group.

Also, it's actually quite refreshing to have a plotline that isn't some kind of evil scheme or alien strategem. It's just a random confluence of events and (individually) small mistakes/errors that pile up to cause some really quite freaky problems. Seriously, when was the last episode we had that wasn't some sort of active plan or alien attack? That wasn't even alien? I'm struggling to think of one in NuWho, with the possible exception of "Father's Day" (and even that had monsters) and the decidedly underwhelming "In the Forest of the Night" or whatever the one with trees everywhere was called. Even "Twice Upon a Time", while not having an evil plan, was still an active alien/future human scheme.

I also have to give credit to whichever crew did the new CGI shots of the TARDIS traveling through the Time Vortex, those shots were gorgeous.

[madd0ct0r]

Two subtleties picked up by others.

One. Instead of young woman seduced away by dashing young stranger, newdoc tries to dissuade and gives warning. Perhaps a minor detail, perhaps part of the whole "being careful"


Two. Most of the episode was a group of four women going around solving problems while the two boys do missions and work through emotional trauma. So subtle i didnt pick up on it

[EnterpriseSovereign]

There was one mention of Trump, which got a reaction along the lines of, "Don't mention that man's name to me" from that guy. They did drop the ball with the ending, I agree. There was a rather large plot hole of there being no evidence of the weaponry for the entire party that guy claimed he had in his panic room, else he would have produced something beefier than the handgun that he picked up off his dead bodyguard.

Interestingly that they didn't completely ignore the square-cube law since they had the big spider already dying partly due to its size. Else it would surely have taken something bigger than a single bullet from a handgun to put it down. From the way they were setting it up it seemed like the final spider was going to be much larger than it actually was.

And I've no idea what they thought they were going to accomplish by using a spray of bloody bath salts!

[Broomstick]

Seriously, when was the last episode we had that wasn't some sort of active plan or alien attack?

Last Christmas - there's even a line in "Twice Upon a Time" where the Doctor says he doesn't know what to do when it's not an evil plot or conspiracy.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Yeah I did mention that episode, I really meant when was the last episode that didn't have any kind of alien scheme involved? Something that was actually an accident?

[mr friendly guy]

Pollution in a mine causing creepy crawlies to grow to giant size? Which classic Who episode has this occurred in before?

[Bedlam]

Pollution in a mine causing creepy crawlies to grow to giant size? Which classic Who episode has this occurred in before?

I was sort of hoping that would be mentioned, or maybe that the Doctor had been killed by a giant spider (sort of) before.

I'm still a bit let down by the near total lack of reference to previous Who so far.

[Crazedwraith]

They've referenced 12 a bit, but they're taking the take not to overload on the continuity to avoid putting off new viewers. Since a new Doctor, especially with a new show-runner is basically a soft reboot of the show for a new audience.

I don't remember any of the NuWho Doctors referencing previous Who that much.

[Tsyroc]

That said I think this is the weakest episode so far.


The Trump parody is actually kind of low key. Trump himself is just too ott to be satirised effectively. He gets away at the end scott-free, gunning down the monster of the week and Thirteen just scolds him impotently.

Despite meeting Yaz's family she continues to be underused. Graham and Ryan's character arc is the strongest thing at the moment.

Considering the cringe I was expecting when he first showed up I thought the Not-Trump was pretty good. He was mostly a self-obsessed American businessman douche but he had teeny moments where he seemed to care that two people who worked for him got webbed up. He was a little cliché but they veered away from some of the even more douchey American businessmen they've had in the past (I'm mostly thinking of the guy who had the captive Dalek in Nu-Who's first season). It's almost like they went Trump and then backed it off a smidge.

I thought the Doctor probably let him slide on shooting the dying spider because it was possible that it may have been more humane to kill it outright instead of letting it suffocate. Presuming you knew where to shoot and didn't just end up making things worse by adding more pain. That being said, I assumed that they planned to asphyxiate the other spiders in the panic room. I don't know why I thought that but that's what I thought as I was watching it.

The various spiders looked good.


One question. Is it common for rich people to have armed people working for them in the UK?

I also thought the choice of handgun seemed a little odd. Mainl bigger and shinier than I would expect private security to carry. I assume they wanted it to be more showy when Not-Trump picked it up and used it later on.