Easily one of the worst episodes of new Doctor Who, full stop. A low mark in the already low mark that is the Chibnall era. The issues with Arachnids in the UK are so numerous I would struggle to even list it all out.

The worst part of Arachnids in the UK is this is the exact sort of content that should be a fun and breezy time. I don't need my giant spider plot to be all that serious, thoughtful, or dramatic, I am open (and was even excited for on initial airing) a fun and goofy time. My standards are already pretty low going into a story like this, in other words. I don't want the next Heaven Sent, I want an entertaining bit of nonsense like the Husbands of River Song. There's a lot of room for content less serious in Doctor Who, and if anything, in a series with Rosa and the Demons of the Punjab, a bit of light-hearted fun felt very, very welcome to me.

But then we get to the actual episode and the Doctor is complaining about not being allowed to suffocate/starve/dehydrate these spiders in a slow, painful, and agonizing way instead of just shooting them dead in a few seconds. We have some examples of truly awful acting here, and a lot of that is around Chris Noth's character. Now, I've seen Noth in a dozen different other shows or other media, he is a fine performer, so I blame the direction and awful character writing here. Nonetheless, it results in a terrible performance even if I don't blame that on the actors. The stuff with Graham is somewhat interesting but I think the show really struggles to give it the justice and weight that sort of character work absolutely deserves, but definitely serves as a highlight in an otherwise really bleak watching experience for me.

How do these spiders look worse and more fake to the extent it is comparable to the Third Doctor's 70s era cheese effects with his spider episode? That episode is at least really creative in its design even if it also looks pretty terrible, and that was almost half a century ago now. This is a bad episode that really sticks out even in the land of bad 13th Doctor era episodes where such things are plentiful. It is such a miserable, dry script that is so slow paced and hardly worth anyone's time. In my eyes, there is little distinction between this and other remarkably bad content like Orphan 55 or Time and the Rani.