Arachnids in the UK

Alright,  I'm gonna be honest. For a while I was this episode's number one hater. When I was first entering my rankings for all of TARDIS Guide, putting this one as a 0.5 was a no-brainer. I had watched it twice - once when it aired and once when I was rewatching 13 in preparation for Flux back in 2021. And I hate hated it. I was very unwilling to engage with a lot of this era as an actual part of this show with its own merits and charm for the longest time, and that coloured my perceptions of a lot of alright episodes. Having seen a lot more classic who and seeing the inspirations a lot of Chibnall stuff took, I've been slowly but surely making my way through episodes that I'd maligned for a while.

This one wasn't one I couldn't imagine growing to like. Praxeus and LOTSD are one thing, but this was another entirely. That said, when I sat down tonight to rewatch this, I was pleasantly surprised. There was a lot more emotion than I remembered. Graham's arc of grieving was exceptional, Yaz's family was charming, and the mystery of the spiders was a lot more engaging than I remembered. 13 has slowly but surely been growing on me as a character for sure. Hell, even Jack Roberts, who is the SINGLE MOST ON THE NOSE STAND IN FOR ANY POLITICAL FIGURE EVER, has his own campy charm to him.

This doesn't mean the episode is perfect, by any means. Despite Roberts having his moments, the obvious Trumpisms get quite grating very quickly. Ryan is alright in this episode but again his arc feels like more an extension to Graham's. And the elephant (or spider) in the room here is the Doctor's handling of the moral quandry of the episode. It is ridiculous. Guns are bad, yet I'm happy to let these creatures suffocate to death underground - a far more humane method of killing them! And the thing is, I wouldn't even mind it as much if ANYONE came out and said "woah, wait a minute Doc, that's kinda cruel" instead of just nodding along as if it was perfectly reasonable. It's not as if the Doctor has never gone overboard in punishing villains before, but at least in episodes like Family of Blood it's called out as being wrong. Could there have been no way to just... take them to another planet or something? Argh!

It's because of this that I can't give this more than 3 stars. I enjoyed it, it was a fun romp, and I would encourage others who are turned off severely by the resolution to give it another go.

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.