Doctor Who: Arachnids in the UK

An up and down Halloween Special.

This episode falls into the category of okay. It’s thankfully absent Chibnall’s normal issues with pacing, but that appears to come at the expense of character development. It seems that if Chibnall can’t do character development through boring dialogue, he just doesn’t do it at all.

Story-wise, the Doctor manages to get, Ryan, Yas and Graham home, only to find that spiders in Sheffield have been acting weird and growing huge.

We get introduced to Yas’ family; her sister owns a phone, her dad is bad a cooking and her mum wants to know if Yas is seeing anyone. Like I said, the character development isn’t strong, but in terms of these characters this isn’t much of an issue.

Where it does become an issue is with the smart science lady whose name I’ve already forgotten. She is an entirely disposable character, but appears to get some of the Doctor’s dialogue when they discover what’s caused the giant spider problem.

Bradley Walsh continues to impress with the presentation of Graham’s grief and survivors’ guilt. The Doctor also gets some development, but her misunderstanding of what ‘seeing each other’ means feels borrowed from something Eleven would have said.

On that point, I’d usually bash the awful “science” that used to explain that a genetically engineered spider could mutate if exposed to toxic chemicals. Things that are toxic kill or injure you; they don’t make you stronger. However, I’m going to give Chibnall the benefit of the doubt and assume that this was a deliberate Halloween cliché of toxic waste creating a monster.

Now to the massive weakness of the episode; the Trump parody. I mean they even directly reference Trump when they talk about the hotel owner. Rather than being a character, he’s a caricature of an American businessman. He’s entirely cartoonish in his villainy, which really removes the suspension of disbelief.

The ending is also a bit stupid; I get that you have to get a “more scared of us” line in for the kids, but the radical shift to political commentary is just weird and out of place.

Overall not a bad episode, but could have done with focussing on being a Halloween special and not cramming an “important message” in at the end.