Doctor Who Re-Watch: Planet of the Spiders – a disappointing end for the Third Doctor?

With the focus on spiders in previous episode Arachnids in the UK, we take a look back at a very important Doctor Who story with giant eight-legged creatures: Planet of the Spiders, the final story of the Third Doctor!

Planet of the Spiders was a Doctor Who serial that had a lot to include. Along with telling the story of the Third Doctor’s death, it also had to resolve several key threads across his era.

These included a return to Metabelis 3, which he had previously visited in The Green Death, and meeting the Doctor’s old mentor, who he had mentioned quite often throughout his era. And of course, he had to fight off an invasion of giant spiders during all of this.

So how come Planet of the Spiders is so slow?

Yes, it’s a six-parter, and a slow story was often the result of such a long length. But even by six-parter standards, Planet of the Spiders just drags.

A clear example of this happens in episode two. For literally half the episode, the Doctor, Sarah Jane and the Brigadier chase Lupton, the main human villain of the piece, via several vehicles. This should be an exciting chase sequence, and yet ironically, it’s so pedestrian. It doesn’t excite the viewer, it adds nothing to the plot, and it’s very basic.

Lupton also feels like a waste of a villain. Across six episodes, he fails to stand out remotely as an enemy, always coming in second place to the Eight Legs. We know he wants power, and we’re even given some backstory to his character halfway through. But his desire for power feels so relatively basic. Overall, he’s a rather bland character.

Planet of the Spiders gave us a great regeneration scene. But what about the rest of the story?

(Photo credit: Doctor Who/BBC.

Image obtained from: official Doctor Who website.)

Strong points

However, there are some good characters. Tommy in particular goes on an interesting character journey, and the scene of him reading is particularly effective.

The story also has some interesting ideas. Particularly with its heavy focus on Buddhism, and how that influence helped to really define regeneration in this story.

In fact, while we had seen the Doctor change before, this was the first ever story to actually refer to it as “regeneration”. So it’s certainly a key story in terms of developing the show’s mythology, even outside of the fact that it’s Pertwee’s final story as the Doctor.

But that’s the biggest problem. The fact that it is Jon Pertwee’s final story should’ve meant that we got something special, and yet what we got was incredibly drawn out and average at best.

Compare this to the previous regeneration story, The War Games. Yes, that serial also had some padding issues, especially at ten episodes, which even Terrance Dicks has regularly admitted was far too long. But somehow, across that length, it was able to make that padding still feel exciting, at times, and gave us so many wonderfully memorable characters.

Great regeneration, weak story

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We don’t really get that with Planet of the Spiders. Many characters simply aren’t as memorable. The Eight Legs are a good idea, but let down by rather weak effects. While of course they’d never have looked as realistic as what we get in Arachnids in the UK, they still look rather weak, even by Seventies’s standards. (They’d eventually be served much better in the far stronger Eighth Doctor story, The Eight Truths/Worldwide Web by Eddie Robson.)

And the story is not only more drawn out than it needs to be, but feels more drawn out, too. As proven by The War Games, that’s not always the same thing.

There is one more good point the story has, however: the regeneration itself. It’s beautifully handled, and the Doctor’s “death” has some real impact, before we get the happy regeneration into Tom Baker’s Doctor. Honestly, it might be one of the best regeneration scenes in the entire series.

But that alone doesn’t change the fact that Planet of the Spiders is, overall, one of the weakest final stories for a Doctor. After a considerably strong era, Jon Pertwee really did deserve so much better.

Do you agree with this review? Or do you think that Planet of the Spiders was a suitable ending for the Third Doctor? Let us know in the comments below.