One year ago today, Arachnids in the UK was released. What does our writer Robert think of it, who’s just seen it for the first time?
(Image credit: Doctor Who/BBC.
Image obtained from: BBC Press.)
Arachnids in the UK is a year old and I just watched it for the first time, and I found its message somewhat annoying. Let me try to explain myself so that you might find it annoying too! (Or don’t if you like the episode! It’s up to you but no complaining in the comments. I gave you fair warning.)
So, here’s something you may or may not find interesting. I’ve been watching each new season of Doctor Who as it comes out on home media since I cut cable around 2015. Meaning outside of Doctor Who Magazine (until I stopped subscribing to that too for a variety of reasons) I mostly stay away from the fandom at large until they bother releasing the current series in North America and I get the thing into my Blu-Ray player and finish it. To avoid spoilers, as you do.
This got substantially harder with the eleventh series, as I’m sure a lot of you can imagine. Lots of background noise started making its way into my life. “Trump parody”, “ruined forever” (actually replace this one with “too many companions” or “no longer made with kids in mind” because people say Doctor Who is ruined forever with every new season), “there’s an implication that the Doctor could ever be as uncreative and boring as to possibly be Banksy”, etc.
Despite my best efforts I was hearing a lot of commotion about the new show, and I was going to go into it with a lot more in mind than, say, the only thing I knew about Twice Upon a Time which was “the First Doctor is in it and he’s purposely not written accurately cause Moffat is annoyed Chibnall didn’t want to start with the Christmas special”. (He’d deny this but we ALL know.)
Luckily, (or unluckily, depending on who you are,) life got in the way, and I have only just recently gotten a chance to watch the new series. Well, most of it: I just finished The Witchfinders (it was my favorite episode so far of series eleven so that should tell you what kind of person I am,) so I’m almost there, but that’s not what I want to talk about.
Rather, while there’s lots of things I could talk about, I want to speak about the moral in Arachnids in the UK. The confusing, strange moral, that seems not only out of character for the Doctor, but out of character for a human being to even write.
But enough about me
Let’s remind ourselves what happened in Arachnids in the UK first though. The Thirteenth Doctor finally gets her current TARDIS team home to the right time and place after an adventure fighting rags and an almost historical that will either have aged perfectly fine or really badly by 2027 due to recently revealed events. Leading Yasmin, Ryan, and Graham to all go their separate ways to think about if they want to continue traveling together with the Doctor.
We then get some nice good stuff with Graham that, while filmed like a horror movie, is honestly rather emotional. I really enjoyed these segments and wish they went on a bit longer. And Ryan is endearing himself to me in every episode from this one onward. You can see him making shadow puppets in the background of this episode in one of the exposition theater scenes, and it reminded me a lot of something Jamie would do. Yasmin is also there.
Eventually though, giant spiders show up! And maybe I’ve just been watching Kamen Rider shows too long and have gotten accustomed to their rushed CGI but I thought the spiders looked fantastic in this. This partnered with the rather horrific deaths of a lot of the supporting cast, in which they’re webbed up and liquefied (I don’t think this part is explicitly stated but come on, they’re spiders), makes this one pretty scary for the younger kiddies or anyone with arachnophobia. Which surely was the point, but what didn’t really have a point was…
Robertson (Chris Noth) is presented as a rather obvious Trump parody. Perhaps too obvious?
(Image credit: Doctor Who/BBC.
Image obtained from: BBC Press.)
Can’t flack the Jack
The Trump parody named Jack Robertson deserves its own article by someone who is more comfortable talking about politics than me, but it’s an awfully strange one. Being a billionaire who owns hotels and yells “YOU’RE FIRED!” is really all you need to get the point across, but then he mentions Trump by name. And also, that he’ll be running against him in 2020. What, as a Democrat?
Is this a political statement about America that all our politicians are the same? Or more likely, was this originally just going to be Trump but they backtracked on it and only somewhat changed the dialog? More confusingly for this type of show, at the end of the story he’s also the one in the right.
At least to me, and here is where I get to the point of all this. The moral of the episode, when you get to the nitty-gritty of it, is that the Doctor goes out of her way to extensively make sure the spiders suffer as much as possible, because for no reason whatsoever the Doctor now no longer believes in mercy killings. And if the Doctor doesn’t, surely we shouldn’t either?
Why are we still here? Just to suffer?
Yes, long gone are the days of The Age of Steel, where the Tenth Doctor mercy kills a Cyberman after its emotional inhibitor breaks and it starts remembering who it was. Or the consideration in The Beast Below to render the suffering Space Whale brain-dead. No, now we just let things exist in horribly agony! Everybody lives! Whether they like it or not.
See, there’s a fundamental problem with the spiders. Well, two actually. One, they exist at all and will screw up the ecosystem if they get out into the wild. Two, the bigger they get the harder it gets for them to breathe. The Doctor’s way of handling these problems? For the little ones, we lock them in a vault for them to die over a period of weeks starving to death. For the big one that is slowly suffocating due to its body weight crushing its spider lungs? Oh, just let it suffocate, it’s fine. Bravo, Doctor!
I’ll admit, I might be a little influenced on the issue to side against the Doctor here. In 2018 I had to put down two cats I’ve had longer than a decade, as they were simply in too much pain. It was an awful time for me, but it had to be done as it would be crueller to force them to keep going as they were. My grandmother also chose to have a Physician-assisted death rather than waste away to a horrible cancer, as that kind of thing is legal where I live. So, come on Doctor Who, you can talk about being progressive all you want but as far as tackling this subject matter goes, you’re on the same side of history as that guy who drove the bus in Rosa.
Chris Chibnall has made some pretty debatable choices since he took over as showrunner. Arachnids in the UK is no exception.
(Image credit: Doctor Who/BBC.
Image obtained from: BBC Press.)
Everybody hates Chris
It’s also possible Chris Chibnall simply has no idea how painful suffocating or starvation is and how there’s nothing actually humane about dying in either of those ways. And if the argument is that Spiders don’t have the necessary pain receivers to be affected by either than what’s the real argument for not shooting them? That they get to live a few more hours confused and scared, not knowing why they can’t breathe correctly or panicking trying to find more food before the darkness comes?
Chibnall might simply have a “humane death” confused with a “natural death”, and in fact the dialog suggests that (not that any of this is natural though). But I don’t know the man outside the extras on the Sixth Doctor DVDs, where he called the Sixth Doctor stories bad when he was 16 as a member of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society, so anything’s possible. Anything except him living down that DVD extra.
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You couldn’t have waited at least one season to do something like this?
In the end, you can have the Trump parody gleefully gunning down the spider while evil music plays all you want, but he was still in the right. Just as he was right to want to just shoot the spiders that ended up in the vault, destined to first eat one another (spiders do that! look it up!) before dying of starvation. So add cannibalism and fratricide to things the new Doctor considers better than a mercy kill.
I understand you can’t have the Doctor running around shooting guns (this isn’t a Second Doctor story, after all), but you shouldn’t have written it so that was an option in the first place. The Doctor shouldn’t be a willing contributor to undeserved pain, no matter what the reason. And for a season as important as this, a season meant to sell you on a female Doctor being just as good as any of the Doctors in the past, that this isn’t all just a publicity stunt during a time when Doctor Who is no longer under the protection of the man with the most powerful mother in law in the British entertainment industry, this was a massive misstep.
(Granted, since I haven’t watched it yet, if It Takes You Away has her mercy kill a suffering alien, just pretend this article never happened.)
What did you think about Arachnids in the UK? Did you agree with the Doctor about how we should just let things suffer horribly rather than letting them be at peace? Or was I making a mountain out of a Cathonian hill? How hard should I be kicking myself for not doing a book review of Forever Autumn, a Tenth Doctor with Martha Halloween novel, in October? Let us know in the comments below.