Planet of the Spiders Part Four

The one where Sarah becomes food in the spiders' larder...

I'm going to get it out of the way early: Tuar and Arak make for a fine pair of brothers, don't they? Ralph Arliss and Gareth Hunt are well cast by director Barry Letts as they are convincing as siblings, and both are handsome young men with fine facial hair. Arliss would go on to be just as impressive in 1979's Quatermass IV, while Hunt would soon find greater fame as Gambit in The New Avengers. I've always found it rather sobering to see actors I admire in this way captured forever in their prime in TV and film, and then think of what the passage of time has done to them (and us all). Doctor Who fans live in the past, poring over old episodes and analysing them, picking them apart (rather like me and this blog!). To us, these people - these characters and actors - are still as they were back then. Ralph Arliss will forever be a handsome 27-year-old, and Gareth Hunt will forever be thought of as action man Gambit, or shaking those Nescafe coffee beans in his hand in those 1980s adverts. So when the inevitability of time catches up with them - as it did Hunt in 2007 - Doctor Who fans feel the loss that little bit more, and mourn appropriately.

Gareth Hunt may be gone, and Ralph Arliss may be in his 70s now, but for Doctor Who fans, Tuar and Arak will never die.

Apologies for that rather cod-philosophical rambling. I feel quite melancholy now!

The Doctor spends 16 minutes of this episode semi-conscious or resting after being felled by a lightning bolt last week. It's surprising, but Jon Pertwee really does not feature very strongly at all in what is his final story as the Doctor. The Doctor plays second fiddle to Sarah and Mike's adventures in part 1, and for most of part 2 the Doctor is simply chasing Lupton, with little dialogue. He also features very little in part 3, so to spend more than half of this episode incapacitated really takes the biscuit. At least the scenes with Sarah at his bedside, the ominous curfew bell tolling in the distance, are lit well, as are the scenes of night-time on Metebelis III. Well done lighting designer Ralph Walton.

I don't know why Sarah is so worried about the Doctor supposedly dying though. She's been through this enough times before to know that he usually has some trick up his sleeve. She thought he was dead twice in The Monster of Peladon alone, so she should have learnt by now that he's a tough old bird.

Elsewhere, Lupton is letting his hubris get the better of him by standing up to the queen spider, or should that be sitting down, daring to sit on the Eight-Legs' shelf-throne and talk rebellion with his spider partner in crime. And back on Earth, Tommy is somehow affected by the power of the blue crystal, restoring his mental capacity to something more akin to his real age. Tommy goes from reading early learning books to quoting William Blake and raiding the meditation centre's library. What happens to Tommy is exactly what happened to the spiders which were aboard the Earth starship which crashed on Metebelis III 433 years ago. The arachnids grew in size and intelligence thanks to the blue crystals, and look at them now! But why didn't the blue crystals do the same to the human occupants of the starship? Why are they not super-intelligent human beings by now?

While there's a nice little story developing for Tommy, too many other characters are being left on the side with nothing to do: all Barnes, Land, Moss and Keaver do is wring their hands in a bedroom, while Mike is left to snoop at doors (then get tied up and gagged, which maybe he enjoys?). The Brigadier and Benton have disappeared completely, and Cho-je may as well not have been in the story at all so far.

All that and the Doctor comatose too. Once he does revive, he sets off for the spiders' domain to get Sarah back, armed with a device which repels the Eight-Legs' lightning bolts. But it doesn't take long for him to be captured and imprisoned in the same larder that Sabor and Sarah are cocooned in (although they do have some nice little pillows for their heads).

And that's that, really.

First broadcast: May 25th, 1974

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: Tommy's transformation is rewarding, and well played by John Kane.
The Bad: The Doctor is basically out of the story for 16 minutes. We are two episodes away from the end of the Third Doctor's era, and all we're seeing is an unconscious hero and a cocooned heroine.
Overall score for episode: ★★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆

"Now listen to me" tally: 34
Neck-rub tally: 17

NEXT TIME: Part Five...

My reviews of this story's other episodes: Part One; Part Two; Part Three; Part Five; Part Six

Find out birth/death dates, career information, and facts and trivia about this story's cast and crew at the Doctor Who Cast & Crew site: http://doctorwhocastandcrew.blogspot.com/2014/06/planet-of-spiders.html

Planet of the Spiders is available on BBC DVD. Find it on Amazon - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Doctor-Who-Planet-Spiders-DVD/dp/B004P9MUK0