Was Spiders In Sheffield too on the nose, Chibnall? If there is one episode that is annoying to look back on from this series, it is the one with Chris Noth, particularly for what was revealed of him last year but also for the imitation he puts on here. I don’t think I’d find anyone that would disagree with me here, but he was the only one that got the tone of the episode down (aside from Bradley). This is one of the few times an American has come into the show and understood that none of this is supposed to be taken too seriously, so he played a stupid and over-the-top businessman by the spec-name of Fonald Frump.

Crap name aside from a man that wants us to believe he’s punk enough to have listened to the Sex Pistols while looking like a geography teacher, “Arachnids in the UK” isn’t a great episode. It isn’t even good. Finally, we have the episode that should let us know about Yaz and her family. However, we’re given more character to the older White guy that is going to appear in one more episode. It is also the episode where the internet (Twitter) was given one tiny hint of lesbians and has since ran with it, presuming and eventually being given their women that lick each other’s face. I don’t know what lesbians do, I’ll need to find a thorough documentary on the internet to know more.

Joking aside, shall we talk about the morality of the Doctor? The most pacifist person in any room at any time, the person that should be working on solution after solution to humanely handle situations where creatures are being threatened. Yet here she has the morality of a child. We’ve seen this child’s morality before, particularly with a Chibnall episode in “Dinosaurs on a Spaceship.” In that episode, it is a shrug and turn to the sunset before we end, here it is forcing a creature that was modified to grow exponentially and is on the search for food to slowly suffocate and die. A bullet to the head is more humane than that.

I shouldn’t be coming out of an episode of Doctor Who with the main takeaway being that the villain, the ostensibly over-the-top cartoon villain based on and supposedly feuding with a disgraced former president, is right and the Doctor is wrong. Nonetheless, four episodes in, and we’re already here. There are countless writing solutions that could have been taken to make an otherwise barely passing episode across the line into something possibly good. Use the TARDIS to take them to a planet full of plant life that the spiders would love, a gun to the head (possibly the one pointed at Yaz), use the arachnologist to look after them and turn the hotel into something of a sanctuary to study them, or literally anything else.

I love that the spiders are just normal house spiders genetically modified by the lab and the toxic dump. It doesn’t overcomplicate things and it doesn’t push its luck of believability either. They are just normal things made big and under no fault of their own are trying to survive. This is why the morality is so important to the humane way they are dealt with, they are Frankenstein’s monster. They didn’t ask to be created, they didn’t seek to be imposing, they just are through circumstance. Fonald Frump is the villain despite the lack of consequences he faces. He is horrible, and he is the one who should be held accountable for his actions.

There are bits of “Arachnids in the UK” that are better in places, but none of it makes the episode good. For example, something I noticed in the rewatch this time around was Tosin Cole just in the background of the lab scene making shadow puppets, adding enormous amounts of character to Ryan that the dialogue just isn’t. I’ve said repeatedly that Ryan (and Yaz) is an exposition machine to be wheeled out when the Doctor needs a question posed to her. Yet beyond the letters that are palmed off for a reveal of a massive spider and yet more exposition, that background work does more than standing at some ladders ever will.

Of course, I can’t sit here and yammer on about an episode of Doctor Who with Shobna Gulati in it and not mention Victoria Wood. A former castmate alongside Bradley Walsh on Corrie, Gulati first comes to mind as Anita in Victoria Wood’s fantastic Dinnerladies which you need to watch, it is the funniest thing. She knows how to be funny, she knows how to play off of someone being funny, but there was nothing really here for her. As I’ve said time and time again, Chibnall lacks the ability to write characters beyond the obvious statements to get a plot point across.

The only thing nailed beautifully is Graham finally going back home for the first time since Grace passed. What is probably the most consistently well-written throughout Chibnall’s several-year reign of terror is Bradley Walsh as Graham. In fact, I’ve got a feeling that is because he’s the only actor to push back so Graham might say something slightly different from what is on paper. One well-placed shot and I fall in love with this slightly cheeky but adoring bus driver that misses his wife all over again, as is the case in just one simple scene.

The one thing I would have loved to stay, beyond the needless bit that would lead Yaz to say she’s in lesbians the Doctor or the first face (I believe) of Chibnall’s mantra to kill the gays at every turn, is the line about the sofa. YES! That “new” (ignore we’ve reviewed series 12 and Flux) TARDIS is missing something, and it is the ability to just sit down and have a chat. Everyone stands about like they are T-posing in this thing, which never really goes away. I don’t mind the design, I just want something that lets it feel like it is lived in, beyond handcuffs and a mattress in the console room.

Ultimately, “Arachnids in the UK” does a total of three things right: it is creepy, the long moments with Graham are crawling into setting something up (that doesn’t come), and Chris Noth is very much like Fonald Frump. The disappointment is once again script editing, this time by Fiona McAllister, and a lack of writing from Chibnall to fix glaring issues. “They deserve a humane, natural death,” it would help if the writer and editor knew what humane meant instead of suffocating the so-called monsters of this week and letting off the actual villain with a tut, eye-roll, and a ruffle of the hair.

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Doctor Who "Arachnids in the UK"

4

Score

4.0/10

Pros

• That scene at the house with Grace and Graham.
• Tosin's background acting.

Cons

• Slow and painful death is not natural or humane.
• Yaz is a cop - Yaz ignores the gun.
• Buy one get one free on graves for gays.