DVD Review: Doctor Who and The Planet of The Spiders
By @edent
· Doctor Who dvd review · 3 comments · 400 words
I had never seen Pertwee's final story. So I was overjoyed when an anonymous reader got it for me from my wishlist.
It is an utterly bonkers story which nearly makes sense.
Let's address the elephant in the room first. The "yellow face" isn't acceptable now and shouldn't have been acceptable back then. Kevin Lindsay does an "accent" which is, thankfully, mild. But would it really have been so difficult to have found actors of even vaguely the right ethnicity to play the various Tibetan Monks? It casts a rather long shadow over the production.
The plot is neatly done. Your dad, angry that he has lost his job, turns to spiritualism and tries to destroy the family. Only he's not shouting at your mum, he's summoning demonic spiders from another dimension.
There's an undercurrent of what we might now call colonialism. Plundering foreign resources to enrich ourselves and denying the superior claim of indigenous holders of knowledge.
Similarly the climax centres on the fact that The Doctor has stolen an artefact from its rightful culture. The only way to save the day is to repatriate it. A bit suspiciously woke if you ask me 🙃
The b-plot is straight out of Flowers for Algernon but, sadly, lacks the resolution.
The various chases (Car! Helicopter! Hovercraft!) wouldn't feel out of place in a modern story. Indeed, the recent episode "Empire of Death" has something similar on mopeds.
The spider special effects are occasionally effective, but mostly pretty naff puppetry. It is such a shame that more care wasn't taken over them. Of course, this is decades before home video releases, so very little thought was given to the longevity of episodes.
The info text subtitles are fun (and suitably irreverent) and there's a clutch of special features of the usual variable quality.
It is absolutely worth watching. The development of the Time Lord lore is significant. The early attempt at a multi-story arc is a template for future stories. Oh, and The Doctor watches a stripper with The Brigadier. Which is… something…
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@blog Thank you for pointing out the appalling yellowface in this story! Doctor Who wasnʼt great on this count, and The New Avengers was terrible. Plenty of suitable actors in the UK at that time and many were used to play “near enough” Asians (Burt Kwouk, Robert Lee, Anthony Chinn come to mind).
I saw it when it first aired, and haven’t seen it since, but I remember being terrified of the spiders and found the story really effective (especially with the revelation that the Doctor was partly to blame). I think that given the general state of TV special effects in those days our minds probably filled in the blanks for us!
Patrick Hadfield says:
I watched that when it first came out. The spiders were particularly scary and I blame Dr Who for promoting arachnophobia!
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