Doctor Who: Arachnids in the UK (2018) - Review

With a premise like 'Arachnids in the UK', Doctor Who can go down the route of terrifying creature feature or make a big old silly B-movie monster flick, and for some reason decides to blend the latter with important character drama central to the rest of the series... I mean, it worked for 'Aliens of London', so why not?

Despite having very little to work with in previous episodes, Yaz finally gets some more character background in this episode with the introduction of her family, but it all feels a little bit tacked-on. Its as though Chibnall realised that Yaz had nothing to work with and so decided to work in a family sub-plot (and it really feels like a sub-plot) into this episode because it was the only present day one for a while. Now, on the one hand, that's fine, but after a while I started to wonder if Yaz's mum and the scientist-whose-name-I-really-can't-remember were almost entirely interchangeable exposition machines with the only difference being that Yaz's mum is Yaz's mum and the other character is...someone else. The other character (according to IMDB) is called Dr. Jade McIntyre, who I didn't dislike in the episode, but found completely perfunctory.

The whole episode hinges on a big pay-off moment that never fully arrives. It basically amounts to "evil Trump man" filling the basement of a hotel with landfill that also includes toxic waste (because apparently Doctor Who is set in a comic book universe this week) which caused an experimented-on spider to grow really big and have a lot of kids. Somewhere along the line, I think the episode needed some kind of antagonist. There's nothing worse than having characters distance themselves entirely from the conflict, but that makes the conflict feel a bit uneventful and unimportant. I'm not asking for the Spider Queen to attack the Doctor and Team TARDIS with her army of giant spiders, but maybe something a little more down-to-earth could've given the episode something to work with. As it is, the spiders are an accident and then get rid of themselves, meaning that no one causes the spiders' growth spurts and no one stops the threat. Chibnall, did you see the fans' response to 'In the Forest of the Night'? Because they did a very similar thing there and nobody seemed to really like it.

Saying all that, there were some pretty scary moments with the giant spiders, and the CGI effects looked pretty solid for the most part, but it didn't feel as epic as 'The Ghost Monument' or as heartfelt as 'Rosa', nor did it have a proper antagonist like 'The Woman Who Fell to Earth'. In a worse series, you could probably forgive 'Arachnids in the UK' for being a shlocky monster flick, but in a series that's been building a real sense of quality sci-fi drama, this feels like a weird step-back that never really indulges in its B-movie tropes or goes all-out on the creepiness inherent in the premise. Maybe alien spiders might've been more fun?