Planet of the Spiders

A tear Sarah Jane?

As it happens, we close the Third Doctor segment with his final story. I remember seeing this one a while back and found it ok, though there were some aspects of it that were sub-par. Interestingly, I think the things that I found I didn't care for were not necessarily the same things others found unenjoyable. My opinion might change but the things I didn't care for stick out pretty hard and as most of them were performance based, I doubt they are going to improve on a second pass. Still, I always aim to keep an open mind.

Plot Summary

Mike Yates is attending a center for meditation therapy and observes a group of men using meditation to expand their power. He gets permission from the deputy abbot Cho-Je to invite Sarah to visit the center and investigate. After picking her up, he drives her back to the center but they are run off the road by a large tractor that appears in the road suddenly. When they look again, it is gone.

At the same time the Doctor and the Brigadier are investigating the telepathic abilities of Professor Clegg, a performer in a local vaudeville show. Clegg tries to deny his abilities, claiming they are just tricks, but the Doctor points out errors he made, revealing that his abilities are real. The Doctor attaches Clegg to several instruments and studies his thoughts and brain patterns as he gives him several tests, all of which he passes. While conducting the experiments, the Doctor receives a package from Jo. She has returned the blue crystal from Metebelis III as it continues to scare the local tribesmen and interfere's with their work. The Doctor reads over the letter while Clegg examines the crystal curiously.

Sarah and Yates speak with Cho-Je, who notes that there are demons within the self that can be tapped in to but that such things do not happen there. He leaves to oversee the meditation class and as Sarah and Yates walk around, they run into a man called Lupton. Lupton is the leader of the group and Yates pulls Sarah away making like he is going to take her back to the train. Lupton smugly tells another man that Yates won't be a problem as they seem to have scared him sufficiently. Yates however merely drives outside the grounds allowing Sarah and himself to walk back and investigate quietly.

Sarah and Yates enter back in to the complex, meeting a mentally challenged young man named Tommy who lives at the center. Sarah and Yates sneak into the cellar and are forced to hide when Lupton and his group enter. They begin to chant and an energy surge occurs on the center mat. The energy surge also manifests through the blue crystal in the Doctor's lab. The whole room shakes and Clegg is locked in a trance with the crystal. The Doctor pulls it out of his hands and the shock of withdrawal kills him. The energy beam in the cellar dies away leaving a giant spider sitting in the room.

The other members of the circle flee but Lupton stays. The spider orders Lupton to turn around and it hops on his back and disappears. The spider melds it's mind with Lupton and uses him to find the blue crystal the Doctor had taken from Metebelis III. Yates and Sarah slip out of the basement and Yates sends Sarah off to warn the Doctor and the Brigadier. Yates tries to tell the abbot, K'anpo, but he is prevented from disturbing him first by Tommy and then Lupton.

The Doctor examines the machine that Clegg was hooked up to when he died and sees images of spiders in the viewer. When Sarah arrives, she tells of the arrival of the spider which immediately piques the Doctor's curiosity. As she goes into further detail, Lupton arrives at UNIT headquarters under guidance of the spider. He stuns one guard as well as Sargent Benton and then uses mental power to teleport the crystal to him. The Doctor and Sarah notice the crystal's disappearance and chase after Lupton.

Lupton steals the Whomobile and drives up. The Brigadier, Benton and Sarah follow in Bessie while the Doctor spots Lupton in a micro-lite helicopter. Unable to lose his pursuers, Lupton ditches the car and hides in the grass. When his pursuers stop, he steals the helicopter and takes off. The Doctor and Sarah follow in the Whomobile which is capable of flight. Lupton is unable to go far due to the lack of fuel and is forced to land near the shore.

Lupton stuns a boat owner and steals a motor boat. The Doctor gives chase, taking a hovercraft that had been parked near the boat. The boat is faster but the Doctor cuts across land to cut Lupton off. Seeing themselves trapped, the spider orders Lupton to focus his mental energy and she transports them back to the meditation center. Lupton heads back to his room to recover. Along the way he is spotted pocketing the crystal by Tommy, who is instantly drawn to it. Once in the room, the spider disengages itself and sends a message back to the queen of their success.

Reuniting with Sarah, the Doctor heads to the meditation center to find Lupton. They are observed by the spider and one of Lupton's associates, Barnes. Barnes alerts Lupton, but Lupton is unafraid. While the two of them are talking, Tommy pokes through the window and steals the crystal which was on the table near the window. The spider returns and threatens Lupton if he does not obey her. Lupton turns his now enhanced mental powers on her and the two form an alliance to overthrow the queen spider and then conquer Earth. Lupton then notices that the crystal is gone. With no time to find it as they are expected on Metebelis III, Lupton opts to bluff. He heads down to the cellar to transport himself.

Cho-Je sends a man to look for Lupton but while he is gone, Tommy calls to Sarah and tells her he wants to give her a gift. He takes her to his closet where he keeps shiny things. While he pokes through, Sarah sees Lupton heading to the cellar. She tells Tommy to get the Doctor and Yates and runs off before Tommy can give her the crystal. Tommy then goes to the Doctor and Yates and tells them of Sarah and Lupton in the cellar.

In the cellar, Lupton chants and is teleported to Metebelis III. Sarah runs to tell the Doctor but accidentally steps on his meditation mat. She freezes and is also teleported to the planet just as the Doctor enters. She sees Lupton in the distance but is grabbed by a man named Tuar who drags her back to his village.

In the village, Tuar presents her and accuses her of being a spy. The town moves to kill her but is stopped by Arak, Tuar's brother, who is being hunted by the spiders. Before she can fully explain herself, the sound of the entourage of the spider queen is heard. Arak, Tuar and Sarah are all taken into the house to hide. The spider queen demands that Arak be surrendered for killing one of her human guards and if not, she will randomly kill a member from every family in the village.

Unwilling to let this happen, Arak's father, Sabor, abases himself and claims that he helped Arak escape into the mountains. The queen accepts this story and orders that Sabor will stand in Arak's place for punishment. Sabor's wife, Neska, comes out to plead for mercy and as she does, the queen spies Sarah in the house. Knowing she was seen and not wanting to expose Arak, Sarah comes out and surrenders.

Having seen Sarah disappear, the Doctor heads back to UNIT HQ and takes the TARDIS to Metebelis III. He arrives just as Sarah surrenders. The guards attack him but he overpowers them. One of the guards shoots energy at him as Lupton did earlier and the Doctor is knocked out outside the TARDIS. Sarah disguises herself and slips back in the house leaving the queen frustrated as she returns to the palace.

Sarah convinces Tuar to bring the Doctor in the house though he is sure the Doctor is dead or dying. The Doctor does come around but is very weak. He tells Sarah to get a machine in a bag from the TARDIS. She slips out after curfew and gets it but is captured by the guards, leaving it outside the TARDIS. After they leave, Arak slips out and grabs it. He activates it with help from the Doctor and the Doctor instantly begins to recover.

Back at the meditation center, Lupton's cronies meet in a room to figure out what to do next. They catch Tommy at the door trying to read the sign. They shoo him off but Yates comes over to listen. Yates is also discovered, knocked out and tied up. Tommy meanwhile heads back to his closet and tries to read a book his mother got him. As he does, he is distracted by the blue crystal starting to glow. He focuses on it and it sends a surge of power. The surge clarifies his mind, allowing him to learn as a normal adult.

Sarah is brought to the spider's palace and wrapped up. She is placed with Sabor who tells her how a spider came along with the original colonists but was blown into the mountains with the crystals. The crystals gave it power and made them larger. Four hundred years later, they now extract tribute from the colonists and control the planet.

Having learned the same story, the Doctor has a set of rocks brought in. Examining them, he is able to identify a type of stone that will absorb the power of the blue crystal weapons, giving the colonists the ability to fight the spider's guards. Fashioning a hand device of that stone, the Doctor heads to the palace to rescue Sarah and Sabor. He encounters guards but is able to fight them off. He is then cornered by Lupton, who had been dismissed by the queen after trying to claim a guarantee for securing the crystal. More guards appear and arrest both Lupton and the Doctor, once his stone shield is knocked from his hand. Lupton is taken away but the Doctor is taken to the same cell as Sarah and Sabor.

The queen of the spiders brings Lupton into the council where it is revealed that they know the crystal is still on Earth. Lupton tries to bargain to retrieve it but the spiders weaken him with their mental powers. However, there is dissent within the council as to whether to attack Earth directly or to pursue another course. The queen elects to visit the Great One to receive clarification. Instead she goes into another room and has Sarah brought to her. The queen offers her a deal that in exchange for the crystal, she will arrange that the invasion of Earth will be cancelled. She even agrees to Sarah's demand to leave the villages in peace.

After Sarah is taken away, the Doctor manages to extricate himself from his wrappings. He goes to look for Sarah and is lured away by the sound of her voice. He finds himself in a cave with the Great One, a spider of enormous size and mental power. The spider orders him to return to Earth and bring the crystal. When he tries to refuse, she manipulates his body to demonstrate her power of him, though he tries to fight back.

The Doctor leaves the chamber and meets Sarah leaving the queen's chamber. At the same time, Arak and some other men attack the spider's palace to rescue Sabor. Arak and his men have bound the special rocks to their foreheads to create shields from the crystal weapons of the guards. Arak and his men save Sabor but Sarah uses a teleportation technique taught to her by the queen of the spiders to take her and the Doctor back to the TARDIS. The Doctor tells Neska of Arak's success as he and Sarah enter the TARDIS and disappear.

Meanwhile, Barnes returns to his room and opts to untie Yates when Yates offers to help them reopen the passage to Metebelis III so that Sarah can be recovered. Tommy overhears this while looking for Yates to help him with his studies and goes to Cho-Je to warn him.

The group begin their chanting and open a passage for the spiders, but they appear elsewhere in the cellar rather than on the mat. When Cho-Je arrives to stop them, the spiders stun him. They do the same to Yates when he rises up. The four spiders then get on the backs of Barnes and the others and take hold of them.

The TARDIS arrives at this moment and the group attempt to stun the Doctor in the same way as Cho-Je and Yates but the Doctor is able to deflect the beams using his stone shield. Tommy calls to them and they flee the basement, buying some time by locking the group in. Tommy takes them to see the abbot K'anpo, whom the Doctor has a strange feeling he has met before. The Doctor tells K'anpo of what has been going on while Tommy stands guard outside the door.

K'anpo reveals that he has the crystal, which is attracting the spider controlled men. The reveal also prompts the queen spider, who had taken control of Sarah, to reveal herself. The Doctor urges Sarah to retake control of her mind and uses the crystal as a focusing device. Sarah rejects the queen's control and the feedback kills the queen, prompting her to fall off Sarah's back and disappear. The Doctor then realizes that K'anpo is the same hermit Time Lord he was instructed by long ago (see Episode Six of The Time Monster and that Cho-Je is only a mental projection of his next regeneration. K'anpo also chides the Doctor for giving in to his thirst for knowledge and rejecting his fears, knowing what he must do.

While all this is happening, the four spider controlled men try to get by Tommy standing guard. Tommy holds them off, his innocence acting as a shield to the energy bursts of the spiders. They unite and contact Metebelis III for more power. Lupton, in a fit of pique, tries to take control and the spiders kill him with an energy blast. They are given more power, but the time involved gives Yates and Cho-Je time to come around. Yates throws himself in front of the blast, stunning him again. Tommy rushes to his side, allowing the men to burst through. The Doctor uses the crystal to mentally transport himself back to the cellar and then into the TARDIS. The men fire a bolt to try and stop him but hit K'anpo instead. They then rush to the cellar to find the TARDIS gone.

On Metebelis III, the Doctor runs into Arak and Tuar who offer to lead him in. They instead take him to the spider warren, having been mentally taken over during their raid. The Doctor produces the crystal but states that he will present it to the Great One himself. The spiders allow this, expecting the Doctor to be killed by the Great One.

He goes into the chamber and is bombarded by the radiation of a crystal web the Great One has built. She takes the crystal from him to complete the lattice which will expand her mind. The Doctor warns her that she has built a positive feedback loop and it will kill her but she ignores him. The lattice activates and does indeed begin to burn her mind. The connection expands outwards, killing the other spiders on Metebelis III and the four controlling the humans on Earth. Arak and the rest of the guards come back to their normal selves and flee the mountain along with the Doctor. Weakened, the Doctor enters the TARDIS and heads back to Earth.

In the meditation center, Yates recovers, having been shielded by his selflessness but K'anpo is too weak and instead regenerates into the Cho-Je form, Cho-Je disappearing with the regeneration. Sarah heads back to UNIT headquarters three weeks later with no sign of the Doctor. However after meeting with the Brigadier, the TARDIS appears and the Doctor stumbles out, the radiation having dealt him a mortal blow. The regenerated K'anpo appears and helps initiate the regeneration as the Third Doctor morphs into the Fourth.

Analysis

Although Barry Letts stayed on to oversee the production of Robot, the final Third Doctor story was also his true ending. As would be mimicked by RTD nearly 35 years later, Letts put in all of the elements that were noted from his era into this story: UNIT, alien invasion of Earth, humans delusional for power, CSO, adventure chases, fight sequences involving the Doctor, etc. In fact, had Roger Delgado not died, it is very likely that he would have been in the place of Lupton to complete the swan song. So in many ways, if you have any hang-ups about the Barry Letts era, this story is not necessarily going to sit well with you. For me, I think it summed up my feelings on the era as a whole with an overly middling outlook.

In many aspects, this isn't a bad set up for a story with an interesting way of tying in a lot of loose elements from prior stories. Nearly everything is brought in in a way that makes sense and does have a natural flow. Where the story falls down is in it's indulgences, certain performances and design. Had this story been tightened up a bit so as to cut down in a few places as well as a little more time in the final design, I think this story could have been much better.

In terms of the Doctor, I think he did very well. He was a bit looser and more natural, but he usually is in the 11th season with Sarah Jane. Perhaps it was just the responsibility with Jo that made him go a bit tight-assed in earlier stories. But the Doctor is enjoyable here. He's presented with a mystery, he is forced to solve it and at no point do things get fouled up because of a mistake on the Doctor's part. The attack on the spider's lair was a bit short-sighted as he should have avoided capture, but it's only a small niggle.

About the only other part that I didn't care for with the Doctor was in Episode Six and that was all about the writing. K'anpo chastises the Doctor for being greedy with knowledge. That makes no sense. It is not greed that has been his shortfall but pride. He has gotten into a number of scrapes and even gotten people killed because he is too prideful to admit that he is wrong or needs help. That is his true failing and humility should be the lesson he must learn. It is overcoming pride and acceptance of the needs of the situation, which means accepting that he might die, that propels things forward. Greed of knowledge has nothing to do with any of that. But again, that is writing, not performance.

Sarah did well and was quite enjoyable. I liked the way the hook of her being a journalist was actually used to kick this story into motion and also gave her agency towards acting the role of Nancy Drew. I also liked the subtle change in acting that was used after the queen spider took possession of her. It shows how comfortable you can get with a performance when small changes just set off little bells in your head. When Sarah emerged after being taken over by the queen, she was just too happy-go-lucky and eager. It reminded me of someone who had just taken some uppers and I knew that something was off. When it was revealed that the queen had control of her, it put everything into focus and made the change in performance pay off.

Most of the other protagonist performances were fairly decent, though I wouldn't say that any were of a particularly high caliber with perhaps the exception of Tommy. He is an endearing character as someone with a learning difficulty and he becomes only more interesting when the crystal clears his mind and makes him more articulate. The huge exception to the acting rule is Neska. That performance is downright atrocious. I have arguably seen better performances in plays my kids have been in and as neither one is in high school yet, that tells you about the caliber of acting typically seen. Fortunately she only has two scenes but in both she just sticks out, especially as everyone else around her is at least trying, even if they are lesser quality actors themselves.

I'm a bit mixed on the villains. Of the humans, only Lupton is really worth noting. The others are of such small scale and small acting quality that they are barely worth noting. Lupton himself starts well, but diminishes after the first two episodes. Once the action shifts to Metebelis III and the spiders take over as the true villains, Lupton is almost lost as a figure. He only comes about a few more times, mostly to protest his treatment by the spiders and try to bluff his way to a better role. In many ways, he really is a stand in for the Master. I have a very hard time believing that Barry Letts and Robert Sloman did not have a visual of someone like Roger Delgado in that role, even though Delgado had been dead for nearly a year at the point of initial broadcast.

As for the spiders, I thought the spider puppets themselves weren't bad and I liked their mental powers overcoming the obvious physical superiority that humans would have. I did not like the fact that although three different women supplied voices for the spiders, they were modulated and sounded very similar to me. It made listening to conversations between the spiders rather difficult to follow. I would rather have had a bit more distinction in the voices as having them unmodulated would have helped. I also wish the settings for the spiders had been changed. The exterior showed mounds of rock with webbing. But inside it was clean hallways and manufactured tables. I also thought it was too well lit. Spiders should operate in the dark and they should have been arranged in council in a giant web in a dank cave. That would have upped the creepiness factor as well. It just seems like a missed opportunity where the production made the spiders look more fake by putting them in such an out of place setting.

There are a lot of ups and downs in this story with some good production values and acting and some poor production values and acting. A lot of people don't like the self-indulgent car chase that takes up half of Episode Two. I didn't mind it because I grew up watching car chase shows and it's arguably more fun to fill time chasing after the bad guy in a car that just in running down an empty corridor. Granted the swapping of the Whomobile and the microlite was a bit silly as well as the comedy moment of the Doctor nearly running over the tramp in a hovercraft, but it was still fairly entertaining. Really, as long as the story was on Earth, it move fairly well and was engaging. It wasn't until the story shifted to Metebelis III that the time-filling elements began to creep in and the story began to bog down.

But even with the limitations here and there, I think this story would pass as a slightly above average story if it weren't for the overall resolution. This story spend five and a half episodes where the Doctor and others worked to keep the crystal away from the Great One. In the end, the Doctor brings it to them and the Great One's arrogance destroys herself. So all the fighting, injury and death was for nothing. If Lupton had been transported with the crystal and presented it to the Great One in Episode Three, the story would have ended and the spiders would have been destroyed. The Doctor's involvement was essentially pointless.

It gets even worse when you factor in that standing in the belt of radiation emanating from the crystal web the Great One had created is what kills the Third Doctor. It is not an act of heroism or being mortally wounded to prevent the villain from triumphing. He dies while watching his enemy destroy itself, with no help from him at all. To make it more aggravating, there is a chance to make a case for regenerating built into the story. The Doctor is zapped and appears to be mortally wounded at the beginning of Episode Four. His gadget zaps him back to health about halfway through. If he had made a comment that all the gadget did was buy him some time but that his body was still dying, that would have set things up better for the end (such as was done in The Caves of Androzani). He was dying and so facing that death nobly by setting up the spiders for destruction would have made the scene play better. As is, the story just feels like a waste of time.

Again, if you discount the ending, I think this story can be enjoyable, especially if you like the overall nature of the Third Doctor stories. If I were judging it up until the halfway mark of Episode Six, I think I would have gone easily with a three and could have seen the merit of considering a 3.5. Not great but an average to good story. But the ending leaves such a bad taste in my mouth that I can't quite overcome. It's not a complete killer but when you spend six episodes and feel like nothing was accomplished other than the Doctor getting himself killed, the journey just wasn't worth it. Admittedly, I'm not a big fan of the Third Doctor era, but this is not one that I would rush for a rewatch, especially now that I've seen it twice.

Overall personal score: 2 out of 5