Arachnids in the UK

The Doctor drops everyone off in Sheffield. But instead of heading straight off on her own, which she clearly doesn’t want to do she enthusiastically accepts an invitation for tea at Yaz’s. Along with Ryan. Graham goes back to his and Grace’s home. 

When there – after the Doctor demonstrates an ongoing ability not to do small talk – pops next door to collect a parcel. But outside the door Dr Jade McIntyre (Tanya Fear) is trying to get the next-door neighbour’s attention. They’re work mates. But she won’t answer.

Breaking in they discover that she’s been cocooned by an unnaturally large spider. 

Meanwhile Graham discovers the shed skin of another big spider and Yaz has gone to collect her Mum, Najia (Shobna Gulati), from the hotel where she works. Because she’s been fired by Jack Robertson (Chris Noth) the owner of the hotel. 

Robertson is clearly meant to be Trump, even if Trump himself gets a name check.

 Jade has taken the Doctor, Graham and Ryan to their lab to discuss what she’s been working on – she’s a specialist in arachnids – and it turns out all the spiders in Sheffield have been going a bit mad. She shows the Doctor a map, which turns out to show that the one area empty of unusual spider sighting is the Hotel complex where Yaz and Najia are. 

So, we finally get everyone together. Just in time for the biggest spider that you’ve ever seen to smash out of a bathtub where Robertson is having a ‘scheduled bathroom break’. There is mayhem and screaming and Robertson’s bodyguard, Kevin (William Meredith) is dragged away.

 There’s a spider problem and everyone finds themselves webbed into the hotel. 

What is happening? 

Well, it turns out Robertson’s hotel is built over old coal working into which another of his companies, a waste disposal company, has been dumping huge quantities of waste, including material from Jade’s lab. Hence the spider problem. 

It’s kind of The Green Death all over again but with spiders instead of maggots. 

The Doctor decides that the best way to deal with the smaller spiders is to lure them into Robertson’s panic room via the vibrations from Sheffield’s best Grim radio station and give them a kindly suffocation. 

The biggest one, which is in the ballroom, they will herd out of the building using some kind of spa perfume-based concoction. But when they arrive the spider is dying. It is too big to survive. Its lungs can’t function properly. They aren’t meant to be gigantic. 

As everyone stands around watching a big spider suffocate to death Robertson walks in and shoots it. Thus, demonstrating that guns and people with them are bad. Except was it crueller than standing around watching the creature suffocate slowly to death? I mean the Doctor’s solution here seems very not like the Doctor. She’s basically willing to allow dozens of spiders to die slow deaths. A more Doctor Who solution surely would have been to round them up and load them into the TARDIS and take them somewhere where they could thrive. Perhaps I’m being harsh, but I find the Doctor’s moral grandstanding in this story particularly irritating. There’s no sign of her feeling bad that this is the solution she had to come up with. They were watching a spider suffocating - slowly - to death and were just watching. Not to mention killing ALL the other spiders. There's no attempt to come up with a solution that might save them. And yet the Doctor tries to play the great moral arbiter. It's utterly ridiculous. 

Robertson is a gun wielding American arsehole, although Chris Noth is a good enough actor to make him not seem too much of a clownish caricature. And I enjoyed his performance. 

Bradley Walsh is superb as he responds to coming home and dealing with the loss of Grace. There’s some good stuff between him and Tosin Cole too. Mandip Gill gets a bit more to do as we meet her family, but I still think she’s the character suffering most from the multitude of companions. 

At the end Ryan, Yaz, and Graham go back to the TARDIS to say a proper goodbye. Except they don’t want to say goodbye. They want to go with her. This ending scene is well played by everyone. You know the Doctor wants them to come, but she knows the risks and she wants them to know the risks. But they all have good reasons to go.