I love Dinosaurs on a Spaceship. I love the crassest of Chris Chibnall’s Torchwood
episodes: I’m an absolute sucker for Cyberwoman.
That probably makes me the worst person in the world to review Arachnids In the UK but… I bloody loved
it.
After three episodes of a series
which seems to have been desperately trying to ape Russell T Davies’s simpler
template for Doctor Who without quite generating the same energy and swag, here
is the first episode which feels truly like a vision from Chris Chibnall and it’s
all the better for it. For the first time, the companions really do click. There
is a place for each of them in the narrative. It’s easy to see why they should
be working. Graham’s grieving for Grace has been a surface spattering of
character up to now but here it defines him and the scenes in his house, with Grace
out of focus, are the restrained highlights in an episode all about the monstrous
visual spectacle. Ryan is funny in the face of adversity and along with last
week’s “Thanks, Ryan. Nice one, Ryan” after his blasting away of Krasko and
this week’s headbanging scene, he is fast becoming the comic relief we can relate
to, the unexpected revelation of his reading his father’s letter coming at a
vitally tense moment. For the first time too, we get to know Yaz and she’s
quite lovely. Four weeks in, this is too little, too late, but as of now, we
have a TARDIS team that have very clear motivations to travel and for the first
time in a long time, the series feels freer, more open to the universe, with
fewer reasons than ever to return home. The last TARDIS scene, despite some
traditionally trite dialogue (“The thing with grief is it takes time.”) is the
most spirited, hopeful and promising the show has been in years. That’s a lot
of firsts for this series.
Special mention this week must go
to Chris Noth as the loathsome Robertson. He is the very embodiment of a Doctor
Who villain and along with the Stenza, Ilin and Krasko is forming a long line
of Chibnall adversaries unafraid to be simply and unapologetically unpleasant. Evil
bastards were notably absent from much of the Moffat era and despite my deep
love of the Sherlock-writer’s years with our favourite Time Lord, it’s so lovely
to have them back. Noth gives a perfectly pitched performance, snarling and
ugly, terrifically funny and totally lacking in self-awareness, like the best
pantomime villains. If he doesn’t hit the Number One spot of Favourite Male
Guest Star in this year’s DWM poll, there must be ludicrously brilliant performances
to come in the next six weeks. He is sensational.
I am terrified of spiders. They make my skin crawl and I spent much of the episode feeling a bit sick between belly laughs. Like Chibnall’s best work in the Doctor Who universe, he balances scares and laughs with aplomb. Perhaps it’s that Arachnids in the UK sets itself up as an archetypal B-Movie that his dialogue decisions really work this week. Yes, there are some very obvious, let’s say cheesy, choices, and the amount of times that someone declared that Sheffield/Yorkshire/this city had a problem with spiders was almost uncountable. But that heightened dialogue chimed with this world of Info-Dump Extraordinaire Dr Jade McIntyre and a man with a Personal Panic Room in every hotel across the world. When dealing with gigantic spiders and gigantic egos, who cares if the dialogue is similarly gigantic? And while I’m on the subject, this is the first time, despite a few flirtations, that Doctor Who has actually managed to make those gigantic spiders properly scary. They look convincing and gut-wrenching and I can’t quite believe I actually cared for one by the story’s conclusion.
Directorially, Sallie Aprahamian is the best we’ve had so far. She may not have the cinematic vistas of The Ghost Monument or Rosa to play with but she has a better sense of pace and spectacle, proving an ace at capturing a moment. The first few POV shots of scuttlings across the floor, the entire bathroom sequence and the explorations of the coal mine are stand-out achievements, and as classic, traditional Doctor Who as it’s possible to get. (Shades of The Green Death and Barry Letts’s Economist column, Hinchcliffe-era horror and RTD character drama all rolled into one.) Such scenes are the very essence of the show and it’s relieving and promising to know that Chris Chibnall seems suddenly to know exactly what he’s doing on this account.
Overall, this is the most unashamed Doctor Who episode in a long time. It’s shameless hokum, full of incident, thrills, laughs and scares. There’s nothing deep about it – although the environmental messages strangely manage to hit home in the middle of this operatic horror – but it has a very definite agenda: to entertain. This is perfect Saturday night entertainment broadcast on Sundays. Even Segun Akinola’s back on form. For the first time this season, I’m “with” Doctor Who again. And it feels bloody terrific.
8/10
JH
I am terrified of spiders. They make my skin crawl and I spent much of the episode feeling a bit sick between belly laughs. Like Chibnall’s best work in the Doctor Who universe, he balances scares and laughs with aplomb. Perhaps it’s that Arachnids in the UK sets itself up as an archetypal B-Movie that his dialogue decisions really work this week. Yes, there are some very obvious, let’s say cheesy, choices, and the amount of times that someone declared that Sheffield/Yorkshire/this city had a problem with spiders was almost uncountable. But that heightened dialogue chimed with this world of Info-Dump Extraordinaire Dr Jade McIntyre and a man with a Personal Panic Room in every hotel across the world. When dealing with gigantic spiders and gigantic egos, who cares if the dialogue is similarly gigantic? And while I’m on the subject, this is the first time, despite a few flirtations, that Doctor Who has actually managed to make those gigantic spiders properly scary. They look convincing and gut-wrenching and I can’t quite believe I actually cared for one by the story’s conclusion.
Directorially, Sallie Aprahamian is the best we’ve had so far. She may not have the cinematic vistas of The Ghost Monument or Rosa to play with but she has a better sense of pace and spectacle, proving an ace at capturing a moment. The first few POV shots of scuttlings across the floor, the entire bathroom sequence and the explorations of the coal mine are stand-out achievements, and as classic, traditional Doctor Who as it’s possible to get. (Shades of The Green Death and Barry Letts’s Economist column, Hinchcliffe-era horror and RTD character drama all rolled into one.) Such scenes are the very essence of the show and it’s relieving and promising to know that Chris Chibnall seems suddenly to know exactly what he’s doing on this account.
Overall, this is the most unashamed Doctor Who episode in a long time. It’s shameless hokum, full of incident, thrills, laughs and scares. There’s nothing deep about it – although the environmental messages strangely manage to hit home in the middle of this operatic horror – but it has a very definite agenda: to entertain. This is perfect Saturday night entertainment broadcast on Sundays. Even Segun Akinola’s back on form. For the first time this season, I’m “with” Doctor Who again. And it feels bloody terrific.
8/10
JH
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