Now, by rights this story should be fondly remembered by
me, shouldn’t it? I’ve since pretty much overcome my phobia, but at the time
this was first shown I was a confirmed arachnophobe. I mean, I wouldn’t say
that I’m ever likely to willingly keep one as a pet, but I have held a
tarantula since without screaming, and so as long as spiders leave me alone,
I’m quite happy to leave them alone as well. This story, then should have
scared me, and yet my memory is not of having been scared, but mainly of having
been bored.
Since watching it as a kid I do remember reading an old
DWM interview with Barry Letts, many
years ago, where he explained that he although the story is credited solely to
Robert Sloman, he himself had a lot of input, and the story, such as it is,
represents a Buddhist allegory. Now, ok, I don’t actually mind the story having
deeper levels to it – as long as they don’t render the superficial levels more
boring or less understandable.
Having said that, I liked “The Daemons” and loved “The
Green Death” and so Robert Sloman is worth taking seriously, and so I will do
my level best to give it a fair hearing.
After Watching
I can’t say that I enjoyed this one as much as the
previous three Sloman-Letts season enders, but I have at least revised the
opinion I had going into watching it, which was based on my childhood opinion
that it was, and I quote , ‘a load of old crap’.
I don’t have a problem with Doctor Who, or any other TV
series, drawing on religious traditions, teachings or sources, nor do I have a
problem with a religious allegory being presented as an adventure story per se.
My only concern is whether it is interesting and/or entertaining, and whether
it hangs together and makes sense. So let’s look at the basic premise. Mike
Yates was allowed to do the honourable thing and resign quietly at the end of
“Invasion of the Dinosaurs”. Actually, you can’t help thinking that maybe the
Brig was hoping that he’d have the decency to take himself round the back and
shoot himself, since the very least that Yates was guilty off was treason –
which was still a capital offence in the 70s, I think – and probably we could
add attempted murder to the charge sheet too. Frankly it beggars the mind that
he was allowed to drive off in his sports car scot free.
Still, at least this meant that he could be at a loose
end, and the kind of muddled, vaguely hippyish new age thinking which meant
that he’d been taken in by the whole Golden Age thing led him to join a
Buddhist retreat. In this retreat a gang of five middle aged nerds who should
have known better, led by Lupton played by John Dearth, are dab hands at the
old Om Mane Padme Hum chant, and they establish contact with a civilisation of
giant psychic spiders – don’t laugh, oh, alright then, laugh – on the planet
Metebelis Three. That ought to ring a bell. In the previous Sloman-Letts story,
the wonderful “The Green Death”, the Doctor annoyed Jo by insisting on going
off there before heading off for Wales, and she left him to go on her own. The
Doctor found Metebelis Three to be a really hostile jungle planet – so much so
that you might even have expected the Daleks to appear for their third story in
a row – they love a good jungle planet do the Daleks – so he grabbed himself a
big blue crystal and buggered off. This crystal was his wedding present to Jo
and Cliff. Now, the spiders have established contact because they want the
crystal for their own nefarious purposes.
By way of coincidence, Jo has sent the crystal back to
the Doctor. She and Cliff are up the Amazon looking for a super mushroom, and
the crystal is apparently spooking the natives. Rather against myself I had to
admit that the first episode was actually pretty good. The first sight we get
of the Doctor is when he and the Brig (in mufti) are at what appears to be a
stag show. The Brigadier seems to particularly enjoy what we’ll charitably call
a ‘belly’ dancer. He gets a little bit of a rough ride in this episode does the
Brig. The Doctor has dragged him along to watch a stage psychic, whom he then
brings back with him to UNIT HQ. The psychic, Clegg, at first pretends that he
is a charlatan, but the Doctor knows that he is in fact a remarkably talented
clairvoyant, which he proves by holding the Brig’s watch, and announcing that
it was given to him ten year’s earlier during what appears to have been a
‘dirty weekend’ at the seaside. It’s funny because it is played to perfection
by Nicholas Courtney. Why they thought even a brigadier would have been allowed
to have hair that long in the army, though, I have no idea.
Poor old Clegg appears to be the first sacrificial lamb
in this story. He looks into the crystal, sees the spiders and cops it. Then
the episode takes a rather macabre twist. The Doctor had Clegg hooked up to a
machine, and this enables him to look at what was going through his mind as he
died, and this is how the Doctor first came to see the Spiders. Meanwhile, back
at the retreat, the Lupton sewing circle manage to materialise a spider, which
jumps on Lupton’s back and disappears, having mentally joined him. This could
only happen if Lupton is complicit – the spider, then represents the
unrestrained ego in the allegory, and by giving himself to this he renders himself
incapable of ever achieving true enlightenment, even though it gives him the
illusion of temporal power.
If episode one is an intriguing melting pot of
interesting concepts, episode two, it has to be said, isn’t. Lupton finds he
now has the power to materialise and dematerialise, and to shoot what look like
mini lightning bolts from his fingertips. He agrees to fetch the crystal, and
after taking it from UNIT HQ the rest of the episode – over half of its running
time – degenerates into a chase in a succession of vehicles.
Helicopter Watch
OK, it isn’t really a helicopter, but at the start of
the chase, after Lupton steals the Whomobile the Doctor leaps off the side of
Bessie, and jumps into an autogyro to follow Lupton.
So, we have a chase which involves the Whomobile,
Bessie, a hovercraft and a powerboat. The Whomobile deserves honourable mention
since when Lupton abandons it, the Doctor jumps in and shows Sarah and us that
it can also fly (it couldn’t really, but that’s CSO for you). Incidentally once
again the Pertwee Era jumps at the chance to extract humour from a brainless
yokel when the Doctor’s hovercraft runs over a trampy character who has just
layed down for a nap. I’ve seen various explanations for why the padding
started so early in this story, but the one that rings the most true to me is
that Jon Pertwee just loved driving fast things, and so this episode was
something of a farewell present for him. I kind of feel that we, the audience
have the gratuitousness of this chase rubbed in our face when it turns out that
just as the Doctor finally catches up with Lupton’s speedboat, Lupton has
dematerialised anyway, all the way back to the retreat. Which he could have
done presumably from UNIT HQ, thus making the chase totally unnecessary.
So, back at the retreat Lupton hides the crystal, and
then he’s off to Metebelis Three, unwittingly bringing Sarah Jane there as
well, whither the Doctor follows in the TARDIS. Here’s where more of the
story’s big ideas start to come into play. There are two distinct societies,
the dominant society of the psychic eight-legs (they have a real thing against
the word ‘spiders’ apparently) and the subservient two-legs society, who
provide services, and from time to time make a tasty snack for the spiders.
Allegorical? Maybe – it could be that if you allow yourself to be ruled by your
unrestrained ego, then you will eventually be eaten by it. Hey, that works for
me. The big idea here is that both eight legs and two legs arrived on Metebelis
Three many centuries after the Doctor left it, when a spaceship crashed after
it came out of ‘time jump’. The humans lived on the plain, while the ickle
spiders from the ship scuttled away to the caves which were home to the blue
crystals, which had the property of both magnifying their minds and their
mental abilities – and also somewhat mysteriously allowing them to grow to
giant size. Oh, and megalomania. It’s pretty clear that all of the spiders are
pretty big on megalomania. All of them long to replace the Queen, who herself
longs to replace the Great One, the mega spider who lives alone in the blue
caves.
The Doctor foments a revolt among the two legs after
discovering a type of stone that shields you against the effects of the
spiders’ lightning bolts if you wear one tied to your forehead. While we’re
talking about this section of the story let’s also note that Arak, one of the
more rebellious of the two legs is played by a pre-New Avengers Gareth Hunt.
This allows me to tell you my favourite Gareth Hunt-Dr. Who tenuous connection.
When Denys Fisher started producing a range of Doctor Who action figures
(translation – dolls) in 1977 during the 4th Doctor & Leela era,
something went wrong with the head they had come up with for the 4th
Doctor Doll, and so, with time at a premium, they used the mould for the Gareth
Hunt(Mike Gambit) head from the range of New Avengers figures. Now, when you
look at photos of the figure, to be fair it doesn’t look desperately unlike Tom
Baker. But it does look more like Gareth Hunt.
Back to the review. The Doctor takes an excursion up to
the blue caves, and meets the Great One, and we are treated to the rare sight
of the third Doctor absolutely bricking it. He has to, because it’s all part of
the allegory. Meanwhile Sarah, for the right reasons has done the wrong thing,
allowing the Queen spider to jump on her back when it promises to free the
humans, and help her defeat the Great One and destroy the power of the crystal.
Which in allegorical terms displays the way that even the virtuous and those
who seek out truth and enlightenment can be seduced by the promises of the
unrestrained ego if they listen to its promises. Sarah materialises herself and
the Doctor back at the retreat. Meanwhile Yates, who has become a bit of a
spare part in what started as his own story, suggests to the other 4 male
menopausal nerds that they can get Lupton back by forming the chanting circle
again. He just wants Sarah Jane back. This has the effect of allowing 4 spiders
to come across, and jump on the backs of the nerds, after they attack Yates,
and Cho Je, one of the two Tibetan monks who run the centre.
The Doctor and Sarah arrive back, and they go to see the
abbot. In the interim, Tommy, the handyman who has learning difficulties has had
his mind cleared by the crystal which he found, and become something
approaching a genius. He has taken the crystal to the main monk, who goes by
the name of K’Anpo Rimpoche. When the Doctor and Sarah come to see K’Anpo, we
learn that this is actually another Time Lord, and is none other than the wise
old hermit mentor of the Doctor’s whom he talked about in “The Time Monster”.
Time for the allegory to kick in again. The Doctor
realises that, although he didn’t see it that way at the time, he ‘stole’ the
crystal from Metebelis Three. It belongs in the blue caves. Likewise, it was in
the same blue caves that the Great One used her powers to make him experience
his greatest fear. He also knows that the unique environment of the blue caves
will, if he stays there long enough, destroy the cells of his body. Therefore
K’Anpo spells it out to him that the only way he can bring the situation to a
successful conclusion is by returning the blue crystal to the cave from which
he took it. In terms of the allegory, this tells us that Enlightenment can only
be reached through admitting what one has done wrong, making every effort to
put these things to rights, and to atone for them, by facing one’s greatest
fears, and finally, by a willingness to embrace the destruction of the ego. All
of this the Doctor undergoes in giving the blue crystal to the Great One. The
Great One, the ultimate expression of unrestrained ego, uses the crystal to
complete a crystal lattice she has built which will exponentially magnify her
mental powers. Predictably enough this blows her mind, then blows up the
mountain above the cave as well.
Following this, it takes three weeks for the Doctor to
return to UNIT HQ – which he tellingly calls ‘home’ and at this point he can
only regenerate, since the third Doctor has done all that he can possibly do
within this life to gain enlightenment, and now is the time for him to move on
to his next life in his eternal quest for spiritual perfection.
I think. You see, I’m not a Buddhist, and I don’t really
know that much about Buddhist thought and philosophy. So I’m quite impressed
that I am actually able to see this spiritual level of meaning within the show.
It really helps too, because if you don’t see this allegorical level, then
otherwise ‘Planet of the Spiders’ is just a rather below par Pertwee story,
with an overlong chase scene, and poorly realised and unscary spider models,
rendered slightly more interesting by the presence of a new Time Lord, and by a
regeneration scene.
I know which view of it I prefer.
What Have We
Learned?
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