Why, back to Sheffield as the Doctor navigates the TARDIS successfully to the right place and time that Yay, Ryan and Graham call home.
It appears to be the end of the journey for this particular TARDIS crew. Until Yaz invites the Doctor 'round for tea which the Doctor eagerly accepts.
Seems all innocent enough... until the spiders come along.
We'll look at more about episode 4 of Doctor Who series 11 right after the break.
Yeah, there will be spoilers.
Arachnids In the UK
by Chris Chibnall
Nonetheless, the team does get separated. Graham elects to go off on his own back to the home he shared with Grace. It's not easy for him there, haunted by Grace.
Yaz is called off to go pick up her mom, Najia who has just been fired and needs a ride home. The job she was fired from was overseeing a new luxury hotel outside of Sheffield. The person who fired her is the hotel owner, Jack Robertson, a Donald Trump expy played by Chris Noth (Law & Order, Sex and the City). The Doctor and Ryan join up with a woman, Jade, who is concerned about the disappearance of her friend Anna who lives in a flat not far from Yaz's. In all three instances, our cast encounters really large webs and really large spiders.
Turns out Spider's are kind of Jade's thing. She's a research scientist in Sheffield working with spiders. But nothing she's working with accounts for spiders this big that eat people. Yep, Anna's dead, webbed up for spider food.
Graham meets up with the Doctor and Ryan and spider scientist Jade. The Doctor works our the epicenter of the invasion of the giant spiders is at the new luxury hotel.
So the Doctor. Graham and Ryan with Jade along for the ride arrive at the hotel to meet up with Yaz and Najia (whom the Doctor continually refers to as "Yaz's mum").
So what's the deal with these spiders anyway? If you're thinking they might be from Metebelis Three, "the Planet of the Spiders" (3rd Doctor story that aired in May and June of 1974), well, no, they ain't.
In fact, our menace du jour is home grown and home mutated. Seems Robertson's new luxury hotel was built on a former mine that was used by another arm of Robertson's businesses as a toxic waste dump. The wastes, including spiders from Jade's lab, are just building up in the confined spaces of the former mines, creating a volatile cesspool of deadly mutations.
Non alien threats in Doctor Who are not unheard of but they don't happen very often. I may be wrong but I think we have to go back to Series 3 and The Lazurus Experiment for the last threat the Doctor faced on Earth that did not come from the stars.
After the spiders are dealt with (and I'm a little vague on how that is accomplished beyond Ryan laying down some jacked up beats by Stormzy to lure the spiders to a central location), the important stuff comes around.
Yaz, Ryan and Graham meet up at the TARDIS to make their case to the Doctor.
Yaz loves her family but they drive her crazy and she needs more out of life.
Ryan isn’t eager to go back to his warehouse job.
And Graham can’t stand the thought of going home to an empty house.
They all want to come along with the Doctor. The Doctor warns them she cannot guarantee their safety. She also cautions them, "You’re not gonna come back as the same people that left here."
The Doctor's team of friends are OK with that.
And off they go!
Other points of note:
The first appearance of the psychic paper in Series 11. (Yay!)
Some more spotlight on Yaz as we meet her sister, her dad and her mum. Mum seems a bit flexible on Yaz's sexuallity. She speculates if Yaz and the Doctor are a couple? The Doctor says no but seems unsure. Yaz sets the record straight with "we're friends". The Najia tries to ship Yaz with Ryan but no dice.
"Why don’t you do what normal people do? Get a gun, shoot things, like a civilized person?" This is Robertson's solution to the spider problem. Man, Brits really have a low opinion of how Americans solve problems. OK, it might be accurate but it still kind of hurts.
The Doctor's still working on social skills.
The Doctor: “I’ve never had a flat. I should get one. I’d be good in a flat. I could get a sofa. Imagine me with a sofa! Like, my own sofa! I could get a purple one and sit on it. Am I being weird?”
Ryan: “A little bit, yeah.”
The Doctor: “I’m trying to do small talk. I thought I was doing quite well.”
We also learn something about the Doctor's eating habits.
The Doctor: “I eat danger for breakfast! [pause] I don’t. I prefer cereal. Or croissants."
We can add that to the fried egg sandwich she was craving back in episode one.
Arachnids in the UK is not a great episode, falling short of the rarefied heights of last week's Rosa. But it does provide solid thrills and scares laced with humor and some pretty good character development. Week four of Series 11 shows Doctor Who is still on solid footing.
Four weeks into this journey, I have to say I am enjoying the heck out of Doctor Who right now.
No comments:
Post a Comment