Planet of the Spiders/Robot: The Cycle of Death and Rebirth

Hello!

This week I'm reviewing Planet of the Spiders and Robot! Arachnophobes beware - the antagonists of Planet of the Spiders are spiders with inflated egos. Actually, the writer being an arachnophobe is apparently the reason for spiders being the antagonists.

The Doctor mid-way through his regeneration

Planet of the Spiders

Planet of the Spiders is a six-episode serial. It's the only regeneration episode to feature multiple Time Lords regenerating. It's also the first regeneration episode to call regeneration 'regeneration', rather than 'renewal' or 'change of appearance'. It starts with a group of characters in a monastery chanting, while another character watches in secret. This other character is Mike Yates, formerly a member of UNIT before he betrayed them and got sacked. The villains are mutated spiders from Earth's future - taken from Earth with human colonists who crash-landed on Metebelis Three. There were ordinary Earth spiders on the ship who got exposed to powerful psychic crystals. One in particular grew to Aragog-size and got a superiority complex to match - she christened herself the Great One. The spiders, now re-named the eight-legs, took over the human colonies and enslaved the humans.

Planet of the Spiders focuses a lot on mental powers and the power of the mind over matter - the first we see of the Doctor, he is conducting research into extra-sensory perception and the degree to which this is latent within the human population. The research is interspersed with the chanting people meditating and using their mind powers to open a rift in time and space! Yates knocks over a candle, distracting the group and closing the rift. He goes to Sarah-Jane Smith (the Doctor's companion at the time) for help - due to his prior betrayal, neither the Doctor nor the Brigadier would be overly happy to see him. Meanwhile, the Doctor receives a blue crystal from an old friend - Jo Grant, a previous companion. The crystal in question comes from Metebelis Three - the planet from which the spiders also come; it was the key to solving a previous crisis, and the Doctor gave it to Jo as a present when she left to get married. 

The crystal

She gave it back to him because she felt that he would need it; as it happens, the spiders want their crystal back. Using their own advanced psychic powers, the spiders (or eight-legs, as they prefer to be called) have established a link with 20th-century Earth and deceived a group of people at the monastery - the chanters. With Yates and Sarah-Jane watching, the chanters open another rift and an eight-legs comes through and jumps on the leader (Lupton)'s back. Together, the spider and its host infiltrate UNIT, steal the crystal from under the Doctor's nose and escape; the Doctor and UNIT pursue them. Lupton then remembers he can teleport (that's how he got the crystal from under the Doctor's nose) and teleports 80 miles to the monastery. After all Lupton's hard work, the crystal gets stolen again. Tommy, a boy with learning difficulties and a fondness for 'pretty' objects, snatches the crystal off Lupton's desk while his back is turned and stashes it in a box of other 'pretties'. Lupton and the spider head back to Metebelis Three without the crystal; Sarah-Jane gets teleported along with them. The Doctor heads off in the TARDIS - while there's still the navigation issues from The War Games, he apparently wrote the temporal-spatial coordinates for Metebelis Three into the TARDIS' programming.

 

He's the other Time Lord - or, the other Time Lord's next incarnation, anyway...

The Doctor arrives in time to save Sarah-Jane from being taken away by the eight-legs; however, he is himself badly injured. Sarah-Jane is able to obtain supplies from the TARDIS that will help him; however, she gets captured by Lupton, who is still on Metebelis Three. After persuading the humans to rise up against the eight-legs, the Doctor goes after Sarah-Jane himself...and promptly gets captured as well. Sarah-Jane is taken away to speak with the Queen of the eight-legs; the Queen manipulates her into working with her to reclaim the crystal. The Doctor escapes his bindings and catches up with Sarah-Jane, who teleports them both back to the TARDIS, whereupon they return to Earth. Meanwhile, Lupton gets himself killed by calling the eight-legs 'spiders', which is a slur for them. The eight-legs then send an advance party to Earth in preparation for the invasion. The advance party hijacks the rest of Lupton's crew, who re-opened the rift to try and reach Lupton. The crystal, by this point, has been given to the abbot of the monastery, who is the other Time Lord. He's also the Doctor's old guru, having regenerated into a new face. The Doctor and the abbot (Kan'po Rimpoche) break Sarah-Jane free from the influence of the Queen-Spider using the crystal; Lupton's spider-possessed friends break into Kan'po's room and shoot him full of electricity. In the confusion, the Doctor uses the crystal to teleport to the TARDIS, planning to return it to the Great One. Meanwhile, Cho-Je, Kan'po's assistant, tells his friends not to worry, before merging with Kan'po; Kan'po then regenerates to look like Cho-Je. Cho-Je was a psychic manifestation of Kan'po's next incarnation - a more sophisticated version of the mysterious Watcher who appears shortly before the Fourth Doctor's regeneration.

The Doctor gives the crystal to the Great One, who then burns up from the accumulated knowledge in her head; the resulting psychic feedback destroys the entire eight-leg species. The Doctor is blasted with tremendous amounts of radiation; he has enough energy to get to the TARDIS. The TARDIS materialises in the Doctor's laboratory, two weeks later for Sarah-Jane and the Doctor's friends, ten years for the Doctor. The Doctor is on the edge of death; Kan'po arrives to give his cells a little 'push', to kick-start the regeneration.

Robot

Robot, just like Power of the Daleks before it, starts with a recap of the Doctor's regeneration. After the regeneration, the Doctor is sent to the infirmary, under the care of one Doctor Harry Sullivan - Doctor Sullivan later becomes a companion. Robot features one of the Doctor's most manic post-regenerative periods: at one point, he karate-chops a brick in half. He also insists he's fine, despite being in a state of mania. While the Doctor is in hospital (or trying to escape), Sarah Jane goes off to look round Think Tank, a science institution. Think Tank specialises in advanced technologies...such as robots. One such robot happens to be stealing certain objects from secure facilities - the parts stolen coincidentally happen to be necessary for building a disintegrator gun. He's not gone rogue - he's working for Think Tank. I'm not too fussed about spoiling that particular plot twist - Sarah Jane coincidentally wants to visit the one place that's sufficiently advanced enough to have working robots. Though the characters don't learn for a while that Think Tank has a robot. Sarah Jane gets to meet the robot, and he nearly kills her, in defiance of the Prime Directive of not killing humans. He's designed to serve in the best interests of humanity; the people at Think Tank have created a loophole by convincing him that certain people are enemies of humanity, so it's OK to kill them. Understandably, the poor robot has a breakdown after killing one too many 'enemies', so goes to his father (the man who created him) for help. The people at Think Tank aren't far behind, and they force the creator to alter the robot's Prime Directive so he won't go insane every time he kills someone. Once they're finished, the robot's creator is tied up and left in a cupboard as a trap to lure UNIT and the Doctor; the robot's 'dad' left Think Tank some time ago, due to not agreeing with their policies. The Doctor fights the robot and gets clobbered for his troubles.

It's not usually this big, otherwise the Doctor would be dead!

The robot escapes and makes his way back to Think Tank headquarters. Also, there's a neo-Nazi group called the Scientific Reform Society, which believes that certain people are inherently better than others. Sarah Jane tries to infiltrate the SRS using the tried-and-tested tactic of going undercover as a freelance reporter - she is a freelance reporter when not travelling with the Doctor, so it's the perfect disguise! In the meantime, Doctor Harry Sullivan goes undercover at Think Tank itself. However, Sarah Jane isn't a member of the Society, and is a woman who wears trousers (how scandalous!), so she's not allowed in. Harry, meanwhile, gets discovered and put in captivity. 

Happily, everybody at Think Tank is a member of SRS, including the robot's creator, so he's able to sneak her in. Once Sarah Jane is in place, UNIT attacks; the SRS people escape the clutches of UNIT, returning to Think Tank to hide in a bunker. They take Sarah Jane captive on the way out. Their plan is to cause a nuclear apocalypse and wait for civilisation to collapse, then enforce their authority over humanity. The robot and his disintegrator gun would prove useful in this eventuality. UNIT, with guns and bombs, barely makes a dent in him - what good would spears and swords do? In any case, the Think Tank people make use of the launch codes for other countries' nuclear arsenals - stolen by the robot along with the disintegrator parts. Specifically, it's the murder of the Cabinet minister who's in charge of guarding the codes which drives the robot off the edge. It's never explained why Britain was trusted with the launch codes when it was an active ally of the US in the Cold War. UNIT launches an attack on the Think Tank base; they fight their way to the bunker entrance, where they're confronted with the robot; the robot shows off his new gun by disintegrating a toy tank - literally a toy tank, parked in the foreground of the shot so it looks bigger. Thank the BBC budget for that one. While UNIT fights the robot, Sarah Jane and Harry get free and succeed in preventing the launch of the nuclear bombs. The robot's creator, forced to help launch the bombs, heads outside the bunker to reason with his creation...who accidentally blasts him with the disintegrator. The robot goes into hysterics and kidnaps Sarah Jane, who he took a shine to, before trying to launch the nukes again. The Doctor is able to literally defuse the situation by overloading the launch control computer with commands until the countdown stops. He then makes use of the laboratories at Think Tank to create a solution to reduce the robot to scrap - firing the disintegrator at him just makes him bigger. The Doctor splashes him with the solution as he turns the UNIT soldiers into paste and the robot dissolves. Back at UNIT, the Doctor, Sarah Jane and Harry pile into the TARDIS and leave - the Doctor insists on not behaving like a mature adult: "What's the point in being grown up if you can't be childish now and then?" He also smacks a brick for the second time in the serial and injures his hand, rather than the brick - a demonstration that he has finished his regeneration.

Shortly after this, the Doctor curls all lanky 191cm of his body into the back of the truck

Planet of the Spiders is a very good serial - it's a lot of fun to watch. It's also one of the more...instructive serials of the show. There's quite a lot of Buddhist imagery - meditating, cosmic balance, and, of course regeneration and reincarnation. For instance, with the meditation, the true purpose is to find inner peace and discover the true self. Lupton and his friends abuse the meditation to focus their psychic powers to summon giant spiders in the name of power. They get repaid in kind - Lupton is killed by the eight-legs when he attempts to (literally) crush them. We never find out what happens to the other four, though given that they aided and abetted an alien invasion, UNIT was probably not kind to them. Another aspect of that is the Doctor - he stole the crystal in the first place. In a sense, he's responsible for the entire mess, because if he had never taken the crystal, the eight-legs would have blown themselves up before becoming a problem for anybody. The Doctor describes it as his "greed for information"; to pay penance, it is his job to return the crystal to the Great One, exposing himself to horrendous amounts of radiation in the process. Interestingly, this element of balance and repayment of sins converges in the attitudes of the characters towards Tommy, the boy with learning disabilities. The human antagonists are constantly rude and unkind, treating him like a nuisance at best. The protagonists, meanwhile, are respectful and kind to him, even Yates, who in his last appearance sold out his friends for power. In turn, Tommy proves crucial in keeping the crystal out of the eight-legs' hands until the right moment. At the same time, his innocence and kindness is similarly repaid - the crystal cures his condition, and he shrugs off the psychic lasers from the antagonists by virtue of that same innocence and compassion. 

It's also interesting to note that the Doctor is the only protagonist who does not treat Tommy with kindness - in their one interaction, he shoves him out of the way in his haste to rescue Sarah Jane from Metebelis Three. The Doctor is also the only protagonist who ends up paying the price for his negative actions. Indeed, Kan'po refers to the weight of his actions as like a spider on his back, not dissimilar to the literal spiders attached to the backs of Lupton and his friends. The Doctor, however, admits to his mistakes and attempts to rectify them, knowing that he will die, or at least regenerate. Regeneration is also important - Planet of the Spiders is the first episode to refer explicitly to a process whereby the Doctor becomes a "new man", where previous episodes called it a renewal. The Doctor and Kan'po also have the ability to recognise each other, despite both having regenerated since they last saw each other - they recognise each other through their mannerisms. This is similar to reincarnation, where the new incarnation of a person will be recognisable, in some cases, as the previous one. This concept of shared traits across reincarnations is another Buddhist belief - when the Dalai Lama dies, they find the new Dalai Lama based on whether babies born in the year of the Dalai Lama's death select toys belonging to previous Dalai Lamas. The child who selects those toys is thus proved to be the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama - they instinctively select certain toys, because they recognise them from previous lifetimes. Similarly, the Doctor recognises Kan'po as his old guru by way of the similarities between what the Doctor remembers of his guru's wisdom and Kan'po's wisdom. In line with the idea of reincarnation, the Doctor, at the end of the episode, is reborn into a younger body. And he spends the first part of the next serial insisting that he is the Doctor - the definite article.

The themes are, I think, well-presented. They're handled respectfully, and Tommy's characterisation is also respectful. The accents and appearance of Kan'po's two incarnations are concerning, though they aren't complete caricatures, which is good. The characterisation and acting is definitely good. I'd give Planet of the Spiders 8.5/10.

Out with the old...

...in with the new!

Robot is a fun serial - the Doctor is amusingly manic. Fittingly given the previous serial, the Doctor does come across as a new man - he's refreshed and rejuvenated, despite everything that happened in Planet of the Spiders. He's also visibly different to the Third Doctor in mannerisms - while the Third Doctor was a responsible, mature man who accepted his responsibilities as UNIT's Scientific Advisor, the Fourth Doctor is more irresponsible, dashing off at the first opportunity. Indeed, at the end of the episode, he throws a tantrum at the idea of continuing to work for UNIT. However, in keeping with the idea of reincarnation and the precedent established by Power of the Daleks and Spearhead from Space, the Doctor is still the same man - he remains sarcastic towards UNIT, for instance. One particular instance is a scene where he criticises the Brigadier calling a base "impenetrable", sarcastically referencing the supposedly unsinkable Titanic. Moreover, during the attack on the Think Tank bunker, he makes use of the sonic screwdriver to detonate a series of landmines, similar to a scene from a Third Doctor story; after the regeneration, he also repeats several statements that the Third Doctor made during his tenure.

Robot does have weak spots - the fact that Sarah Jane is interested in visiting the place which happens to be responsible for the thefts is somewhat contrived. Additionally, it is somewhat strange that UNIT doesn't connect the thefts and the high-tech research facility for a while. The special effects are somewhat silly - case in point, the toy tank. Overall, I'd rank it at 6/10.

Random observations:

-Avatar: The Last Airbender took inspiration from the method of finding the new Dalai Lama - it's how the Air Nomads find the new Avatar. Indeed, the Air Nomads were based on Buddhist and Tibetan culture as a whole.

-The Avatar is not the only character the Doctor has things in common with - both the Doctor and Iroh (Zuko's uncle) are wise, compassionate old men who try to make the world a better place and make up for their mistakes.

-In Buddhism, spiders are depicted as hiding 'the ultimate reality' behind the 'veils of illusion' - the episode's choice of antagonist is therefore fitting, considering that Lupton is too blinded by his greed for power to perceive that the eight-legs are using him to invade Earth.

-When the Doctor greets the Great One for the second time, he notices that she's constructed a web of crystal which will create a positive feedback loop, destroying her; he then attempts to dissuade her from placing the final crystal. It's a small moment, but it demonstrates who the Doctor is, as a person - he tries to save everybody, even the villains.

-The actresses for the eight-legs are truly brilliant - they put a lot of emotion into their acting. However, there is a moment when Lupton seals his fate by calling the eight-legs spiders - they react like they're about to burst into tears. On the other hand, though, the Great One's demise is glorious, largely due to her bombastic reaction to the psychic feedback.

-Tommy is honestly one of the best things about Planet of the Spiders, and Sarah Jane's compassion towards him is lovely to watch.

-According to practically every official Doctor Who statement, episode, book or comic to reference the reason for the Doctor's regeneration, he suffered severe radiation poisoning. However, he spent ten years in the TARDIS flying home - either the radiation was severe enough to give him radiation poisoning, and he would have regenerated (or died) long before reaching Earth, or it was minimal to the degree that he died ten years after exposure, in which case he shouldn't have died at all. My take is that the radiation gave him severe cancer, and that cancer is what did him in.

-Planet of the Spiders is technically, in a round-about way, the first episode to show a regeneration in which the Time Lord regenerating changes ethnicities - Kan'po in his Cho-Je incarnation looks ethnically different to his previous incarnation.

-The robot in Robot has a rather dramatic reaction to killing his creator...you'd think he'd caused a paradox, from the way he reacts.

-The Doctor and Sarah Jane have a touching conversation at the end, where they discuss the fact that the robot was essentially alive - he was basically a human with a metal body.

-The robot is made from living metal. Later stories revealed that the TARDIS is also made of living metal, though presumably a different type - it does explain why the robot is so human.

-It's actually possible to assign Robot (and Planet of the Spiders, as it takes place only a few weeks before for UNIT and Sarah Jane) with a specific year range - somewhere in the 1970s. The characters refer to the Cold War as if it's over, decades before the fall of the Berlin Wall; the 1970s were a period where the Cold War lessened in intensity, and it must have seemed as if it were coming to a close.

-However, this ease with dating the episodes does cause issues - a Fifth Doctor episode puts the UNIT stuff in the 80s. This inspired what is known as the 'UNIT dating controversy' - nobody knows whether the UNIT episodes are supposed to take place in the 1970s or the 1980s. It even got referenced in The Day of the Doctor!

-There's a scene where the Brigadier says that, in the name of trust, the nuclear launch codes were given to a neutral party and Britain was the only option. The Doctor makes a crack at the xenophobic attitudes of some Britons by remarking that the other candidates "were all foreigners".
-Regeneration count - third regeneration, died of cancer (in my opinion), Third to Fourth Doctor. 9 of 12 regenerations left (he does run through them quickly!)