Category: Doctor Who
Doctor Who episode 380: Planet of the Spiders – Part Five (1/6/1974)
I like the way that petty power struggles on Earth and Metebelis 3 begin to pale with the introduction of two awesome, opposing forces: the as-yet-unseen Great One, and K’anpo, the wise Yoda figure back on Earth. The Great One’s minions plot against each other. Lupton, brought before the Parliament of Spiders, proves he’s a very slippery customer as he begins to turn the Eight Legs against Queen Huath. No wonder he was salesman of the year. In response, Huath has a woman-to-woman chat with Sarah Jane and brings her into a counter-plot to shore up the Queen’s own shaky position. That a power struggle between twitching spider puppets should be quite this fun is quite baffling.
Doctor Who episode 379: Planet of the Spiders – Part Four (25/5/1974)
Very much a middle episode, this doesn’t quite work. Pertwee spends a lot of it on his back, in a slight return of the classic third Doctor coma trick, which isn’t really a great look for his final story (although Sarah’s loyal vigil is good foreshadowing for Part Six). Instead, we get Gareth Hunt and Ralph Arliss rehearsing the themes of hot-headed action vs measured courage that were tired when Terry Nation did them. We also get several scenes of Lupton’s businessmen associates having a conference at the meditation centre, and Sarah Jane learning the history of Metebelis 3.
Doctor Who episode 378: Planet of the Spiders – Part Three (18/5/1974)
I’m quite sold on Lupton: he’s easily the pettiest and most human villain the show has had in years (probably since The Highlanders). He gives a potted history of his backstory and it’s like he’s a character in a soap: embittered ex-sales wunderkind, forced out in a merger and now driven entirely on a quest to make other people as humiliated as he feels. This leads to an astonishing sequence in which he turns his spider’s mental torture back on her, forcing her to beg him to stop. This is the kind of person he is: he’ll torment a spider to make himself feel like the big man.
Doctor Who episode 377: Planet of the Spiders – Part Two (11/5/1974)
There’s something very Dennis Wheatley about this story: of burnt-out businessmen who have presumably had their fill of worldly pleasures and have started to dabble in the otherworldly as an easy route to the success that has eluded them. The domesticity of the villains, and their disgust and incomprehension at what they’ve unlocked, is a new angle on sci-fi horror only hinted at by The Dæmons, where the Master’s plans for universal domination prevent it from being quite so thrillingly mundane.
Doctor Who episode 376: Planet of the Spiders – Part One (4/5/1974)
Sticking with the end of an era feel of Season 11, this episode is the closest thing the classic series has to those RTD’s season-finale reunions like Journey’s End. Not only does it bring back Mike Yates, to give him a chance of redemption ‘after that Golden Age mess’, but also Jo Grant – at least, a letter from the Amazon written in her distinctive voice, which means she’s present even if absent. As such, this isn’t just a swansong for Pertwee, but for his entire team.
Doctor Who episode 375: The Monster of Peladon – Part Six (27/4/1974)
The last episode sees the villains spinning in increasingly erratic orbits around the Doctor’s centre of gravity, as he takes over their base and uses their weapons against them, apparently at the cost of his own life. This means Azaxyr gets a showdown with the Pels and is ultimately stabbed by a miner as he threatens to kill their Queen. It’s a slightly ignominious end, but there’s some nice theatre as his corpse is borne away. The venal Eckersley gets a less noble end: hunted down by Aggedor, in its role as Hound of the Baskervilles to his Stapleton, and mauled to death. It’s just desserts for the man who appropriated the image of Aggedor to line his own pockets.
Doctor Who episode 374: The Monster of Peladon – Part Five (20/4/1974)
Again, the second half of the serial, while by no means great, is a significant improvement over the leaden first half. Eckersley may have turned into a bit of a panto sadist (he chuckles at the idea of the miners being massacred), but at least he’s vivid. Ortron gets to go out in style, proving to be a better chancellor than Hepesh as he hurls himself in front of the Queen to protect her from the Ice Warriors. And Azaxyr continues to be an excellent addition, revealed as an anti-Federation Marxiteer pining for the ‘good old days of death or glory’ – a jingoist like so many of the baddies this series.
Doctor Who episode 373: The Monster of Peladon – Part Four (13/4/1974)
I’ll give this to The Monster of Peladon: this feels like the climax to a four-part adventure rather than a tedious six-parter middle episode. The script has a plot (maybe too much plot – it absolutely burns through it compared to the last three), and it has a pretty relentless pace that clearly inspires Lennie Mayne: the chaos of the revolt is represented really well, and the Doctor’s desperate race to stop Ettis, who has gone mad and decided to ‘kill them all!’ with his stolen sonic lance, really feels like life and death.
Doctor Who episode 372: The Monster of Peladon – Part Three (6/4/1974)
There’s a well-intentioned if patronising message to the episode that Peladon is well overdue a dose of Women’s Lib, and Sarah Jane is the woman to administer it (just in case there’s any doubt, Ortron outs himself as a horrid old sexist with lines like, ‘Since she is only a female, her activities are of little importance’). I like the Doctor’s recognition that the planet is in need of some fresh thinking, and the trust he places in Sarah to educate the Queen, and it results in the best line of the episode: ‘There’s nothing only about being a girl.’ However, I fear she’s onto a loser with Thalira, who has all the majesty of a mousey suburban spouse, and whose main contribution to the episode is calling for ‘chairs and refreshments for our guests’ as if she’s organising an afternoon tea.
Doctor Who episode 371: The Monster of Peladon – Part Two (30/3/1974)
I suspect my episode-a-day approach may do a disservice to The Monster of Peladon: while it’s only a couple of months since I saw The Curse of Peladon, viewers in 1974 would have had to think back two years to recall the Doctor’s first visit. And so what feels like a tiresome re-tread to me might have felt pleasingly nostalgic to them (or even brand new, to kids who’d started watching in the intervening years). That said, even if the original story isn’t fresh in your mind I think it’s hard to get very inspired by this: it’s so linear, with loads of wandering back and forth between gloomy locations while the poshest miners in the universe orate at each other, Queen Thalira pouts and Chancellor Ortron gets fruitier by the moment.
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