July 10: Planet of the Spiders Parts Five & Six

The ruling chamber of the Eight-Legs. (Planet of the
Spiders Part Five) ©BBC

Part five has a lot of running around and ensuring that all the pieces are in the right places for the final confrontation.  So the spiders are attempting to make contact with people on Earth again so that they can control said people and then take over the Earth.  The Queen Spider, on the other hand, is less interested in controlling Earth and more in recovering the blue crystal.  To this end, she sweet-talks Sarah into helping her out, convincing her to take the Doctor back to Earth so he can retrieve the crystal.

The more chilling part, though, involves the Doctor's encounter with the Great One ("all praise to the Great One"), as he's first tricked into entering the Great One's lair and then forced to do her bidding.  Watching the Doctor try desperately to resist the Great One's mental control and failing, stomping around in a small circle while the Great One taunts him ("Is that fear I can feel in your mind?  You are not accustomed to feeling frightened, are you, Doctor?"), is genuinely quite upsetting, and the look on the Doctor's face, particularly as he runs from the Great One's cave, is disturbing -- particularly from a Doctor we've known to confront things with confidence and aplomb.

But the Doctor and Sarah make it back to Earth, where they're met by Tommy, who's determined to stop the spider-controlled people from breaking into K'anpo Rimpoche's study and taking the blue crystal from those inside ("Tommy, you're normal," Sarah says to him, somewhat insensitively.  "You're just like everybody else."  "I sincerely hope not," Tommy replies).  And so while the Doctor and Sarah meet with K'anpo, Tommy takes the brunt of the attacks from the spider-controlled...

Part six, curiously, adds a reasonable amount of new material to the reprise from last time, such that the actual cliffhanger moment doesn't come until five or six minutes in.  We learn more about how the Doctor stole the crystal, but we also learn that the Queen Spider is in fact riding on Sarah's back -- but Sarah is able to reassert her own personality and cause the Queen to fall from her back.  "We are all apt to surrender ourselves to domination. Even the strongest of us. ... Not all spiders sit on the back," K'anpo says.  It's during this conversation that we discover that K'anpo is in fact the Doctor's old teacher, the hermit we first heard about in The Time Monster (and George Cormack, who here plays K'anpo, was King Dalios in that).  And (important, this) it's the first time we hear about regeneration: "When a Time Lord's body wears out, he regenerates, becomes new," the Doctor tells Sarah, in an effort to explain why he didn't immediately recognize his old teacher.  And it seems that Cho-Je is in fact a projection of K'anpo's future self -- in other words, he's there to help ease the audience into the idea of a Time Lord changing his form in the way that the Doctor is going to do.

Jon Pertwee regenerates into Tom Baker. (Planet of the Spiders Part
Six) ©BBC

But the main point of this episode is to show how the Doctor accepts his fate and has to right the wrongs he caused by his greed in taking the crystal from Metebelis III in the first place -- even if he didn't know he was being greedy at the time.  Even though he knows it will destroy him to go back, he has to.  And so he does, returning the crystal (which, it turns out, is a perfect crystal) to the Great One, who puts it into a crystal lattice designed to amplify her mental powers -- only the mental energy creates feedback which destroys the Great One and the rest of the spiders, thus freeing the humans on Metebelis III (in a "blink and you'll miss it" moment).  But it seems that that final confrontation with the Great One in her lair did in fact lead to the Doctor's end: the ending reveals that it's been three weeks since the Doctor left for Metebelis III, and that when he does return, visibly ill, it's because "the TARDIS brought me home."  And then, as the Doctor dies, he brings home the point of the whole exercise: "I had to face my fear, Sarah.  I had to face my fear. That was more important than just going on living. ... A tear, Sarah Jane?  No, don't cry.  While there's life there's..."

But Cho-Je/K'anpo is there to ensure that the regeneration proceeds smoothly: "I will give the process a little push and the cells will regenerate.  He will become a new man."  And thus Jon Pertwee regenerates into the fourth Doctor, Tom Baker.⁸⁴

It's probably the story with the most investment of any of season 11, but Planet of the Spiders isn't without its flaws.  There are a number of pointless scenes that feel more like padding, which does give the production a rather bloated feel (and it's worth noting that the omnibus version, which cuts almost an hour from this story and is available on the DVD, loses almost none of the major plot points), and there are definitely moments where things feel more preachy and showy than organic.  But because the people involved are investing more into this to give Pertwee a proper send-off, there's enough good will generated by the parts they get right to carry the day -- part six, in particular, does a great job of both getting the point across without too much effort and wrapping up a number of hanging threads from earlier Pertwee stories.  It'll never be regarded as brilliant, and the tragic death of Roger Delgado means it's not the final battle between the Doctor and the Master that we've been (sort of) building to, but nevertheless Planet of the Spiders is a solid departure for the third Doctor.

On the whole, though, this is the exception to season 11 rather than the rule.  Of the five stories that aired this season, only the first one really feels like it's firing on all cylinders -- and it's the one that was made as the end of season 10.  Everything else this season (with the qualified exception of Planet of the Spiders, as noted above) feels like it's marking time.  Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks clearly don't want to be there anymore, and even Jon Pertwee's enthusiasm is visibly waning (and the reaggravation of an old back injury around this time certainly didn't help matters any for him).  There's a sense of the old team breaking up, with Katy Manning and Roger Delgado both gone from the show and UNIT featuring less and less, and the ultimate result suggests that they're no longer putting in the same effort they once were.  This would prove to be Letts and Dicks' final season, but unfortunately they don't go out on a high note.  Season 11 is the weakest season that Doctor Who has yet experienced.

But even though they hit a rough patch at the end, we shouldn't overlook the overall effect of this production team and their Doctor.  The third Doctor's tenure saw Doctor Who's popularity steadily increase, securing its future and ensuring that it would remain a hit.  Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks aren't quite done yet (they'll do one last story, Tom Baker's debut), but they've left their mark on a series that some had left for dead, revitalizing it for a whole new audience.  But it's not just Letts and Dicks: a large part of the success of this period can be attributed to Jon Pertwee, whose performance as a straight action hero with scientific knowledge and experience added into the mix proved that the character of the Doctor was even more malleable and adaptable than one might have thought.  Hartnell and Troughton, while giving different styles of performance, are to an extent recognizably the same character.  Pertwee's Doctor shows that even with a radically different Doctor, more prone to using Venusian aikido and hobnobbing with authority figures than bamboozling his adversaries and subverting leader figures, the character can still not only survive but thrive.  There are a lot of fantastic moments during Pertwee's time as the Doctor that demonstrate that he is indeed the Doctor, and his combination of charm and action will be missed.  There'll never be another Doctor quite like him.







⁸⁴ In the last regeneration we actually saw (Hartnell to Troughton), the production team achieved the effect by lining up the actors' cheekbones and merging one face into another.  They do a similar thing here, except, entertainingly, the feature they chose to use as their baseline is the actors' noses.  Which is doubly entertaining if you know anything about Pertwee's sensitivity about his sniffer.