July 8: Planet of the Spiders Parts One & Two

And so here we are, the start of Jon Pertwee's swansong.  There's a bit of a sense of coming full circle here: Mike Yates is back (and clearly once again on the side of the angels, even if he's no longer with UNIT after the events of Invasion of the Dinosaurs); Jo's returned (via post) the blue crystal from Metebelis III, along with a letter describing her adventures with Professor Jones in the Amazon; even the actors in the roles are primarily actors who'd been in previous Pertwee tales.  And into all this we're introduced to the dangers of Buddhism gone wrong, as a group of power-hungry people are in the basement of a Buddhist retreat trying to summon something.  It's sort of impressive how they manage to make the Jewel in the Lotus prayer sound menacing.

There's also a slight sense of playfulness in this first part, as the monk Cho-Je (Kevin Lindsay, last seen as Linx in The Time Warrior) outlines the Doctor's journey in this story as he describes Buddhist philosophy to Sarah: "A man must go inside and face his fears and hopes, his hates and his loves, and watch them wither away.  Then he will find his true self, which is no self.  He will see his true mind, which is no mind.  ...  The old man must die and the new man will discover to his inexpressible joy that he has never existed."  And in case this is all a little too abstract for some viewers, we also get magically appearing and disappearing tractors; a "powerful clairvoyant" in the form of Professor Clegg (Cyril Shaps, last seen as Lennox in The Ambassadors of Death) who gets to do some psychometry (even if the Doctor calls it psycholotry) on the sonic screwdriver -- which allows for a short clip from Carnival of Monsters, even if it's visibly a different sonic screwdriver; and even an earthquake as Clegg tries psychometry on the blue crystal while the evil (misguided?) wannabe Buddhists perform their summoning ceremony -- a ceremony which produces a giant spider⁸³ out of a blue glow on their mandala...

Part two keeps the goodwill going for a bit, as the spider leaps onto the back of the leader of the bad Buddhists, Lupton (John Dearth, last heard as the voice of BOSS in The Green Death), and starts ordering him around, while the Doctor looks at the final recorded images from Clegg before he died at the end of part one, only to see lots of images of spiders.  The spider on Lupton's back is after the Doctor's blue crystal, so Lupton heads to UNIT to get it back.  This is where things start to decline, as the entire second half of this episode is devoted to an extended chase sequence to try and get the crystal back, complete with "comedy" moments such as the befuddled police officer and the vagrant who gets run over by a hovercraft.  It mainly looks like an effort to fit as many different vehicles into a chase as possible, with Bessie, the Whomobile, an autogyro, a speedboat, and the aforementioned hovercraft all involved.  Oh, and it turns out the Whomobile can fly (and can reflect the yellow CSO backdrop to such an extent that it looks gold -- although the DVD has generally rectified this side-effect).  All of this might not be so bad if, at the end of the chase, the spider didn't simply whisk Lupton away just as the Doctor catches up to him.  But that's what happens, which leads the viewer to wonder why the spider didn't just do that in the first place and spare us twelve ultimately irrelevant minutes.







⁸³ And supposedly, in keeping with BBC guidelines, a deliberately unconvincing one, lest any arachnophobics be tuning in.