Giant spiders in a hotel is a premise that writes itself. You’ve got a confined space, a monster with a genuine phobia attached to it, and an audience that will do half the work for you. Doctor Who has been mining exactly this seam since the sixties and it almost always plays. “Arachnids in the UK” has all of that and manages to be dull, because it isn’t actually interested in the spiders. It’s interested in the man who owns the hotel, and it would much rather talk about him.
Home, briefly
The best stretch is the first fifteen minutes, and there’s barely any plot in it. The fam get home to Sheffield, and the episode lets them be people for a bit. Graham walks back into the house he shared with Grace and can’t cope with it, hearing her voice in every room, and Bradley Walsh plays a man moving through his own life like a trespasser. Her death in The Woman Who Fell to Earth is still the only thing this season has done that carries weight, and it’s the most affecting thing in the episode by a distance. Yaz finally gets a family, too. Najia Khan, her mother, is sharp and funny and immediately suspicious of the strange woman her daughter has brought home. The dinner scene is genuinely warm, and the Doctor’s total inability to behave normally in a domestic setting is good comedy. This is what the season keeps proving it’s good at: four people who like each other, in a kitchen. Then a plot turns up.
Najia has just been sacked from her job at a nearly finished luxury hotel, which is built on top of an old landfill, which is full of the discarded remains of laboratory spider experiments. Toxic waste, mutation, giant spiders. Fine. That’s a perfectly good B-movie engine. The execution is oddly bloodless. The spiders themselves are decent CGI and there’s one properly effective moment with a body wrapped in webbing in a bathroom, but the episode never builds tension in a place purpose-built for it. Corridors go unused. There’s no sequence where anyone is genuinely hunted. The hotel is huge, empty, and largely wasted. The Doctor’s solution is to lure them into a panic room with garlic and a Bluetooth speaker, which is the sort of daft, improvised nonsense I actually enjoy from this show. That bit works.
A quick word in the episode’s defence, because I’ve been hard on it. The biology here is complete rubbish. Spiders don’t scale that way, the square-cube law would have the big one collapsing under its own weight, and the idea that toxic waste produces orderly gigantism rather than dead spiders is pure 1950s drive-in. The Doctor even hand-waves it with a line about experimental mutation and moves on. I don’t mind any of that. Doctor Who has never been hard science fiction and the giant-creature story is a respectable old tradition. “Planet of the Spiders” was daft too. The complaint isn’t that the premise is silly, it’s that the episode doesn’t commit to the silliness or the horror. It plays the whole thing at a polite middle distance, too embarrassed to be a creature feature and not interested enough to be anything else. Pick a lane. B-movie schlock would have been a great watch.
The real villain is the American
Then there’s Jack Robertson. Chris Noth plays an American hotel magnate who hates Trump, wants to run against him in 2020, shoots things he doesn’t understand, and cares about nothing except his own liability. He dumped the toxic waste. He built on the landfill. He’s the actual cause. I don’t object to the target. I object to how much room he takes. Every scene he’s in stops the horror dead so somebody can make a point about corporate irresponsibility, and the points are neither subtle nor new. The AV Club put it well: the spiders aren’t the villains of this episode so much as the victims of the one the script actually wants to talk about. The episode has a monster in the building and keeps cutting away from it to have an argument.
And the ending is a genuine misfire. Robertson shoots the giant mother spider, which is already suffocating to death, and the Doctor is appalled by his cruelty. Her alternative was to lock every spider in a room to starve slowly. That’s not obviously the more merciful option, and the episode doesn’t notice. It wants a clean moral contrast between the compassionate Doctor and the trigger-happy businessman, and it hasn’t set one up. He then walks away with no consequences whatsoever, presumably because a sequel was planned.
Compare and despair
The last scene is the one bit of season structure the run bothers with. All three companions choose to keep travelling, not because they’re trapped or curious, but because they’ve each looked at their actual lives in Sheffield and decided they want something else. Ryan’s speech about his mum, Graham’s admission that he can’t be in that house, Yaz’s flat refusal to go back to parking disputes. It’s a small, well-judged scene that does what a fourth episode should. It also underlines the problem, because the show is far better at these four people than at anything it puts in front of them. Four episodes in, the pattern is set and I don’t much like it. Every story so far has a social theme, a functional monster, and a villain who exists to embody the theme. Nobody recurs. Nothing carries over except Grace’s absence. There’s no season arc and no returning threat, which would be fine if the standalone stories were strong, and they aren’t. They’re vehicles.
“Planet of the Spiders” is decades old, four times the length, and made for about the price of a modern catering budget. It is also considerably more frightening. The reason is commitment. The Eight Legs are absurd, wobbling about on visible wires, and the story treats them as an existential horror anyway: they get inside people’s heads, they colonise, they have a genuine hierarchy and a genuine plan. Nobody involved is embarrassed. The daftness becomes part of the dread. This episode has better spiders and less nerve. It keeps cutting away at the moment tension might build, plays several sequences for comedy, and never once puts a character in a situation you’d struggle to watch. The best horror moment is the webbed body in the bathtub, and Den of Geek was right that the images themselves are strong; it just lasts about eight seconds before someone makes a joke. That’s the whole episode in miniature: a good idea, glanced at, then defused.
What it leaves behind is Graham in Grace’s house, Bradley Walsh alone in a kitchen hearing his wife, the best two minutes of the episode. It leaves Najia Khan, because Yaz finally gets a family and her mother is sharper than anyone in the plot. It leaves a hotel that goes unused, with empty corridors and no hunt sequence and no tension, a setting that does nothing. It leaves Robertson, a villain given more screen time than the monster, making points the episode has already made twice. And it leaves the fam choosing to stay, the only piece of deliberate season structure in the run, and a good scene.
Rating: 2/5. A monster episode that can’t be bothered with its monster. The domestic material is strong and the cast remain the best thing here, but the horror is limp, the hotel is squandered, and the ending picks a moral fight it hasn’t earned. The spiders deserved better and so did I. Giant spiders in a Sheffield hotel, and the episode wanted to talk about property development. Somewhere in that building there was a proper scary hour going begging.