Arachnids in the UK
Jan. 2nd, 2019 08:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
purplecatAt the time of watching, I felt that Arachnids in the UK, while not in the same league as Rosa, was preserving a general upward trend in the quality of the stories in series 11. I now feel like I'd like to revist both it and The Woman who Fell to Earth since I'm not sure it would stand up terribly well back to back with the latter.
While Arachnids has better narrative drive, certainly than The Ghost Monument, like The Ghost Monument it just seems to stop at the end of its allotted 50 minutes. The situation is apparently contained and we can infer that something is done about the baby spiders in the panic room, but a little bit more would have been welcome. Allowing Chris Noth's Robertson to leave apparently scot free is another odd choice. While it could be argued this is a case of the Doctor choosing not to interfere with a more systemic problem, the man has clearly broken a number of laws (including waving a gun at a police officer - even if she hadn't identified herself as such) and, as many people have pointed out, would it really have hurt to have had a newspaper headline, or throwaway comment, that he was now being investigated by the authorities?
Where the series set up as a whole is reminiscent of the early Davison years, and its historical reminiscent of early Hartnell, Arachnids invokes late Pertwee with its giant spiders and environmentalist underpinnings. That said, it didn't feel much like a Pertwee story to me. Robertson wasn't a consistent enough antagonist and the spiders not really enough of a threat. As in The Ghost Monument the presentation here of the Doctor's anti-gun stance seems more hypocritical than usual - allowing creatures to die of suffocation or, we infer, starvation in preference to killing them directly.
Yaz and her family were fun, though even with their foregrounding here, she continues to feel oddly underdeveloped.
I enjoyed it at the time but in retrospect Arachnids in the UK feels like an oddly unsatisfactory tale.
While Arachnids has better narrative drive, certainly than The Ghost Monument, like The Ghost Monument it just seems to stop at the end of its allotted 50 minutes. The situation is apparently contained and we can infer that something is done about the baby spiders in the panic room, but a little bit more would have been welcome. Allowing Chris Noth's Robertson to leave apparently scot free is another odd choice. While it could be argued this is a case of the Doctor choosing not to interfere with a more systemic problem, the man has clearly broken a number of laws (including waving a gun at a police officer - even if she hadn't identified herself as such) and, as many people have pointed out, would it really have hurt to have had a newspaper headline, or throwaway comment, that he was now being investigated by the authorities?
Where the series set up as a whole is reminiscent of the early Davison years, and its historical reminiscent of early Hartnell, Arachnids invokes late Pertwee with its giant spiders and environmentalist underpinnings. That said, it didn't feel much like a Pertwee story to me. Robertson wasn't a consistent enough antagonist and the spiders not really enough of a threat. As in The Ghost Monument the presentation here of the Doctor's anti-gun stance seems more hypocritical than usual - allowing creatures to die of suffocation or, we infer, starvation in preference to killing them directly.
Yaz and her family were fun, though even with their foregrounding here, she continues to feel oddly underdeveloped.
I enjoyed it at the time but in retrospect Arachnids in the UK feels like an oddly unsatisfactory tale.
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Date: 2019-01-02 10:18 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-01-05 12:10 pm (UTC)