Review of Arachnids in the UK
Warning: This review contains episode-specific spoilers and wild speculation about future episodes.

This episode is not for arachnophobes. Straight up—if spiders squick you out, skip this one. Do Not Pass “Go,” Do Not Collect $200.

If you can handle spiders, well… It’s still plenty creepy. There’s something primordial that just gets at one’s brainstem when something is crawling rapidly toward you with purpose, especially when it has many legs. As usual, though, the creatures are just a convenient (or inconvenient, depending on your perspective) backdrop for a deeper story.

This time that story is nominally about the greed and egoism of a man who is such an obvious analog for the current US President that they actually had to use said President’s name in the dialog in order to maintain deniability. The parallel actually made it hard for me to watch whenever that guy was on screen (that and the fact that the actor will forever be Mr. Big to me, though that actually worked relatively well in context).

What I really got out of the episode, though, was an exploration of family. The undercurrents are everywhere. Most obviously, we meet Yaz’s family. She and her sister snark relatively good-naturedly at each other; her dad is excited to cook for her friends, but she’s worried about the quality of his food; her mom hopes she’s paired up with someone else on the team, and doesn’t care whether it’s the Doctor (charmingly clueless) or Ryan (mutually uninterested).

But Graham and Ryan both have family issues to work through, too. Graham has to try to cope with Grace’s ghost impinging on his every thought as he goes back to their now-empty home. Meanwhile, a letter from his dad makes Ryan confront his feelings about his relationship with Graham, though he probably wouldn’t think of it that way himself.

And of course, we continue to get to know the Doctor. Not only does she claim to once have had sisters (as well as having been a “sister” in an aqua-hospital) and thus extend the familial theme, but her personality also continues to develop. She’s still lonely without companionship; she still loves a puzzle (or a conspiracy); and she is still compassionate to a fault, as evidenced by her attempt to reason with a mutant spider (“You stay here until I figure this out. Deal?”).

Unlike her previous incarnations, though, she’s much more of a “people person.” Instead of barreling ahead, she asks for consent from the humans around her (“I could open the door. … If you thought it was appropriate.”). And she’s all about mentoring her friends. Just as in previous episodes, she exclaims here about the quality of the questions they ask, nudging them toward thinking about problems the way she does.

That’s not to say she’s not still authoritative. When they first encounter Big, she shoves her psychic paper credentials in his face and demands, “Tell me exactly what’s going on, omitting no detail, no matter how strange.” And he complies.

But the baddie has some wins, too. The Doctor takes a stand against harming the spiders, telling Big, “Whatever happened, there are living, breathing organisms out there, and we treat them with dignity.” (Some day I need to write a treatise on how the Doctor is a Unitarian Universalist, complete with examples like this of how she lives by the seven Principles (e.g., “The inherent worth and dignity of every person” and “Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part”).) He doesn’t put any stock in her authority, though, and takes matters into his own hands. Everyone else is left staring after him in dismay.

Perhaps that’s part of why I found the episode difficult to watch. As I mentioned above, certain parts of it were just a bit too on-the-nose. And it didn’t help that the first on-screen human death (though not corpse) we saw was that of a queer woman, Big’s niece’s wife Frankie.

Nor is this the first mention of a queer woman’s death this series. Back in The Ghost Monument, Angstrom found a connection with Graham when she realized both of their wives had died because of the Stenza. Two instances in four episodes—both in ones penned solely by Chibnall—is a pretty high rate, and it concerns me that the showrunner hasn’t noticed what he’s doing.

I expect he thinks he’s being inclusive (“Look: I’m putting canonically queer characters on screen!”), and doesn’t think anything of the deaths because people die left and right on Doctor Who. However, the fact that he apparently hasn’t considered the optics of which characters die (including starting off the season by killing a Black woman) is troubling. Even though the messages of inclusion and tolerance are being touted in overt ways, these subtler messages are also coming through.

While the writer may not be as self-aware as we’d like him to be, the Doctor herself seems to have learned a few things over the years. When her friends ask to come along with her on her travels, she doesn’t just close the doors and engage the drive. She gives them warnings and a little time to think, and asks them to “be sure” of their decisions. Thus Team TARDIS is officially born.

I don’t know what adventures these particular friends have ahead of them, but I do know that some of the Doctor’s biggest enemies will continue to be humans’ “me/mine first” tendencies and lack of compassion for each other. Just as she continues to fight them, so must we.

If you’re eligible to do so in the US, please go vote this week.