Planet of the Spiders

074 – Planet of the Spiders
Doctor Who serial
A Giant Spider of Metebelis Three
Cast
Doctor Jon Pertwee (Third Doctor) Tom Baker (Fourth Doctor) (uncredited)
Companion Elisabeth Sladen (Sarah Jane Smith)
Guest stars
Nicholas Courtney — Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart Richard Franklin — Captain Mike Yates John Levene — Sergeant Benton John Dearth — Lupton Carl Forgione — Land Andrew Staines — Keaver Terence Lodge — Moss Christopher Burgess — Barnes John Kane — Tommy Kevin Lindsay — Cho-Je George Cormack — K'Anpo Cyril Shaps — Professor Clegg Chubby Oates — Policeman Pat Gorman — Soldier Terry Walsh— Man with Boat Michael Pinder — Hopkins Stuart Fell — Tramp Geoffrey Morris — Sabor Ralph Arliss — Tuar Gareth Hunt — Arak Jenny Laird — Nesta Joanna Munro — Rega Walter Randall, Max Faulkner — Guard Captains Ysanne Churchman, Kismet Delgado, Maureen Morris — Spider Voices
Production
Writer	Robert Sloman Barry Letts (uncredited)
Director	Barry Letts
Script editor	Terrance Dicks
Producer	Barry Letts (uncredited)
Executive producer(s)	None
Production code	ZZZ
Series	Season 11
Length	6 episodes, 25 minutes each
Originally broadcast	May 4–June 8, 1974
Chronology
← Preceded by Followed by → The Monster of Peladon Robot

Planet of the Spiders is a serial in the British science fiction television series Doctor Who, which was first broadcast in six weekly parts from May 4 to June 8, 1974. It was Jon Pertwee's last serial as the Doctor and marks the first, uncredited appearance of Tom Baker in the role.

Synopsis

Mysterious goings-on at a meditation retreat run by Tibetan monks are linked to the blue planet Metebelis III, and a colony of monstrous, evolved spiders. The Doctor must reflect on his past and reconcile with his present to defeat a deadly and possibly fatal challenge...

Plot

Following the events of Invasion of the Dinosaurs, Captain Mike Yates was discharged from UNIT and is now attending a Tibetan meditation centre in rural England. He is visited by Sarah Jane Smith and they witness some curious happenings at the centre, seemingly organised by a resident called Lupton, a middle aged former salesman, and his cronies. Mike and Sarah stumble across Lupton performing an incantation which conjures up a giant spider into the middle of the basement room. It jumps on Lupton’s back and then disappears. The spider manifests itself in Lupton’s head, telling him to seek out and locate a certain blue crystal.

The Third Doctor has developed an interest in psychic ability, but his testing of a clairvoyant called Professor Clegg backfires when his subject has a heart attack. It is triggered when Clegg comes into contact with a blue crystal from Metebelis Three (sent back from the Amazon by Jo Grant), which caused him to see the image of deadly spiders. Sarah returns from the retreat, having left Mike to watch things there, and she and the Doctor swap spider tales. Meanwhile Lupton has also arrived at UNIT HQ and steals the crystal from the Doctor’s laboratory. A multi-vehicle chase ensues which Lupton escapes by teleporting himself back to the monastery. Once there, the spider reveals that it is plotting against some of its sisters back on Metebelis Three. The spiders and the crystal originate from the same blue planet in the Acteon Galaxy which was none too hospitable to the Doctor the last time he visited (during The Green Death).

The Doctor and Sarah now make for the monastery and tell the deputy abbot, Cho-Je, that something is very amiss. The crystal now strays again when it is taken by Tommy, the simple-minded handyman of the retreat, whose mind is opened and improved by the power of the crystal. Lupton is teleported to Metebelis Three, unconsciously allowing Sarah to follow him. She soon meets the human slave inhabitants of the planet, a generally dispirited bunch, other than the rebellious Arak, who flees to the mountains.

The planet is ruled by the Eight-Legs or giant spiders, and their Queen is the supreme ruler. They govern using guards chosen from among the planet's Two-Leg (human) population and their own phenomenal mental powers, amplified by the blue stones of the planet. The Doctor arrives on the planet and he makes contact with Arak, who explains that the Metebelians are the descendants of the crew of an earth space ship, which crashed hundreds of years before. A spider on board found its way to the Blue Mountains where, through the effect of the crystals, its progeny grew larger and larger and cleverer and cleverer. The Doctor works out that a “negative” stone can absorb and reject the power of the blue crystals and starts a revolt among the humans, but this is defeated and the Doctor ventures to the Blue Mountains. There he encounters the Great One, a giant spider which controls the world of Metebelis and desires power over other domains too. She knows the crystal is still on Earth and sends the Doctor there to get it for her. He flees back to Earth with Sarah – not knowing the Queen spider has now implanted itself in his companion's mind.

Tommy has given the crystal to the abbot, K’Anpo Rinpoche, who is an elderly Time Lord and the one-time hermit mentor of the Doctor. He now lives in peaceful exile on Earth. He tells the Doctor of Sarah's control and they work together to expel the Queen Spider. A fight breaks in the monastery between Lupton’s cronies and the Abbot’s men. The Abbot advises the Doctor to take the crystal to the Great One: the Doctor started this chain of events by removing the crystal in the first place, and it is up to him to put it back. He departs in the TARDIS with the crystal.

On Metebelis Three, Lupton has been killed by the spiders after falling out with the Spider Queen. When the TARDIS lands, the Doctor heads to the cave of the Great One and gives her the crystal, which she uses to complete a lattice that begins to magnify her mental powers. However, the forces unleashed are too strong for the Great One and the positive feedback kills her and the other spiders. A vast wave of deadly radiation floods the cave. The Doctor, now very weak, staggers back to the TARDIS and teleports away.

Three weeks later, Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart and Sarah are in the Doctor's laboratory when the Doctor returns and promptly collapses. The Doctor dies, and Sarah cries. The abbot K’Anpo arrives in his new body, having regenerated into the form of Cho-Je, who was a sort of forward projection of his soul. He tells them that the Doctor will change too and before their eyes the Doctor starts to regenerate. Sarah tells the Brigadier that she thinks The Doctor is starting to regenerate. The Brigadier says "Well, here we go again!" And The Doctor regenerates into a younger man (Tom Baker). The abbot comments on his brain cells being rattled around a bit, perhaps to account for the Fourth Doctor's radically eccentric personality.

Cast notes

• This story marks the final appearance of Richard Franklin as Captain Mike Yates. Franklin would reprise his role in The Five Doctors (1983) and Dimensions in Time (1993), although on both occasions they were illusory versions of Yates. After his departure from the series, Franklin would go on to become a stage and television director.
• Kismet Delgado, the widow of Roger Delgado, who had played the Master during the Third Doctor's era, was one of the voices for the Spiders.
• Gareth Hunt, who would go on to play Mike Gambit in The New Avengers, appears here as a human rebel on Metebelis III. See also List of guest appearances in Doctor Who.

Production

• The final story of Season 11 (to have been titled The Final Game) was originally intended to write out the character of the Master, with the villainous Time Lord sacrificing his life to save the Doctor's. Due to the death of actor Roger Delgado, script editor Terrance Dicks abandoned the project in favour of a new story, which eventually evolved into Planet of the Spiders. Coincidentally, Kismet Delgado, Roger's widow provided her voice to one of the spiders.
• The train station Sarah Jane arrives at in Part One is Mortimer railway station, near Reading.

Continuity

• This story was the second and last appearance of the "Whomobile".
• The character of Surgeon-Lieutenant Harry Sullivan, the UNIT medical officer, is referred to by the Brigadier who calls for him when the Doctor falls into a daze after staring into the crystal. Sullivan would not actually appear on screen until Robot, where he was played by Ian Marter.
• The Spiders of Metebelis Three make further appearances in the short story "Return of the Spiders" by Gareth Roberts (in the collection More Short Trips) and a brief appearance in the Eight Doctor Adventure The Eight Doctors by Terrance Dicks. They also have a full encounter with the Eighth Doctor in the Big Finish audios The Eight Truths and Worldwide Web by Eddie Robson.
• The Eighth Doctor Adventures novels Interference: Book One and Two by Lawrence Miles has the time-travelling voodoo cult Faction Paradox changing history so that the events of this story never happen and instead having the Third Doctor regenerating on a planet named Dust after being shot. A later novel in the series, The Ancestor Cell by Peter Anghelides and Stephen Cole, resolves this paradox and restores the Doctor's timeline to its previous state. The canonicity of the novels is unclear.
• It is unclear how long it takes the Doctor to return to Earth in the TARDIS from Metabelis Three, although three weeks have passed for Sarah and the Brigadier. Paul Cornell in the Virgin New Adventures novel Love and War established that the TARDIS was lost in the time vortex for the equivelant of ten years. This is revealed during a sequence in cyberspace where agents of the alien race called the Hoothi are attempting to trap the Seventh Doctor in a virtual recreation of the worst moments of his life, of which this regeneration is the most painful for the Doctor to re-live.

Regeneration

The concept of regeneration is named in this serial. Fan speculation about whether Patrick Troughton's Second Doctor was a regeneration or merely a "change of appearance" continued until The Five Doctors.

This is the first story to feature a Time Lord (other than the Doctor) regenerating on screen. To date, only two other Time Lords have had a regeneration take place in a television story. The first is Romana in Destiny of the Daleks (1979), although even in her case, the regeneration was actually not seen, as she was in a different room when it transpired. Although the Master was also shown changing appearance on two occasions (in The Keeper of Traken and the 1996 TV film), neither was an actual regeneration. The Master was finally seen to regenerate in the 2007 episode "Utopia."

K'anpo Rimpoche

This story introduces the character of K'anpo Rimpoche, the previously unnamed Time Lord hermit from the Doctor's childhood, first mentioned in The Time Monster. K'anpo has the power to travel through time without the use of a TARDIS, to make a corporeal projection of a potential future incarnation (Cho-Je) of himself, and to stimulate the regeneration process of another Time Lord. Whereas a Time Lord was seen to travel without a TARDIS in Terror of the Autons and the Doctor has met two future potential incarnations of himself: the Watcher in Logopolis (1981) and the Valeyard in The Trial of a Time Lord (1986), no other Time Lord has been shown to stimulate the regeneration process (although it can be argued that the Time Lords stimulated the Doctor's regeneration in The War Games; and that the Doctor's companion Romana may have stimulated her own regeneration or projected possible future incarnations for the Doctor to choose from in Destiny of the Daleks). K'anpo was referenced again in the Fourth Doctor serial State of Decay as the man who told the Doctor about the legends of the Great Vampires.

In print

Doctor Who book
Doctor Who and the Planet of the Spiders
Series	Target novelisations
Release number	48
Writer	Terrance Dicks
Publisher	Target Books
Cover artist	Peter Brookes
ISBN	0-426-10655-5
Release date	16 October 1975
Preceded by	Doctor Who and the Green Death
Followed by	The Three Doctors

A novelisation of this serial, written by Terrance Dicks, was published by Target Books in October 1975 as Doctor Who and the Planet of the Spiders.

Broadcast, VHS release

• This story was repeated on BBC One as a 75min omnibus over Christmas 1974 (26/12/1974) and (27/12/1974) at 2.45pm. *The serial was released on VHS in April 1991 as a double pack.
• A commentary with Elisabeth Sladen, Nicholas Courtney, Richard Franklin, Barry Letts, and Terrance Dicks was recorded on 19 February 2007 for a future DVD release.
• As of August 5, 2008, this serial has, along with a number of other selected Third Doctor serials (and the Second Doctor story The Krotons) been offered for sale on iTunes.

DVD Release: Planet of the Spiders will be released on DVD in late 2010. There will be 2 DVDS with audio comentaries, and never before scenes.^{[citation needed]}

References

External links

• Planet of the Spiders at bbc.co.uk
• Planet of the Spiders at Doctor Who: A Brief History Of Time (Travel)
• Planet of the Spiders at the Doctor Who Reference Guide
• That Doctor Who Episode with the Hovercraft Chase: A Retrospective — A tongue-in-cheek analysis of Planet of the Spiders Part Two.
• Planet of the Spiders on BBCWorldwideTV Youtube channel

Reviews

• Planet of the Spiders reviews at Outpost Gallifrey
• Planet of the Spiders reviews at The Doctor Who Ratings Guide

Target novelisation

• Doctor Who and the Planet of the Spiders reviews at The Doctor Who Ratings Guide
• On Target — Doctor Who and the Planet of the Spiders