Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: Planet of the Piders Part Six

Sarah starts acting strangely because she has the pider queen on her back. When K'Anpo reveals he has the blue crystal that everybody is after, Sarah pews the Doctor. K'Anpo shouts

"Stay!"

and hypno-eyeses Sarah into standing still, then makes the pider visible to the Doctor, and to us.

"See through my eyes. Look."

he says. He must have strong mind-powers indeed to affect the viewers at home. The Doctor and K'Anpo together try to de-hypno-eyes Sarah, and use the crystal to help them. The pider falls off and vanishes.

It is only now that we get the cliffhanger reprise of the henchmannys (and henchpiders) pewing Tommy - a very unusual change to the normal structure of an episode, to have new material intercut with the old. The henchpiders need more power to overcome Tommy, so get the henchmannys to start up an Om Mani Padme Hum. That's their answer to everything.

In the room K'Anpo celebrates Sarah's liberation (from the pider - I don't mean her Women's Lib, lol) by talking some mystical nonsense.

K'Anpo: "We are all apt to surrender ourselves to domination. Even the strongest of us."

Doctor: "Do you mean me?"

K'Anpo: "Not all spiders sit on the back."

Sarah: "Oh, I don't understand. You're not saying they've taken over the Doctor, are you?"

Doctor: "Oh no, Sarah, no. No, he's talking about my greed."

Sarah: "Greed? You?"

Doctor: "Yes, my greed for knowledge... for information."

He wants information... information... information.

Doctor: "He's saying that all this is basically my fault. If I hadn't taken the crystal in the first place."

The Doctor at last recognises his old teacher, who tells Sarah (and us) he is a Time Lord, who the Doctor didn't recognise straight away because he had regenerated since the Doctor last saw him.

Sarah: "Regenerated?"

Doctor: "Yes. Yes, when a Time Lord's body wears out, he regenerates... becomes new."

K'Anpo: "That is why we can live such a long time."

Sarah: "I see. Well, what about Cho-Je? Is he a Time Lord, too?"

K'Anpo: "In a sense. In another sense, he doesn't exist."

Sarah: "You've lost me."

Doctor: "Me too, I'm afraid."

K'Anpo: "Cho-Je is a projection of my own self."

It is interesting that even the Doctor doesn't know that this kind of "projection" is possible.

K'Anpo asks the Doctor if he knows what to do. The Doctor says no, but he is really in denial - he does know what to do, he just doesn't want to. We get a hint as to what this is when we see a flashback to his meeting with the Great One in the last episode. When K'Anpo tells him there is no other way, the Doctor realises that while he doesn't like it, he has to go along with it. The Doctor takes the crystal and sets out to give it to the Great One, even though going back to the cave of crystals will "destroy" him.

With additional power the henchmannys are able to pew Tommy (and Yates, who tries to help) out of the way. They burst in as K'Anpo teleports the Doctor away, so they pew K'Anpo instead.

The Doctor gets into the TARDIS and takes it to Metebelis 3, where he meets Arak and Tuar and asks them to take him to the caves. Instead they take him to the piders' room, and the Doctor tells the pider council he has to take the crystal to the Great One himself. Lupton (who is also there) tries to take the crystal from the Doctor, but the piders stop him.

Lupton: "Why do you stop me? Everything we've planned, everything we've dreamed of is there in the palm of his hand."

Pider: "We dare not take the crystal. The Great One is all seeing."

Piders: "All praise to the Great One!"

Pider: "The Great One is all knowing."

Piders: "All praise to the Great One!"

Pider: "The Great One is all powerful!"

Piders: "All praise to the Great One!"

The Doctor departs, then Lupton gets angry and calls the piders spiders, which they don't like so they pew him and he goes

So much for Lupton.

Yates and Tommy recover, and Sarah says

"Hey, we thought you'd had it." 

but K'Anpo says

"I'm afraid this old body has 'had it,' Miss Smith."

Cho-Je, who is standing nearby, vanishes, and then K'Anpo regenerates so that he looks like Cho-Je. This confuses Tommy (and maybe also some cats watching this on TV who were unfamiliar with the concept of Time Lord regeneration might also have been confused), so K'Anpo reassures him (and us them) by saying

"No, Tommy. I am K'Anpo."

The Doctor takes the blue crystal to the Great One, who pays him for it by telling him the full extent of her plan:

The Great One: "Give me the crystal, I thirst for it! I ache for it!"

Doctor: "Why is it so important to you?"

The Great One: "You see this web of crystal above my head? It reproduces the pattern of my brain. One perfect crystal and it will be complete. That is the perfect crystal I need."

Doctor: "And then?"

The Great One: "My every thought will resonate within the web, and grow in power until... until... until..."

Doctor: "But you've built a positive feedback circuit. You're trying to increase your mental powers to infinity."

The Great One: "Exactly! I shall be the ruler of the entire universe!"

Doctor: "Now listen to me. Listen! I haven't got much time left. What you're trying to do is impossible. If you complete that circuit, the energy will build up and up until it cannot be contained. You will destroy yourself."

It is unclear if the Doctor is genuinely trying to warn the Great One against trying a plan that cannot succeed, or if this is a double-bluff where he is really daring her to go ahead and try it, like with Davros and the Hand of Omega. It is most likely the former, though, since the Great One was definitely going to being trying her plan anyway.

The crystal flies into position and the Great One has a moment of triumph:

"All praise to the Great One! All praise to me! Bow down before me, planets! Bow down stars! Bow down whole galaxies and worship the Great One! The me, the Great, all-powerful me!"

Then the Doctor's prediction takes effect and she goes

"I hurt! Help me, I am burning! My brain is on fire! Help me! Blargh I am ded!"

The Doctor runs away, while in the room of the piders the piders there are all dying. The two-legs are freed from their hypno-eyes and able to run away. The camera shakes throughout this bit, as though indicating an earthquake, but none of the two-legs seem to be affected by it, which means either it is a psychic quake that only affects the piders, or else none of the actors could be bothered to do any earthquake acting. Given what we have seen of the two-legs so far in this story, it could just as easily be either option.

The Doctor gets into the TARDIS just before the mountain blows up.

The next scene is at UNIT HQ, where Sarah and the Brigadier have been waiting "three weeks" for the Doctor to come back. The Brigadier says

"Oh, that's nothing. One time I didn't see him for months. And what's more, when he did turn up, he had a new face. Could have been a completely different man."

Hmm, I wonder where this is going? They really have laid the groundw-word for the regeneration superbly well in this story.

Sarah has by now found that the best way for her to prove the Doctor isn't ded is for her to predict that he is, an ability that has had a lot of uses in the last couple of stories, and as soon as she does so here the TARDIS materialises. The Doctor comes out and says

"I got lost in the time vortex. The TARDIS brought me home."

then he collapses.

Sarah: "Oh Doctor, why did you have to go back?"

Doctor: "I had to face my fear, Sarah. I had to face my fear. That was more important than just going on living."

Sarah: "Please, don't die."

Doctor: "A tear, Sarah Jane? No, don't cry. While there's life there's..."

There's a little fakeout moment where the Doctor appears to die, but because Sarah is there it is difficult to be taken in by this - we've seen too many instances of the-Sarah-that-cried-the-Doctor's-ded to be fooled this time.

K'Anpo appears and says he will help the Doctor regenerate.

K'Anpo: "I will give the process a little push and the cells will regenerate. He will become a new man."

Brigadier: "Literally?"

K'Anpo: "Of course, he will look quite different."

Brigadier: "Not again."

Lol, the Brigadier is comic relief even at a time like this. K'Anpo disappears and the Doctor regenerates. The final line is the Brigadier's

"Well, here we go again."

and the final shot is the Doctor, changing.

What's so good about Planet of the Piders?

While hardly as good an end to its era as Survival was for the Sylvester McCoy era, Planet of the Piders is a great story and a great sendoff for the third Doctor.

Piders were a great choice for the monster, since it took something that is normally cute and cuddly and which only noms nasty flying things and made them scary by having them be giant, with lightning powers, hypno eyes, and able to nom mannys. This subverted the usual way Doctor Who monsters were designed by taking something from the real world that was already scary to begin with, such as hoovers or policemannys.

The piders are, of course, an allegorical monster - in this case they represent the greed of mannys. Lupton is greedier than most so he gets a more powerful pider than his henchmannys, but the most powerful pider of all, the Great One, is for the Doctor, even if it is too big to go on his back in a literal sense. It may seem strange to us that the Doctor, a goody, is considered greedy ("for knowledge... for information" he tells us) but it makes more sense if we consider the Buddhist philosophy of writer Barry Letts, with all the consequences of the Doctor's actions (even unintended ones such as the death of Professor Shaps or the piders taking over Metebelis 3) rebounding upon him as karma. It might have made even more sense still if the original conception of the Master being a manifestation of the Doctor's subconscious darker side (something like an evil Cho-Je) had made it into the final version of the story.

Buddhism at first looks like a strange fit for Doctor Who, which normally likes to have rational explanations for seemingly magical or religious encounters (even if those explanations are sometimes far-fetched), but here we see this rule is observed, with the 'magic' Om Mani Padme Hum abilities that Lupton, the piders, and K'Anpo make use of revealed to be psychic powers enhanced by the special properties of the Metebelis 3 crystals or (in K'Anpo's case) sufficiently advanced Time Lord enlightenment.

Of course Doctor Who has always had a connection to Buddhism, since the Doctor is a BBC version of Monkey. Like the Great Sage, Equal of Heaven, the Doctor travels around solving problems and then moving on to the next adventure, the TARDIS is his cloud, the sonic screwdriver his magic wishing staff. Obviously he's not exactly like Monkey - the Doctor needs no headache sutra to compel him to help others (well... most of the time). And they both know many magic tricks... or science tricks in the Doctor's case. Perhaps the Doctor's exile to Earth is his equivalent of being trapped under a mountain for 500 years (also accomplished with an Om Mani Padme Hum), or perhaps not?

King Monkey, Aware-of-Vacuity, is immortal and indestructible, but the Doctor has to regenerate as the next best thing to ensure his longevity. The regeneration is absolutely key to the theme of this story, and is foreshadowed throughout, beginning subtly - Mike Yates starts the plot when he attends the meditation centre to try to sort himself out or 'renew' himself, then there's Cho-Je's line about the old manny and the new manny.

It gets progressively more obvious over time - Tommy's transformation is a form of regeneration, and then K'Anpo's regeneration makes the process plain so that viewers are fully prepared for the same thing to then happen to the Doctor. The exposition about Time Lord regeneration is also cleverly inserted early on in part six (before we see it 'in action,' so to speak), as the reason why the Doctor didn't recognise K'Anpo straight away.

Logopolis gets a lot of credit for being strongly themed around and building up to its regeneration, but this earlier example is just as good in its own way. It is also the first use of the term "regeneration" in the show to refer to the process of the Doctor changing actors, and it is easy to see why the term stuck and became a core part of the series' mythology.

Pertwee Six-Parter Padding Analysis

It would be impossible to ignore the fact that this story contains some of the most obvious padding out of any Pertwee Six-Parter, as can be seen concentrated in the 10-minute chase in part two.

This watching through of all the Pertwee era in order that I began back in April 2020, necessarily including all 11 Pertwee Six-Parters, has taught me to value the padding in these stories as being an intrinsic part of them, which in their own way can be as much fun to watch as the main plotlines themselves.

Also, a look at the most recent (at time of writing) episode of Doctor Who broadcast on BBC TV shows the peril of going too far in the opposite direction. Stripping out all padding from the script so that what is left is just the essential story beats, strung together as though without rhyme or reason, results in something like we saw in The Power of the Doctor. This single, 90-minute episode had about six* plots all competing for screen time, all of them raced through at breakneck pace (perhaps so that viewers didn't have time to stop and think about how incoherent they were), any one of which could have formed the basis for a four or six-parter in the olden days. On top of that we had the fanservice of the old Doctors and Companions making their appearances, and then at the end the Doctor regenerated.

Put that next to a story like Planet of the Piders, as padded as it is, and there's no comparison.

Padding can be quiet moments of dialogue between two characters imprisoned for the tenth time this story in between a dramatic moment of revelation and an exciting action scene, or a gratuitous chase scene in between slower-paced scenes of plot-driving dialogue and exposition, or anything in between.

Padding allows time for character development for minor characters (Lupton and Tommy are the ones who benefit most from this in Planet of the Piders) and sometimes, like the Master watching Clangers or the Doctor and Jo discussing a daisy, even main characters.

Padding is what you make of it. We should celebrate padding. We should love padding.

* The Master takes the place of Rasputin and hypno-eyeses the Tsar and Tsarina; the business with the space train and the cybermannys; the Master and the Daleks team up to set a trap for the Doctor; the Master impersonates the Doctor to ruin her reputation; the cybermannys take over UNIT HQ leading to a Die Hard-style situation for our heroes stuck inside it; the Daleks have a hollowed-out volcano lair which new series Companion Graham and old series Companion Ace have to team up to sneak inside and blow up.