Planet of the Spiders

Planet of the Spiders is the fifth and final serial of the 11th season of the British science fiction television series Doctor Who, which was first broadcast in six weekly parts on BBC1 from 4 May to 8 June 1974. It was Jon Pertwee's final regular appearance as the Third Doctor, the last regular appearance of Mike Yates, and marks the first, uncredited appearance of Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor. This serial introduces the term "regenerate" to explain the Doctor's transformation into another appearance. It also contains the first mention in the series of future companion Harry Sullivan.

A Tibetan monastery in rural England, a stage magician with uncanny powers; these are the strands of the sinister web woven by the Metabilis spiders. The serial is set in England and on the planet Metebelis Three. Failed businessman Lupton (John Dearth) allies himself with a race of giant spiders with psychic powers, who call themselves The Eight-Legs, in order to seize power on Earth.

Plot
Following the events of Invasion of the Dinosaurs, Mike Yates is discharged from UNIT and joins a Tibetan meditation centre in rural England for therapy, to help him cope with the experience. He asks Sarah Jane Smith to visit him, to investigate a group organised by a resident named Lupton. Mike and Sarah witness Lupton perform an incantation that conjures up a giant spider, which takes control of him. The Spider has come to Earth to seek a certain blue crystal.

The Third Doctor has developed an interest in psychic ability, and his experiments include testing the blue crystal which he brought from the planet Metebelis Three, the blue planet in the Acteon Galaxy which he visited during The Green Death. The experiments show images of giant spiders. Sarah returns from the monastery, and she and the Doctor compare spider stories. Meanwhile Lupton's spider has traced the crystal to UNIT HQ, whereupon Lupton travels there and steals the crystal from the Doctor’s laboratory. A multi-vehicle chase ensues, with vehicles including Bessie, the Doctor’s Edwardian roadster; a Campbell Super Cricket gyrocopter, G-AXVK; the Whomobile, a futuristic-looking vehicle that combines the abilities of a hovercraft with the ability to fly; and a conventional hovercraft.

Lupton escapes by his Spider teleporting him back to the monastery, where it reveals that it too comes from Metebelis Three. Both the giant spiders and the crystal originate there. Before the Spider can contact Metabilis, the crystal is stolen from Lupton by Tommy, the monastery's handyman, a retarded innocent with mental difficulties, who is strangely drawn to the crystal. Sarah has recognised Lupton, and she and the Doctor quickly arrive at the monastery to warn the lama in charge, Cho-je, about Lupton's strange powers. Lupton is compelled to flee with the Spider to Metebelis, without the crystal. Sarah secretly follows, but is quickly captured by the Eight-Legs - as the spiders call themselves.

The Doctor arrives in the Tardis to rescue her, and begins organising a resistance movement among the human slaves, descendants of the crew of an Earth spaceship that crashed hundreds of years before, who the spiders prey on. The planet is ruled by the giant spiders, who also came from the crashed ship, but whose mental powers have been amplified by centuries of exposure to the strange blue crystals found in the mountains of Metabilis. The Queen Spider seems to be the supreme ruler, but in the Blue Mountains the Doctor encounters the Great One, an enormous spider who is really in control, who now desires power over other worlds too. She craves the crystal, which she insanely believes will expand her mental powers to infinity and give her dominion over the entire universe.

The Great One sends the Doctor to Earth to get the crystal for her. He flees with Sarah, unaware that the Queen spider - who also craves the crystal - has taken over Sarah's mind. At the monastery, Tommy has been cured by the crystal, which has expanded his intelligence too, just as it has for the spiders. He gives it into the safe-keeping of the abbot, K’anpo Rimpoche, an elderly Time Lord who has retired into a peaceful exile on Earth.

The Abbot uses the crystal to free Sarah's mind from the Queen's control. The crystal kills the Queen. A force of Spiders arrives, and a battle breaks out in the monastery for possession of the crystal. The Abbot advises the Doctor to give the crystal back to the Great One, as the Doctor has caused the entire problem by taking the crystal in the first place.

When the TARDIS arrives on Metebelis, Lupton tries to seize the crystal but is killed by the spiders, who are too much afaid of the Great One. The Doctor returns to her cave and warns her of the dangers of using the crystal to complete the feedback loop she has built, but she is now insane. The forces released are so powerful that a vast wave of deadly radiation floods the mountain, killing the Great One and all the other spiders. The Doctor, now very weak, dying from the deadly radiation, staggers back to the TARDIS.

The Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart and Sarah are in the Doctor's laboratory when the TARDIS materialises. Upon emerging, the Doctor collapses to the floor. The Abbot K’anpo then also materialises, having regenerated into the form of Cho-je, who was a sort of projection. He tells them the Doctor can yet survive, by regenerating. Although he will look quite different. K’anpo initiates the process with a little push, and before their very eyes the Doctor begins to change...

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 (played by the recently deceased Roger Delgado), with the villainous Time Lord sacrificing his life to save the Doctor.

The railway station at which Sarah Jane arrives in Part One is Mortimer, near Reading, a major continuity error, as director Barry Letts' allows this to be identifiable on-screen in the establishing shot of the railway station, thereby placing the location of the Tibetan monastery in Berkshire, close to London. But the extensive location scenes in Part Two, filmed in Wiltshire and Gloucestershire, imply a setting of 'darkest Mummerset' in the wilds of the West Country.

Producer and director Barry Letts said in an interview in 2004, referring to the use of CSO (Colour Separation Overlay) to create backgrounds of the planet Metebelis in long-shot, that he was unhappy with the scenes, which "never looked right".

Cast notes
Ysanne Churchman had provided the voice of Alpha Centauri in both The Curse of Peladon (1972) and its sequel The Monster of Peladon (the serial immediately preceding Planet of the Spiders); she would briefly reprise the role in "Empress of Mars" (2017). Kismet Delgado, the widow of Roger Delgado, was one of the voices for the Spiders. Carl Forgione would later play Nimrod in Ghost Light (1989). Christopher Burgess had previously played Swann in The Enemy of the World (1968). Cyril Shaps who played Professor Clegg had previously appeared in The Tomb of the Cybermen (1967) and The Ambassadors of Death (1970) and would later appear in The Androids of Tara (1977). Kevin Lindsay had previously appeared in The Time Warrior (1973) as the Sontaran, Linx; and would re-appear the following season in The Sontaran Experiment (1975), as the Sontaran warrior Styre and as the Sontaran Marshal. John Dearth had provided the voice of the computer, BOSS, in The Green Death (1973).

Broadcast and reception
The story was edited and condensed into a single omnibus episode broadcast on BBC1 at 2:45 pm on 27 December 1974, reaching 8.6 million viewers. The compilation was included on the DVD release of the complete story.

Paul Cornell, Martin Day, and Keith Topping wrote of the serial in The Discontinuity Guide (1995), "Grotesquely over padded and stuck with bad CSO, Planet of the Spiders is not the celebration of an era that it should have been." However, they felt that the regeneration scene "almost atones for this". In 2010, Patrick Mulkern of Radio Times awarded it four stars out of five. He praised the regeneration and wrote that the story was "fun". He noted that some of the cliffhangers were "unusually feeble", but the first was one of the best. DVD Talk's John Sinnott gave the story three out of five stars, writing that it was "enjoyable" despite "not the great sendoff that Pertwee should have received" with padding and weak special effects. Reviewing the serial for SFX, Ian Berriman rated the serial three and a half out of five stars and described it as "a mix of the fresh and the hokey". While he noted that some of the plot was repetitive and traditional, he praised the inclusion of Buddhism. In 2010, Alasdair Wilkins of io9 called the story a "mash-up of a bunch of different types of Third Doctor stories", but the plot was not enough to stretch out over six episodes and so a lot of unnecessary elements were added. However, Wilkins felt that it was a good thematic end for the Third Doctor, and named it the third best regeneration of the Doctor but the third worst regeneration story. In 2009, SFX listed Sarah Jane with the spider on her back as the tenth scariest Doctor Who moment.

In print
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. The novel's prologue shows Jo Grant and her husband Professor Jones in the Amazon jungle following the events of The Green Death. Harry Sullivan is referred to as Doctor Sweetman.

Home media
The serial was released on VHS in April 1991 as a double pack. It was released on DVD in the UK on 18 April 2011, and in the USA and Canada on 10 May 2011. This serial was also released as part of the Doctor Who DVD Files in Issue 110 on 20 March 2013.