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bamfdaddio · 3 years

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X-Men Abridged: 1979

The X-Men, those globe-trotting mutants that have sworn to protect a world that hates and fears them, are a cultural juggernaut with a long, tangled history. Want to unravel this tapestry? Then read the Abridged X-Men!

(X-Men 117 - 128, X-Man Annual 3) - by Chris Claremont and John Byrne, Terry Austin, George Perez

See Jean? Dark Phoenix is nothing: this is how you turn evil properly. (X-Men 123)

So, these things have been getting longer. Whoops.

Last year, plotlines tended to bleed over in one another, but this year is a lot more arc-based, jumping from location to location. This is basically X-Men: World Tour. After hitting Antarctica and the Savage Land, our team of merry mutants visits Japan, Canada, Egypt, Scotland and even a theme park! (And really, both Murder World and Disney Land are run by capitalist scumbags who pretend to be in it for the art, the only difference being that Arcade purposefully murders his guests.)

But, before we check in with the X-Men, we return to the Institute. See, there’s a mutual misunderstanding that wouldn’t be out of place in a Shakespearian tragedy: Jean and Charles think Beast and Jean were the only survivors of their fight with Magneto in Antarctica, while the rest of the X-Men believe they were the only survivors and Jean and Beast perished. Since the X-Men have been trapped in the Savage Land, nobody has been able to clear up the confusion.

With their grief driving a wedge between her and Charles, Jean leaves the mansion to deal with her feelings on her own. (She’ll end up on Muir Isle.)

This is adorable! And, if the whole "Empress of the known Universe "-thing blows up in her face, she can always become a barista at Starbucks. (X-Men 117)

Lilandra successfully persuades Xavier to leave Earth as her consort, now that there is nothing left for him. Xavier agrees, but not before having a flashback to the time he met another telepath named Amahl Farouk in Egypt. (The Shadow King isn’t relevant just yet, but he’ll become an important villain later on.)

The X-Men, meanwhile, cross a treacherous ocean on a raft and are picked up by a Japanese vessel. The Japanese do not allow them to call anyone, for some reason. Sure. When they finally dock in Japan - six weeks later - some arms dealer named Magnum Moses has put Agarishima is on fire. Like, literally an inferno of such big proportions that even Storm can’t do much.

What follows is an uninspired, slipshod adventure. For some reason, Misty Knight and Colleen Wing are there too, because the president needed American detectives to investigate Magnum Moses (?) and for some reason, Misty doesn’t know Jean thinks Scott is dead, nor does she mention she just saw Jean to Scott. AUGH. It will take almost a year for Scott to figure out Jean isn’t dead and it becomes increasingly more contrived. I get that Claremont needed to isolate Jean to make her susceptible to, er, a certain someone’s machinations, but holy fuck do I have to suspend my disbelief for all of this bullshit.

The only good things about this little arc are:

Sunfire is still a dick.

Wolverine meets Mariko Yashida, a Japanese girl who actually reciprocates his feelings, as opposed to Jean. I’ve mostly been ignoring his budding feelings for Jean, because I stopped finding love triangles interesting since I was 16 and watched The OC, so I can only applaud this development. Mariko brings out Wolverine’s soft side and it’s very adorable. Later on, she moves to NYC for some reason and they start dating.

There is something sweetly disarming about calling Wolverine ��beautiful’. (X-Men 120)

Anyway, Magnum is holding Japan hostage: either they give him what he wants - I think that might be money, sorry, wasn't paying attention - or he sinks Japan by activating the fault lines and you guys, I am sooo bored. Unsurprisingly, the X-Men stop him and for once, it’s Banshee who gets to play the most important part.

It’s a good thing I was terrible at science, otherwise I might have to point out that earthquakes and sonic waves don’t work that way! I simply get to be entertained by little rascal Colossus, plugging his ears like a toddler, and Sunfire’s gritty determination to not be impressed by some silly screaming Irishman. (X-Men 119)

Banshee pays a steep price for the victory, however: his vocal chords end up damaged, leaving him effectively powerless for the remainder of the year.

Oh, and here’s interesting fact about the above spread: you may or may not know that Chris Claremont and John Byrne were notoriously terrible at working together; this issue became a particular sore point between the creators. See, Byrne wanted to run the above panel without the sound of ‘Kra-Koom’, believing the art was strong enough to convey the destruction. He was livid when the finished product ended up containing a sound effect after all. I get your frustration, man, but if you want a writer who knows how to say less with more, you should maybe not work with Claremont?

(One of the reasons Claremont liked being so verbose and descriptive in his scripts was because otherwise, the artist would fill in the blanks using his own imagination. It’s no wonder these two found it hard to work together.)

On the flight to the US of A, Colleen Wing hits on Cyclops. It has to be the jawline, right? It can’t be the personality. All of a sudden, a snow storm causes their plane to be diverted to Calgary. The cause of this delay is Alpha Flight, who want their Wolverine back!

When even the narration is all “and they think they’re equal to any team of superheroes”, you know you’re a bunch of C-listers. Ugh. (X-Men 121)

Vindicator, previously known as Captain Alpha. He changed his name after accidentally shooting Moira that one time, which is exactly the kind of hollow gesture this dude would make. Ugh. If you think his new-found remorse won’t let him threaten an airplane chock full of innocent passengers, you would be wrong.

Shaman, doctor by day, magic user by night. Him and his magical little pouch are to blame for the snow storm.

Sasquatch, Canada’s answer to the Hulk. (Hilariously, the theory on why he turns furry instead of green is because he’s closer to the Aurora Borealis and this somehow messes with the radiation?)

Snowbird, a young Arctic goddess. Precious. To be cherished. Barely there for this adventure, sadly.

Northstar, an arrogant, hot-headed speedster, the twin brother of

Aurora, a lover, not a fighter. Together, they have light powers.

Vindicator and Shaman hog most of the spotlight, so Alpha Flight continues to be the ever-loving worst. They’re really wasting Northstar’s first appearance here. Here's why they suck:

Alpha Flight accidentally smashes a plane and keeps threatening to drag Wolverine back to the military against his will.

They push the cover price of the comic to a whoppin’ 40 cents.

Johnny fuckin’ Hudson even provokes Storm into an attack in the middle of a mall.

Shaman lets his blizzard get out of control.

After Storm fixes this mistake for him, Northstar has the gall to knock her out, “because she’s obviously the strongest”. Like, you’re not wrong, but damn, y’all a bunch of unpleasant superheroes.

To stop the fight, Wolverine decides to turn himself in. The X-Men leave, but while flying back, they already make plans to save their teammate. Wolverine saves them the trouble, casually sauntering into the cockpit while claiming that pulling a fast one on them was the easiest thing ever.

To be fair, I understand why you’d want to put a country between yourself and those bozos.

And finally, the X-Men are home! Xavier left them the equivalent of a Post-It saying “off to space”, so they try to pick up their life as best they can. None of them contact Jean’s parents, make an attempt to visit her grave or happen to see Beast on TV and by now, my suspension of disbelief is stretched so far that it could replace Reed Richards on the Fantastic Four.

Ororo, meanwhile, makes a little pilgrimage to Harlem, to the building she grew up in before she moved to Cairo.

I have failed you as a recapper, because I have absolutely no idea how to parse this scene. (X-Men 122)

I think I’d have to write a full-on thesis before I could properly analyse this, because so many things intersect here: poverty and racism, the boundaries of a superhero comic, confronting a (shared) past. I can’t even fully gauge if this is a clumsy, privileged attempt at tackling a serious topic or rather, a valuable moment in a comic that continually tries to expand on its themes of racism, exclusion and prejudice. One thing I will note is:

Luke Cage delivers the sort of trite conclusion that they’re superheroes: they’re better at fighting Galactus than at fixing the human condition. Point is, he kind of has to believe that, doesn’t he? It’s the sort of blind spot we all permit ourselves: you can’t fix everything. None of us have the power to fix the earth, or humanity, or the economy, or whatever: if you’re lucky, you can maybe tend to your own garden and leave it better than you found it, ensuring some happiness for yourself and a few loved ones.

Chasing bank robbers is easy. Superhero stuff. But here? Who do you attack here? These kids, or the system that failed them? You can’t really punch a needle exchange into being. Maybe that’s the appeal of superhero comics: there’s a clear villain, which is so sorely lacking in our day to day lifes. There, we are ruled by systems that are rooted in inequality, patriarchy, gender...

But Storm isn’t like Luke Cage, not in this regard. Before she became an X-Man, she used her powers to help people that came to her. And the whole point of the X-Men - other than beating up villains in colorful spandex - is that they want to change the system. They want to fix things, they want to fix a dark part of human nature, the part that hates which we fear.

Storm doesn’t really respond to Luke Cage here, but we know she’ll keep fighting the good fight, despite insurmountable odds. You can’t fix mankind, I don’t think, but you can sure as hell try.

*coughs*

Anyway!

Black Tom and Juggernaut hire Arcade… to kill the X-Men! I’m not sure why? I thought these two usually attempted to solve things on their own and Arcade’s fee is, like, a million bucks, so…? Maybe Black Tom asked his boyfriend what he wanted for his birthday and Juggernaut clenched his fists and said “I WANT THE X-MEN DEAD” and things escalated from there.

So, Arcade is a subtle villain. While Scott and Colleen Wing are on a date, this happens:

I can’t decide which is funnier: kidnapping people by sneaking up on them with A GARBAGE TRUCK or the fact that Spider-Man deduces this is Arcade’s doing by the noise alone. (X-Men 123)

Spider-Man doesn’t really figure into the rest of the plot, by the way.

Arcade successfully kidnaps all of the X-Men (and their dates: Colleen, Amanda and Betsy). Who is this Arcade? Well, he is an assassin who lets his victims run through a gauntlet of some sort, testing them with potentially deadly results in his Murderworld. He’s like a discount-combo of Saw and the Joker, except a lot less competent and a lot more spoiled rich kid. He barely kills anyone, ever, until maaaybe Avengers Arena, some forty years later.

Arcade veers heavily to the silly side of the silly-to-sinister scale, but he at least commits to a theme. Bonus is that trapping your heroes in a bunch of ricocheting balls fubars them ever-so beautifully. (X-Men 123)

This whole adventure is very silly and has very little bearing on the overarching plot, but it’s a fun enough romp: Cyclops nearly gets squashed by a hydraulic press, Nightcrawler gets attacked by bumper cars with chain saws attached to them, stuff like that. The absolute best part is when Colossus is hypnotized by an illusion of the KGB and becomes THE PROLETARIAN.

His insignia is Vladimir Lenin, y’all.

After various shenanigans, everybody is freed from their respective booby traps, everyone except Colossus. See, Piotr has been feeling down, torn between the exciting new loyalty to the X-Men and the more dutiful loyalty to his family and his motherland. (Also, he’s been feeling like a failure because he came up short a couple a times, aw.) Those feelings are exactly what Arcade has been abusing, but when Colossus comes in for the kill, Storm gives the most heartfelt plea:

I’m not crying, you’re crying. (X-Men 124)

Arcade’s all: “Eh, can’t win ‘em all” and yeets the X-Men out of Murderworld. The story has barely any other repercussions, except we stop seeing Colleen Wing and Betsy (Piotr’s date) after this. To be fair, being kidnapped by a super villain is a good reason to stop seeing someone.

Even more inconsequential is the adventure in the Annual. The only important thing to glean from there is that, when Thor is unavailable, Storm is a suitable substitution. Couldn’t agree more.

The quality of the comic has been steadily ascending throughout the year and ends on a supremely high note: Proteus. Because I think it might be Claremont’s best work so far, I’ll be dedicating a full post to that. (Man, that 10-picture-limit is a real bummer, huh?)

Ugliest Costume: I don’t care, I just want someone to cosplay the Proletarian.

Best new character: There’s actually a few options - Snowbird, Northstar, Proteus - but both Jean-Paul and Narya don’t really show their best sides this year, so I’m going in a different direction. My pick is the Shadow King. He is a very effective foil to Xavier, perhaps even moreso than Magneto. I know I rag on Xavier and his cavalier attitude to bending others to his will a lot, but imagine if you had his powers: wouldn’t you just make people do whatever you want? Just, like, all the time? The Shadow King is an effective reminder of what Charles would have been like, had he been immoral. (Well, more immoral.)

No matter how cool your psychic battle may be, this is what it looks like to the rest of the world. (X-Men 117)

Turns evil: Colossus, for the first time!

What to read: 117, 125 - 129.

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timeagainreviews · 6 years

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“I call people dude now!”

Hello friends! Over the weekend I had myself a pretty difficult time. I learned a friend of mine is dying and there’s nothing that can be done for it. Because of this, I am not sure how long or thought out this article will be. I might just touch on some key elements from last night’s episode. Either way, I do have half of a Twin Peaks article written, and Edge of Destruction has been viewed, so expect those soon. Also, a friend of mine asked me to submit an article for her zine, and I will be writing that for both this and the zine. You can probably expect that one soon as well!

So far Chris Chibnall has proven to be an interesting showrunner. I’ve not hidden my disdain for his writing at times, but in other ways, I really do enjoy his work. His scripts have the tendency to be like a box of bran cereal with a really cool toy at the bottom. There’s a lot that works, and there’s a lot that doesn’t. One of my biggest issues with "Dinosaurs on a Spaceship," was how dour and depressing it was at times. With a title like that, you’d expect something more lighthearted. When I saw the trailer for last night’s episode, my biggest hope would be that it was more akin to "Gremlins 2." Something kind of camp and silly, which in some ways we did get.

The episode opens in a large hotel in Sheffield. A man named Jack Robertson (a Donald Trump proxy) is discussing the logistics of a vague problem that could "cost [him] in 2020." The woman he’s speaking to, Frankie, is his niece’s wife, though he had to be reminded of this. So far, we don’t like this guy much. His bodyguard waits to whisk him off to his plane, while he tells Frankie to make their problem disappear, though she’s not so sure it’s that easy. Before they can discuss this any further, they are interrupted by a woman named Najia Khan, the general manager of the hotel. She’s there to check up on things before the grand opening. Very callously Robertson fires her (further solidifying his Donald Trump status, and his role as the hotel owner) seemingly for interrupting his nefarious meeting. He gives Frankie and hour to "make this all go away."

Before saying anything else, I would like to talk about that time vortex sequence! How cool was that? The last time we saw the time vortex in such intimate detail was "Timelash," which if you ask the fandom, was pretty bad. (Though I sorta love it for that.) Elements of it reminded me of the hyperspace scenes from "Babylon 5," and other elements reminded me of "Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure," how you could take certain avenues to sort of dial a point in time. The way the sequence segues into the console room was a beautiful bit of production value series eleven has needed. (Even those god-awful closeups were missing!)

Watching the Doctor and her companions all fly the TARDIS, was kind of great. I was reminded of the scene in "Journey’s End," when the Doctor and his friends pilot the TARDIS together. I loved the idea of her still getting used to the controls. If you’ve not watched the video on YouTube of the production crew talking about the TARDIS interior, you really should. It’s a lovely glimpse into the design process. Not to be outshone, the exterior of the TARDIS, in its brilliant aqua blue, lands in Sheffield. This may be one of the Doctor’s best landings ever. She’s in Sheffield, it’s the right period, they’re right outside Yaz’s, and it’s only been thirty minutes since they were teleported away from the warehouse into the depths of space.

The Doctor made good on her promise- she brought her friends home. Looking like a kicked puppy, it’s more than obvious she doesn’t want to say goodbye. Yaz, picking up on this, invites her and the others up for tea. It’s a rather sweet scene. Graham, who’s not yet had any downtime to mourn since the funeral, decides to nip back home for a moment. Ryan offers to join, but Graham needs to do it alone. It’s a nice bit of character development between them. I rather loved it.

While heading into Yaz’s flat, the Doctor notices a worried woman trying to reach the occupant of a flat a couple doors down. She also notices a bit of spiderweb but doesn’t pay it much mind. Yaz lives with her family still, and we’re introduced to her dad and sister. I’ve been saying how I wanted a bit more Yaz, and this episode really delivers. Her dad is pretty much instantly likeable. He’s excitable, friendly, and has a personal project of keeping rubbish in the living room, or "evidence," as he calls it. It’s a conspiracy! Yaz’s sister is the typical bratty little sister. The banter they share was also charming. She teases Yaz that she’s surprised she even has friends. Yaz is usually too married to her job to worry about friends. Yaz counters with “At least I have a job to be married to.” I like sassy Yaz.

The Doctor is being her usual self- a bit weird. Marvelling at a couch is not exactly normal. Historically, she’s always been rather enamoured with the mundane elements of human life. Things like having a flat, going to work, watching a bit of telly, are all parts of a life she can never have. Yaz’s sister, Sonya, probes Ryan about his relationship to Yaz. She clearly has the hots for him. Yaz’s father, Hakim, wants to know if the police have followed up on the rubbish he’s collected. Before she can answer, Yaz’s phone rings revealing Najia to be her mother on the other end. She tells her she needs a ride home from work. (If you recall from my "The Woman Who Fell to Earth," review, I wondered if she didn’t have a mother, well she does!)

The sisters’ bickering as Yaz leaves, reminds the Doctor of her sisters. It also reminds her of the time she was a sister at an aqua-hospital, that actually turned out to be a training camp for the "Quiston Calcium Assassins." Ryan responds with "Going off on one again…" Which is what she’s doing right? Going off on a little tangent. Then why is it that the line really irked me? The Doctor is known for always telling stupid little stories, but this one really got to me. It’s right up there with suddenly having Audrey Hepburn or maybe Pythagoras’ sunglasses in her pockets. It’s a question of when. When would she have been a sister with some order of nuns?

The Doctor has always been male leading up to this point. So when would she be a woman in a past life to do this? When in this life would she have done this and not had Ryan around to have witnessed it first hand? If it’s just Chibnall trying to be cute, he’s really bad at it. It leaves you asking the wrong kind of questions, and for me, actually took me out of the story for a moment. Another implication is some "The Brain of Morbius" level fuckery indicating that the First Doctor, is not in fact, the first incarnation, which you could make an argument for. The War Doctor didn’t go as "the Doctor," which makes him "The War Doctor," and not "The Ninth Doctor." Another implication is that one of the past incarnations had a bit of a drag phase, which I could actually see. Both Two and Three have dressed in drag before. Either way, it’s a bad line and Chibnall should feel bad. (Ok rant over)

The Doctor notices that the Khans have a parcel to pick up from the neighbour down the way. She offers to go pick it up while Yaz’s dad cooks his terrible pakora. We’re now back with Graham at his home. We see more of that portentous spiderweb. The house is empty and feels lifeless. It’s the first time he’s been back home since Grace died and is haunted by her essence, as depicted by having Sharon D Clarke actually there as Grace. She talks to him about all of the little things around the house he’ll need to remember to keep the house in working order. He indicates that he has something else to tell her, but it’s left unsaid. He sits and smells her clothes, trying to remember her. Anyone who has ever lost a loved one can immediately identify with this. I found these moments with Graham and Grace very effective. He’s interrupted by a sound up in Ryan’s room, where he finds massive strands of spider web, and the moulted exoskeleton of a spider the size of a house cat.

Graham isn’t the only one dealing with large spiders though. The Doctor and Ryan are about to discover these overgrown arachnids themselves. The parcel they’re picking up is at the same flat where the woman, we now know as Jade, was trying to reach her friend Anna. They both work in the same lab at their uni. After confirming Anna may be in trouble, the Doctor sonics the door open. Inside, the flat is covered in the same webbing as Ryan’s room. I’m reminded of "Mulholland Drive," where Naomi Watts and Elena Harring search the apartment of Diane Selwyn. Rather horrified, they discover the body of poor Anna, cocooned in spiderweb. "Spiders don’t do that, do they?" asks Ryan, but the Doctor asks a more important question- where is the spider that did this now?

Many people are squeamish about spiders. My mate Gerry’s wife sat this episode out, due to an intense dislike of the little creatures. Which is why I found myself rather amused when they finally show the spider, and it’s actually a bit cute. It’s a brown house spider, once again, about the size of a cat, but it is rather aggressive toward the Doctor, Ryan and Jade. Using some quick thinking, the Doctor uses vinegar and garlic paste to keep the spider quarantined, as the noses in spiders’ feet are sensitive to these substances. She creates a sort of perimeter around the spider which seems to work. Now outside the flat, they meet up with Graham who has also seen some freaky stuff today! Graham gives Ryan a sealed letter that he found back home. It’s from his father, who if you remember correctly, didn’t attend Grace’s funeral. The Doctor asks Jade to take her back to the lab where she’s been testing on spiders. Hakim and Sonya are having pakora alone tonight it would seem.

The Doctor tells Jade she thinks she knows more than she leads on. She questions Jade about their experiments, but Jade defends their practices. They’ve been doing everything within the law. The spider carcasses are disposed of by a special containment unit. She doesn’t know why the spiders are mutating. Jade has been plotting out instances of giant spiders on a map in the lab. In what may be one of the most overused tropes in cinema history, the Doctor connects the dots with a series of lines all pointing to one centre point. It’s a bit stupid when you realise she could have just pointed at the centre point of the dots to the exact same effect, but that wouldn’t look as cool right? The centre point is, of course, the hotel Najia just got fired from, where she’s still waiting for Yaz.

Frankie walks through a pair of doors marked with danger warnings, into an underground tunnel that looks like rock that’s been excavated by human hands. It’s full of spider web. Timid and afraid, Frankie moves forward with her camera phone but is taken suddenly to her doom by an offscreen spider. Back in the lobby, Jack Robertson and Kevin confront Najia and Yaz who has just arrived. I was slightly frustrated by the fact that Kevin pulls a gun on Yaz and she doesn’t mention once that she’s a police officer. Not once does she cite any kind of statute or even try and calm the situation as a police officer. They explain that Yaz was there to pick her up, but feeling antagonistic, Robertson wants to show Yaz how bad her mother is at her job, and why he fired her. He takes them to a room full of spider web.

While in the room, Yaz thinks she hears something through the walls but is called away by the Doctor who is now outside the hotel with Jade, Ryan, and Graham. Still in the room, Kevin and Robertson are confronted by a very large spider, about the size of a car. Robertson very cowardly leaves Kevin as bait as he’s dragged into the depths underneath the hotel to his death. Poor Kevin.

The Doctor, using psychic paper (a nice callback I was hoping to see) tells Robertson she’s there on official business and goes about looking for the source of the spiders. Ryan and Graham know exactly who he is, as he’s a bit famous. Their standing there grinning like idiots at Robertson was cute. I loved the bravery the Doctor shows when sticking her head into the giant spider-sized hole to get a peek, and what a peek she gets! She pulls her head back just in time as the giant spider lunges at her and they all sprint toward the exit of the hotel, which has now been completely webbed up, which it hadn’t been before. The spiders are trapping them in!

The Doctor refers to Yaz’s mum since she knows the hotel so intimately. They go hide out in the kitchen where everyone begins asking questions. The Doctor doesn’t seem to know who Robertson is, much to his annoyance. She rather humorously asks if he’s the Ed Sheeran she’s been hearing so much about. Robertson, it turns out, is gunning for the presidency in 2020, mostly out of disdain for Trump. So he can’t be all bad, right? Robertson butts against the Doctor’s authority, but the companions in a sign of solidarity let him know with no uncertainty that she’s in charge. The Doctor sends Ryan and Graham to capture a spider for Jade to inspect and takes everyone else to find a map of the hotel.

Graham and Ryan find a spider and catch it in a cooking pot, only to get chased down the hall by an agitated army of arachnids. It’s about the closest the spiders get to being actually scary in the entire episode. If you don’t suffer from arachnophobia, it’s really rather tame. The true villain, as it turns out, is capitalism. It’s revealed that Robertson built the hotel on top of an old mine that was used as a landfill. It’s a profitable endeavour from his perspective. Get paid to cart off a bunch of rubbish, find use for a disused mine, and build a lavish resort on top of it! This explains the rubbish Mr Khan had been finding sprouting up all around Sheffield. While looking over maps, Najia wants to know how Yaz knows the Doctor and even asks if they’re in a relationship. The Doctor naively asks Yaz if they are, as she’s been ignorant to this sort of thing in the past. (Be still my heart.) They find the entrance to the mine on the map and set off.

As they barge past the danger doors, Robertson protests, trying to use his powerful status to keep everyone from discovering his dirty secret. He tries to stop Najia, and in what may be the best line of the episode she defiantly looks him in the eye and says "You’re not the boss of me anymore." Oof. Good one, girl. Now inside, they find the bodies of Frankie, Kevin, and several others, all of whom met the same fate as poor Anna. Even the callous Robertson can’t hide the tinge of guilt on his face, though it doesn’t stop him from pocketing Kevin’s web caked gun. Anna, who had spider pheromones on her from the lab, attracted spiders to her home from this location. (Why neither Jade nor the lab had been affected, or why they were attracted to the O'Brien homestead is anyone’s guess.) In a very "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles," moment, it’s revealed that the toxic waste of gases building up, and the improperly disposed spider carcasses created a sort of mutagenic stew to breed giant mutant spiders. It’s all a rather stupid explanation, but I kind of love it for that. It was Laird and Eastman’s Doctor Who. I’m all for it.

Back in the kitchen, Jade tells Ryan and Graham she needs a bigger specimen, which basically is only written in as an excuse to give the two of them something to do. It’s a bit sloppy and doesn’t go anywhere. It does, however, give us a nice opportunity to have a bit of a heart to heart between Graham and Ryan. Ryan tells Graham that he read the letter from his father. He mentions he doesn’t like that his father referred to himself as the only proper family Ryan had left, indicating that he still thinks of Graham as family. Does this mean we might hear him call Graham "Granddad," soon? Their heart to heart is cut short, however, when they are confronted in the ballroom by a giant spider.

Once again, the spiders aren’t very scary, as the two of them escape rather quickly and they’re back in the kitchen. Why the kitchen has been established as the safest place in the hotel, is still unknown, but Yaz’s mum said! Robertson reveals he has a panic room installed in the hotel. He has one in every hotel, as he’s a bit of a paranoid guy. When he had it installed in case the poor ever decided to rise up and eat the rich, I’ll bet he didn’t foresee them being spiders! The panic room has an ocular scanner, a small green laser that really should have blinded him if I’m being honest, but hey, it looks cool! In the panic room, Robertson has enough food and drink to survive for six months. He also had a rather swank entertainment system with a flat screen and giant speakers. Using Ryan’s phone, the Doctor devises a plan! (Always with Ryan’s phone, that one.)

The next sequence is something akin to the campiness I was hoping we would get from this episode- hip hop spiders! Drawn to the sick beats from Ryan’s phone, and Robertson’s sound system, the spiders all gather inside the panic room where the Doctor and her friends trap them inside. Robertson, however, has become increasingly paranoid in the face of being the least powerful man in the room and has decided to take refuge in the safety of his gun.

The Doctor puts together a very "Ghostbusters," style backpack garden sprayer filled with peppermint and tea tree oil diluted in water. She plans on using this natural spider repellant as a way to wrangle the big spider that chased Graham and Ryan in the ballroom. After all, there’s the Sheffield Comic Con there in a week, they need it empty! However, the spider is behaving strangely. Under the weight of its own mass, the poor beast is struggling to breathe. The Doctor takes pity on it, and apologises to it, as she knows it’s going to die. Then the real monster enters the room in the form of Robertson wielding a gun. He fires a single shot into the spider, killing it, and angering the Doctor.

Now back at their homes, the companions all seem to be slightly removed from their roots. Before walking out of her flat, Yaz is told by Najia she still wants to know how she came to know the Doctor. There’s a sort of Jackie Tyler "I want to know who my daughter is out galavanting with," element to her questioning that I liked. They all convene back at the TARDIS, still parked outside Yaz’s. The Doctor invites them in, expecting to have to say goodbye. Instead, they decide they would rather travel with her. Graham says he’d rather grieve with her, than in an empty house. Ryan has no desire to resume working in a warehouse, and Yaz wants to see the universe. I rather like the responsibility the Doctor has been taking with her companions’ safety, as she tells them in no certain terms, that travelling with her will be dangerous. They all accept, and the Doctor christens their new "fam," as "the TARDIS team." Then, all together, they pull the lever and the TARDIS takes them on their next adventure!

And that’s it, really. Which I must say, was a bit disappointing. Not the entire episode, but the ending. It sort of fizzled out. While I was actually rather pleased to see the spiders weren’t treated as big evil monsters, it would have been nice to actually have some sort of final showdown. Maybe Ryan gets webbed up and they had to save him before it was too late. Something. Sadly, most of the danger was short-lived, or off camera. Also, what actually happened with the spiders? Will they spend the rest of their lives listening to garage beats? How many of them were still out in the wild? Did the waste get cleaned up? Will there be a public outcry? Are there more people dead in their homes, wrapped in a gauze of spider web? What’s the difference between killing spiders outright, and starving them in a panic room? Lots of unanswered questions.

I liked that they gave us more interior shots of the TARDIS. I liked that the console room still has Gallifreyan written somewhere. With as much change as the show has gone through, it’s nice to see that continuity. Speaking of change, Jodie Whittaker continues to sparkle as the Doctor. But I did have some issues with her role in this episode. Aside from wrangling spiders, and figuring out what was happening, the Doctor doesn’t actually do much in the episode. I mean, did she do anything to ensure this won’t continue to happen?

While I rather liked Jack Robertson’s campy turn as the villain, even his story seemed to fizzle out. Considering the Doctor had once taken down the prime minister with six words, I expected her to give Robertson a warning or something. But alas, he, like every villain this season, lives to fight another day. Doctor Who writer Paul Magrs said on twitter recently that Missy would have made them into mincemeat by now, and I’m inclined to agree. The Doctor and her crew have yet to really face a truly terrifying foe. The stakes have been disappointingly low. I’m beginning to expect we’ll see a sort of legion of men scorned by the Doctor come together at the end of this series. Perhaps they’ll form a society of the Doctor’s evil exes. Is this all turning out to be one big metaphor for misogyny? Maybe. Regardless, I must say I rather enjoyed this one.

#doctor who #arachnids in the uk #thirteenth doctor #jodie whittaker #chris chibnall #graham o'brien #ryan sinclair #yasmine khan #yaz #time and time again #bbc #tardis

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