6 episodes
Aired between 4th May 1974 and 8th June 1974
Written by Robert Sloman
Produced by Barry Letts
Directed by Barry Letts
Synopsis
Mike Yates, ex UNIT officer has taken himself off to a an idyllic country manor, where Buddhists have founded a meditation centre. His goal is to sort his head out after all the brainwashing he's been through (see The Green Death and Invasion of the Dinosaurs).
Whist at the retreat, he comes across a small group of people, also staying at the retreat, who have turned their Buddhist practices to the occult. They meet secretly in the basement and use a mandala and a strange meditation ritual to try and summon something into being. Yates watches them one night and is forced to flee before they catch him. The group, led by a man called Lupton, deduce that the only one with a car there that night was Yates.
Elsewhere, the Doctor and the Brigadier are on a night out.
They go to see Professor Herbert Clegg, a gentleman who runs a clairvoyance stage show. The Doctor is interested in him, as he is currently doing research into psychic energy, and as such he invites Clegg to visit UNIT HQ.
Clegg accepts the invitation, believing that the Doctor is just another customer wanting a psychic reading.
He passes everything off as a trick, simple illusions; a story that the Brigadier is more than happy to accept, but the Doctor knows better. He watched the show, and could tell that Clegg's reactions were far faster than they should have been. He accuses Clegg of being authentically clairvoyant. Clegg admits it and the Doctor convinces him to undertake some tests to help his research.
Back at the country manor, Yates has called in Sarah Jane. He wants her as an investigative journalist to look into it and hopefully tell UNIT as no one there would believe him.
As he fills her in on the ride down, they almost hit a tractor and are forced to swerve off the road, It turns out to be an illusion, and is clearly a message sent to Mike to stop prying.
The Doctor hooks Clegg up to a machine that can read his thought patterns and begins the tests, just as Sgt. Benton arrives with a package addressed to all the main UNIT staff. The Doctor playfully asks Clegg to tell them what's inside the envelope. He concentrates and tells them it's a blue crystal.
The Doctor smiles and opens the package to show that it is indeed a blue crystal. It contains a note from Jo Grant, sent all the way from the Amazon (not BY Amazon you understand). It says that her and Cliff are fine, but the natives don't like the look of the crystal and if they want to make any progress in finding their rare mushroom, they need to get rid of it, so she's sent it back.
Little do they realise that whilst they are reading the note, Clegg is staring into the flashing crystal. The ground begins to shake and Clegg has terrifying visions before he dies of a heart attack. The Doctor uses the machine to find out his thoughts prior to death, revealing a vision of a spider.
Meanwhile, Mike and Liz get to the manor. After a bit of snooping, they meet Lupton who alludes to the fact that he summoned the illusion of the tractor and gives him a friendly warning. They pretend to be frightened and leave the manor in the car, but then ditch it outside the grounds and sneak back to find the group are in the cellar. Mike and Liz are spotted by an autistic handyman called Tommy.
Sarah gives Tommy a trinket to keep him quiet as he loves pretty objects, and once alone again, Mike and Sarah sneak down into the basement. They watch the ritual commence and are horrified to see a giant spider appear on the mandala before their very eyes.
The men are just as surprised to see the spider as Sarah and Mike. They try to flee, but one is shot by blue lightning that the spider emits.
Lupton commands the spider to leave but it talks and it tells him he will have great power if he helps it retrieve the blue Metabilis crystal. It jumps on his back and disappears, much to everyone's surprise.
The men leave, with Lupton warning them that they tell no one of this.
Back at UNIT HQ, Clegg is taken away to the coroners and the Doctor decides that the only thing for it is to look into the crystal himself.
Mike and Sarah leave the cellar. Sarah goes back to tell UNIT but Mike decides to stay and try to warn the Abbot of the retreat. He hears Lupton and one of his cronies coming down the corridor so makes himself scarce.
Lupton explains that the spider's mind and his are now psychically joined together. It tells Lupton of the crystal and together they seek it with their minds.
The Doctor looks into the crystal and spaces out for a bit, but cannot get anything accurate out of the thing.
Mike goes to see the Abbot but Tommy tells him it's late and stops him. Mike is forced to give him another trinket to send him away, but the delay allows Lupton to find him. Lupton gives Mike another friendly warning and he's forced to go back to his room to keep his alibi.
The next morning, Sarah visits the Doctor. She tells him everything she's seen and explains about the spider which correlates to the image from the blue crystal. Little do they know that Lupton and the spider have tracked the crystal's aura to UNIT HQ. Lupton shoots blue lightning out of his hands and disables any guards that get in his way.
He then uses his new found psychic power to teleport the crystal to his hand from outside the door.
The Doctor, Sarah Jane, the Brigadier and Sgt. Benton give chase in Bessie as he escapes in the Whomobile. They run around the countryside until they arrive at an airstrip. The Doctor gets in a small helicopter and spots him from the air,
After a lengthy chase, that draws the attention of the Police, Lupton realises that it's no good so he abandons the Whomobile and hides. As the group look for him, he sneaks into the helicopter and flies off.
The Brigadier thinks all is lost, but the Doctor and Sarah rush to the Whomobile and fly off after him!
The chase continues in the air until Lupton runs out of fuel and is forced to land, where he then steals a speed boat and races off. The Doctor leaves Sarah by the shore and jumps in a hovercraft and continues the chase.
After even more cat and mouse antics, the spider tells Lupton to concentrate. He and the spider disappear just as the Doctor jumps on the boat to stop him.
Lupton re-appears in the meditation centre and goes back to his room, unaware that he's seen by Tommy. He makes plans with the Spider to take over Metabilis III and gain untold power from the crystal, but he doesn't count on Tommy stealing it through the open window to add to his "pretty" collection.
The Doctor and Sarah Jane decide to head to the meditation centre as it's the logical place for him to be. They begin searching for Lupton.
Lupton is obviously angry that the crystal has been stolen, but he and the spider have no choice but to abandon it as they are summoned to Metabilis III by the Queen Spider. Together, they make a pact to bluff their way through.
Sarah Jane finds Lupton just as he goes through the time vortex from the mandala in the basement. She steps on the thing too and is transported shortly after, The Doctor is forced to race back to UNIT and use the TARDIS' hardwired coordinates to go and get her back.
On Metabilis III, Sarah finds herself in a human village, where the primitive folk are subjugated by the spiders (or 8-legs as they call them). The spiders periodically visit the village and take people away for food. Sarah tries to stick up for the village elder as one of the spiders arrives and is arrested herself.
The Doctor shows up in the TARDIS just as she's about to go and gets himself into a fight with the spider's human servants when he tries to bargain.
He gets shot by the human guard's use of blue lightning and falls unconscious at the foot of the TARDIS. In all the confusion, the elder's wife gives Sarah Jane a red scarf to hide herself in the crowd. The 8-legs and her servants leave, taking the elder with them and enforcing a curfew on the village.
Back at the meditation centre, Mike Yates sees Lupton's cult gathering in a room together. He sneaks closer to overhear them. They're worried about Lupton and are panicking. They are paranoid when Tommy turns up to clean the room and they shove him outside, warning him to keep away from them.
On Metabilis III, the elders sons take the unconscious Doctor into their home along with Sarah. They're convinced the Doctor is dead until he moves slightly. Even though he's not dead, he's certainly dying.
The 8-leg Queen goes back to her citadel and finds Lupton among her council.
She challenges him but it turns out his spider is prepared to stand with him. They claim they have the crystal and will not give it up to the great one (all hail the great one), some kind of spider-goddess, until they've been suitably rewarded with power. The Queen counters their demand by telling her council about the Doctor and Sarah's presence on the planet. She suggests that Lupton's requests be denied until they are dealt with.
Back on Earth, Tommy ends up looking into the crystal and getting his intelligence significantly increased. He's amazed to find that he can read and think intelligent thoughts.
Elsewhere, the Doctor whispers to Sarah to get a special machine from the TARDIS. Sarah risks death by going out during the curfew, but manages to get it. As she turns to head back, she comes face to face with Lupton who captures her and takes her off to the Citadel. she leaves the machine by the foot of the TARDIS.
Back on earth, Yates decides to approach Lupton's cronies directly. He tries to reason with them but they're so paranoid that one knocks him out cold.
Sarah is placed in a web cocoon alongside the village elder, whose name is Sabor. He's quite content to accept his fate and recommends they just wait for death.
The Doctor recovers and over breakfast, he learns from Sabor's sons that the humans are descendants of colonists that crashed on the planet. The spiders were normal sized ones that came on that ship too, but thanks to the special crystals around, they evolved into the size they are now and got intelligent.
The sons ask for the Doctor's help and he agrees, but first, he asks for lots of different types of rocks and begins testing them with his machine to find out which ones have special powers in them. He finds some and can use them to counter the blue lighting. He sets off out to rescue Sabor and Sarah.
He gets to the citadel and strolls in, countering the guards lighting on his way.
He gets into a brawl and Lupton disarms him, demanding that the guards kill him. The guards refuse to obey Lupton and capture him instead, taking him to the cocoon area where Sarah is glad to see him only to become dismayed when the guards follow. They web him up in a cocoon and leave him there.
Back in the Council of the eight legs, the Queen discovers that Lupton and his spider conspirator have lied, they don't have the crystal.
Lupton thinks fast and tells them that it's still on Earth, yes, but it's hidden where only he knows. The rest of the Council see it as the Queens failing and speak of a new coronation if there's no invasion of Earth. The Queen says she will visit the Great One (all praise the Great One) and get approval for the invasion.
The Doctor and Sarah swap puns as they're held captive. Sarah questions why the spiders didn't just take the crystal from Metabilis before the Doctor did. The Doctor says they weren't around then though.
The guards come back and take Sarah Jane away.
Back in the village, Sabor's sons get the protective stones as headbands and gather a militia to assault the citadel.
As time passes, Sabor carries on doing his Monty Python impression (you know, "you lucky, lucky, lucky...") The Doctor tells him to shut up because he's spoiling the Doctor's concentration in trying to loosen the webs. Thanks to tricks learnt by Harry Houdini, he manages to get out of the webs.
Meanwhile, Sarah Jane is taken to the Queen who offers Sarah a bargain.
The Queen doesn't want to invade the Earth, and explains that she lied to the council. She asks Sarah to help her get the crystal back and gives a promise to let the Doctor and Sarah Live, as well as listening to the villagers and generally being more kind to them. Sarah relents and the spider Queen possesses her.
Back on earth, Lupton's cronies talk to Mike Yates. Mike convinces them that the only way to help Lupton is to try and re-establish contact via the mandala, the hope being that Sarah Jane comes back as well.
In the council, Lupton talks to his spider and says they should go back and get the crystal ASAP and use the bridge between worlds to kickstart the invasion. The spiders turn on Lupton for his presumptuousness but allow him to live.
The Doctor is running through the corridors trying to find Sarah. He hears her calling him but when he gets there, he comes face to face so to speak with the Great One (all praise to the Great One).
On Earth, Tommy is reading everything he can, his mind full of questions. He eventually goes to find Mike Yates, believing he can tell him what's happened to his brain. He sees Yates and Lupton's cronies talk about the cellar. He makes the connection that something's happening with Lupton and the cellar. He decides to go to Cho Je, the centre's guru.
The Doctor tries to make sense of the strange feminine voice coming from the ether. It is the Great One (all praise to the Great One). She demands that the Doctor returns the last perfect crystal of Metabilis to her so she can complete her Crystal web and span her consciousness throughout the cosmos. The Doctor refuses to help her, but she can effortlessly control his mind. She makes a big show of forcing him to stomp around in a circle against his will and jeers at him for feeling afraid, a sensation he's not particularly used to. The spider god demands again that the Doctor brings him the crystal and in fear, he flees the area.
Yates and Lupton's cronies begin chanting and the council of spiders pick up on the energies. They work to open another gateway through the mandala and send some spiders through it.
Tommy tells Cho-Je about everything that he knows and the guru calmly asks him to go and get the crystal whilst he goes into the cellar and warns them to stop. The spiders appear and zap Cho-Je with blue lightning, Yates too when he tries to stop them. Tommy hears it all and runs off to find the abbot of the meditation centre: K'anpo.
Back on Metabilis, the villagers assault the citadel just as the Doctor finds Sarah Jane. She convinces the Doctor to hold her hands and together they teleport back to the TARDIS. The Doctor is a bit bemused but Sarah waves it away by saying that the Queen spider taught her how. They rush into the TARDIS and go back to the meditation centre.
At said meditation centre, the spiders jump on all the cronies backs and disappear.
They confront the Doctor as he arrives in the TARDIS but he counters their lightning with one of the stones he gathered.
Tommy runs in and helps them escape, locking the cronies in the cellar. Sarah looks astonished at Tommy, saying "you're normal, you're just like everybody else" to which Tommy says "I sincerely hope not."
Tommy takes Sarah and the Doctor to K'anpo Rimpoche and waits outside. The old abbot seems to know the Doctor and listens with a glint in his eye as the Doctor recounts what's happened.
The cronies get out of the cellar and try to assault Tommy with fists as well as lighting. Neither works though and he stands fast, refusing to let them by.
In the other room, K'anpo suggests to the Doctor that giving them the crystal might be a good idea. The Doctor refuses and says he doesn't know where it is anyway, but K'anpo reveals it in his hand. Tommy gave it to him. Sarah suddenly acts rather strange and begins talking with the Queen spider's voice. She shoots the Doctor with lighting and advances on K'anpo.
The Doctor is still conscious though and he and K'anpo talk Sarah round into repelling the Queens possession.
The Doctor seals the deal by getting her to look into the crystal. The Queen falls off Sarah's back and disappears.
Outside the cronies lighting still cannot affect Tommy. The spiders try to focus their energy.
After more discussion, the Doctor figures out that K'anpo Rimpoche is the very same hermit that the Doctor spent time with on Gallifrey (see The Time Monster). K'anpo explains that he regenerated and went to Tibet and decided to stay there.
He explains that Cho-Je is a figment of his personality and not truly alive in the strictest sense. K'anpo tells the Doctor that he must face his greatest fear, meaning that he's to take the crystal back to the Great One (all praise to the Great One).
The cronies storm the room and shoot K'anpo but are too late to stop the Doctor from teleporting to the cellar (with the help of K'anpo's mysticism). He rushes into the TARDIS and goes back to Metabilis III.
When he arrives, he meets Sabor's sons who tell him the attack was successful. As they lead him into the citadel however, it becomes obvious that the attack actually failed and they're all possessed by spiders.
The council of spiders gloat at the Doctor but Lupton tries to snatch the crystal from him. The spiders stop him as they know that on Metabilis III, the Great One will see them coveting the crystal (all praise to the Great One). They let the Doctor pass and take the crystal to their goddess, much to Lupton's dismay. The resentful man rants at the spider's and get's shocked to death for it.
Back on earth, Sarah and Tommy care for K'anpo as he lies dying. He tells them not to be concerned and they watch as he regenerates into the younger Cho-Je.
The Doctor takes the crystal back to the Great One (all praise to the Great One) and advises that if she puts the final crystal in the web, it will cause a feedback circuit that will destroy her.
The spider goddess mocks him and says it's too late for him either way, as the sheer amount of crystals in the cave are already destroying the cells in the Doctor's body one by one, so it doesn't matter for him - he's a dead man anyway. She levitates the crystal from his hand and places it in the web, laughing and waxing maniacally.
The Doctor watches as her brain gets overloaded and begins to throb with energy.
The rest of the spiders begin having fits (including the ones on Lupton's cronies). The citadel and the mountain on Metabilis III self-destruct and the spiders on earth die. The crisis is over, but the Doctor has gone.
Three weeks later....
Sarah Jane pops into UNIT HQ looking morose and wandering around the Doctor's lab, lamenting his loss to the Brigadier. She's convinced that he knew going back to Metabilis III would be the death of him, and she says they won't see him again.
As she finishes her words, the TARDIS materialises in the lab and the Doctor emerges, looking deathly pale. He says he got lost in the time vortex and collapses on the floor. Sarah holds his hand and tearfully begs him not to die.
He says "A tear, Sarah Jane? No, don't cry, while there's life, there's ....." with that he goes silent and closes his eyes.
Suddenly, a mystical music and energy field appears, heralding the arrival of a levitating K'anpo Rimpoche.
The Brigadier watches baffled as K'anpo reassures Sarah that the Doctor's alive. He says that he will give the Doctor's cells a little push with some of his energy and the Doctor's cells will regenerate. He will look different and his brain cells might be a bit frazzled for a while, but he will effectively be the same man. Sarah asks when it will happen and K'anpo says there's no time like the present. He gestures towards the Doctor and fades away, parting with the words "look after him".
Sarah gasps and says that it looks like the regeneration's started and the Brigadier exhales, uttering the words "well, here we go again."
Slowly, the Doctor's face transforms into a man with dark curly hair and a big nose.
Trivia
- Given that Barry Letts and Terrence Dicks were about to leave, it's no surprise that Letts kept this last story for himself. He co-wrote the piece officially with Robert Sloman, but a significant part of it had Lett's influence, chiefly everything about Buddhism as Letts was big into Buddhist practices himself.
- Jon Pertwee's back troubles continued, which is why you see him far less in the fight scenes than in previous stories.
- The guy who played Tommy went to the first rehearsals for this story by taxi. He decided to try his Tommy voice out on the driver and managed to convince the driver that he was a bit simple. When the Driver asked him why he wanted to go to television centre, he was caught in a situation where he didn't want to have to explain that he was putting it on, so he said he was there to see Doctor Who. This gave the taxi driver the unfortunate job of trying to convince him that Doctor Who wasn't actually real! They even had to get the security guard to reassure him that this was just a TV studio. He was in a very bad position and ended up convincing the driver to go, and then explaining to the security guard in his normal voice what had happened!
- The guy who played Tommy later went on to create the British sitcom Terry and June.
- Roger Delgado's widow was having a tough time getting any inheritance from the insurance company as they were being unscrupulous and finding loopholes. To help her out, Barry Letts gave her some voice over work as the voice of the Great One (all praise to the Great One).
- Liz Sladen was absolutely terrified of spiders. This as you can imagine, would be a problem when she had to have a giant one hanging off her back. In an act of kindness, Jon Pertwee worked with her for a couple of weeks, beginning with a tiny spider prop and urging her to touch them, building them up in size each day until she could do the scene. No wonder the bit where she says "I'm frightened" seems pretty convincing!
- You might be surprised to know that this is the first story to use the word regeneration when talking about the Doctor changing forms. From this point on, it would become a staple, and would also be an indicator that each subsequent regeneration had to have the Doctor fatally injured in some way.
- So this is the end of an era. For this last story, Jon was a bit subdued, keeping more to himself in rehearsals, answering fan mail and learning his lines. He was undoubtebly sad to go, but according to him, he went to head of serials, Shaun Sutton and offered to stay if they paid him more. He says Sutton refused. Barry Letts however contests this story, saying it had nothing to do with Shaun as he made the final decisions around what the money was spent on. Jon went on to have a fruitful career, especially in children's TV where he played the loveable scarecrow, Wurzel Gummidge, and Spotty in Superted, but nothing quite overshadowed his time in Doctor Who. He was a well known face on the convention circuit and in the dark years between series', he worked with Mark Gatiss and the guys who would establish Big Finish to do some B-Movie straight to video spin offs.
What worked
- The spider designs were quite good, especially Boris, the running spider
- The feel of the occult was pretty good and creepy
- Loved the Brigadier's one liners and flummoxed disbelief
- The hovercraft chase was refreshingly different
- I like it how they tied up all the loose ends such as the crystal and a satisfactory redemption for Mike Yates
- Sarah combating the Queen spider's mind control
What didn't work
- Every single thing about the village and villagers on Metabilis III
- The script's idea of the Doctor being scared
- Lupton's cronies attacking Tommy
Overall Feelings
So it's come down to this. The end of Pertwee's run and given the often action oriented stories he's been involved in, we can expect something really explosive to send him out on....well, we can expect it. What we get is re-heated left overs. This story is the bubble and squeak of the Doctor Who universe. Helicopters - check, chases in vehicles just left there with the keys in them - check, the Doctor doing kung-fu - check. This is a paint by numbers story, but it's not necessarily what Barry Letts wanted it to be.
The story was supposed to have deeper meanings to it, a moralistic tale that made us all think. Some of those things resonate through, fair enough. but for every nugget of spiritualism injected into the story, there's a huge blob of bad CSO, crappy acting, or pointless time wasting scenes. Even the spiritual bits don't seem to fit for me. I'm sure lots like them, but it feels out of kilter, like Barry Letts shoehorned them in because he wanted to, not because they could legitimately add anything to the story - to me, K'anpo's presence, levitation and pedantic wisdom is as out of place and wrong as Midichlorians are in the Star Wards Universe.
But is it all bad? No, it can't be if it's re-heated Pertwee. They've got some of the things in there that made his time extra special. The vehicles chosen for the chases were interesting, but we didn't need almost a full episode of them, only to find out that the spider could have teleported away in the first place. The occult feel invokes the very best parts of the Daemons, and the end scene is pretty emotional.
For many, this is an adequate story with a famous ending that would influence Doctor Who for generations to come. To me, it's disappointing because if it was toned down, and if some of the effects worked just a little bit better, and if we'd have seen Metabilis III like it appeared the first time, this would be one of the very, very best.
Rating
6 out of 10
Not the worst regeneration story ever, but it could have and should have been far better than this.
Rewatchability Factor
5 out of 10
Nice to watch once in a blue moon, if only for the nostalgia that this is the end of an era.
Watch this if you liked,,,
- The Runaway Bride (Doctor Who, Christmas Special)
Consulting the Matrix
Do you think the Doctor confronting his fears was a good climax?
