20 Worst Moments In Modern Doctor Who (According To YOU)
7. Robertson Shoots The Spider (Arachnids In The UK)
In terms of good points Arachnids in the UK has some cool Sheffield location filming and some honestly quite impressive CGI spiders.
On the flip side it’s also got a highly controversial ending – partially because Ryan saving the day with a Stormzy track is absurd, and partially because of the ethics surrounding Robertson’s “mercy killing” of the mother spider.
The episode is so preoccupied with presenting him as the monster that it doesn’t stop to consider the view that putting the mother spider out of her misery might actually be kinder than letting her starve to death. As with The Ghost Monument's Call of Duty scene, it's another case of the show being so determined to paint the Doctor in a specific moral light that it ignores all other factors and nuance.
The same is true of the other mutated spiders. Were they eventually going to starve to death too? Or could the Doctor have given them a new life elsewhere?
Either way, their fates are never clarified: the episode just ends abruptly, almost as if it’s deliberately avoiding the difficult questions. Which it almost certainly was. As a result the episode comes across as oversimplified and self-righteous.