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| Planet of the Spiders |
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 Name: The Giant Spiders; known to themselves and
their followers as the ‘Eight-Legs’
Format:
Television show, Book and Audio
Time of Origin: Mutated into their
current state on Metebelis Three, apparently in the future; precise
dates are unknown, but they were able to escape to Earth in 1975
and 2015; ‘local’ spiders were created in Sheffield in 2018 after a scientific accident.
Appearances: "Planet
of the Spiders", "Return
of the Spiders", "The Eight Truths", "Worldwide
Web",
brief appearance in "The
Eight Doctors", technically featured
in "The
Ancestor Cell"; Earth-based giant spiders appeared in "Arachnids in the UK".
Doctors: Third
Doctor, Fourth
Doctor, Seventh
Doctor and Eighth
Doctor; the Thirteenth Doctor confronted Earth-based giant spiders.
Companions: The
Brigadier, Sergeant
Benton, Captain
Mike Yates, Sarah
Jane Smith, K9, 2nd
Romana, Lucie Miller; Fitz Kreiner and Compassion encountered bone versions of the Spiders that the
TARDIS manifested as a defence; Graham O’Malley, Ryan Sinclair and Yasmin Khan confronted Earth-based giant spiders.
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| Planet of the Spiders |
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History: Although the Spiders have only made one
appearance in the television series, they are significant for the
lasting effect they had on The Doctor, his encounter with them having
left
him with an arachnophobia that has merely varied in all his subsequent
incarnations without ever actually going away. Originally normal
spiders, the spiders were mutated into their current state when the
ship they were on crash-landed on Metebelis Three, the unique radiation
of the blue crystals of Metebelis Three resulting in the Spiders
mutating and growing significantly in both size and intellect, to
the extent that they came to dominate the human population of the
planet. With their more long-term goal being to enhance their psychic
powers, they began to gather the purest blue crystals together with
the intention of creating a psychic web that would greatly enhance
their powers.
The
Doctor became involved in this plan when, during a visit to Metebelis
Three for a brief holiday, he departed the planet taking one of the
last pure blue crystals as a souvenir, subsequently using it to break
the hypnotic conditioning of the supercomputer BOSS before giving
it to his former companion Jo Grant as a wedding present before her
departure for the Amazon with her new husband Cliff Jones ("The
Green Death"). However, Jo was forced to send the crystal back
to UNIT because their native guides regarded it as black magic, the
crystal arriving back at UNIT just as The Doctor’s new companion
Sarah
Jane Smith was investigating odd goings-on at a Buddhist retreat
being attended by former UNIT member Mike Yates, Mike having turned
to meditation to try and recover from the trauma of recent events
where he betrayed his friends and participated in a plot to destroy
the human race ("Invasion
of the Dinosaurs") after suffering
a mental breakdown following his brief period under the control of
supercomputer BOSS ("The Green Death").
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| Planet of the Spiders |
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Thanks
to Sarah and Mike’s investigations, The Doctor learned of the
Spiders’ existences, the Spiders using the mental energies
generated during the meditation sessions to travel to Earth via psychic
ley lines - evidently stretching across time and space given that
evidence suggests that the Spiders existed in Earth’s future
- to try and recover The Doctor’s blue crystal, aided by some
of the guests at the retreat. Although The Doctor initially fought
against the Spiders, allying himself with his old Time Lord mentor
K’Anpo to free Sarah and others at the retreat from their influence,
K’Anpo encouraged him to recognise his responsibility for the
course events had taken, prompting him to take the blue crystal back
to Metebelis Three and deliver it to the cave of the Great One, the
largest spider of all. With The Doctor’s crystal, the queen
completed the psychic amplifier she had sought to design, only to
learn after she attempted to use her new psychic powers that she
had actually created a positive feedback circuit, burning out her
mind and seemingly killing the other Spiders on the planet with the
subsequent release of telepathic energy due to her link to them (Although
The Doctor subsequently spent a decade drifting in the time vortex
due to the radiation poisoning he had suffered while in the Great
One’s cave, finally returning to Earth as the poison completed
its work, subsequently regenerating into his fourth incarnation with
K’Anpo’s help) ("Planet
of the Spiders").
Although The Doctor assumed that this encounter
would mark the end of the Spiders, the Fourth
Doctor faced them once
again after he and Romana arrived in a suburban housing estate ("Return
of the Spiders"), swiftly learning from a local pizza delivery
boy - after making a bet with Romana that Romana could find something
unusual in the area - that the inhabitants of 9 Honeysuckle Close had
been ordering the meat special for the past four nights. Investigating
the house, The Doctor learned that the family who lived in the house
were under the control of Spiders who had escaped the destruction of
Metebelis Three by travelling along psychic ley lines. Learning that
the Spider’s Queen was about to lay her eggs, The Doctor and K9 attempted to destroy the attic, but the Queen managed to extinguish the
fire. Fortunately, neighbours had summoned firemen to deal with the blaze,
allowing The Doctor to use the hosepipes to knock the Queen off the roof
to her death (Although The Doctor told Romana that this didn’t
count as ‘something unusual’ as that kind of thing was always
happening to him).
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| Planet of the Spiders |
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The
Doctor’s next encounter with the Spiders was the result of
a brief visit to Metebelis Three towards the end of his seventh incarnation.
Feeling rather depressed and melancholy and seeking something to
revive his currently-flagging spirit, The Doctor decided to travel
to Metebelis Three for a brief holiday, reasoning that the beauty
of the planet would give him something to admire and remind him why
he travelled while the potential danger would reawaken his interest
in life. Unfortunately, the decision proved to be too successful
when The Doctor was captured and bound in webbing by one of the last
remaining Spiders on the planet, only escaping becoming the creature’s
dinner thanks to the arrival of his next incarnation ("The
Eight Doctors"), currently visiting his past selves to regain his
memories after a trap set by The Master left him with almost total
amnesia. Killing the Spider with The Master’s old Tissue Compression
Eliminator - which the Eighth Doctor had acquired after helping the
Third
Doctor fend off an attack from The Master -, the Eighth
Doctor then freed his past self from the webbing that he had been trapped
in before departing, leaving the Seventh with a renewed appreciation
for his life despite the knowledge that his next regeneration was
closer than he had expected.
In The Doctor’s last encounter with the Spiders,
he found himself facing the Spiders on a scale that he had never
fought before, particularly since the Spiders were using Gallifreyian
technology that they had acquired from the mysterious Headhunter.
During a holiday on Earth in 2015, the Eighth Doctor’s companion Lucie Miller was recruited by an organisation known as the Eightfold Truth, which had apparently been established by the enigmatic self-help guru Clark Goodman to prepare for an approaching apocalyptic event, the Eightfold Truth ‘convincing’ Lucie that The Doctor was manipulating and brainwashing her for his own purpose to help win her over to their cause while The Doctor was occupied with helping a science team track missing space probes. Learning about the Truth, The Doctor discovered from the lost probe’s sensor readings that the ‘Rebel Sun’ that the Truth had predicted would come to Earth was actually a stellar manipulator - similar to the Hand of Omega - that had been stolen by the Headhunter in their last encounter ("Orbis"), the Headhunter selling it to the Spiders for their latest plan in return for a considerable payment. With the Eightfold Truth rapidly gaining members as the Sun approached, and The Doctor nearly killed after an attack with radioactive gas left him in a healing coma for over three weeks, Lucie became the host for the Spider Queen after being identified as the ‘Chosen One’ during her initiation, the Headhunter having programmed the Manipulator to follow her DNA after their confrontation on Orbis to ‘lead’ it to Earth at the right time.
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| Planet of the Spiders |
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As part of the Truth’s initiation efforts, each member was given a unique crystal, allegedly to help them meditate on their true selves, but in reality these crystals were all from Metebelis III, having been found by Goodman in the 1980s. Goodman had been subtly manipulated by the spiders for years so that the concepts of the Truth would encourage submission to the Spiders’ rule, while his use of the Crystals would influence the minds of the cult’s longest-standing members so that they would be more vulnerable to suggestion and hence easier to control. Using the Stellar Manipulator, the Spiders were able to turn all of humanity into nodes in their telepathic network, dispersing the feedback that had killed the original Great One across multiple minds to increase the time they could maintain the node before it burnt out their minds. As well as influencing virtually all of humanity to consider the Spiders their gods, the Queen used the Manipulator’s power to take complete control of Lucie’s body while sending Lucie’s mind to a virtual ‘storage area’ within the Manipulator. Although the Queen intended to use the power of the hive mind to make everyone worship her, after using a blue crystal to free a few of his key allies from the Queen’s control, The Doctor was able to defeat the Queen by transferring Lucie’s mind into the TARDIS before
sending her back into her body and ‘exorcising’ the Queen,
forcing the Queen to take control of the Headhunter. Although the
Headhunter’s species possessed a natural resistance to telepathic
attack, this would only keep the Queen contained for a limited time,
but the Headhunter managed to defeat her by chanting worship to the
Great One, triggering a feedback loop as the Queen essentially began
to worship herself, destroying the Queen but rendering the Headhunter
catatonic as nobody knew her real name to help her assert her own
identity. Accessing the power of the Stellar Manipulator through
the remnants of Lucie’s link to it, The Doctor used it to transmit
a signal telling everyone to forget about the Spiders, banishing
them back along the astral plane to their home planet, The Doctor
hoping that the humility the Spiders would thus be forced to experience
would limit the likelihood of them trying something like that again.
Even without appearing, the Spiders have had a significant
effect on The Doctor, with the Third Doctor’s encounter with
them having left each subsequent incarnation with varying degrees
of arachnophobia, as well as the pain of the memory of the Third
Doctor’s regeneration remaining one of their most difficult
regenerations. Although the Fourth, Seventh and
Eighth Doctors faced the ‘Eight-Legs’ on later occasions
without experiencing more than the traditional discomfort and apprehension
that one would
expect in such a situation, the Seventh Doctor was once tortured
by being forced to relive his memories of the Third Doctor’s
long death of radiation poisoning ("Love
and War"), the Eleventh Doctor specifically asked
his companion Amy to avoid even the subject of Spiders when she compared
the Cybermats to Spiders ("Blood of the Cybermen"), and the Fifth
Doctor had great trouble crawling through an air vent filled
with normal spiders due to his fear despite the fact that his companion
Peri was in danger at the other end of the vent and required his
help, although he was able to overcome his fear in time to save her
("Light at the End of the Tunnel").
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| Planet of the Spiders |
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Although the circumstances of the Third Doctor’s regeneration
were unintentionally altered by the Eighth Doctor during a confrontation
with Faction
Paradox in "Interference
Book Two: Hour of the
Geek" - the Eighth Doctor unintentionally diverting
his past self’s TARDIS when the ship was meant to be returning
to Earth in time to confront the Spiders, resulting in the Third
Doctor regenerating
after being shot on the planet Dust in the far future following a
confrontation with the Faction instead -, a temporal ‘ghost’ of
the Third Doctor who should have been survived thanks to the TARDIS
taking The Doctor’s altered timeline into itself to protect
him from the Faction’s efforts to infect him with a Paradox
virus that would turn him into a member of the Faction by his eighth
incarnation. The Third Doctor’s ‘ghost’ eventually
manifested in the infected TARDIS as a version of himself composed
of dust particles ("The
Ancestor Cell") after the TARDIS
was nearly torn apart after being caught in a dimensional rift ("The
Shadows of Avalon"), the ghost-like Doctor creating bone spiders
to defend himself and the TARDIS from intruders after it manifested
above Gallifrey, he and the Eighth Doctor admitting that they knew
spiders were somehow important to them even if they couldn’t
remember how. At the conclusion of The Doctor’s last battle
with the Faction, the Metebelis regeneration was restored to its
proper place in The Doctor’s history after The Doctor drained
all of the TARDIS’s power away, forcing the universe to choose
one reality or the other in order to resolve the paradox of his two
third regenerations once and for all.
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| Arachnids in the UK |
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While the Metebelis Spiders have yet to return to the series, Earth-based giant spiders confronted the Thirteenth Doctor in modern-day Sheffield in "Arachnids in the UK", when she had managed to bring her new friends Graham, Ryan and Yasmin back to their home time after accidentally teleporting them with her while trying to retrieve the lost TARDIS ("The Woman Who Fell to Earth" and "The Ghost Monument"). While having a meal with Yasmin’s family, The Doctor discovered that one of the family’s neighbours had been killed by a spider the side of a large dog, a meeting with the dead woman’s supervisor, Doctor Jade McIntyre, revealing that McIntyre’s lab had been experimenting with augmenting spiders to harness their webbing and other materials for industrial purposes. Tracing recent reports of spider attacks to a new hotel owned by businessman Jack Robertson - the hotel being coincidentally managed by Yasmin’s mother - The Doctor and her companions learned that one of Robertson’s subsidiary companies had taken to dumping waste in the mine the hotel was built over, the combination of various waste products causing some of the spiders from McIntyre’s experiments to mutate and expand even further when they had been disposed of before confirming that the spiders were dead. The Doctor and her allies were eventually able to lure most of the spiders to Robertson’s personal panic room and trap them there until they could dispose of them humanely, recognising that these spiders weren’t actually dangerous, but The Doctor was angry at Robertson when he killed the mother spider when it was already dying of oxygen starvation due to its size. |
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The Eight Doctors
(Terrance Dicks) |
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The Eight Truths
(Eddie Robson) |
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Worldwide Web
(Eddie Robson) |
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The Ancestor Cell
(Peter Anghelides and Stephen Cole) |
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