YMMV / Doctor Who S37 E4 "Arachnids in the UK"

• Accidental Aesop: If you want to do shady business, make sure that your underlings don't do a botch job. After all, Robertson successfully turned a wasteland into a resort 15 times prior to this episode; it was only when his subcontractors cut corners that things went badly.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: Does Robertson also loathe Trump because he disagrees with his politics, or simply because of the rivalry with the fellow real estate magnate he mentions? It's worth noting that many allegedly "liberal" businessmen despise Trump for rather shallow reasons, such as his scandals, and only pay lip service to opposing him while endorsing many of the same business practices, and the politics that allow them, as he does, and are secretly motivated less by getting Trump out of office than making sure actual Progressive Politicians don't get into the White House.
• Designated Villain: Jack Robertson shooting the Spider Mother is portrayed as needlessly cruel and cowardly, but considering how the spider was already dying a slow, agonizing death via suffocation, this seems quicker and less drawn-out. Plus, the Doctor couldn't save her and the Spider Mother killed too many people to warrant any sympathy in the first place. But then again, Robertson's claim that his murder of the Spider was motivated by mercy is quite clearly Blatant Lies.
• Esoteric Happy Ending: While it's presented as the "humane" option within the episode, the fate the spiders receive from the Thirteenth Doctor locking them all inside the hotel's bunker is incredibly cruel. At best, the spiders will all slowly starve to death and at worst, they'll resort to cannibalizing each other in order to survive. And since the episode establishes that the spiders never stop growing, this means that eventually they'll run out of space to grow in and slowly die from being crushed to death in a room full of the corpses of their siblings.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • The idea of the Thirteenth Doctor going up against deadly mutant spiders becomes a lot harsher to think about after an incident where Jodie Whittaker was almost killed by a South African sac spider during the filming of "Spyfall".
  • At one point, Jade tells the Trump-expy "You don't know anything. You just avoid taking any responsibility." A little over a year later, the real President Trump infamously declared "I don't take responsibility at all" for the deaths from the COVID-19 Pandemic.
  • Robertson's lack of accountability can be this considering, a few years later, Chris Noth was accused of sexual assault by multiple women.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: A billionaire running against Trump out of a grudge instead of a want to help the county? Sounds a lot like Michael Bloomberg.
• Les Yay: Yaz's mum asks if she and the Doctor are together, and doesn't seem like she'd be against it. For her part, the Doctor actually has to ask if their relationship counts as dating. Later, Yaz tells the Doctor, "I want more time with you. You're like the best person I've ever met."
• Narm: Jack Robertson is for the most part a chilling take on Donald Trump and other Corrupt Corporate Executives, but at one point he goes into a massively over-the-top rant about how much he loves guns that makes you wonder how they resisted giving him a cowboy hat.
• Strawman Has a Point: Robertson is a Gun Nut and completely unsympathetic, but even if his reasons are wrong, his idea of shooting the spiders is certainly way more humane than just locking them up and letting them die from starvation or asphyxiation, as shown by the Spider Mother's obvious agonizing death while scratching the door to get out. His use of the disused mine to dump waste materials is also supposed to be villainous, but it actually comes across as a sensible way of dealing with landfill issues. The issue is with the stuff his contractors put down there, not with the use of the mine in itself.
• Ugly Cute: Some of the smaller spiders are downright adorable... when they're not attacking people.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic:
  • If you are an arachnophobe, Robertson can seem like the hero of the story for finally killing the biggest spider when the Doctor is beating around the bush. And even though we're meant to be aghast that he uses a gun, is it all that different than killing a normal-sized spider with your shoe? Also, the Spider Mother was in obvious pain while suffocating and Robertson was the one portrayed as a psychopathic monster for shooting an already dying spider, which is giving it a quicker, less painful death.
  • It's played with when Robertson kills the Spider Mother. At first it seems like he's putting it out of its misery and saving her from a long and painful death by asphyxiation... then you remember that's not why he's actually killing her. However, as unpleasant as Robertson is, his desire to quickly shoot the spiders is presented as him being a bloodthirsty, bull-headed idiot, rather than having, if not the best, a reasonable response to there being a swarm of monstrous beasts that are killing people on the loose.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: This is played with regarding the zoologist Jade McIntyre. She is supposed to be sympathetic and an ally of the Doctor for most of the episode. However, she is just as responsible as Robertson because she was the one who experimented on the spider and let a live test subject out without fully analysing it when they thought it died. However, she never denies responsibility, unlike Robertson, is clearly horrified about what happened, and tries to fix the mess she accidentally caused.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The absolutely breathtaking new Time Vortex effects showcased near the beginning of the episode. The titular arachnids aren't bad looking either.

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