Planet of the Spiders is the fifth and final serial of the 11th season of the British science fiction television series Doctor Who, which was first broadcast in six weekly parts on BBC1 from 4 May to 8 June 1974.
In this serial, a group of men at a Tibetan monastery in rural England make contact with a race of giant spiders with psychic abilities from the planet Metebelis 3, who intend to conquer Earth.
Following the events of Invasion of the Dinosaurs, Mike Yates is discharged from UNIT and joins a Tibetan meditation centre in rural England for therapy, to help him cope with the experience.
The Doctor arrives in the TARDIS to rescue her, and begins organising a resistance movement among the human slaves, descendants of the crew of an Earth spaceship that crashed hundreds of years before, who the spiders prey on.
The planet is ruled by the giant spiders, who also came from the crashed ship, but whose mental powers have been amplified by centuries of exposure to the strange blue crystals found in the mountains of Metabilis.
She craves the crystal, which she insanely believes will expand her mental powers to infinity and give her dominion over the entire universe.
He gives it into the safe-keeping of the abbot, K’anpo Rimpoche, an elderly Time Lord (and former guru of the Doctor) who has retired into a peaceful exile on Earth as a Tibetan Buddhist.
But the extensive location scenes in Part Two, filmed in Wiltshire and Gloucestershire, imply a setting of 'darkest Mummerset' in the wilds of the West Country.
Producer and director Barry Letts said in an interview in 2004, referring to the use of CSO (Colour Separation Overlay) to create backgrounds of the planet Metebelis in long-shot, that he was unhappy with the scenes, which "never looked right".
[5] The story was edited and condensed into a single omnibus episode broadcast on BBC1 at 2:45 pm on 27 December 1974,[8] reaching 8.6 million viewers.
[10] Paul Cornell, Martin Day, and Keith Topping wrote of the serial in The Discontinuity Guide (1995), "Grotesquely over padded and stuck with bad CSO, Planet of the Spiders is not the celebration of an era that it should have been."
[4] DVD Talk's John Sinnott gave the story three out of five stars, writing that it was "enjoyable" despite "not the great sendoff that Pertwee should have received" with padding and weak special effects.
[15] A novelisation of this serial, written by Terrance Dicks, was published by Target Books in October 1975 as Doctor Who and the Planet of the Spiders.
The novel's prologue shows Jo Grant and her husband Professor Jones in the Amazon jungle following the events of The Green Death.