If you happened to watch Doctor Who back in 1974, you were probably disappointed.

It was the last season that Jon Pertwee would play the Doctor, thanks to the combined circumstances of the untimely death of Roger Delgado (the original Master) and the leave of Katy Manning (Jo Grant) to other projects.   With the times of yore seemingly behind him, Pertwee decided to finish off this season and be done with it.  Hence, the season played out.

Originally, the season was supposed to be quite a big deal, with more of the same classic Pertwee/Who stories.  More encounters with the Master, including an ending to the 3rd Doctor's era which would have been more complete as opposed to what was aired.  The underlying threads of the Master, the constant references to the blue planet Metebelis 3 solved...all wrapping up five years of Doctor Who which has been unfairly overlooked in many Whovians' eyes.  However, thanks to the death and leavings of many of the important actors, the show couldn't possibly do this.  Hence, Season 12 is seen in many eyes as the extended goodbye of a beloved actor who didn't have the heart for it anymore.

The five stories of Season 12 were either uninvolving or just boring. The Time Warrior, while introducing the Sontaran race and revealing the name of the Time Lord planet (Gallifrey), was strangely uninvolving and just a precursor to next season's The Sontaran Experiment. Invasion of the Dinosaurs is still an unknown thanks to the fact that it hasn't seen the day of light in it's completed form due to the very first episode still being in black & white as opposed to color, which makes all current American prints supposedly confusing.  Death to the Daleks, the final Dalek story which does not include their creator and master Davros, is just damn silly and confusing.  The Monster of Peladon, sequel to the earlier Curse of Peladon, is a continuation of a story which didn't need a sequel.  And finally, we come upon the final episode of the Pertwee era, the final goodbye in the form of Planet of the Spiders.

Which is our experiment for today....God help us all.

Throughout the greater part of Pertwee's era (after The Three Doctors), the trip to Metebelis 3 propelled most of the stories through.  Finally, the Doctor finally got to Metebelis and nearly gets killed in order to fetch a blue crystal which has psychic inducing powers.   He gives it to his assistant Jo Grant at the end of The Green Death as a wedding present and hence the plot is seemingly dropped.  Good?  Okay, now to our experiment....

The Doctor is doing tests on psychic powers when he receives the blue crystal.  Apparently Jo sent it back because some natives her and her husband encountered said it was bad luck.  This is confirmed when a person the Doctor is helping tries to use the crystal to enhance his mental strength and is killed by a giant spider.  Also, it seems that these spiders are invading Earth via a monastery somewhere in the English countryside.   Who are these spiders?  Well, it turns out that these spiders are the eventual rulers of Metebelis 3 who need the Doctor's crystal to perfect their goals to control every sentient being's mind this side of the universe.  So, after four episodes of running around the monastery, Metebelis 3, and various double-crosses and a quite neat chase scene involving the Whomobile (?), the Doctor confronts the spiders' queen, a GIGANTIC spider which induces fear into the Doctor's mind.   The Doctor decides to run until he finds that the leader of the monastery is also a hermit from the Time Lord race that was a pseudo mentor to the Doctor during his formative years.  The hermit tells the Doctor that he must confront his fears or be doomed forever.

Seems like a good idea, huh?  Well, welcome to phony '70s philosophy.

The Doctor does, and returns the crystal to the Queen.  However, instead of gaining power over every living thing, the Queen's mind undergoes mental overload and is destroyed in a (seemingly) fantastic explosion which wounds the Doctor with it's radiation.  He vanishes into the TARDIS and it dematerializes.....

Two weeks later, the TARDIS finally lands back at UNIT headquarters where a worried Sarah Jane and Brigadier help the wounded and now dying Doctor to no avail.  However, the hermit shows up (in a regenerated form for some reason) and gives the Doctor help to regenerate.   As Sarah Jane and the Brig watch, the features of the 3rd Doctor change into a younger form with prominent teeth and curls.....

Honestly, there is nothing more infuriating to see a work wasted like this.  You see, there's a fine line between stretching a story to a length then compressing the best parts of said story instead of building on them.  It's not a sin to have a story which is expressed by talk instead of action.  In fact, with all the little tidbits about the Doctor's past, I think this story would have been greatly affected if the whole Spider nonsense was pushed back to the background and more information about the good Doctor given.  Enough of all this 'face your fear' talk, the writers should have backed it up.  But instead, we just have a shell of what might have been.  Hardly the send off Jon Pertwee should have been given.

But, there are enough elements to recommend this story, most of all the 'Whomobile' which is just a glorified hovercraft and the chase scene that rounds out the end of Episode Two.  However, most of the episodes were not needed.

RATING:  If you want a true end to the Pertwee era, pick up a copy of The Green Death.  If you want to see how the Tom Baker version came about, check this out.  But you have a long wait until then.  Two stars out of Four.