Absolutely, he's just fantastic in the role

Absolutely, because of its beautiful dialogue and Pertwee and Sladen's acting. Her anguished line 'please, don't die...' is one of the most heart breaking in the show's 60 years.

Wow, I could've just said that! Wouldn't have taken me nearly as long to edit, and would've gotten my basic thoughts on the serial across quite effectively.

@@DalamReviews when i was little and watchd classic doctor who vhs all the time, i was obsessed with trying to get planet of the spiders, cus pertwee was my fave doctor and it sounded awesome! This was late 90s early 2000s so no youtube or dvds to easily get. I read the book a few times and imagined how awesome the 3rd doctor fighting giant psychic spiders would have been! Wen i FINALLY managed to get it on vhs after many years i was old enough to see how poor it was...i could not hav been more disapointed

Yeah, that's quite unfortunate, and that experience makes a lot of sense. I can imagine that if you have high expectations or much excitement going in, this story could prove quite disappointing. As much as I agree with you, I probably wasn't quite as let down because I didn't have such excitement going in. It's still a weaker note to end the era on though, imo, and despite enjoying some of its elements, I wish there was a different story to end things off on.

That's an absolutely fair take, and I'm glad you like the story as much as you do! As said, I do like a number of its elements, and ultimately did give it a positive grade, in spite of some of (what I found to be) its shortcomings :)

Agreed

Thanks for pointing out that he's actually Australian, I shouldn't have made that mistake. While I see where you're coming from here about the accent, it's really just one part of the entire portrayal of this Tibetan character. The makeup, the accent, and the performances by White actors make me deeply uncomfortable. I don't know that it's the accent on its own, but rather how it is used by White actors to portray characters who aren't White. Tibetans are an Asian ethnic group, and Asian actors (like Black, Hispanic, Indigenous, and all non-White actors) have historically been oppressed, and as a result find a far more difficult time getting roles in TV and movies then White actors. Not allowing actors of the actual minoritized groups to play their representations on TV just limits their already small opportunities to even smaller opportunities (which Doctor Who has done several times across the years). As said, it is far more about the bigger picture than the actual accent, so I should have made that clear. In an equal world, these things wouldn't matter, because everybody would have equal opportunities, but the reality is that we aren't there yet. I don't mind English or Australian actors putting on American accents (aside from the fact they're often as cartoonish and inauthentic as the attempt at a Tibetan accent in here), because its just some White actor playing a White character from a different region of the world. Does that makes sense? Again, I see where you're coming from, and on its face (in an entirely just and equal world) it shouldn't be bad, but it contributes to a wider issue which makes it wrong. Sorry for the long reply, just wanted to have a degree of nuance and really explain the problem.

@@DalamReviews Thanks, and you're right to point out the bigger picture. However, that big picture also shows that there were very few decent Chinese/Asian actors available to British television companies during the early 1970s. The production team had gone to the trouble of enlisting a specialist Asian actors' agency to get an actor to play a Chinese diplomat in "Mind of Evil" (1972). Sadly, none of the actors auditioned were up to scratch, and that was for a role that didn't require the actor to speak English! In the end, the production team had to use the Chinese owner of the casting agency to play the part instead. Maybe it was different in the USA, which has a much larger Chinese population that Britain, but we had to wait until 1981 before David Yip became the first Chinese/British actor to land a decent role in a TV series. It was very slim pickings before then.

Yeah, I see what you mean. The smaller population would definitely explains the choice, even if it doesn't justify it. I've tried researching information on the actual populations of Asian people in Britain in the 60s and 70s but have failed to find much information on the matter. I'll probably look more into it in the future. At the end of the day, if the character really was essential to the story, and if they had to use a White actor, I wish they would've just changed the story slightly to make the character from a different region of the world. Seems like a fairly simple change which is unlikely to upset anyone.

@@ftumschk That's still a product of historical marginalization and oppression of Asian people in the UK though. It's more so an issue of British society, the BBC, the actors' union, etc. than of the Doctor Who production team specifically, but that doesn't make it acceptable to use white actors to portray minority characters. Certainly not when discussing it nowadays. Not to mention that these characters, albeit written earnestly, are made up of racial stereotypes. "Having to wait until 1981" for a British actor of Asian descent to land a prominent role in a TV show is an indictment of the ways Asian actors were kept out of certain kinds of jobs that white people had no trouble getting. Also, Zienia Merton (a British/Burmese actor) played Ping-Cho in Doctor Who's Marco Polo in 1964, so it was not impossible to find these actors.

Certainly worth watching if you take an interest in the Pertwee era, whenever you get the opportunity!