Why I like the Racnoss
The Racnoss are a race of giant world-eating spiders from the dawn of time, not to be confused with any of the other spiders you may have seen before on this show. For one thing they're red.
The Racnoss date from the Age of Legends, a time in the universe's history when there were lots of giant horrifying world-devourers and people like Rassilon (and the young Time Lords generally) went around exterminating them. They may have been contemporaries with the Great Vampires, and seem to have had a similar modus operandi of swarming and swarming and just...eating everything. The Racnoss are born starving - which, as their Empress rightly points out - is hardly their fault. They just eat...everything. Tolkien would approve. At any rate, there's a history there, and the heretofore unflappable Racnoss Empress blanches at the very mention of Gallifrey. Given that the Doctor then goes on to murder her entire brood, she is perhaps right to do so.
The story as I understand it is this: the Last Empress of the Racnoss was hibernating out at the edge of the universe somewhere for something like four and a half billion years, until Torchwood Dug Too Deep and activated the Racnoss ship hidden at the center of the Earth. Why was Torchwood digging that deep? Maybe they wanted to tap into the vast pockets of Stahlman's Gas sitting right below the Earth's crust (Do you want Primords other Barry? Because this is how you get Primords). Who knows why Torchwood does anything. But this is very exciting because we now have more living Racnoss and no Time Lords to worry about, so hey, time to get a new breeding Colony going. And so the Empress starts making friends and influencing people in the building upstairs, and heads our way. I can only presume that in between she watches lots and lots of daytime television (you know, to learn our culture and language) given how not just informed but how invested she is in contemporary human marriage customs.
That's probably what I like best about the Racnoss Empress. She just really seems to love being a giant man-eating spider-woman. She's having a really great time, up until the Doctor mentions where he's from (and starts murdering her children). She and Lance share a good laugh about the whole axe thing. She's just wholly unapologetic about anything that's going on - but she also wants to make wedding puns and takes Lance to task for being mean to Donna (eating him first, and all that). Eating people is one thing, that's just what you do - but there's no call to be rude. But throughout basically all of it she's having fun, and that's always a joy to watch. There's no reason to be super serious all the time, even if you are a giant world-devouring spider, and even if you are the Last of your Kind. Just because she's serious about what she's doing doesn't mean she has to be serious about how she's doing it.
This era is full of folks who are the Last of their Kind, because the Doctor needs someone to play off against. The Racnoss, strangely, refuse to play the angst card (possibly because she's too busy having fun with Fantasy Wedding Planning) but it's there nevertheless, and this story is the one that really starts the Doctor's downward trajectory into the Time Lord Victorious. This is the one where the Doctor drowns babies - adorable spider babies! And not so much for what they're doing, but for what they are. Carnivorous, basically. And that's always an interesting dilemma: is peace possible with something that just wants to eat you? And while he offers to relocate them, he does so without providing really any of the relevant information - and he immediately absolves himself of his own actions. The whole narrative he's pushing is one of "you did this," "everything that happens next is your fault," and so on. And it gets a lot easier to justify atrocities when you can blame them on the victim, when it wasn't you committing them. The Doctor in this era is simultaneously making himself an Authority and denying any responsibility for his own actions. It's a really very frightening trend, and one Donna calls him out on almost immediately. Absolving himself of the guilt of this genocide is the first step on the way to absolving himself of the guilt of of the previous one against the Time Lords, which allows hims to declare himself the Winner in "the Waters of Mars." Was there another solution to the Racnoss? Maybe. Maybe not. But nobody looked terribly hard for one, and it a crucially important character moment, the Doctor visibly making himself okay with wiping out another race.
There's always something appealing about giant spider monsters. But also I just love love love the planetary composition digression, with the earth itself forming up around a sufficiently heavy core. Planetary science is awesome, team. The Racnoss are a pretty silly monster in a pretty silly story, but with deeper undertones that stay with the show for the next two solid years. I wish we'd gotten to see the adorable spider babies before they got drowned, but maybe that would just have spoiled the effect. But it is nice seeing a villain who really loves doing what she's doing, and it cast interesting if oblique light on the early history and general mystique of the Time Lords. And, of course, we all know who's really to blame for all this - bloody Torchwood. What were those guys thinking?
The Racnoss date from the Age of Legends, a time in the universe's history when there were lots of giant horrifying world-devourers and people like Rassilon (and the young Time Lords generally) went around exterminating them. They may have been contemporaries with the Great Vampires, and seem to have had a similar modus operandi of swarming and swarming and just...eating everything. The Racnoss are born starving - which, as their Empress rightly points out - is hardly their fault. They just eat...everything. Tolkien would approve. At any rate, there's a history there, and the heretofore unflappable Racnoss Empress blanches at the very mention of Gallifrey. Given that the Doctor then goes on to murder her entire brood, she is perhaps right to do so.
The story as I understand it is this: the Last Empress of the Racnoss was hibernating out at the edge of the universe somewhere for something like four and a half billion years, until Torchwood Dug Too Deep and activated the Racnoss ship hidden at the center of the Earth. Why was Torchwood digging that deep? Maybe they wanted to tap into the vast pockets of Stahlman's Gas sitting right below the Earth's crust (Do you want Primords other Barry? Because this is how you get Primords). Who knows why Torchwood does anything. But this is very exciting because we now have more living Racnoss and no Time Lords to worry about, so hey, time to get a new breeding Colony going. And so the Empress starts making friends and influencing people in the building upstairs, and heads our way. I can only presume that in between she watches lots and lots of daytime television (you know, to learn our culture and language) given how not just informed but how invested she is in contemporary human marriage customs.
That's probably what I like best about the Racnoss Empress. She just really seems to love being a giant man-eating spider-woman. She's having a really great time, up until the Doctor mentions where he's from (and starts murdering her children). She and Lance share a good laugh about the whole axe thing. She's just wholly unapologetic about anything that's going on - but she also wants to make wedding puns and takes Lance to task for being mean to Donna (eating him first, and all that). Eating people is one thing, that's just what you do - but there's no call to be rude. But throughout basically all of it she's having fun, and that's always a joy to watch. There's no reason to be super serious all the time, even if you are a giant world-devouring spider, and even if you are the Last of your Kind. Just because she's serious about what she's doing doesn't mean she has to be serious about how she's doing it.
This era is full of folks who are the Last of their Kind, because the Doctor needs someone to play off against. The Racnoss, strangely, refuse to play the angst card (possibly because she's too busy having fun with Fantasy Wedding Planning) but it's there nevertheless, and this story is the one that really starts the Doctor's downward trajectory into the Time Lord Victorious. This is the one where the Doctor drowns babies - adorable spider babies! And not so much for what they're doing, but for what they are. Carnivorous, basically. And that's always an interesting dilemma: is peace possible with something that just wants to eat you? And while he offers to relocate them, he does so without providing really any of the relevant information - and he immediately absolves himself of his own actions. The whole narrative he's pushing is one of "you did this," "everything that happens next is your fault," and so on. And it gets a lot easier to justify atrocities when you can blame them on the victim, when it wasn't you committing them. The Doctor in this era is simultaneously making himself an Authority and denying any responsibility for his own actions. It's a really very frightening trend, and one Donna calls him out on almost immediately. Absolving himself of the guilt of this genocide is the first step on the way to absolving himself of the guilt of of the previous one against the Time Lords, which allows hims to declare himself the Winner in "the Waters of Mars." Was there another solution to the Racnoss? Maybe. Maybe not. But nobody looked terribly hard for one, and it a crucially important character moment, the Doctor visibly making himself okay with wiping out another race.
There's always something appealing about giant spider monsters. But also I just love love love the planetary composition digression, with the earth itself forming up around a sufficiently heavy core. Planetary science is awesome, team. The Racnoss are a pretty silly monster in a pretty silly story, but with deeper undertones that stay with the show for the next two solid years. I wish we'd gotten to see the adorable spider babies before they got drowned, but maybe that would just have spoiled the effect. But it is nice seeing a villain who really loves doing what she's doing, and it cast interesting if oblique light on the early history and general mystique of the Time Lords. And, of course, we all know who's really to blame for all this - bloody Torchwood. What were those guys thinking?