for the Great One, and the positive feedback causes agonizing deaths to her and the other spiders. A vast wave of deadly radiation floods the cave. The Doctor, now very weak, staggers back to the TARDIS. Weeks later, Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart and Sarah are in the Doctor's laboratory when the TARDIS materialises, and on exiting it the Doctor collapses on the floor. The abbot K’anpo arrives in his new body, having regenerated into the form of Cho-je, who was a sort of forward projection of his soul. He tells them that the Doctor will change too and before their eyes the Doctor regenerates into his fourth incarnation. Production The final story of Season 11 (to have been titled The Final Game) was originally intended to write out the character of the Master (played by the recently deceased Roger Delgado), with the villainous Time Lord sacrificing his life to save the Doctor. The railway station at which Sarah Jane arrives in Part One is Mortimer, near Reading. Producer and director Barry Letts later said in an interview in 2004 that he was unhappy with the scenes on Metebelis, which "never looked right". Cast notes Ysanne Churchman had provided the voice of Alpha Centauri in both The Curse of Peladon (1972) and its sequel The Monster of Peladon (the serial immediately preceding Planet of the Spiders); she would briefly reprise the role in "Empress of Mars" (2017). Kismet Delgado, the widow of Roger Delgado, was one of the voices for the Spiders. Carl Forgione would later play Nimrod in Ghost Light (1989). Christopher Burgess had previously played Swann in The Enemy of the World (1968). John Dearth had provided the voice of the computer, BOSS, in The Green Death (1973). Broadcast and reception The story was edited and condensed into a single omnibus episode broadcast on BBC1 at 2:45 pm on 27 December 1974, reaching 8.6 million viewers. The compilation was included on the DVD release of the complete story. 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." However, they felt that the regeneration scene "almost atones for this". In 2010, Patrick Mulkern of Radio Times awarded it four stars out of five. He praised the regeneration and wrote that the