Doctor Who has long been my favorite show, but my actual viewing it over the years has been very on-again / off-again. Lately, it’s been all-on, as I’m actually closing in on finishing re-watching all of the classic episodes (at least the ones that are easily available for me to stream), whilst blogging about each serial.
A little while ago I wrote about The Chase, another First Doctor story from just a bit later this same season. It occurs to me that taken together, The Web Planet and The Chase capture something that I love about Doctor Who: even though neither story is particularly good drama, they both represent the utter audacity of the show’s ambitions. The Chase shows us how there are just no limits as to where or when the series could take us, and The Web Planet displays the absolute nuttiness of what we might see when we get there.
Seriously, you just have to remember that people sat around the Doctor Who production office in the mid 1960s and looked at a script that featured not one, not two, not three, but four different giant bug-based creatures and said, “Yes! We should definitely make that!” If that’s not audacious, I don’t know what is.
The Web Planet
Starring William Hartnell as the First Doctor.
Companions: William Russell as Ian Chesterton, Jacqueline Hill as Barbara Wright and Maureen O’Brien as Vicki.
Written by Bill Strutton. Directed by Richard Martin. Produced by Verity Lambert. Story Edited by Dennis Spooner.
Format: 6 episodes, each about 25 minutes long (individually named The Web Planet, The Zarbi, Escape to Danger, Crater of Needles, Invasion, and The Centre)
Originally Aired: February – March 1965 (Episodes 16-21 of Season 2)
Spoilers Ahead!
The Web Planet is one of those stories that is on pretty much nobody’s list of favorite Doctor Who serials, or even Doctor Who First Doctor stories. The most common complaint is just how far the show’s production capabilities fell short of its production ambitions.
And certainly, this is a justifiable complaint. After all this is meant to be a desolate alien world with a strange atmosphere, for instance, but it’s obviously a soundstage with some background art and distorted lenses (which may or may not have had vaseline smeared on them as well). The main guest characters are meant to be giant butterfly-like creatures, but they’re obviously actors in pudgy suits who habitually do funny movements with their hands.
The main monsters are meant to be humongous ants, but they are obviously guys with totally normal human legs walking around with big ant prosthetics over their bodies. And the story’s big bad, the Animus is supposed to be some sort of ancient power with the physical form of some sort of spider/plant/octopus hybrid, but it looks like an elaborate prop made of construction paper.
Even comparatively mundane concepts like a the ground giving way beneath someone’s feet are clunky. And maybe my favorite implausible bit of production is the realisation of the primitive “Optera” (the unevolved forms of the butterfly people), who out of all the non-humanoid aliens featured in the serial have a particularly foam-rubber looking costume, and hop around unconvincingly in an effort to simulate some sort of grub-like movement.
But with all of that, I kind of enjoy the serial’s look. Nothing looks real, but it all looks wondrous and full of imagination. I like the way that the planet Vortis doesn’t look lit like a normal place. I like the use of the background paintings (or whatever) that are employed to make it seem like the terrain stretches out endlessly in the distance. And I like the way the serial just goes all-in on creating its alien life forms. This is a planet populated by giant bugs, and so by golly, the show is going to give us giant bugs. And a lot of them.
It’s even going to show them fly, which is pretty neat.
It’s limited to one extensive scene in the middle of the story, but it’s still pretty well directed and some good fun, and definitely an example of that audacity that I was mentioning earlier.
I think one’s reaction to all this has a lot to do with what you are coming to the show for. You want special effects that are impressive enough to “fool” a modern day audience watching this thing on high definition devices? Well, you’re in the wrong place. You want a show that isn’t afraid to let its limitations prevent it from reaching for the stars? Well come in and make yourself at home.
But even with this very forgiving attitude toward the show’s production values, The Web Planet is not what you call a good serial. The problems rest, as they so often do, with the actual script.
What is actually going on in the story is not bad. The TARDIS is drawn to a planet by a mysterious power. That power, the Animus, has taken over the normally docile Zarbi (giant ants) and turned them into a vicious army, driving the dominant life form, the Menoptra (the Butterfly people), off world. And now a small advanced force of Menoptra are back, hoping to take their world back.
So the issue isn’t the plot, specifically, but the pacing. Things happen very slowly, particularly in the early episodes. So often you just feel like you are watching the four leads just kind of wander around and look around. I classically like it when the show includes stuff like that (a particular quality of the First Doctor’s era) but not for multiple episodes. The second part, The Zarbi, is the worst–everyone is split up and one after the other they get caught by Zarbi.
It’s all very slow and very repetitive, with very little actually progressing in the plot.
It picks up as it goes along, and there’s even a somewhat profound moment when the Menoptra Prapillus is convincing his colleagues that they should trust Barbara. He tells their story quite poetically, saying, “…the Menoptra have no wisdom for war. Before the Animus came, the flower forest covered the planet in a cocoon of peace. our ancestors carved temples like this for resting places of our dead, but that was all the work we did.” He goes on to say that, “Our banishment has taught us of enemies and weapons, and my captivity has taught me strategy. They tore my wings from me and I felt, as you feel, that all was lost. But if their gods favour our survival, we must learn their lesson and use our brains and not our wings. This earth woman we must trust, for she can show us how to exist without wings, to survive and flourish.” That’s some nice stuff.
But then it gets to the climax and things fall apart again. The whole lead-up to the big face off with the Animus has to do with Ian Barbara, and the Doctor and Vicki, all in their own little storylines, all facing different obstacles as they make their way to “the Centre.” The Doctor and Vicki get their first and just end up being prisoners.
Barbara gets there next and the special Menoptra weapon she’s carrying doesn’t work. Ian arrives last and does literally nothing.
Then Barbara falls over and drops the weapon onto the Animus, and the Animus dies. It’s an incredibly unsatisfying payoff to all that story, a big let-down after watching everyone’s struggle to get to this place to have them all do almost nothing.
The Web Planet is an interesting story to evaluate from a performance point of view. All the regulars have their moments, including Ian reaction to the sacrifice of the Nemini and the Doctor’s various face-offs the Animus via the little cone of silence he gets put into regularly. But it’s Jacqueline Hill’s Barbara who shines the most here, in scenes with the Menoptra like the one I mentioned above.
Aside from the leads, this is the only story in Doctor Who‘s televised history in which the entire guest guest are non-humanoids (unless you count The Edge of Destruction, which had no guests at all). Thus trying to evaluate the guest performances of the actors who play the Menoptra or the Optera is a bit of a funny task, as they are all so stylised. The “insect movements” are credited to Roslyn De Winter, who also played Vrestin.
She was apparently a choreographer who was hired to develop the Menoptra’s speech patterns and movements before she was cast in the main guest role. And she’s fine, as are all the other Menoptra, as far as I can rate them. But I think any time you have a bunch of aliens with a majorly affected behaviour and vocal ticks, like these guys have, it’s always going to be a bit distracting. And that’s the result here.
So if you look at The Web Planet from the right perspective, you can find things to appreciate. But you have to be willing to see past the many well-intentioned but inadequate production elements (and I can certainly understand if some people in the modern audience are too tripped up by them to keep going), the tedious story pace, and the underwhelming climax. If you can do all that, then you’ll probably love this one!
Other Thoughts
• Jacqueline Hill doesn’t appear in the third episode, Escape to Danger, and she is not credited for it either. By all accounts she was not happy about it. She was absent from a couple of episodes of The Sensorites as well, but was still credited there (as was William Hartnell whenever he took a week off).
• In a fun bit of continuity, the bracelet that Barbara got from Nero in The Romans (the previous serial) shows up as a minor plot point in this one, including the fact that Vicki doesn’t know that Barbara ever went to Rome.
• In a bit of excessive bit of continuity, there are a lot of references to Coal Hill School, where Ian and Barbara worked in An Unearthly Child, specifically with Ian’s school tie which he seems to have been pretty attached to.
• One of the few sets of characters in any story that I actively “ship” are Ian and Barbara. Expanded universe media makes it pretty clear that they get married later on, but the series itself never addressed this. There aren’t anywhere near the number of “bits of evidence” that they are a couple or will be a couple in this story as there were in say, The Chase, but one minor moment that pops up is when Barbara tells Vicki about the bracelet mentioned above and that it was a gift, and Vicki’s automatic assumption is that it was from Ian.
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