13: The Web Planet

Before Watching

I have such mixed feelings going into this one. On the plus side it is one of my old Hartnell hit list of stories I really wanted to see if I ever got any chance to do so. It’s another space/aliens/monster story, and these are what Doctor Who’s success was built on.

On the other hand, I do recall reading the Bill Strutton novelisation of his own script. Doctor Who and The Zarbi was the second novelisation ever published, in 1965. My primary school had a hardback copy of both this, and the slightly earlier Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks. I enjoyed the Dalek book when I read it, but my reaction to “Doctor Who and the Zarbi” was, and I quote – what was that load of rubbish all about? – Well, to be fair, I was 9 or 10 at the time. At around about the same time I read the first Doctor Who annual, which had stories featuring Sensorites, Voord and also Menoptera and Zarbi. I thought that the Zarbi in the story were just dumb, and the Menoptera got on my wick.

While we’re at it, very little of what I’ve read about The Web Planet is complimentary either, and the photos I’ve seen from it – well, either they don’t do the production any favours, or the whole thing looks a bit ridiculous. Not that I am biased, you understand.

After Watching

Well, what can you possibly say about that? That hasn’t already been said, I mean? One half of me kind of almost wants to watch it all over again just to prove to myself that I wasn’t hallucinating, and it really was like I think it was – while the other half of me is saying – over my dead body.

Now, this isn’t the first time that Doctor Who has featured giant insects. We had one earlier in the season in “Planet of the Giants”, and we’ll have them again in such future delights as “The Green Death” and “The Ark In Space”. Lots of people find normally sized insects rather unsettling, so giant ones are something of a natural choice for a show such as Doctor Who. The problem is, though, that giant insects are very difficult to do convincingly, especially if your special effects budget amounts to the equivalent of tuppence ha’penny and a used bus ticket. So, while the Zarbi bodies aren’t bad, they only ever use one set of legs, and that set of legs are unmistakably human legs. I rather like the menoptera masks, but their bee/butterfly costumes aren’t the best. Then there’s the optera. Pedantry corner. You can understand the name Menoptera. Optera comes from the greek for –wings. So either the idea behind them is an English/Greek hybrid word for men-insects with wings – which is fine – or its meant as a shortening of Hymenoptera – the family of insects including bees and wasps. Again – that’s fine. Now, when Ian and Vrestin find the regressed species descended from menoptera that live beneath the surface, they call them optera. Which means wings – which they don’t have! It’s an irony which I don’t believe for one minute is intentional – and it’s like calling a race of blind aliens the Eyeballs.

Oh, and the optera costumes are terrible too.

How often do we see the Doctor and the crew take it for granted that the atmosphere on a planet on which they land is breathable? Alright, they might check it but it’s a pretty good bet that it will be breathable. So it was a bit of a surprise when it turned out that the atmosphere of Vortis, the ‘web’ planet of the title, is very thin, and so Ian and the Doctor go out in their special breathing anoraks. Just the first clue that “The Web Planet” is Doctor Who, but not as we know it. The breathing anoraks run out of air, and our heroes nearly die from lack of oxygen. Then they recover and we hear no more about it.

The plot is relatively straightforward. Vortis is a planet in habited by giant antlike creatures called the Zarbi. Normally stupid and harmless creatures, the Zarbi are under control of an entity called the Animus. Animus is Latin for mind, and so it’s an appropriate name for a creature that controls the minds of others. So at least Bill Strutton knows his Latin, even if he’s a wee bit shaky on Greek. An a way, the animus reminds me a little bit of the Great Intelligence in the two Troughton yeti stories, and the Nestene Consciousness in the two Jon Pertwee auton stories. Both of them also use proxies to do their dirty work, although the Animus, like the Nestene, does have a body, unlike the Great Intelligence.

The formerly dominant species of Vortis are the Menoptera. These are hybrid bee/butterfly/men in suits creatures. They plan to invade Vortis to defeat whatever is controlling the Zarbi, and win back their planet. The Doctor  and the companions become involved with an advance party of Menoptera, and after winning their friendship, do their best to aid them to defeat the Animus.

Is there a lot more to it than that? I didn’t see an awful lot more to it, I will confess. There’s the usual plot device of the crew splitting up. As with “The Romans”, Vicki and the Doctor make one team, while the Ian and Barbara team is soon split up, and the two of them have to fend for themselves. If the script and the director are both very good, then this can work extremely well. If they’re not, then it can make for a tediously episodic story, and to an extent that’s what we are dealing with in “The Web Planet.

Yes, I know, this was made in the mid 60s, and I will admit that there are aspects of it that almost pull it off. All the shots on the surface of Vortis are shot with some fairly heavy filters on the cameras. Now, I know that there is a story that they actually had Vaseline smeared over the lenses, but my industry insiders say that this was highly unlikely to be the case, since it would have ruined the expensive cameras. However it was done, it does give the shots on the surface eerie fuzzy edges, which does add to the feeling of unworldliness that the team were trying to achieve.

There are moments when the production heaves its bulk out of the mire of its own making. Flight is a motif which recurs throughout the story. Now, I could point out that thin atmospheres and winged flight really don’t mix, but that would be churlish. At one point Barbara asks one of the wounded Menoptera, whose wings were destroyed in a fight with the Zarbi whether his wings will grow back, and he replies that he will never fly again, and there is such real pathos in that moment that you can see just how important flight is to the Menoptera, and what it means to be a Menoptera who has been denied the right to fly. Speaking of which, there were just a couple of shots of the Menoptera flying which despite myself I found rather impressive. One jumps off a ledge just as he’s about to be caught by a Zarbi, and there’s another shot of Menoptera from the main invasion party landing.

While I liked the fact that the production tries so hard to make the Menoptera seem more insectoid by the way they speak, and the way they move (I don’t need to mention the credit “Insect Movements by Roslyn de Winter” credit, since everybody else who’s ever written about this story has already done so) it just starts off weird, and then becomes bloody annoying after a while. Making another point about the way they speak as well, I don’t get why they insist on calling Ian ‘Herron’ and Barbara ‘Abara’. I mean, it’s not as if these would be Menopterised versions of Ian and Barbara – for they sound nothing like the names the Menoptera have for themselves – they have names like Vlasta and Vrestin. Yes, nitpicking again.

With so much that is unusual and atypical about “The Web Planet”, I have to ask myself why I didn’t enjoy it a lot more, and why I couldn’t accept it for what it was, rather than pull it apart for what it wasn’t. I think I can boil it down to a number of things : -

* I think that I read once that this is the only story with no humanoid characters other than the TARDIS regulars. I can only imagine the terrible demands that this made on the costume department. Now, the Menoptera are good – I like the individual masks especially, but they don’t exactly blow your socks off – and I doubt that they removed much footwear back in 1965 when it was first broadcast either. The Zarbi are a pretty decent attempt at doing a giant antlike creature in a costume which an actor can wear – but – and here’s the rub – they are just not frightening. They make some weird noises whenever they are near, and they bump into each other, and that’s about it. Now, you can have mindless monsters that never speak which can be frightening if you make them relentless and unstoppable. Neither can be said of the Zarbi. They have what are called larva guns. These are rather woodlousey looking creatures which scuttle along, firing nastiness from what I can only assume is their proboscis. They look rather pathetic, although not as pathetic as the optera. Speaking of the optera, I couldn’t believe the way that they moved – bouncing around like people in a sack race.

* It’s a six parter, and it’s clearly too long. You could edit away a good half hour of this, and if you did it carefully nobody would be any the wiser.

* The story really isn’t great. It’s the sort of thing which you can end up with when you have a putative script discussion like the hypothetical one below –

“Bill, insects are frightening. Giant insects even more so. Can you write us a giant insect story?”

“I suppose. What’s in it?”

“Giant insects.”

“No, I mean yes, but, what’s happening in it?”

“Giant insects.”

“Ok, but like, is there any theme I can explore?”

“Giant insects”.

Which is why, dear friends, what we have in the web planet is a story about a plentiful of giant insects. And not a great deal more.

What Have We learned?

Don’t pull the wings off a Menoptera. It’s cruel and they get very depressed.

Either the Menoptera are hermaphrodites, or their males are the only species in the Universe immune to Barbara’s charms.