The Web Planet
(Season 2, Dr 1 with Heiron, Arbara and Vicki, 13/2/1965-20/3/1965, producer: Verity Lambert, script editor: Dennis Spooner, writer: Bill Strutton, director: Richard Martin)
Rank: 84
'I know you thought the giant ants were big but they're still the insects on this planet - you should see the eleph-ants. Zarbtrumpet! Ick! Ick! Ick!'
‘The Web Planet’ is my candidate for the single most misunderstood episode of ‘old’ 20th century Who. For your average fan this is the story they can’t bear, creaky slow and full of six foot ants that talk in bleeps rather than words in a wonky production made in such a hurry that they even leave in the moment when the local monster trips over the camera and knocks it over so it looks at the ceiling. I know where they’re coming from: ‘The Web Planet’ has less plot than perhaps any other 1st Dr story – despite running to six whole episodes – while to modern eyes the costumes and props are as amateurish as Dr Who ever got. But oh the potential makes up for all of that: of all the many weird and wonderful alien worlds DW visits in its sixty-plus years this is the one that’s most weirdly alien and in many ways the most wonderful. Dr Who is a series that has the freedom to do absolutely anything, but such are the restrictions of television budget and taste that it all too rarely gets to explore those boundaries fully. ‘The Web Planet’ is the most ‘anything’ in the series’ entire history and the fact it doesn’t always work is the reason we didn’t get more stories like it. But oh the thrill of that ‘anything’ - especially if you come to it after yet another base under siege story, or the Doctor and UNIT on Earth or another Moffaty timey wimey story where the series falls into something of a rut – when it’s unlike ‘anything’ ever seen on television before, is a thrill indeed. For there will never be a story quite like ‘The Web Planet’, an attempt to re-create an entire alien world that is absolutely nothing like ours, in a cramped TV stage at Riverside studios. Part of the fun of early Dr Whos is dropping the Doctor and co ‘inside’ another TV series and watching them cope – this one is a wildlife documentary, only the wildlife are ‘our’ size. Lots of scifi B movies make insects lifesize (particularly ‘The Fly’) but only Dr Who thinks to make them quite this ‘Human’ and see life from their point of view.
Which is a bit ironic
because this is, famously, the only Dr Who story where there are no humanoids
at all other than the regular cast (though a few Dalek stories cut it close)
and where the closest thing to ‘normal’ we see all story is acclaimed classical
actor Martin Jarvis dressed as a six foot butterfly. This is a world whose sets
aren’t the usual buildings and screaming jungles but a barren land of craters
and underground caves that look like more like the surface of all those planets
that are out there for real than anything else we ever see on telly. Those
aren’t familiar life-affirming water but pools of acid strewn across the planet
surface, strong enough to disintegrate Ian’s Coal Hill school tie. There’s even
an ‘atmosphere’, thanks to the brave decision to smear the camera with
Vaseline, so that everything we see takes place in a heat haze-type blur (this
is the only Dr Who story that looked better on video than it does on DVD, as
the digital effects assumed it was a defect and ‘cleaned’ it up – it took a
long time to put right again and still doesn’t look as smeary as my old copy
did). It’s a land where the local species all have their own distinct languages
and names for things and struggle with English (the Tardis translator circuits
apparently on the blink – the ship did crash with quite a thump after all). The
Menoptera (those giant butterflies) are so confused by human names they come
with their own approximations ‘Arbera’ ‘Heiron’ and ‘Vricki’, though weirdly
they seem to get the Doctor’s right. There’s no incidental score as such for
this story – just a few snatches of musique concrete from French avant garde
specialists Le Structure Sonare, a Verity Lambert discovery who – for all of
five minutes – were originally booked to do the Dr Who theme tune. Their eerie
sounds and special effects (using glass rods and steel bars ‘played’ like normal
instruments) really add to the feeling that you’ve just travelled across the
universe for two and a half hours (though an attempt to save on the budget and
make sure Rosalyn de Winter had music to orchestrate some wing-waving to in
reality, it’s a really good move and one a lot of future stories will copy, but
never with as much success I don’t thin. If only because no other Dr Who alien
world demands a soundtrack as weird as this one). And then there’s the Zarbi,
giant ants that scurry across the floor and a species so alien they don’t even communicate
in a way we can understand, driven by an ant-like need to survive and stalk
their prey who can’t be reasoned with or shouted at the way the Doctor usually
solves the day. While the series goes to other places that are alien and
strange they usually leave you some foothold so you can imagine what it might
be like to be on a distant world. Here there’s nothing: everything is weird,
everything is blurry, every rule is broken. There are long passages where
nobody says anything ‘normal’ at all, other scenes where ‘people’ only talk in
bloops or an alien tongue and times when ‘normal’ for this world is a seven
foot butterfly on the run from a six foot ant. Even for a series that recently
shrunk our heroes to the size of butterflies and ants (‘Planet Of Giants’) this is truly weird.
Granted this is only the
13th ever Dr Who story total so there isn’t a set formula to break yet and
every story has been impressively different to the last (any other series,
getting a surprise hit with The Daleks, would have introduced seventeen Dalek
knock-offs and gone off air the first or second year), but ‘The Web Planet’
goes further, breaking the mould in every possible way it can, pushing the
envelope of everything that this most elastic format could possibly do – and
why not? The reason ‘The Daleks’ was
such a big hit was because it was nothing like anything anyone had ever seen on
television before and pushed everyone making it to do things they would never
normally think of. No other mainstream series would ever dare try something
quite this bold or inventive. Like everything bold or inventive, though, a lot
of fans just don’t get it and see a story that refuses to play ball in a way
they understand. There are times when it looks as if you’re watching a
playgroup nativity (albeit one with an insect theme) as an under-rehearsed cast
do lots of unlikely things, from chanting ‘ick ick ick ick Zarrrrrbi!’, flying
across the set on kirby wires or trying not to knock over the poor Dalek
operators who have been roped into carrying a six foot ant costume on their
back. How you feel about this story falls into two camps: whether you see the
death of Nemini, a sweet Optera grub (yes grub) hurling herself into a wall to
plug a pool of acid and save her brethren as one of the most selfless heroic
acts of bravery in the entire series or the laughable sight of an actress in a zipped
up sleeping bag dressed to look like a
five foot woddlouse waving their bottom in their air as they endure their death
throws. The thing about ‘The Web Planet’ though is that it can be both, simultaneously.
The whole story is like that: it’s a tale of high emotion and drama better than
anything Shakespeare ever wrote, delivered as a colourful pantomime (and yes
even though we’re in monochrome, this is still clearly a highly colourful
story).
A lot of fans just see
the silliness but there’s a seriousness behind this story too. Author Bill
Strutton had scored a big hit in the late 1950s with detective story ‘The
Secret Invaders’ and had gone on to be a pioneer of television, co-creating the
sadly lost 1960s series ‘R’ (which is very much a ‘Doomwatch’ prototype about
the dangers of scientists meddling with nature – you think Dr Who had it bad
archives-wise but only a minute survives, out of a twenty-five episode run and
that’s the trailer which went out after something else). He knew absolutely
nothing about science-fiction but became hooked by The Daleks and told his
agent he’d like to have a go at something similar so they rang Verity Lambert
up and offered his services. He was the biggest name Dr Who had yet had writing
for it, but they realised his tale of robots on a distant world was a bit too
close to The Daleks so asked him if he had any other ideas. The informal
conversation led to earliest memories when Bill mentioned his first memory was
of being a toddler watching two bull-ants fighting in an empty can of kerosene
(quite what a toddler was doing next to a can of kerosene and surrounded by
insects is another matter, but then he did grow up in Australia at a time when
parenting was a bit more lax than it is now!) Bill tried to prise them apart
and was shocked when they both immediately joined forces and bit him. It was
the first time he’s realised that there was more to life than humans and that
it was going on all around him in the Australian outback, in lives parallel to
his. He’d also been reminded of that fight to the death lately as he had two
little ones, aged six and four, who always seemed to have each other in a
headlock and had idly wondered if it was a universal fact of nature that
happened to all species too. As strange and bizarre as this story seems,
scientifically it may well be the most believable one of them all: after all,
we know that ants can live in the most impossible conditions on our world and
that they have a civilisation utterly alien to ours so why not make them a bit
bigger taking over a whole planet? That’s actually more realistic than a bunch
of people talking to green mutated blobs in tanks after a nuclear war or a
potatoheaded clone race hunting a green blob. At the time it made sense – so
much sense that after seeing the specially shot trailer episode one of ‘The Web
Planet’ was watched by 13.5 million viewers, a ridiculously high number at a
time when a sizeable minority of households still didn’t have a television
(albeit with less choice around for those who did) and it’s a record that won’t
be broken for a decade and ‘The Ark In Space’
episode two (which features a giant wasp! Funny how popular they seem to be
with the general viewing public. One of the highest viewed ‘modern’ series
episodes, Christmas specials aside, is ‘Planet
Of The Dead’ which features a giant alien fly). It’s only since, now Dr Who
has metamorphosised to being less about exploring alien worlds and customs and
more about plot and morals that this story looks a bit weird. Well, OK a lot
weird – this is, after all, the Dr Who story with the single best credit in the
show’s history (Roslyn De Winter for ‘choreography and insect movement’ – the
Menoptera actors would stay behind in rehearsals for extra ‘wing waving’
practice from a ballet dancer who taught them how to move their arms).
It’s also home to one of
my favourite Dr Who anecdotes: rising star Martin Jarvis was overjoyed to win
this role, courtesy of having worked with and impressed the girlfriend of this
story’s director Richard Martin on stage in a West End production of ‘Poor
Bitos’. The future world famous thespian had been itching to break into TV and
so far his only part had been the tiniest of walk-ons in BBC anthology
‘Kipling’ (about the author Rudyard, not the cakes). This was an actual meat
role, sold to him as an exiled prince who was trying to avenge the death of his
father. Jarvis boasted to all his friends and family and told them the dates of
when to tune in and eagerly set about learning his lines. He was most
astonished when a letter came through the post inviting him to as ‘wing
fitting’ and found out that he would be dressed up as a giant butterfly! Even
so, he’s really good – already a star even behind a thick mask and a sort of
Humpty Dumpty padding. In fact the cast are strong all round: it’s unusual to
have so many strong female roles in this era of Dr Who but Catherine Fleming
(as the eerie voice of the main baddy, the Animus), Rosalyn De Winter (chief Menoptera
and choreographer), Anne Gordon (fellow butterfly Hrostar) and Barbara Joss
(doomed Opteras Nemini) are all top notch, especially considering that under
that heavy a mask their personalities really all come down to their voice and
their flailing arms. The regulars too are superb and they do what the best of
the Doctor’s companions do: get to know the people of this world and the help
them right their wrongs and overthrow their captors, while undergoing crisis of
their own that reflect how we would feel in such impossible situation. It feels
as if they’re in real danger in this story too, after sleepwalking through a
couple of the previous ones this series: the Doctor being possessed by the
Zarbi really feels dangerous (after all, we know the Doctor can defeat
conquering alien armies, but we’ve never seen him up against a culture this
alien and strange before), while Barbara having her hands ‘glued’ by the Venom
Grubs so she can’t ‘fly away’ while her captors talk about all the chilling
things that are likely to happen to them is truly horrifying despite being told
to us by a man in a butterfly suit. Legend has it that the frustrations of
making this story is what caused William Russell to hand in his notice (he does
say the line ‘there’s no end to it!’ with an awful lot of gusto!) and William
Hartnell spent it continually grumpy even for him (usually directors would let
him walk his own way through the set and get the cameras to follow, but this
time everyone had to hit their marks or the Zarbi actors – who couldn’t see –
would run into the cast and knock them over).
In fact ‘The Web Planet’
is one of the most horrifying Dr Who stories of them all, for good reason, two
foes in a fight to the death. This is, in a sense, another cold war story.
Script editor Dennis Spooner assumed from the first that this story was about
America and Russia, with the United States the ‘free enterprise’ capitalists
who weren’t used to working together and had their wings clipped or been forced
to burrow underground for safety, while the Zarbi are the communist Soviet
Union, mindless drones controlled by a central intelligence. That sort of works
up to a point – the Zarbi (named by Bill’s ex-wife Margueritte when he couldn’t
think of anything suitable) are naturally placid creatures who wouldn’t
normally hurt a fly (not even a Human sized one) but have been brainwashed by
the animus ‘hairdryer’ into working only for it, in a web that spreads across
Vortis’ surface much like maps showcasing the ‘communist threat’ (the official
name for the ground it’s taken, ‘the carsinome’, means ‘a spreading cancer’). However
it’s a very ‘Russian’ communist threat where rather than a Robin Hood taking
from the rich to give to the poor, instead the poor keep giving to a regime
that never spits out anything back. The animus absorbs everything the prisoner
of war butterflies supply it with: territory, riches, energy, culture, food. It
is, to a degree, an alien version of ‘Animal Farm’, the George Orwell classic
that portrays Russian leaders in terms of farmyard animals: it’s not that big a
leap to portray them as alien insects. It
gets a bit weird when it comes to the butterflies though who aren’t the plucky
hard-working but gullible masses walking to their doom Orwell portrays: they’re
a race of pacifists who haven’t quite got their act together to fight back yet,
which doesn’t really sound like America or Britain. They do the very American
thing of creating a weapon (an ‘isop-tope’) that’s designed to wipe their
enemies out but in every other respect they’re a pacifist race who haven’t got
the first clue how to fight back (Strutton clearly thought every Dr Who story
was like ‘The Daleks’. The Menoptera are Thals right down to the interesting
stripes they wear). There’s also a curious sub-plot never explained, where gold
is magnetic o this planet and the animus seizes both Ian’s gold pen and
Barbara’s gold bracelet (given to her by Emperor Nero in the previous story,
written by Spooner himself – a rare early example of a plot point crossing
between stories).A lot of modern fans have assumed it too, not least because
the cold war is lurking behind most of the ‘classic’ stories (although nobody
hoarded more gold and treasure than the Nazis, a lot of it still buried and
missing to this day). Spooner wasn’t the
only person to think it either: ‘The Web Planet’ became the first Dr Who story
mentioned in The House of Lords, in a debate about productivity by the earl of
Bessborough (who had clearly never worked a proper day in his life) complaining
that American workers were four times more productive than Brits and wondering
if ‘they could learn something rom Dr Who’s Zarbi’ (a slight misreading of the
story there given they’re brainwashed drones!)
However I’ve always seen
it as being about a different war, WWII. Strutton, you see, signed up as a
soldier the minute he was eligible and travelled to lots of different countries
with a zealous urge to fight ‘the enemy’. But the more he travelled the more he
learned that actually his ‘enemy’ were people just like him, whipped up to
fight by their governments in a similar way he had been. He found a lot more in
common with the ordinary people he met than the officials giving order on both
sides. So he resigned from the army – only for war to break out and everyone
his age to be conscripted. Given his experience he was sent on all sorts of
early dangerous missions, including one fighting the Nazis in Crete (now you
see why the Nazi Daleks had such an impact on him). Strutton’s plane was shot
down and he was captured and placed in a prisoner of war camp, Stalag VII, for
four long years. One just like ‘The Crater Of Needles’ in this story but in an
alien country rather than an alien planet. It was there he became a writer,
with nothing else to do but work on a camp newspaper (‘Focus’) and a bunch of
contacts who helped give him his publishing breakthrough after the war. You
never forget such a large and scary chunk of your life though and it was only
twenty odd years before ‘The Web Planet’.
So yes the butterflies are the Americans (and Brits and Australians like
Bill) but the Zarbi are the Germans, all following Hitler blindly. The
butterflies are him and his buddies who are used to flying in planes but have
(quite literally in this case) had their wings clipped, stuck on Earth for the
foreseeable future. Bill himself is most likely Hilio, the young arrival
idealist who believes in thrashing the enemy at all costs, while Vrestin is the
old hand who calms him down and shows him how futile resistance is, while
others go ‘underground’ ashamed by the fact they used to fly (while tunnelling
is the most obvious escape route at any camp). Or maybe the author identified
most with Hrostar, the hero who’s wings are burned off in a truly haunting
sequence. Like the Menoptera the author was at the mercy of strangers who
appeared to be brainwashed, who not only didn’t think like him but couldn’t
even speak the same language; indeed, language was his ‘escape’ as he learnt
how to talk through the other nationalities trapped there and work together.
Learning how to speak to his fellow captors and guards in grunts and
monosyllables must have seemed very like what happens to the Tardis regulars
when they’re taken prisoner by the Menoptera, while the small details – such as
their hands being tied and dosed with a substance that sets them together – is
the sort of detail only someone who had been through the real thing would think
to add. So all the butterfly explorers can do is gaze back at the moon where
they came from, Pictos, and dream they were back home. Some critics wonder why
the Menoptera, fighting for their life, come to immediately trust the regulars
and see it as lazy writing but actually I think it’s deliberate. In a prisoner
of war camp the enemy of your enemy is your friend and it doesn’t matter if
your cellmate is a Brit, a Frenchman, an American or a Russian (they were on the
same side back then after all, strange as that is to think given what happens
later) they are automatically your pal. The Menoptera see people who don’t look
like ants and that’s good enough for them. Overthrowing the Zarbi, then, of
puncturing the Animus where it hurts and dissolving it (although that actual
shot got taken out by producer Verity, who admitted that without proper
dialogue she couldn’t work out what was happening) must have felt like a wish
fulfilment from someone who dreamed every night for years of overthrowing the
drone-like Nazis in charge, running around mindlessly and following orders
like, well, ants (what with the Daleks as Nazis as well you begin to wonder if
we would even have had Dr Who at all without Hitler).
For the writer, and
indeed a lot of the audience at home who’d lived through a time when they might
well have ended up adrift and trapped in a culture every bit as alien as what
we see here, this was no joke however much modern fans assume this story to be,
even with the giant comedy ants tripping over and beeping like a rap remix of a
car alarm. There is no easy route off this world (well, not until the Tardis
materialises back again anyway) and Strutton is particularly good at evoking
that feeling of being trapped. We see the Optera burrow underground because
they can’t bear the light: it reminds them too much of the freedom their
ancestors had. The Menoptera stare up at the moon and sigh, their wings
drooping. Even team Tardis feel more like prisoners than explorers this week.
Most of these early stories spend half the plot taking the Tardis away from
them or one of them away from the Tardis so they don’t simply get back in and
go somewhere else but few do it quite as comprehensively as this one does.
There’s a fabulous first episode cliffhanger where Vicki accidentally jolts the
Tardis into a take-off and the 1st Doctor, always calm always in
control always carrying on regardless, looks terrified for the first time since
we’ve known him. ‘My ship’ he gasps ‘My Tardis’. Even he struggles against the
Animus, possessed by a giant hairdryer that drops down from the ceiling to
drain his mind, in a scene that reflects a real WWII torture chamber (note how
sleepy and ‘drugged’ the characters seem after being processed by it, as if they’ve
been drugged and deprived of sleep). Only by coming together, by co-ordinating
an attack on the Zarbi and inspiring a group of people who seemed to have no
fight in them do our friends escape this terrible world, something that Bill
must have dreamed of playing out all the time in captivity when he had little
to do but let his mind wander.
Interestingly the
regulars who have to an extent breezed through their recent stories (especially
the farce of ‘The Romans’) are
changed by their experience. Barbara discovers the sort of reserve she would
never have discovered as a ‘normal’ schoolteacher, rallying troops of
butterflies and coming up with battle tactics that would impress a hardened
general. Ian has always been shown to be brave and resourceful but there’s a
grimness to his fighting back we don’t often see here and an exasperation and
impatience with a group of butterflies who have given up. Vicki especially is
re-written as a more complex character – terrified out of her wits but still a
lot braver and less wimpy than Susan was ever given the chance to be (given
that Ian and Barbara’s greatest character strength is their calmness in the
face of danger and the Doctor is meant to be able to handle everything, this is
new territory all round and something copied in most Dr Who stories to come).
Of course, after being scared out of her wits, it’s also totally in character
that she adopts a Zarbi and calls him ‘Zombo’ – truly, we should have more
companions like her in Dr Who. Only the Dr gets little to do, but even that
pushes Hartnell to find news ways of playing this Doctor, who has no-one to
mouth off at. The Doctor learns to do the first of his ‘stringing along the bad
guys long enough to work out a solution’ idea that will become a regular in the
future but for a time even he seems to doubt he can get everyone back home
again. There’s even a great scene of the Tardis in trouble where the console
spins right round, something it was designed to do with every takeoff (but cut
for budgetary and technical purposes) yet we never see it do before or since.
Throughout there’s the feeling that the Animus is a being of real power that even
The Doctor is a bit afraid of for a change. Indeed he only saves the day
through his ‘ring’ – the original sonic screwdriver – which is used here more
than ever before (it stays to the end of Hartnell’s run bu slips off his finger
when he comes Patrick Troughton. It might well be on the Tardis floor
somewhere. Until cleanliness freak Mel Bush comes along maybe).
It’s unusual that we
spend more storytime talking to the victims rather than the oppressors
(everyone loves a baddy after all) but The Menoptera are one of Dr Who’s most
interesting, believable races (yes, even when dressed up like giant butterflies
and enunciating in Cod Shakespearian dialect): they’re a suppressed race who
were overthrown before they even realised what was happening and are now slaves
divided and conquered, separated and lonely, not knowing what has happened to
their brethren. The Zarbi aren’t as well drawn but then they’re not meant to
be: in contrast to the Menoptera who all have very different views on their
situation, they’ve stopped thinking and only follow orders (very Nazi Germany,
that). Along the way we get all sorts of loving details few other writers think
to create: John Wood is new to Who (a third set designer was added to take the
weight off Barry Newebury and Ray Cusick) but its 3/3 as he instantly ‘gets’
this show and makes a world like no other out of nothing more than wood and
some drapes (although admittedly you can hear people walk an obviously wooden
floor more than normal). this is a rare truly barren unbroken world that looks
just like the ones seen on the news, with no sign of civilisation (because the
Menoptera are new here and The Zarbi are content to scurry around without
building anything). This is also a rare planet with a moon just like ours, an
atmosphere too thin for humans normally. Strutton has even given some thought to
how a moon being pulled across the sky would affect a planet (which makes
walking a bit of a struggle for the Humans at first and explains why the Zarbi are
comparatively feeble given their size). I for one love the blurry Vaseline
effect (actually a specialised lens according to some sources, though some say
Vaseline was added on top) which really makes this world seem hot and exotic,
adding to the effect that this really is an alien world. Even the fact these
different races have different words for things is a bit of ‘realism’ that most
other stories lack, the author more concerned with creating a plausible alien
world than a functional bit of telly. There’s a logic to Vortis throughout that
makes it believable eve when it’s doing something stupid. For the most part
anyway.
Which shouldn’t be a
surprise. We know, from the animal documentaries he made later, that Bill had a
passion for animals ain general eco-systems in particular. ‘The Web Planet’ is
all about an invading force from outer space that have over taken a planet’s
natural eco-system and covered it with its own web and cobwebs, disrupting the
natural balance (although more usually it’s flora, fauna or small animals that
do this rather than insects. You only need to see ‘Planet Of Giants’ for what happens when
Humans meddle in nature though). This would explain, too, why the beings here
are so obsessed with light: this eco-system is so messed up that half of the
population can’t see the sun for cobwebs and the other half are underground. And
how can life grow without sunlight? As imaginative as it is, ‘The Web Planet’
is written with at least half an eye on real biological facts. Talking of
darkness, the problems with making these episodes meant many of them (especially
two and three) over-ran badly so the cast would have to make their way to their
dressing rooms in the dark, the lights officially switched off at 10pm.
They went through hell
making this story (not least the overpowering stench from the seaweed
decorations on set which only got worse under the studio lights) and never did
solve a lot of the logistical problems in having this much strangeness on set
in one go. For yes, even I have to admit that this is a story where the reach
outdoes the grasp. There are moments when this isn’t the bold story going on in
the script but bad children’s TV, one of those low budget shows like ‘Let’s
Pretend’ or ‘Playschool’ or ‘Why Don’t You?’ 9where Russell T Davies got his
first breakthrough) where you’re supposed to use your imagination at home and
are supposed to think that Brian ‘Dominator’ Cant and Jeremy ‘I’m going to kill
my agent when I get out of here’ Irons really are on an alien world when
they’re visibly in a studio surrounded by toy props. Even when this story is
good it’s agonisingly slow and almost comes to a full stop in the middle (for
modern viewers who have, well, ants in their pants - or maybe Zarbis in their
trousers - I can understand why this story gets such short shrift). There are
so many moments when you want the Menoptera to stop waving their arms about and
actually get on with it. The ‘venom grubs’ are perhaps an invention too far,
portable tanks that do nothing but shoot under Animus orders. The Optera are
completely stupid, obviously sewn together costumes and four fake arms (the
actors’ real ones are inside the bottom two if you hadn’t already guessed!) Only
the Menoptera actually look good and even then all that arm waving never quite
comes off and they all seem to have giant paunches that makes you wonder how they
could ever fly. Money clearly ran out before we reach the dome, which turns out
to be a cross between The Crystal Maze and a washing up bowl, with some pathetic
‘guns’ added at the side and clearly being worked by some por assistant behind
a curtain of webbing. After such a big buildup it’s a bit of an anticlimax, And
the Zarbi were the sort of thing that were never going to work in a month of
time-travelling Sundays – the BBC prop and costume department worked together
to come up with a giant ant suit (made out of fibreglass and worn as a sort of
suit of armour) that could be ‘worn’ on the actor’s back that’s a one hell of a
lot better than it has any right to be and yet still looks hopelessly daft. Four
were made in total, designed by Shawcraft Models who’d made the Daleks, to a
design by costumer Daphne Dare who also made eight Menoptera costumes (half of
them built with kirby wires for ‘flying’ that works a lot better than when they
try it again with fish people in ‘The
Underwater Menace’ and actually has something to do with the plot here).
The four Zarbi actors clearly wishing they were back in their nice safe stable
Dalek casings (at least they could sit down in those). The ending is a
particular let-down given that the Animus is now a ful grown set yet gets sent packing
with un-seeming haste given how slow the rest of the story has been (but then prisoner
of war stories have to end the same way, with the ‘hero’ outsider opening a
door and letting people escape. At least it’s faithful in that sense). There
are moments, specifically those where the camera/Zarbi run into something every
five minutes and the picture shakes and scenes where the entire dialogue
consists of the lines ‘Ick! Ick! Ick! Zaaaaarbeeeeee!’ when ‘The Web Planet’
seems like the stupidest thing that ever ended up on prime time UK telly. And
there are a lot of moments like that in this story, I have to say, where you
have to hold in your immediate need to chuckle so you can concentrate on what’s
there.
However where other fans
see total and utter stupidity I see courage and ambition, where other people
see a load of actors who should know better waving their arms around and
tackling giant ants I see a world that’s gloriously imaginatively alien. Where
others see a mess that should never have been tried I see a story that’s moving
and well told, one of Dr Who’s most emotional in many ways. I just also have a
sneaking secret wish that we’d lost this one, so that we could listen to the
soundtrack and imagine it instead rather than look at it and all the mistakes
that made it to air (alas one thing that was wiped is a fun sounding trailer
that showed the Zarbi turning up to BBC TV centre and being shown to their dressing
rooms! This was Verity’s ideas and so upset the director – who thought it had ‘given
away’ all his carefully panned ‘surprise shots’ they had a blazing row, which meant
this was his last Dr Who story. He has a point, although a lot of ‘original’
fans remember the trailer better than anything in the story and it certainly
boosted ratings). Had this story lived on only in people’s imagination, a
spooky atmospheric soundtrack and an ambitious script I suspect fans would be
talking about it in hushed tones (no doubt greeting it’s return with the same
half-disappointed response to ‘Tomb of the
Cybermen’ and ‘Enemy Of The World’). It
is, indeed, a story that fans tend to be more fond of if they came to it through
the novel first: what with Strutton being a writer he was an obvious person to
ask for the first batch of Target novels soon after transmission, which for a
quarter of century before the video release or the UK Gold repeat was the only
way a lot of fans got to know this story at all. It’s actually very faithful to
the TV script rather than adding another layer of imaginative, but the ideas
work a lot better in your head than on screen. Still, a zillion points for
ideas and ambition. ‘The Web Planet’ might just be the most Dr Who story ever,
one whose desire to tell a tale of a very alien world outreaches its grasp by
light years but whose ambition is so sky high that even as a ‘failure’ it’s a
brilliant bit of telly because you’ll never ever see anything quite like it
again. There’s never been another story quite like this one in all of Dr Who,
even in the books and audios where it’s easier to imagine such an alien world.
Let’s face it there’s never been another bit of TV quite like this one period.
For that alone ‘The Web Planet’ is a story to champion – the fact that it also
manages to be really good, most of the time anyway, is astonishing given the
amount of risks it takes. Would that we had more stories that take as many
gambles as this one does. No it’s not perfect, not even close, but watch it in
the right spirit, pretending you’re watching a fuzzy black and white telly in
1965, and you too might feel some of the magic of being transported to the one
truly fully alien Dr Who world.
POSITIVES +The first
episode cliffhanger is one of the series’ best. For pretty much the last time
The Tardis is presented to us not just as a travelling home or a fancy
spaceship but as the only lifeline that can save the regulars from being
trapped forever on this awful, alien world and much of the plot revolves around
them trying to get back to it. Only, shock horror, Vicki manages to make her
way back the Zarbi do something clever and the Tardis takes off with her still
in it, dematerialising in front of her eyes. Neither the Zarbi nor Menoptera
have discovered space travel yet so there really is no other way off Vortis.
This Doctor, who has rarely been fazed by anything so far up to and including
The Daleks, giving a look of utter helplessness as he sighs ‘My Tardis...My
ship’ while staring more or less at the viewer at home, is heartbreaking in all
the best dramatic ways. Even the way the tardis is written back in makes some
sense rather than being the copout it is when other writers try something
similar.
PREQUELS/SEQUELS: Plainly
The Doctor is lying when he says he’s never been to Vortis before: he’s been to
it lots, including adventures set before ‘The Web Planet’. The Dr Who
production team were always looking for the next Daleks – and for some reason
kept thinking the Zarbi were it. While the cumbersome costumes and poor audience
reaction meant we never saw Vortis again on screen it turns up a lot in the
comic strips of the day. ‘On The Web Planet’ was a strip that started in TV
Comic less than a week after the last episode aired, running between issues
#693 and #698 between March 22nd and April 26th 1965.
This was a big deal at the time: the comic strip existed in a sort of parallel
world without any links to the TV series beyond a Doctor with only a vague
likeness to William Hartnell and the Tardis. The illustrators have great fun
adding to Vortis with things that even the overly ambitious TV story could
never have dreamed of getting away with (such as giant explosive killer
mushrooms!) and the creatures look a lot more convincing in illustrated form,
especially the Zarbi who seem a lot more stable and in control here than the
ones that keep tripping over the cameras. Alas the story is quite a dull one,
simply re-hashing ‘The Web Planet’ without really adding much as The Doctor and
his grandchildren John and Gillian free the Menoptera slaves. There is a subtle
difference though: Bill Strutton wrote ‘The Web Planet’ after his experiences
as a prisoner of war and identified with the Menoptera as a white man in a
Japanese camp but the writers of the strip seem to have assumes it was really a
civil rights story, making the Menoptera the African-American slaves and new
characters The Skirkons (basically Zarbi with Wings) the slave-owners, using
the local population to mine the precious mineral Galvanium X. Which, by 1960s
TV Comic standards, might just be the most daring thing they ever did (for
context the Who strip was run in between bright and colourful ones for Popeye
and another irritating but decidedly more Earthbound insect ‘Mighty Moth’).
The Zarbi also return in the first and – for me –
the best of the Dr Who annuals made for World Distributors between Christmas
1965 and Christmas 1985, with full proper lengthy stories and some of the most
gorgeous Who-related illustrations of them all (the frontispiece, of the 1st
Doctor set against a planet-filled sky, was my laptop screensaver for years
it’s so good). ‘The Lair Of Zarbi Supremo’ was the very first story in this
very first annual, filled with yet more continuity references to the story
(such as the atmospheric density jackets, ant-hill style buildings and moons in
the sky – all three look better than they ever did on screen> Weirdly,
though, The Doctor refers to himself as an ‘Earthman’. Even in this ambiguous
early era it was pretty much a given he didn’t come from Earth even if we at
home knew nothing about Gallifrey as yet. The Doctor (travelling solo for once)
has landed on Vortis’ ‘dark side’ this time, alarmed to hear the fading strains
of an emergency broadcast coming from an anthill warning all visitors to
‘beware of the Zarbi Supremo’. The Doctor goes over to help and is met by
hordes of Zarbi that seem strangely docile but pushes through to a crashed
spaceship caught between two of the anthills, physically falling through a door
that violently opens up on one side. It turns out that the warning has not come
from a person but a reel-to-reel tape recorder (ah, they must make a comeback
in the future then the way vinyl has!) while the spaceship has been abandoned
‘just like the Marie Celeste’. Finally, in a hidden room at the back, The
Doctor locates two injured crewman, one of them a boy. The story then turns
into a straight re-tread of ‘The
Rescue’, with the rest of the crew having wandered off to
their doom five days ago and the two survivors staying behind after being
struck down with space sickness. They’re from Earth and still think they’re in
the Earth’s solar system, perhaps on one of the moons round Jupiter; The Doctor
though knows that they are actually many millions of light years away from
Earth. The Doctor investigates and finds that the Zarbi outside aren’t physical
flesh and blood but robots (the first time Dr Who ever used this twist that would
feature many many more times in the future) and by manipulating the controls
The Doctor finds that he can control the ‘real’ Zarbi using radio signals. The
robot Zarbi is then carried away, Mexican wave style, by all the many millions
of real Zarbi throughout their underground catacombs, described as a ‘nightmare
journey’ (they even have a nursery for their larvae and a larder for storing
dead meat, not a detail they could give on TV!) Finally The Doctor is taken to
a giant amphitheatre where the remaining Earthmen have been imprisoned with
collars around their necks to keep them docile, one of them also badly sick, alongside
the Menoptera who are being tortured into giving up their secrets but are
boldly resisting (choice quote that would sound quite tough were it not being
delivered by a giant butterfly: ‘You are transgressing the paths of nature!’
before promising a ‘War between us as you have never seen before’). The
Doctor’s Zarbi-bot lifts the collars off the Humans and he orders the survivors
to use their guns to shoot the Zarbi, which they do, as the whole building
crumbles down around them. The Menoptera (who look a lot more ’Humany’ in the
illustrations) are freed and the poorly spaceman healed (though if anything is
going to give him a relapse it’s waking up to see a Butterfly nurse attending
his bed-side!) This story is clearly set after the TV episode as the Menoptera speak to the Doctor of old times
and how ‘we have legends of you and your strange vessel. We know we have
nothing to fear from you, strange mortal who can flit in and out the ages’. The
Doctor in turn talks about coming back one day to see how the planet turns out.
Oh and the reason the spacemen thought they were still near home,
astronomically speaking? It turns out that The Zarbi have turned Vortis into a
big car and transported it to the Earth’s solar system looking for a ‘green,
damp world’ to spawn in (did they not learn anything from ‘The Dalek Invasion Of Earth’?!)
A veritable classic, with some lovely thoughtful dialogue other comic strips
could only dream of, you can tell that original script editor David Whittaker
had a big hand in this story as its made with a lot more care than anything in
the later annuals. William Russell reads it out as an extra on the ‘Web’ DVD!
‘Return To
The Web Planet’ (2007) is to date Big Finish’s only return to Vortis and again
never quite takes off even though an audio adventure ought to be the perfect
place for such colourful, imaginative, yet hard-to-render characters.
Originally released as a year-ending ‘extra’ exclusive to subscribers (who
always tended to get something wacky back then), this short piece is less a
full adventure with a standalone plot and more an excuse to see how many
continuity references they can throw in. What plot there is follows a
father-daughter pairing: Acerhon is a scientist who lives a lonely existence
away from society, believing in the ‘old ways’ and caring for his offspring Hedyla,
who is considered disabled (which in this context means she was born without
wings and can only walk, not fly). Comedian Sam Kelly brings much pathos to the
role, but it’s a pretty minor story for such a major world while The 5th
Doctor and Nyssa are the ’wrong’ pairing for the story too, old hands at space
travel taking giant insects in their stride (one can only imagine what Tegan
would have made of giant ants and butterflies!)
‘Un-Natural Selection’ (2013) brought The Menoptera
back in comic strip form in the first issue of the series ‘Prisoners Of Time’.
The 1st Doctor, Ian, Barbara and Vicki have landed in 1868 just in time to see
the opening of the London Underground, but instead of Yeti lurking in the
tunnels they find the Animus instead. It came to Earth in search of The Doctor
and desperate for revenge, with an army of Zarbi ready to invade Earth. A fun
climax sees The Doctor try all sort of scientific ways to conquer the Animus
this time, only for Ian to kill it by brute force when ramming into it with a tube
train! A fun sub-plot involves scientist Thomas Huxley, the man who deserved
co-credit for his work with Charles Darwin defining and refining ‘On The
Origins Of Species’, who is a witness that ends up most confused by events (not
least the amount of evolutionary theory he’s going to have to re-think!) A
decent modern strip with some pretty good likenesses (it’s rare to see Vicki,
especially, in cartoon form).
Finally, while it has nothing to do with Vortis or
giant insects, Bill Strutton did try to write for the story once more,
submitting a twenty page outlined titled ‘The Mega’ to Terrance Dicks for
season eight in 1970, who was said to be politely dismissive (though the idea
might have been a tad too close to the just commissioned ‘Claws Of Axos’
for comfort). Big Finish revived it for their Lost Stories range (2013) with
Simon Guerrier doing an excellent job of making it an epic six parter and it’s
a surprise in being amongst the most straightforward and generic Dr Who script
around! The Mega are a humanoid but alien race who are prepared to fight for
peace and horrified at the Earth’s nuclear arms race (and a new invention, the
deadly ‘Wiley’s Gas’) so they take matters into their own hands and use a
‘death ray’ that takes out all weapons. A lot of humanity greets them with open
arms but it soon becomes clear they’ve (spoilers) disarmed Humans to invade
them instead. Yes, that old plot. One idea that works well though is having the
usual formula turned on his head: the story is split in two, The Brigadier
believing all the lies told by the Mega on Earth while Dr 3 snoops around on
their home world, with Jo caught in the middle and faced with choosing between
her loyalty to The Doctor and to UNIT. Oh and there’s a gratuitous speedboat
chase to make it seem even more like a Pertwee tale! It’s a good listen, though
more for character than plot.
Previous ‘The
Romans’
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