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The Web Planet
by Fiona Moore and Alan Stevens
Originally published in Celestial Toyroom Issue 329
"The Web Planet" is a story which, on the face of it, has a lot going for it. Made during the initial period of development of the series, a time known for its liberal innovation and clever use of subtext, it involves William Hartnell, Verity Lambert, Martin Jarvis and a number of other respected performers and production team members, and garnered very high ratings on its first broadcast (although the audience appreciation index gradually fell from 56% for episode 1 to 42% for episode 6). The fact that it has come in for subsequent criticism should not necessarily make a difference; many stories which were once poorly regarded are currently undergoing reassessment. Unfortunately, while "The Web Planet" is not the worst serial to come out of 1960s Doctor Who, it is far from the best, due largely to inconsistencies of writing and production.
First of all, it has to be said that the
periodically-mooted suggestion that "The Web Planet" contains some kind
of deep subtext obscured by the confused circumstances of its
production, unfortunately, doesn’t read. While Dennis Spooner
tried, in an interview quoted in Doctor
Who: The Sixties,
to claim that the story was actually a metaphor for Communism (the
"ants") versus Free Enterprise (the "butterflies"), this
doesn’t actually work in narrative terms-- leaving aside the
problematic equation of Free Enterprise with pretty, frivolous-looking
insects that waft about sipping nectar-- first of all, because the
Zarbi are stated explicitly to be brainless, cattle-like animals
(suggesting a rather racist view of Eastern Europeans, Chinese, Cubans,
and other members of Communist states), and secondly because the
Menoptera don’t really give much sign of being particular
supporters of free enterprise; indeed, by the end of the story, we have
no real idea of what, if any, sort of politico-economic system that
they favour, beyond the fact that they have a concept of military
organisation (which is hardly unique to democratic, free-market
states). It is tempting, reading the initial setup, to develop some
kind of ants=workers, butterflies=artists, maggots (i.e.
Optera)=criminal lowlife equation, but this isn’t carried out
in the story, as the Zarbi aren’t particularly industrious,
the Menoptera aren’t particularly artistic, and the Optera
(who aren't technically maggots anyway, but trogloditic Menoptera)
don’t really seem to do very much at all. It is true that the
Animus, as a "spider," does weave webs and engage in social control,
but at that it isn’t particularly clever or secretive. The
resemblance to different insects (and/or arthropods) seems to be more
for ease of classification and development of choreography, but, since
no particular narrative use is made of their appearance, all we really
get in story terms is the tale of a group of aliens, whose planet is
taken over by another alien, and who then take it back with a bit of
help from the Tardis crew.
Some explanation for the relative
simplicity of
the story and complicatedness of the production can be gleaned from
what we know of its development. According to the A
Brief History of Time (Travel)
website, Verity Lambert and
outgoing story editor David Whitaker commissioned "The Web Planet" from
Bill Strutton without seeing a storyline first; had they done so, they
might have vetoed it, or at the very least worked with Strutton to
develop it into something more interesting. Further complications,
famously, came when (according to the abovementioned Spooner interview)
all the different production departments started trying to outdo each
other rather than work together, with the consequence that, while there
has clearly been a lot of work put into the sets, costumes, makeup,
effects and so forth, they never quite seem to gel together into a
seamless whole. The result is that some of the scenes are quite
brilliant taken on their own as set pieces-- the part where the Doctor
and Ian look up at the huge pyramid-shaped monument and speculate on
its purpose, for instance, or the first appearance of a Menoptera-- but
at the end of the day, there isn’t much of a sense of
connection between these moments.
Consequently, what we have in "The Web Planet" is a serial which manages to get away with it, as it were, for about two episodes on sheer strangeness alone. There is something eerily compelling about the images of the lunar landscape populated with giant insects, Barbara seemingly becoming possessed, the Tardis losing power, and Ian and the Doctor encountering strange monuments. However, once the narrative actually has to settle down and deliver a story, what we get is really rather simple and not too imaginative. It also suffers from some problematic direction, for instance the number of scenes which begin with an empty set, followed by a brief moment of some Zarbi, larvae guns etc. running through the set, followed by a further stretch of nothing happening, apparently intended to indicate "action". The overambitious nature of the production of "The Web Planet", and consequent need to cut corners and desperately avoid overtime, leads to some inadvertent visual hilarity, such as the Zarbi who runs full-tilt into the camera (every bit as good as the Voord tripping over its flippers in "The Keys of Marinus") and the larvae-gun apparently running along on wheels. Although the viewer starts out by admiring the production, by the third episode in the problems become clearly apparent.
Furthermore, whatever Bill Strutton may
or may
not have said about the story being inspired by his being struck by the
resemblance between two bull ants fighting and his stepsons brawling,
the story evidences a clear debt to the 1964 film version of H.G.
Wells’ The First Men
in the Moon, which
features a Victorian scientist and his companions exploring a desert
Lunar landscape inhabited by insectlike creatures, the intelligent ones
being dwarfish and antlike, and their "cattle" being rather
caterpillar-like. There is even a sequence in the film in which the
female lead looks out of the spaceship at the landscape as the ship is
picked up and carried off by insects, which is paralleled by a
near-identical scene in "The Web Planet" involving Vicki and the Tardis
scanner. The somewhat inexplicable Episode 5 cliffhanger, in which the
Doctor and Vicki are covered by webs (which appear to paralyse them
only briefly, and which are never used at any other point in the story,
even when they might have been reasonably useful), is also foreshadowed
in a scene in the film in which we see aliens covered by cocoonlike
webs. While some Doctor Who
stories have borrowed
heavily from well-known films or film genres of the time and got away
with it, this one never really does anything new or original with the
concept.
The general sense that "The Web Planet"
consists mainly of ideas which are good, but disconnected, can also be
seen in the costumes and characterisation. Seen from the shoulders up,
the Menoptera are quite striking, with beautiful makeup and headpieces.
Unfortunately, the decision to give them portly bodies with furry
horizontal stripes (which were, apparently, yellow) gives them an
unfortunate resemblance to that Mexican wrestler who dresses up as a
bee on The Simpsons.
In fact, the team in general
seem vague on what sort of insects they are meant to resemble: the
similarity between their name and the word Lepidoptera,
and Strutton’s remarks quoted earlier, suggest that the
original idea was to have them be butterflies, but the costumes tend to
suggest bees instead, and at one point one of them is attracted to the
light of the Animus like a moth. Similarly, the idea of giving them
insectlike, alien body language is a good one in principle, and the
actors get quite into it (dying with their limbs folded, breaking off
in the middle of a sentence to continue the thought with gestures,
etc.), but in practice, the stilted speech and exaggerated gestures
periodically remind one of children’s presenters, dressed up
as bees and maggots in a bid to educate young viewers about the
diversity of the insect world. The larvae guns (which, it turns out,
are only called "venom grubs" in the novelisation, in another instance
of apocrypha becoming included in the canon through popular usage),
look cool, sort of like a cross between a woodlouse and a weevil, and
the idea that the Zarbi are quite different in larval form to their
adult abilities and appearance is in keeping with the general nature of
the insect world. However, oddly, they look more like adult insects
than grubs, where the supposedly-adult Optera are rather more grublike.
Finally, the atrophied wings and hypertrophied eyes on the Optera are a
nice touch, following the idea that they are Menoptera who have become
adapted to an underground life, but they don’t really
contribute much to the story beyond some alienesque dialogue in
impenetrable accents, and guiding Ian and Vrestin through the tunnels
(which isn’t really essential in plot terms). There is a
partial implication that, under the predatory influence of the Animus,
the remaining Menoptera became stunted, grublike and stupid, but the
idea is not really well-developed, or even brought out into the
narrative.
The
science in "The Web Planet" is also problematic. In general, we tend to
maintain the view that lack of scientific accuracy in Doctor
Who is not usually a problem, so
long as the principles,
flawed or otherwise, remain consistent throughout the story. In this
case, however, the science does not even remain consistent-- one minute
gold is something physically attracted to the Animus, the next it is
something the Animus uses to control the minds of its victims, with no
mention of the earlier physical-attraction tendencies (and, to be
honest, the idea that gold is a magnetic metal is pushing the limits of
tolerance for scientific inaccuracies). The Doctor’s signet
ring also keeps cropping up throughout the story as a kind of magical
plot-device object, and, while this is not necessarily a problem in Doctor
Who terms (q.v. the sonic
screwdriver later in the series),
it would be nice to have had some kind of pseudo-scientific explanation
for how it is that the ring has suddenly developed all these powers.
The scene where Barbara and Vicki talk about the practice of education
in Vicki’s home time is also less than brilliant: the idea
that Vicki studied medicine at the age of ten is an amusing
extrapolation from the way in which, as science advances, things once
considered cutting-edge are demoted to more basic levels (aspects of
present-day secondary-school calculus were university-level many years
ago), but the idea that future children would learn for an hour a day
through a computer was already a cliché by 1965, and
it’s a little surprising that, if Vicki is so well-educated,
she wouldn’t know that aspirin is a basic painkiller.
"The Web Planet" has, however, made one major contribution to Doctor Who, in that elements apparently lifted from it have been put to more interesting use in later stories: "The Abominable Snowman" and "The Web of Fear" (dumb creatures, or, in this case, robots, controlled by a static alien Intelligence with a great voice and a fondness for spider-webs) in the old series, and a number of episodes of the recent Christopher Eccleston series ("venom grubs" being mentioned in "Boom Town", the Isop galaxy being apparently the home of the Face of Boe, and the year 200,000 AD, the setting for "The Long Game", being suggested in the novelisation of "The Web Planet" as a possible time for its taking place, and "The End of the World", depending on how one views Cassandra, depriving "The Web Planet" of its status as the only story to feature no human characters outside of the Tardis crew). Otherwise, however, it is only really worth a second look as an object lesson of how not to do Doctor Who in the 1960s.
Images
copyright BBC
Effects courtesy of Maureen Marrs and Fiona Moore