Doctor Who A-Z #13 – The Web Planet (1965)

Nothing dates faster than special effects, largely because their success is dependent on us not being accustomed to them. An effect which uses a brand-new process will always look more real to its initial audience than an effect which has been picked apart on countless behind-the-scenes featurettes. Which makes me worry for the shelf life of modern television and film, where digital colour correction has turned the entire image into a kind of digital effect. (You thought this was going to be about the creature effects in The Web Planet, didn’t you? Aah) Today, there’s a certain kind of image whose quality is thought to be beyond argument: high definition, prevalent but strangely washed-out shadows, colours flattened out to a range Whistler would consider a bit narrow. Will future audiences see this as an aesthetic that can be enjoyed nostalgically, or an effect that’s laughably dated?

There are more ways to enjoy dated special effects than mockery, as Doctor Who fans know well. With that in mind, let’s celebrate one of The Web Planet director Richard Martin’s biggest, most easily lampooned swings: the atmosphere of Vortis. Even without taking the black and white into account, the vaseline-smeared lens and strange, streaky lighting Martin uses for the Vortis exteriors are completely alien to anything a modern audience would consider to be a ‘good’ image. The restoration team charged with getting this story ready for its DVD premiere had to go back and start again when they initially treated this style as a mistake, perhaps the result of the print being badly archived. But the first episode, which cuts back and forth between the normally-shot TARDIS scenes and the bizarre Vortis landscapes show beyond doubt that this was a deliberate choice.

What Martin is doing here is taking the core mission of the Hartnell science fiction serials on board: they want to show you another world. Not a world that is analogous to ours, or a pastiche of ours, or which draws from any current in our society, but a completely foreign world. Remember, around the time this was first broadcast people were seeing the first photos from space: they didn’t look much like the rest of BBC One’s schedules either. This goal of complete alienation bubbles away in the background of most of the First Doctor’s trips to other planets, but The Web Planet is its moment in the spotlight. Famously, it is the first Doctor Who story where the Doctor and his companions are the only humanoid characters; everyone else is either a giant ant, a giant butterfly, a giant grub or a weird tentacular brain.

You can see a bit of the problem here. It’s too easy to watch The Web Planet and say the BBC was nowhere near ready to do this in the 1960s; it’s true, but it’s not the issue. James Cameron has all the money in the world to create Pandora, and that planet is similarly full of outsize, recoloured and extra-legged versions of animals that already exist on Earth. The Web Planet’s belongs to a strain of science fiction that too often stalls at the superficial, more content with things that look different rather than things that behave or think differently. It rests on the creator’s ability to constantly throw new wonders at the audience, and if they don’t have the imagination to do that, the whole appeal of the thing withers away.

Bill Strutton, the serial’s writer, didn’t enjoy much science fiction, which explains his surface-level view of the genre’s appeal. Script editor Dennis Spooner rewrote it under the impression that Strutton created the hive-minded Zarbi as an analogy for Communism and the butterfly-like Menoptera as an allegory for free enterprise, which makes sense of the conservative slant to Spooner’s own The Reign of Terror but is frankly wishful thinking. The Zarbi are basically cattle, animals pressed into service by the telepathic Animus, and once they’re freed from the Animus’s control their ultimate destiny is to be used by the Menoptera as livestock. This betrays a view of the working classes that I’ve often suspected Conservatives have, but didn’t expect Doctor Who to confirm. Really, though, the whole script seems unsure how to pitch the Zarbi; they’re not quite invaders, not quite villains, but the script is disturbingly happy to show them being slaughtered and mind-controlled by the heroes as well as the villains. By contrast, the Menoptera are at least consistently annoying. They moan about every possible plan of action and get everything their own way not through their own talent, but thanks largely to Barbara’s intervention on their behalf. Huh, maybe these things are a metaphor for Conservatives after all.

My stinging satire aside, the Menoptera’s irritating qualities are mostly down to their realisation. The costumes aren’t actually bad, and even the flying scenes are cut before they can become too embarrassing. But they talk at a maddening sing-song pitch, reminding you of how wise The Sensorites’ director Mervyn Pinfield was to let the actors playing the titular aliens just talk in their natural voices. The Menoptera children are even worse; little two-legged maggots who sound like Monty Python’s Gumbies. There are plenty of perfectly good Doctor Who stories that have similar failures of realisation, but they usually work because there are some good ideas beyond the fitful realisation. Despite Spooner’s heroic self-delusion, that isn’t the case here. The Web Planet aims to show you wonders, and what you see is what you get.

In fairness, the first couple of episodes get by on strangeness alone, and the appearance of the Animus – Doctor Who’s first monster that could be termed Lovecraftian – spices up the final episode. If The Web Planet was a four-parter, it could just about get away with vamping a third episode to pad this out, but it’s a six-parter, and I genuinely lost track of which episode was which some time around part four. If Strutton’s creatures can’t hold the viewer’s attention, the regular cast are a more mixed bunch. Strutton is, at least, better at writing for the TARDIS’s women than most writers around this time, giving Barbara plenty to do and remembering that Vicki is meant to be from the future. His innocent view of science fiction, fascinated by even the genre’s most obvious possibilities, does at least give us the scene where Vicki expresses wonder at Barbara’s 20th century medication, likening a headache tablet to leech therapy.

As with Susan, the other writers tended to forget Vicki’s unique background, and it’s no wonder that after she left the show gave up and only introduced 20th century companions for the rest of Hartnell’s tenure. Hartnell himself is on rather saddening form; the stories around this time, not least the one immediately before it, would show him incorporating elements of mischief and whimsy that continue to define the Doctor’s character, but he’s defeated by the lack of anything familiar to hold onto in Strutton’s script. Frankly, he seems more comfortable delivering lines in The Three Doctors than he does here, constantly tailing off and waiting for William Russell to ad-lib a prompt. The serial’s slow pacing means it doesn’t stick out as badly as the fluffed lines in, say, The War Machines, but it’s an unfortunate reminder that Season Two of Doctor Who was not wholly a matter of the series consolidating its strengths. Some problems were starting to rear their head as well.

Next: The Crusade (1965)

Graham’s Archive – The Web Planet

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