Day 32 — February 1st 2021
Invasion and The Centre
Invasion (The Web Planet — Episode Five)
I woke up today really determined to change my opinion on The Web Planet. I feel like I’ve spent the last couple of days being a right miserable bugger about the story, and I don’t like that! I’m a fan of Doctor Who. I love Doctor Who! It sometimes feels like being a Doctor Who fan means hating on it more than the next person does, but I much prefer it when I’m enjoying the series and finding things to celebrate and love in there. So it’s been a bit rubbish spending the last two days moaning on about how rubbish the story is.
So please, take it as read that I really tried today. It hasn’t really worked, I’m still not a big fan of The Web Planet, but I tried. I will say that it was nice to be watching it again today instead of just listening in — the costumes and sets might not always work, but they do actively help enhance the story.
The narrative itself just isn’t all that interesting. It feels a bit like Doctor Who by the numbers, and I do wonder if Bill Strutton took a look at The Daleks when preparing the story. Our heroes arrive on a seemingly dead world. They then encounter the inhabitants (Daleks / Zarbi), who take them hostage and use Doctor Who to discover what their newly-arrived enemies — who have been absent for generations — are doing just beyond the range of their scanning capabilities. Doctor Who and his friends team up with the attacking force (the Thals / Menoptra) and help overpower their captors, leaving their allies free to reclaim their world when the TARDIS departs.
As I say, that’s very much by-the-book Doctor Who, and I’m sure there’s plenty of other stories you could apply the template to, but the similarities stick out here because while I wasn’t a huge fan of The Daleks, I wasn’t as bored by it as I am The Web Planet.
I still think this story would benefit from losing two episodes (giving them over to expand The Romans). As a tighter four-part story, I think The Web Planet would get away with a lot more. You wouldn’t have so long for the conceit of the totally alien guest cast to wear thin, and you could sustain the attempt at eeriness from the first episode for longer. 2/10.
The Centre (The Web Planet — Episode Six)
I’ve actually enjoyed this episode more than any since the first episode of the serial, but I don’t know if that’s just because it means I’ve reached the end of the story.
The opening sequence, with Doctor Who and Vicki cocooned in web is genuinely quite frightening, and were The Web Planet a missing story, I reckon a tele-snap of that moment would made it look a bit like a classic. It’s just a shame that they’re not stuck that way for very long — moments later they brush the web off and carry on as though nothing had happened. Maybe it would have been a good thing to do so Hartnell could have a couple of weeks off? Wrap him up in web and leave him there for a couple of weeks while his friends desperately try to save him?
Also quite nice is the design of the Animus itself, with the strange glowing orb beneath a creature of vines which floats in the centre of its web. Again, it’s an arresting image which comes a little too late to really save the story. Perhaps instead of the hair dryer we’ve had for the last four episodes, Doctor Who could have gone directly to the centre to talk with this creature?
There’s a theory — which I think is picked up on in some of the 90s novels — that the Animus seen here is The Great Intelligence. I’ve always ignored it because I’m not a huge fan of trying to link various parts of the Doctor Who universe for the sake of it. But actually, it doesn’t take an enormous leap of logic to see how that could work.
It’s presented here as a largely formless creature, which exists at the heart of Vortis and has to control others with its mind because it doesn’t have a body of its own. It has immense mental power, and seems to be keen to take the form of something living — ‘What you are, I will become,’ it tells Doctor Who during the final battle. I don’t think it’s conclusive proof, and it has ambitions beyond simply gaining physical form; it wants riches and control of the universe. But it’s not as much of a leaps as I’d always assumed.
The end of the episode seems designed to rub in the fact that it feels like we’ve been trapped on Vortis for ages, by leaving us there with the various insects for a bit after the TARDIS has desparted. I think this is the first time this has happened in the series — we stay behind with Susan for a couple of minutes at the end of The Dalek Invasion of Earth, but given she’s one of the regulars I don’t think that really counts. In all other stories, the departure of the TARDIS either means the end of the narrative, or we go with our heroes.
All in all, I’m glad to have reached the end of The Web Planet, and I’m looking forward to moving on somewhere new tomorrow. 3/10.
I’ve not really discussed the TARDIS prop during The Web Planet, but we should because I have a theory about something which happens to the box during production of this story, and while I can’t prove it, I think it makes sense.
So first thing’s first; in Episode One, the prop has a new lamp fitted. I know what you’re thinking. ‘But Will, you told us that they fitted a new lamp to the prop for The Rescue,’ and yes, it would appear that they did. But they’ve fitted another new one to the prop — and not a very nice one — by the time we reach The Web Planet.
Something else to notice in that first episode is that the window on the right-hand door has lost its ‘glass’, and you can see straight through to the inside of the prop.
But there’s Part One of my theory; I think the left window is also broken. In the picture above, you can see that it’s open. That’s not unusual in itself; all of the windows on the prop have the ability to open, and some were seen that way in The Dalek Invasion of Earth. But I think that this window is open because it either can’t or won’t close.
My reason for thinking this is simple. This window is always closed right up to The Rescue Episode One. Then, throughout The Rescue Episode Two it’s seen open. In the same episode you notice that the ‘Pull to Open’ sign directly below the window has attained some damage in the top right corner — you can see it on that image above.
After recording of The Rescue Episode Two, the prop went into storage for about six weeks. It was over Christmas and New Year, and the prop doesn’t appear in The Romans so they didn’t need to bring it to the studio for ages. The next time they used it was for The Web Planet Episode One, where as we’ve seen that window is still open. The prop remains that way the following week for The Web Planet Episode Two, and it seems a strange bit of continuity to have maintained for so long.
Between Episodes Two and Three of this story, the prop is given a bit of a spruce up. That’s fact — by Web Planet Episode Three the prop has another new lamp (the third in as many months, though this one will stick around for a long time), and the window frames have been dirtied down — they’re no longer a clean white finish, but have a darker weathered apperance.
And here’s Part Two of my theory; I think when they were repairing the box between these two episodes, they took the left door off entirely to fix the broken window catch. And I think that while they were fixing it, someone else was doing the weathering on the other windows. Someone who finished that job and left before the door was re-attached.
The reason I think that’s the case isn’t actually clear for the rest of The Web Planet. When the box appears on screen in Episodes Three and Six, the decision is taken to never show the front of the prop. We see both sides and the back, but never the front. Which is strange when you think about it. But when the prop shows up again in the first episode of The Crusade, you can clearly see that all the windows have been dirtied down… apart from that left door, which still has a clean white finish and is closed for the first time in over two months. The film sequences for that first episode were shot between Episodes Four and Five of The Web Planet, so we know the box definitely looked like this before it was used for the departure from Vortis in Episode Six.
Now I think that Richard Martin, directing The Web Planet, disliked the mismatched windows that suddenly appeared on the prop half way through production on his serial, and so chose not to show the front of the box for the rest of it.
As I say, I have no way to prove that the left window was broken. Maybe someone decided to open it for that second episode of The Rescue, and simply no-one bothered to close it for a couple of months. Maybe the door wasn’t removed during the restoration, and that window was simply missed, or it was a conscious decision not to weather it. Certainly, the windows on the left side of the box are weathered less than the ones on the right, but they are still weathered.
But it’s a theory which I think makes sense. And trust me, I spent a while with TARDIS expert Clayton Hickman trying to find anything which might disprove it, and we came up with nothing.
The box remains looking like this, bar a couple of smaller changes, right through until the next major overhaul which takes place at the end of Season Three, but I’ll tell that story when we get there.
