By Jessica Holmes

After a cracking serial last month with a really fresh story format, we’re getting another ‘base under siege’ plot in Doctor Who. Will The Web Of Fear turn out to be the same old yarn, or have Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln found a way to put a new spin on the format?

EPISODE ONE

You might recall that the last episode of Doctor Who ended with the TARDIS leaning on its side and the occupants clinging on for dear life. It provides a nice little high-action start to the episode, as Jamie manages to climb to the TARDIS door controls and save the group. Out of one perilous situation, the Doctor immediately wants to go and look for another adventure.

Sometimes I think he must enjoy being in imminent danger of a horrible death.

Well, he doesn’t have to go far. The TARDIS stops, but it hasn’t landed. It’s caught in something. Something like a web.

It turns out we are back on Earth in (roughly?) the modern day. Remember Professor Travers (Jack Watling) from The Abominable Snowmen? He’s back, but rather a lot older, and in quite a bit of trouble. He managed to recover a Yeti along with their control equipment and brought it back to London. Rather than keep it safe, he went and sold it to a wealthy collector, yet carried on tinkering with the control sphere. As you can imagine, this has backfired big-time, and he can’t persuade the collector to give it up. The ridiculously-stereotypical Silverstein (whose personality can be summed up with the words ‘greedy’, ‘rich’ and ‘stubborn’) soon ends up on the wrong side of his prized Yeti, and by the next scene, London is in a sorry state indeed.

The Yeti are taking over, spreading a mysterious weblike fungus through the Underground. Trying to hold back the onslaught are our main cast of side characters. We’ve got resident ‘Yeti Experts’, Professor Travers and his daughter Anne (Tina Packer), a handful of soldiers trying to hold out against the Yeti threat, and an absolutely infuriatingly irritating journalist reporting on the situation, Harold Chorley (Jon Rollason).

The TARDIS breaks free of the webbing and lands in the Underground, the group soon finding that the street level entrances are closed off.

Trapped on the London Underground. That sounds like my personal Hell.

The cinematography in this serial is rather good I must say. Some interesting angles and dramatic lighting. Makes things a lot more visually interesting.

Victoria and Jamie soon get caught by a couple of patrolling soldiers, but the Doctor evades capture by being conveniently off-camera.

The kids soon get to meet everyone hunkered down at the base, and Anne quickly establishes herself as my favourite new character. I just have a real soft spot for smart women who know how to handle condescending men.

Oblivious to the full details of the situation, Victoria and Jamie think that they’re protecting the Doctor when they insist that they were alone in the tunnel. However, what they don’t know is that the soldiers have a plan for halting the advance of the Yeti. They’re going to collapse the tunnel, and the kids have just given them the all clear.

The Doctor could not have picked a worse time to start poking around the explosives stockpile.

EPISODE TWO

The charges go off with more of a whimper than a bang, to the soldiers’ surprise. What they don’t know is that the Yeti have covered the explosives in webbing, containing the explosion. Thinking that the Doctor may have tampered with the charges, finding the Doctor becomes a high priority. But he’s nowhere to be found. At all. In this entire episode. I think he must have gone on his holidays.

Travers gets to introduce his daughter to Jamie and Victoria, and Anne finds their time travel story a bit hard to believe. She later confesses to her father that she’s a bit suspicious of the Doctor, finding his arrival a tad convenient. She’s not the only one. Chorley is starting to take an interest in the Doctor as well.

Don't you just hate it when you can't get a guy to take a hint and leave you alone?

While searching the tunnels for the Doctor, Jamie makes the acquaintance of a singing driver, Evans (Derek Politt), who is very Welsh. I know they call it the land of song but there’s a time and a place. He’s the sole survivor of a Yeti attack, and tells Jamie he saw one of the Yeti carrying a pyramid. Evans joins Jamie on his journey through the tunnels, but before they run into the Doctor, a Yeti runs into them.

The pair find themselves hemmed in by a Yeti and a wall of advancing… soap bubbles? Of all the ways to make a special effect for spreading web or fungus, soap bubbles would not be the method I’d go for. It doesn’t really look anything like the fungus covering the rest of the tunnels. Still, it would be funny if the Yetis’ web-shooting gun was actually just a water pistol filled with washing-up liquid.

Now, webs that help Yetis can feel soft as your face with miiild greeeen…Faaairy Liiiquiiiid!

EPISODE THREE

Shooting the pyramid does nothing to stop the advance of the soap suds or the Yeti (there must be at least one more out there, methinks), so the pair flee into a side tunnel.

Victoria strikes out on her own to find the Doctor, and soon enough finds him in the company of a new arrival to the Underground: Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart (Nicholas Courtney). What a posh name that is.

Lethbridge-Stewart is here to take over leadership of the little group of soldiers. He has the right paperwork and everything. Still, with the circle line fully consumed by the fungus, the soldiers are a little suspicious of where he came from.

As for Jamie and his Welsh friend, they split up once Evans sees an opportunity to escape. He returns not long later, partly because he felt a bit guilty about abandoning everyone else, but mostly because the street access turned out to be locked.

Once everyone (sans Jamie) is gathered together, Lethbridge-Stewart gives a briefing full of information I’m pretty sure the soldiers should already know given that they’ve been watching this whole situation unfold. Still, he seems an authoritative chap who knows what he’s doing. I already like him better than Chorley, who keeps butting into everything, won’t shut up about finding an escape route, and is getting on my last nerve.

Realising that the Yeti keep cocooning any explosives the soldiers place before they get a chance to set them off, the Doctor suggests putting the explosives on a moving trolley. The Colonel approves of the idea, and it begins to look like the situation might turn to their side.

Then Victoria and Anne realise that one of the Yeti control figurines is missing.

And someone is using it right now, to send a Yeti into the explosives store and web the place up. How very convenient that they should choose to do that at this precise moment… unless it’s not a coincidence. Finding the missing figurine in the weapons store, the Doctor realises that someone in the group must have put it there, and that person is in league with the Great Intelligence.

This base-under-siege is turning into a bit of a whodunnit! That’s refreshing.

Chorley seems oddly horrified when Victoria tells him of the Doctor’s intentions to blow the tunnel, and he’s a little too interested in the Doctor’s TARDIS. He leaves in a hurry once the Doctor shows up, and the Doctor is instantly suspicious—especially when he realises the journalist has locked the door behind him.

I don’t know, I think that Chorley seems a bit too obvious a suspect. I think he's just a coward who wants to use the TARDIS to escape.

They aren’t trapped for long, as Jamie finally emerges from the labyrinth of tunnels to let them out. Good timing!

A scream from another room brings Anne and Travers running to discover one of the soldiers, Weams, dead and all webbed up. A Yeti figurine lies beside him on the floor… and the real thing is looming over them, ready to strike!

What a wonderful facial expression. He looks like one of those Greek tragedy masks.

Final Thoughts

So, we’re halfway through The Web Of Fear and so far it’s fine, I suppose. It's a pretty good serial but nothing that has me forgetting to take notes because I’m so engrossed in the story. It is cool to see Travers again! I appreciate the continuity here. I was a bit surprised to see the Great Intelligence returning so soon, but it’s an interesting villain, so who am I to complain?

I have to applaud the crew for the set design in this serial, with particular regards to the Tube station set. You can practically smell the old dust and stale sweat. I kept half expecting a train to come through at any moment. The resemblance to the actual Underground is uncanny—so much so that I’m not the only one who thought they’d filmed on location. I did do some digging to double check, but it is definitely just a set. Well done, crew.

It’s too early to tell if this serial will do anything very interesting with the base-under-siege format, but the mystery elements of the plot are quite promising.

We’ve also got a decent roster of supporting characters, with Anne being a bit of a favourite for me.

The Colonel’s not yet had enough screen-time for me to draw any conclusions about him, but I hate Chorley so much I just want him to go get lost in a long dark tunnel. Of which there are many, many, MANY in the Underground.

Still, at least his existence isn't an insult to an entire group of people.

Certainly, Evans could not be more Welsh if they called him 'Cymru Llandudno of Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychrwyrndroblllantysiliogogogoch', and it's not an entirely flattering depiction. The singing habit is quite endearing but he’s not exactly bright and definitely not brave. Basically the same old insults the English have been tarring the Welsh with for centuries.

But Silverstein… wow. The depiction of Evans is unflattering but the short scene featuring Silverstein is just absurdly bad. The writers cannot have been oblivious to what they were doing there. They could have just made him a stubborn rich bloke, but they just had to go all in on the antisemitic caricature. It’s very disappointing to see.

I know it’s possible to worry too much about what other people might think about your writing, but maybe some writers could stand to worry about it a little more.