By Jessica Holmes

Hello, everyone. Today we're going to have a look at The Web Planet, the latest serial on Doctor Who, written by Bill Strutton. Now I don’t want to alarm you all, but we’ve got an infestation, and I think we’re going to need a bigger bottle of ant powder…

THE WEB PLANET

The Web Planet opens on a desolate landscape with some good miniature work by the art department. It’s barren and somewhat lunar, with strange column-like rock formations dotting the landscape. Stretching across the rocks, however, are threads of  a great web. I wouldn’t like to see the spider that made that.

The arrival of the TARDIS breaks the silence for a moment. All is eerily quiet, both outside and inside, as the Doctor worries about what dragged them to the web planet, and why.

We might be about to get a clue.

Behold…the Zarbi.

Are we meant to pretend we can’t see the human legs? Are they meant to match the insect legs? I’d say they look like they came out of a B-Movie but those have higher standards.

But what’s worse than the visuals is the noise these things make. They never. Shut. Up. It's like they're trying to induce a migraine.

I must also apologise for the blurriness of the images in this article. I do my best to get the clearest frame, but somebody seems to have smeared the camera with petroleum jelly, possibly to hide the dodgy effects.

And another thing before I move on. Ants? On the WEB planet? Would a spider costume have been two legs too many, or do we have an arachnophobe in the art department? Not that I'm complaining too much. Spiders have far too many legs for my liking.

The ship lurches about as the din increases, and loses all power. The noise is painful for the whole crew (and me) but it hurts Vicki most, so Barbara takes her to the medbay while Ian and the Doctor decide to go exploring.

And here we have them modelling the TARDIS springwear collection.

In the medbay, the women talk a little about Vicki’s schooling, and she mentions learning medicine as a standard subject, rather a step up from the ‘three Rs’ of Reading, wRiting and 'Rithmetic.

Yes, it is ridiculous. We know.

Anyway, it seems the youth will whine about school until the end of time (gosh, I sound like an old lady), as Vicki laments having to spend a whole hour a week at school.

Poor thing.

Barbara also finally manages to tell Vicki that she and Ian went to Rome, when Vicki takes an interest in the golden bracelet Barbara got from Nero. I’m a little surprised she kept it. Then again, gold is gold.

This scene doesn’t move the plot along, but I still like it as a chance to give the characters breathing room. There’s a tendency in Doctor Who (or indeed any other adventure story) to get so wrapped up in the plot that the characters are little more than narrative chess pieces. A short break now and then does wonders for both the pacing and the character development. Being early in The Web Planet, a quiet scene like this isn’t slamming the brakes on the plot.

Outside, the Doctor makes an attempt to be scientific about examining his surroundings, but when he asks to borrow Ian’s pen, the writing implement has other ideas and flies off. Now, this would probably bother most people, but the Doctor assumes it to be a clever sleight of hand by Ian. When Ian protests that it wasn’t him, does the Doctor take a bit more of an interest? Does he, heck. Ian’s raised voice produces a marvellous echo off the rocks, and all thoughts of scraping up bits of mica are forgotten as the Doctor gleefully amuses himself with the sound of his own voice.

He looks like a child who's just been told he can have whatever he wants at the toy shop.

Back inside the TARDIS, some unknown force starts to pull on Barbara's arm. It lets up after a short while, and she returns to the infirmary, troubled. It’s eerily quiet. It feels like something is about to happen.

Outside, Ian spots a pyramid-like structure. It’s very old. The men approach it, but can’t see what’s at the top.

Ian spots a pool of something he assumes is water, but the Doctor stops him before he touches it, and asks for his tie. Upon dipping it in the liquid, it begins to smoke, and Ian complains that he’s ruined his Coal Hill School tie. Ian, get a little perspective.

As they turn to go, that awful noise starts again.

Barbara can even hear it in the TARDIS, and watches in horror as the console itself begins to spin about (I didn’t even realise it could move) and the doors swing open. Her arm lifts again, and as if in a trance, she walks out onto the surface.

Vicki wakes up to find herself completely alone.

Ian and the Doctor hear the echoes of her cries, but as they run to help Ian gets caught in some sort of web, so the Doctor carries on alone. Meanwhile, Barbara walks ever forwards towards a bubbling pool of acid.

In the TARDIS, the control room starts to lurch around once more, and the familiar wheezing sound of the engine starts up, while Vicki can do nothing to stop it.

By the time the Doctor gets back to where he parked the TARDIS, his ship is long gone.

Whatever’s going on on the web planet, they’re in deep trouble.

'Now, where did I park the car…'

This is a very quiet episode, in more than one sense. Not that much happens, but I don’t think I’d call it boring per se. Honestly, I quite like being able to keep up with my notes for once.

That said, for viewers with a shorter attention span, The Web Planet might be a little too quiet and slow paced.

The mystery of just what the heck is going on is interesting, though. I mean, the answer is going to be ‘a weird space alien thing that we humans don’t know about’ but The Web Planet brings a real sense of scratching the surface of the unknown, the truly alien. This is what science fiction is for, after all.

THE ZARBI

So, TARDIS gone, Ian tied up, Barbara wandering towards a pool of acid. It’s all going a bit pear-shaped around here. This is why you should always remember to leave your handbrake on.

However, just before Barbara reaches the acid pool, one of the Zarbi makes that annoying noise, and she changes direction. It seems that it’s guiding her away from it. That’s interesting.

The Doctor finds Ian free of the webbing but covered in blisters and in a good deal of pain. It seems that the web had some sort of irritant on it. As if Ian wasn’t having a bad enough day, the Doctor informs him of the TARDIS’ disappearance.

Barbara carries on in her trancelike walk, and then an unexpected stranger pops up.

Boo.

I’m sorry, but that’s the funniest costume I’ve ever seen. That is absolutely ridiculous and I love it. It’s so bad it’s brilliant. It’s some sort of insectoid entity, more human-like in appearance than the Zarbi.

Meanwhile, Ian is having an existential crisis and the Doctor might be having a heart attack. So everything’s going well there. The thin atmosphere is starting to have an effect. It’s not deadly, but it’s very uncomfortable.

The Doctor spots some ridges in the sand, and realises that the TARDIS has been dragged away. He looks up and spots some unintentional comedy in the distance as the box scoots across the landscape. I don’t know why it’s funny, it just is.

Elsewhere, the bug man is guiding Barbara along, to join more bug men. I’ll give the costuming department credit, their wings are rather good. They treat her gently, and the one who was leading her removes her bracelet and throws it into an acid pool, snapping her out of the trance.

Ian and the Doctor traipse around trying to track the movements of the TARDIS. They lose the trail, but find a new trail of claw marks.

Ian steps in some sort of shell, which I can’t understand how he didn’t see given the size of it. The Doctor examines it and figures based on the wildlife and the landscape they might be on a planet called Vortis. However, Vortis doesn’t have a moon, and in the sky there are several.

Barbara explains to the insect people what’s been going on and how she came to be wandering the wilderness. They listen quite politely, and I had just written down in my notes ‘they seem friendly enough’ when one of them yelled ‘Kill her!’, so I guess I’m not the best judge of character. Another stops him, though, before he can bash Barbara.

They're also wonderful dancers.

These insect-like people, the Menoptra, greatly fear the Zarbi, and fear that Barbara will betray their location to them, willingly or not. While they talk, Barbara snags a stick with her feet, and manages to trip one of the Menoptra and flee.

Elsewhere, Ian and the Doctor spot lights in the sky, and below them, the home base of the Zarbi. As if on cue, a bunch of Zarbi show up.

Inside the TARDIS, the doors open of their own accord, and Vicki makes the questionable choice to leave, hoping to find the others.

Instead, she finds the Zarbi.

The Zarbi escort Ian and the Doctor to the settlement, which seems to have been grown rather than built. They reunite with Vicki, and the Doctor demands to know what the Zarbi want.

It doesn’t take long for Barbara to run into some Zarbi herself. What is the plural of Zarbi? Zarbis? Zarbii? Zarbodes?

Back in the Menoptras’ hideout, they’re debating whether to break radio silence and attempt contact with the Menoptra Invasion Force. Invasion? Interesting. We’ll put a pin in that.

However, they can’t get a response, and realise the cave is blocking their signal. Before they can go outside and try to get better reception, the Zarbi come along with a hypnotised Barbara, who has led them straight to the B-movie rejects. They smash their communication device and put up a brave fight, but the Zarbi are much bigger than the Menoptra. In the fight, the Zarbi kill one and capture another, but the third manages to flee.

The captured Zarbi removes a sort of metal collar from Barbara’s shoulders, waking her up. It seems the Zarbi need a metal conduit to control people. Specifically, gold. Ah, so that’s why the bracelet affected her!

Barbara asks what’s going to happen now, and the Menoptra informs her the Zarbi will take them to the ‘Crater of Needles’, which sounds delightful.

Back at the Zarbi base, the Doctor tries to communicate through mime, but doesn’t seem to be getting anywhere.

Some sort of alarm goes off, and the Zarbi force the Doctor into a… well, I think he describes it best himself when he calls it a hairdryer. It seems to be some sort of communication device, as once inside, an unknown voice asks the Doctor a question: “Why do you come, now?”

ESCAPE TO DANGER

The Doctor explains to the unseen voice that they come in peace, but the voice asks why they attack. It thinks that the Doctor is with the Menoptra, but won’t let him fully explain that he’s not with them, and moves to demonstrate what the Zarbi will do to the Menoptra, and uses some sort of energy weapon to fire on the TARDIS.

However, rather than destroying the machine, the energy pulse appears to restore power to the TARDIS.

It takes work to maintain that hairdo.

The voice asks the Doctor how his ship’s shielding works, and the Doctor in exchange wants to know how their weapon works. The voice makes him an offer: if they can use his ship’s defences against the invaders, they’ll grant him freedom.

The Doctor asks where Barbara is, and the voice tells him she’s at the Crater of Needles. He can get her back, but first the voice wants to know where the Menoptra forces are massing. The Doctor agrees to find out, and the Zarbi allow him to take Ian into the TARDIS to retrieve some equipment, but they keep Vicki as a hostage.

In the TARDIS, the Doctor practices medicine for once and gives Ian some ointment. He states the bleeding obvious that the Zarbi are ants, and Ian asks how they can be so big.

Answer: THEY CAN’T. It's just physics. They literally cannot get the oxygen required to sustain such a huge size. Ants this big would suffocate. Oh, and that's assuming an Earth atmosphere. I doubt the atmosphere on Vortis could sustain any arthropods much bigger than a centipede.

With Ian on the mend, the Doctor tells him to try and track Barbara down while he works.

They lug a device out of the TARDIS, and the Doctor tells the voice that something is interfering with his instruments, probably to do with the nearby Zarbi. The voice is reluctant to stand down the local Zarbi, but agrees when faced with the prospect of not getting help at all.

The nearby Zarbi become docile and stop making noise, their minds apparently going dormant, and Ian is able to slip away.

He promptly runs into a Zarbi. He tries to sneak past, but it stops him and he has to wrestle it in a deeply ridiculous manner. Ian wins, but then goes and gets himself trapped. That went well. The Zarbi forces come for him, but they’re such lumbering clumsy human-ant abominations that it’s not exactly difficult for him to give them the slip.

The voice accuses the Doctor of trying to escape, and demands to know why. He refuses to answer the question, and is completely fearless. If the Zarbi kill them all, his knowledge dies with him. Could he be lying? Sure. But the Zarbi can’t know either way.

The Doctor then asks Vicki to run into the TARDIS and grab a little red box. She brings it, and he insists he said a white box, as this is one of his specimen boxes. However, the Zarbi on guard seems to be very frightened of it. But what is it? It's a dead spider. I wouldn't be at all happy to find it in my bathtub, but it's a tiny thing compared to the Zarbi.

Well, I think it's a spider. Not sure where most of the legs are. Maybe it had an accident.

Outside, Ian meets up with the lone Menoptra, who is called Vrestin. She tells him the Zarbi have enslaved many of her friends at the Crater of Needles, where they tear off the Menoptra’s wings so they can’t fly away. Ian asks what else they expect when they invade a planet, but Vrestin insists that Vortis is their planet, and they’re reclaiming it.

She tells him that the Zarbi are an unintelligent species who used to live with the Menoptra, in peace, until they were made militant by a dark power, the Animus, which is the voice the Doctor’s been talking to. Nice to put a name to it. The structure inhabited by the Zarbi colony and the Animus grew at that time, and Vrestin calls it the Carcinome. At least I think she does. The Menoptra have a very strange (and annoying) speech pattern placing the emPHAs-is on thE wrong sy-LAb-LE, so I might have misheard.

The Menoptra had no weapons, and by the time they sensed the danger, the Zarbi were too strong to overcome, so they had to flee the planet. At that time, the strange moons appeared in the sky. One became their home, but it’s not a good place to live, so they must try to reclaim Vortis.

The Menoptra sent Vrestin to the surface along with two others to prepare the way for the invasion force. The Zarbi killed one, and the other is at the Crater with Barbara.

She teams up with Ian to go to the rescue, but of course Ian can’t fly, so it’ll take two hours to reach the Crater. The Zarbi soon catch up, so the pair run to hide, and their situation goes from bad to worse as the ground beneath their feet gives way. Well, I guess they’ll be very well hidden under a few tonnes of rock and dust.

Final Thoughts

Being quite a straightforward story so far, I’m not sure what else there is to add about The Web Planet. It’s a pleasantly strange trip out into the unknown. I like the decision to include non-humanoid aliens, even if the execution leaves something to be desired.

I've also enjoyed the sweet little bits of interaction between the Doctor and Vicki. It seems our Doctor has turned into a right softie, offering Vicki sweets to cheer her up when things get tough. Perhaps he's trying to make up for not doting on Susan as much as he perhaps should have.

I'll be back again later this month with a write-up on the second half of The Web Planet (and a big can of bug spray), so goodbye for now, and don't let the big bugs bite.

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