Twilight of the Gods |
BBC The Web Planet |
|
| Episodes | 6 |  |
| Story No# | 13 | |
| Production Code | N | |
| Season | 2 | |
| Dates | Feb. 13, 1965 - Mar. 20, 1965 |
|
With William Hartnell, William Russell,
Jacqueline Hill, Maureen O'Brien. Written by Bill Strutton. Script-edited by Dennis Spooner. Directed by Richard Martin. Produced by Verity Lambert. |
| Synopsis: A powerful force has turned the peaceful inhabitants of the planet Vortis into soldiers who enslave the moth-like Menoptra. |
A Review by Paul Williams 3/6/19
The Web Planet is ambitious but dull. That's the first time I've used the D word to describe a whole story, thirteen stories in. There is a distinct lack of pace as a four-part story, at best, extends to six. The concept of a world without humanoid characters would deter many sci-fi novelists, so credit goes to the production team for commissioning the attempt and creating five different species. The Menoptera are impressive and laden with individual traits, unlike the clumsy Zarbi, the awful Optera, and the unnecessary lava guns.
The Zarbi needed their own weapons. We don't see the Animus until the final episode. Until then, it speaks through a cheap tube that even Hartnell makes fun of. Revealed, it is a formidable opponent in need of better slaves and a tight script.
The Longest Web by Matthew Kresal 29/6/20
What is the quintessential First Doctor story? Is it the first Dalek tale? Or something like The Aztecs? Perhaps it's The Web Planet, the story that marks the mid-way point of this opening era for the series. It is, after all, a serial that features so much of what makes this era what it is, for better and for worse.
Definitely for worse.
It's the ambition of producer Verity Lambert and director Richard Martin that's most on display. Here is Doctor Who as a series, barely a year old at this point, betting that it can bring to life not only an alien world a lot like the Moon but populate it with beings who aren't just humanoid but creatures that include giant ants, grub creatures, anthropomorphized moths and something akin to a Lovecraftian Elder God. All of which was a tall order, but one they attempted anyway.
It does all of that inside a story that, fundamentally, is a science-fiction version of the Second World War epic The Longest Day, released as a film in 1962 from the Cornelius Ryan non-fiction work published in 1959. As with the account of the Normandy invasion, The Web Planet features an invasion force dropping out of the sky, scouting parties sent to gather key intel, a literal underground force, and a pervasive enemy trying to discover both when and where the invasion is coming due. That its writer, Australian Bill Strutton, had served in the war and even been a prisoner of war suggests that this allegory was likely very intentional indeed. As with The Reign of Terror's French Resistance atmosphere before it, the idea that The Dalek Invasion of Earth was Classic Who as its most influenced by the events of the war twenty years earlier is very much a mistaken belief, as this story shows.
On the other hand, it's over-ambitious to a fault. It's hard to imagine Modern Who, with all of its resources, being able to bring this story to life convincingly, let alone a feature film of this era with the budget of, say, 2001: A Space Odyssey. With the budget of 1960s Doctor Who, it was practically a fool's errand. The Zarbi, those aforementioned giant ants, look like precisely what they are: actors wearing an ant over from the waist up. That's without forgetting the moment that one of them crashes into a camera, a sequence left in presumably due to the pressures of recording episodes "as live". Elsewhere, the grub-like Optera are just downright laughable, with actors shouting and hopping around, as if in a sack race, despite shots revealing their legs are very much apart. Of the various aliens, its the moth-esque Menoptra who come across the best as pieces of design, but, even so, the attempt to make them alien with their hand gestures and speech patterns renders them laughable instead. As commendable as the effort to expand what the show could do was, it was something that created many of the cliches that would be invoked against it later on.
It doesn't help that, despite Strutton's interesting thematics, the script didn't match the ambitions of those making it. After stories such as The Reign of Terror and The Dalek Invasion of Earth, Strutton's script feels like it's aimed at children with some laughable technobabble, such as the Isop-Trope ("isotope" with an extra letter and hyphen thrown into it). Pacing is also an issue, something that the script is as much at fault for as the production is, with even individual episodes feeling short of incident at times, particularly in the early installments. Indeed, the script feels like one written by a writer with no real experience of science fiction as a genre, something that a look over Strutton's other credits suggests was very much the case. Perhaps it's no wonder he wouldn't write for the TV series again, with the 2013 Big Finish Lost Story adaptation of his outline for The Mega featuring the Third Doctor being the closest he would even come to writing for the series again.
In the end, The Web Planet is something of a failure. Yet it's a noble one, speaking to the ambition, and over-ambition at that, of the people making it at the time. Rarely again would those making the show take quite a throw of the dice and stretch the capabilities of the series they were making, though perhaps that was due to seeing what had happened when they had done so here? It's just a shame they didn't put those efforts behind a script that one of this era's best directors, and the talents of all involved, couldn't keep interesting.
For, as the Fifth Doctor would observe in another story famously let down by the production values, "There should have been another way."
A Bridge Too Far by Jason A. Miller 30/6/24
From September 17, 1944, through September 25, 1944, the later stages of World War II, Allied forces began a military push into Europe called Operation Market Garden. "Market" was code for the airborne forces ordered to seize bridges; "Garden" was code for the ground forces. It was an ambitious operation designed to strangle Germany's industrial region.
It also failed spectacularly.
The Allied forces were unable to capture necessary bridges and therefore could not cross the Rhine. Before Operation Market Garden, British Lt. General Frederick Browning, the deputy commander of the First Allied Airborne Army charged with seizing the bridges, told Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, "I think we may be going a bridge too far." The phrase has remained in Western vernacular ever since.
*****
When you're watching Doctor Who in sequence, one episode a night, it takes you about two months to get to The Web Planet. In that time, you've followed this crazy little show backwards in time, to visit cavemen and Robespierre; far into the future, to see 25th-century spaceships, and, uh, um... 28th-century spaceships. You've even been shrunk roughly to the size of an inch, and witnessed a Roman-era bedroom farce with William Hartnell repeatedly sticking his sword into Caesar Nero's face (a metal sword -- what did you think I meant?!).
What you have not seen, however, is surrealist imagery with butterflies, ants, larvae, jumping wingless moths and a sibilant-voiced spider cavorting about the confined dimensions of Riverside Studio 1, the ant costumes bumping into the camera, the butterflies playing catch with a Galaxy-destroying weapon, and the Williams --- Hartnell and Russell --- making jokes about the latter's pants falling down.
Doctor Who works because it is most things to most people. It can go anywhere in time and space, it can cover any genre, it can reference any classic work of literature (Peter Capaldi's Doctor, discussing Moby-Dick: "Shut up, and get to the whale!"), it can be funny and tragic and epic and small-scale and operatic and boring. Sometimes even all at once. And sometimes, it just fails. Falls on its face and just doesn't work.
The Web Planet is a failure, spectacularly, and just doesn't work.
Nothing like The Web Planet had been tried before, and, after 1965, nothing like it would be tried again. It truly proved to be a bridge too far for this experimental, innovative, we'll-try-ANYthing, TV series.
*****
I've tried to enjoy this story in every way possible. I've tried watching it drunk. I've tried watching it sober. I've tried watching it alone. I've tried watching it with my kid and her cousins. I've tried watching the DVD with the captions on so I can understand some of the more mumbled and inaudible dialogue. I've tried watching the DVD with Martin Wiggins' pop-up production notes. I've tried watching the DVD on mute while listening to the soundtrack of "The Wizard of Oz". At no time has the story every worked.
I do recommend the pop-up notes, though. Wiggins' notes are excellent, funny and informed; they help me understand why this story was so difficult to make, they help me understand what's going on when the blocking fails or when the actors failed to deliver a key line of dialogue... and they show me that even in 1965, viewers hated this story. They tell me that this was Doctor Who's highest-rated serial of the 1960s, when Doctor Who, riding the peak of Dalekmania, had never drawn more viewers... and then the viewers started to tune out. Reference to later ratings shows that, within another 18 months, 67% of The Web Planet's audience went away, and wouldn't come back for another decade or more.
So when I tell you that The Web Planet failed, I'm not being cruel or spiteful. I'm not making a value judgment; I'm just making a statement of fact. It failed, and it nearly dragged the show down with it.
There are many good reviews above this one explaining what's so bad about The Web Planet. I won't belabor the points; I'll just borrow an observation from Rob Shearman and Toby Hadoke in one of the Running Through Corridors volumes: good drama comes from good actors reciting good scripts. The Web Planet gives flat, functional, sparse dialogue to its human actors; Wiggins' production notes show that the most natural-sounding, funniest, and best lines in the piece, were ad-libbed by the Williams during rehearsal, as encouraged by director Richard Martin. The rest of the actors are all playing aliens, and thus have to give nuanced, if not to say affected, performances. The Zarbi and their venom grubs don't speak at all. The Optera, the wingless little moth men, have their leader speak in what almost sounds like a bad Yiddish accent. The Menoptra introduced in Episode 2 speak in s l o w l i l t i n g v o i c e s (the three Menoptra introduced in Episode 4 clearly learned the lesson, and rattle off their dialogue at a pace befitting a David Mamet play being shot in the studio next door). The script is too ambitious for a 1965-sized budget and studio space (there's a reason why Riverside One was later only used for talk shows), which leads to actors tripping over camera cables, Zarbi bumping into the camera and William Hartnell grabbing onto his lapels more than usual, for fear of swinging his arms too wide and knocking down some Styrofoam boulders or the backcloth.
By Episode 6, the script had to be padded out, with William Russell pretending to climb the scenery or with 45 seconds' worth of Menoptra shouting "Zar-bee! Zar-bee!" at the poor clunky ant costumes. Not that the serial has been good up to this point, but the Menoptra shouting is just the most amateurish sort of acting -- not even edgy black-box theater experimental, but community theater acting aimed at the less-discerning eight-year-old. After that comes the bit where the Menoptra play catch their galaxy-destroying weapon to prevent the Zarbi from confiscating it. Awful.
*****
The second-to-last paragraph of my Ratings Guide reviews is typically where I hide faint praise for a bad story (or faint damning of a good story), just to be even-handed and judicial. So this is the bit where I'm kind and understanding to The Web Planet. The effort to create a thoroughly alien society shows through. The Menoptra and particularly the Optera speak in metaphors; we see a Menoptra temple in Episode 5, and you learn that they worship light, which is a neat touch both from the moth-to-a-flame perspective and the fact that Vortis is shrouded in perpetual night. I bet the color night-sky backdrop would have looked awesome and fun to act against in studio (we get a brief sense of this in An Adventure in Space and Time). The astral map is an awesome prop: I would love to have that in my home, and it shows up several more times through Season 6.
Oh, and the whole thing is a World War II metaphor written by a veteran of that war. For that reason alone, this story doesn't deserve to be torched. But that's not enough to overcome the painful nature of the rest of it.
In short, all the elements that make a successful Doctor Who production -- good acting, good dialogue, good visual effects, good direction -- are almost entirely absent from The Web Planet. If Doctor Who were any other show, you wouldn't even be watching a 60-year-old episode anymore, but we Who fans are a stubborn breed, and if it's there, we have to watch it, even if we know we don't like it. The script is weak, the Doctor comes off poorly, Jacqueline Hill goes on vacation in the middle of it, and most of the alien-acting is actively painful to sit through. The best thing about The Web Planet is that, in sequence, the next episode is The Crusade... which, unlike The Web Planet, doesn't even exist in full anymore. Memo to BBC Enterprises: why did you manage to lose half The Crusade but preserve all of this one? I'd love to know that answer...