Chapter the 253rd, Doctor Who waited a year for a story with giant ants and then two came along in quick succession....
Plot:
The TARDIS is dragged down to the planet Vortis, and cannot dematerialise. The Doctor and Ian go out to investigate. Barbara and Vicki, impacted by odd forces seeming to emanate from the planet, follow them out separately. The TARDIS travellers eventually find themselves split up with different factions of the creatures on the planet. Barbara is with the Menoptera (giant butterfly people). Generations earlier, when their planet was a verdant paradise, a force they call the Animus (giant spider) arrived, polluted the water and made the ground barren, turned the Zarbi (giant ant creatures) from benign cattle into aggressive assailants, and also attracted various heavenly bodies towards the planet. Most of the Menoptera escaped to one of these nearby planetoids, and planned how to win back their home. An advance party has recently landed and most were captured; Barbara joins up with them and helps them escape from a chain gang bringing to the Animus raw materials to build its Carsinome (giant web). Ian meets up with the only one of the advanced Menoptera party who's still free and the two of them find Optera (giant weird caterpillar-ish things, but they don't look like much of anything really). These are descendants of the Menoptera that stayed behind who adapted to life underground. The Doctor and Vicki are mainly with the Animus, with the creature believing that it can harness the Doctor's intelligence for universal domination; they do manage to get away briefly and meet up with the Menoptera to plan an attack on the Animus. Eventually, everyone works toegther to destroy it with the Menoptera scientists' doomsday device, the Isop-tope. The TARDIS is freed and the travellers leave, the planet starts to return to normal, and every insect lives happily ever after together.
Context:
As ever with my lifetime's collecting of Doctor Who stories on tape and shiny disc, I had the Blu-ray box set of season 2 - William Hartnell and the show's second year, originally broadcast 1964 / 65 - on pre-order, and received it on its day of release in December 2022. Though it's a big ol' season (see Deeper Thoughts section below for more on that), I'd already blogged every one of the stories bar two. As usual, I introduced a random factor as to whether I should blog a story at all (it came up 'Yes') and which it should be. So, paenitemus The Romans, it looks like you'll be the last of season 2 to be blogged. The Web Planet it was. I watched from said Blu-ray version, an episode an evening with a break in the middle for one day, over a week of January 2023. People occasionally came into the living room and commented, but nobody sat down to watch. The Better Half asked what the name of the giant wasp people was. When I pointed out that they were butterflies, she asked me how I knew this, as they looked more like wasps to her. I realised she was right - the bodies are striped, and the wings transparent. Nowhere in the dialogue does any character compare them to butterflies, and the order of insects hymenoptera, from where the creature name seems to be derived, includes wasps but not butterflies, who are in the order lepidoptera. Why has Doctor Who fiction and non-fiction since then convinced itself that they are modelled on butterflies instead of the wasps they most resemble?!
First Time Round:
Like the last story blogged at the end of 2022, The Web Planet was one I first saw on VHS in the early days of the releases. That last blogged story The Robots of Death came out in the 1980s: from 1986 to 1989, Doctor Who tapes at affordable prices appeared on the market in fits and starts. If you were lucky enough as I was to be able to find them and buy them all as they came out, you would have had a dozen titles by the end of the 1980s. That was a veritable collection in itself, but any fan of the time knew there were hundreds more stories that could yet be released. From 1990, the releases finally became regular, with pairs of tapes coming out every couple of months. Things were taken a little bit more seriously: stories no longer had their intermediate credits edited out, and specially commissioned artwork covers replaced the photos that had been used up to that point. BBC Enterprises (as they then were called) went way back into the back catalogue: most of the releases in 1990 came from the early black-and-white years of the show. The Web Planet was one of the final pair released in September of the year. As with all stories of six or more parts back then, the story was released in two boxes that had to be purchased together - the innovation of double tape boxes did not come in until the following year. I bought the tapes from W.H. Smiths in Worthing, and took them home and watched the story in full on the same day. It has a reputation for being a snooze-fest, but I don't think I knew that at the time, and didn't feel it once I'd watched the episodes - I was too busy staring in wonder at Who history.
Reaction:
The Web Planet is still to date the only Doctor Who story with a guest cast comprising of wholly non-humanoid characters. The only people who look anything like humans in the story are the regular cast, with everyone else in an outre costume and make-up job. It has never been attempted in the series again. Why might this be? There's one likely reason from a production point of view, and another from a narrative point of view. The production reason is that it's a very expensive thing to do well. It's hard to perceive now, so much time has gone by and it looks so dated, but The Web Planet was one of the bigger budget shows of its time, and every creative department is pushing the boat out in a way they couldn't do every week. If one considers that in the next futuristic, space-based episodes two stories after this (The Space Museum) making an actor look alien was reduced down to dressing them in a single-coloured uniform and sticking on some bushy fake eyebrows, the Zarbi story is clearly one that busted the budget. A lot of work has gone into making the landscape and creatures of Vortis as other-worldly as possible: the distinctive soundscape created for the planet including echoing dialogue plus stock music by Les Structures Sonores, the Vaseline-smeared camera lens to produce atmospheric blur, the choreographed ways the Menoptera move, and the consistent way they speak (them not being able to manage Ian and Barbara's names and it coming out as "Heron" and "Arbara" is a nice detail).
The Optera and Animus are not as successfully realised as the Zarbi, Menoptera or Larvae Guns (these last are rather fun grub-like creations played by people laying flat on a wheeled platform and pushing themselves around), but they still have their moments. The cliffhanger where a prong extends from the wall of the Animus's lair and sprays the Doctor and Vicki with web is great. As well as the distinctive imagery of the planet Vortis and its inhabitants, there's little bits and bobs of TARDIS lore too. The Atmospheric Density Jackets (the Doctor's advanced take on spacesuits) are instantly recognisable, and there's some nice hints about the powers of the Doctor's jewelled ring. The fantastic worlds of the story have been thoroughly thought out. Even in Doctor Who's later radio and animation one-offs, though, when budget would have been less of a concern, it never attempted anything as fantastic as The Web Planet. So, maybe it's more to do with the narrative reason. This is that, for an audience watching, too much that's alien can be, well, alienating. Doctor Who, though, is about exploring the unknown, particularly in this early era. So, there's clearly a balance to be struck. There needs to be some grounding of the exploration to make it relevant as a piece of drama for its intended audience. When he was planning the first year of the restarted Doctor Who in the 2000s, Russell T Davies put together a pitch document that included the phrase “If the Zogs on planet Zog are having trouble with the Zog-monster [...] who gives a toss?” It feels a bit close to home where this story is concerned: if the Menoptera on Vortis are having trouble with the Animus, why should we care?
There's a couple of ways the writer can try to make people give a toss. One is to lean in to the genre and how its associated story beats will impact the protagonists. The four regulars do all take part in an adventure story with a few fights and escapes. Like most of director Richard Martin's work for Doctor Who, the film work captures this adventuring in an exciting and fluid way (there's some beautifully balletic moments of Menoptera flying on Kirby wires shot at Ealing), but in the TV studio things are much more clunky as Martin struggles to work within the constraints. Nonetheless, one is carried through the action for the most part, despite the story's reputation for having many longueurs. It would have worked out fine for a four episode story, but for six, it's not enough. Another way the writer could have made the action hit home is through some allegorical resonance. It's not enough just to have ants versus butterflies, but there is a theory that the ants represent conformity and maybe even communism, and the butterflies stand for freedom of thought and politics. This would however only power a narrative through, ooh, the length of a haiku, maybe. It was a fairly hackneyed metaphor even in the mid-1960s, and the script doesn't do anything with it. In summary then: if you're going to have the Doctor and friends visit somewhere really weird, keep it relatively short or think of some way it can be relevant to the people watching.
Having said this, it must be pointed out that the story was wildly successful when it went out. It initially captured and then more or less sustained a phenomenal size of audience (the number of people watching the first episode would not be bettered for a decade). Though not anywhere near as popular as the Daleks, the creatures from this story did have multiple items of their own merchandise, and the story was one of the first three selected to become a tie-in novelisation. The imagery clearly had an impact. There's some nice interplay between the regulars early on too, particularly in the scenes between Ian and the Doctor, the former annoyed that the latter has melted his old school tie to test the corrosiveness of a pool on Vortis. There's also a good scene between Barbara and Vicki, where the cultural differences of the different periods they originate from are explored. More of this might have also helped offset the alien nature of the surrounding material, but everyone soon gets split up. Some dramatic moments for the insectoid characters manage to cut through the surrounding costumes: a Menoptera sad that their wings have been cut off and they'll never fly again, the matter of fact death of the female Optera, stoically staying still in a torrent of acid to block it from reaching the rest of the party. Martin Jarvis appears at a very early stage of his career in the role of Menoptera military leader Hilio, and he's wonderful. His slightly sneering delivery ("Codeword?") is a joy.
There are some other moments that don't work so well: the Doctor betrays part of the Menoptera's plan to buy time to fight the Animus, and elsewhere they work out that he must have done this. When they finally meet him, though, it's all smiles and nobody says a things about it. When Barbara arrives at the Temple of Light, she waxes lyrical about how beautiful it is, but it is just a quite tatty set. The characterisation that actor Ian Thompson chooses for the main Optera Hetra is... questionable. To my ear, he seems to be doing a Mexican bandit accent. The youngest child (girl of 10) came into the living room at one moment when the Optera were on screen and said the voice sounded like Robin the caveman from the BBC comedy Ghosts. Maybe it was primitive that they were going for, but it's a bit disconcerting (even before one sees them hopping about the place). It also took me out of the action when one of the Menoptera describes the Optera as being "like slugs". Somehow, creatures that look like (but aren't called) butterflies, ants and spiders shouldn't know of slugs, and even if they did shouldn't call them that, but should call them Gastropoda or similar. A more significant issue is that the Animus repeatedly threatens the Doctor with death, but then repeatedly doesn't follow through; this undermines the central threat. It's almost as if it knows that there are six weeks of action that need to be filled. Perhaps some or all of these issues wouldn't be so apparent if I'd watched the story an episode a week as it originally went out (I tried this experiment with another 1960s Who story recently), but I didn't have time: it's taken me the best part of a month to get through watching and posting about the story as it is. On balance, though, I'd say the story's reputation for making time pass slowly is definitely exaggerated.
Connectivity:
Both The Web Planet and The Robots of Death feature a relatively new female companion in their first TARDIS trip to an alien planet (though both of them had been picked up off-Earth). Aspects of both stories were referenced in the first Russell T Davies showrunner period of new series Doctor Who (the Host are a homage to the robots from Robots of Death, and the Isop Galaxy turns out to be the Face of Boe's home, as well as the Animus's). In both stories, a group of alien characters have been conceived in more extensive detail than usual, from the look and feel to how they'll move and speak.
Deeper Thoughts:
Animus-ity! Doctor Who: The Collection - Season 2 Blu-ray box set overview . I didn't get to the BFI event last year that tied in to this set's release (they showed The Time Meddler), but thought it was worthwhile doing a quick review of the contents here. The limited edition sets seem lately to be available longer before selling out, and - perhaps a reason why they're available longer - sets are rapidly coming out as more affordable standard releases after the initial release too. As such, my feelings about the set may be useful to any potential purchaser reading this who might be wavering. After having reminisced in the First Time Round section above about amassing 12 Doctor Who video tapes in the 1980s and feeling that definitely constituted a collection, I note that this is the 12th Blu-ray box set release. The shelf space required for them all to be lined up in broadcast order is growing, and these 12 boxes represent almost half of the classic era. It would be exactly half if the usual three sets had been released last year instead of two, as I grumbled about in the last blog post. I realised how ungrateful I was being as I dug into the contents of these discs more, though: this series comprises a mighty 39 episodes, substantially more than on any set released before this one (seasons of Doctor Who were longer in the 1960s) and almost three times as many episodes as some of the sets that have come out (for later seasons in the classic era starring Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy).
Every one of the existing episodes has never looked or sounded better. The restoration work is nothing short of astounding, and watching these stories is like seeing them brand new for the first time (probably better than that, in fact, as someone with the most expensive 1960s TV equipment would never have watched the episodes in such clarity). They have never been more complete either, the two missing episodes of The Crusade being represented by photo reconstructions married to the existing audio, and a 12-second gap in The Time Meddler cleverly filled. The stories themselves are a great selection, a second series allowing producer Verity Lambert and her collaborators to try new things (like experimenting with more comedy in The Romans, doing a pseudo-Shakespearean number with The Crusade, pushing the production boundaries with The Web Planet, and pushing the story boundaries with The Time Meddler) and be more expansive in the action (Doctor Who's first extensive location filming took place for the two Dalek stories in this run, and there's a lot of great celluloid sequences filmed in Ealing studios deployed in other stories too). Perhaps because of the number of episodes to fit onto nine discs, the additional material is a little less extensive than on other sets. The age of the material precludes much in the way of archive (it's a minor miracle that as many episodes survive, let alone extra bits) but a few trailers and continuity excerpts are included, as is a sketch featuring a Dalek from the Wayne and Shuster show, a somewhat obscure comedy series of the time. Apart from that, it's mainly newer items, either created especially for the Blu-ray set or ported over from the DVD releases of these stories.
David Whittaker, subject of "Looking for David"
This second run of Doctor Who was the first to see changes of the show's regular cast, and Matthew Sweet continues his series of "In Conversation" pieces with in-depth interviews with one of the regulars who left (William Russell, who played Ian Chesterton) and one who joined (Maureen O' Brien, who played Vicki). Sweet's gentle but probing style and thorough research are both on display as ever; Russell is in his late 90s, so it would be wrong to expect (and we don't get) detailed answers drawing upon old memories, but his affection for Doctor Who, and the people he worked with on it, shines through. O'Brien's interview goes wider and into more depth, taking in a lot more of her life and career beyond Who, including her Catholic upbringing (which seems to have cast a long shadow) and her perfectionism; it's nonetheless a happy chat with lots of laughter. There's three other new documentaries: a solid story by story season overview with talking head interviews with some of the people involved, a fun featurette on 1960s collectibles presented by an infectiously enthusiastic Emily Cook (the first of a series that will definitely take in the 70s and 80s, and maybe even beyond), and finally Looking For David, the centerpiece of this collection. Looking for David is a genuinely investigative work looking at the life and career of the first Doctor Who script editor, and writer of many episodes, David Whittaker. Directed by Chris Chapman and presented by Toby Hadoke, with a lot of input from Simon Guerrier who is working on a biography of Whittaker, this is another in the occasional set of "Looking For..." docos that have appeared on other Blu-ray sets, and is - in my opinion at least - the best so far. What makes it great is that, unlike the previous entries in this strand, Whittaker is not a blank. Becuase of his key role in the early days of Doctor Who, we fans think we know a reasonable amount about him, but as the documentary progresses, revealing more and more, we realise what we had known was very little after all. It's almost worth the price of the set alone.
One of the "Behind the Sofa" companion groupings
Another extra on the discs that's not exactly new, but not as archive as season 2, is a recording of a Doctor Who convention panel from 1985 featuring Carole Ann Ford (Susan), Jacqueline Hill (Barbara), plus actors that joined Doctor Who in season 3, Adrienne Hill (Katarina, and no relation to her predecessor, I don't think) and Michael Craze (Ben). As three out of the four are sadly no longer with us, and passed on in the 1990s before they did too many interviews, they perhaps didn't get as extended an exposure within organised fandom that they would have had later; as such, this is an invaluable historic document. Everyone is very forthcoming - including being somewhat critical of the 1985 version of Doctor Who, particularly of the outfits that Nicola Bryant was made to wear - and there's some great moments. Another fabulous feature is split across six of the nine stories: Behind The Sofa. Reacting to clips of season 2 stories are three groups of companion actors: season 2 stars Ford, O'Brien and Peter Purves (who joined at the end of the run as Steven); a duo of Sylvester McCoy co-stars from Doctor Who in the late 1980s, Bonnie Langford and Sophie Aldred; and Wendy Padbury (who appeared with Patrick Troughton later in the 1960s) with Janet Fielding and Sarah Sutton (who came in at the end of Tom Baker's tenure and carried on with Peter Davison) - this last one seems like an arbitrary grouping, but from the way they interact they are clearly old pals from the convention circuit. Each of the three groups is great to watch, but it's Langford (watching for the first time ever, she claims, any Doctor Who story not featuring her good self) that delivers the most, and forms a great double-act with Aldred ("You say Fraggle Rock, I say testicles" is a great pull-out quote from them). There's a few amusing moments when the 1960s group are all agreeing how well designed something is, and the action cuts to one or both of the other groups dissolving into giggles at how rubbish they think the same thing looks. And both are right, somehow. In summary, then: the biggest set of episodes yet on Blu-ray, without perhaps the biggest set of new extras, but that's made up for by the big personalities involved. It's definitely worth picking up a copy.
In Summary:
If it were four episodes long, it would probably be thought of as a classic. But it's not.
Plot:
The TARDIS is dragged down to the planet Vortis, and cannot dematerialise. The Doctor and Ian go out to investigate. Barbara and Vicki, impacted by odd forces seeming to emanate from the planet, follow them out separately. The TARDIS travellers eventually find themselves split up with different factions of the creatures on the planet. Barbara is with the Menoptera (giant butterfly people). Generations earlier, when their planet was a verdant paradise, a force they call the Animus (giant spider) arrived, polluted the water and made the ground barren, turned the Zarbi (giant ant creatures) from benign cattle into aggressive assailants, and also attracted various heavenly bodies towards the planet. Most of the Menoptera escaped to one of these nearby planetoids, and planned how to win back their home. An advance party has recently landed and most were captured; Barbara joins up with them and helps them escape from a chain gang bringing to the Animus raw materials to build its Carsinome (giant web). Ian meets up with the only one of the advanced Menoptera party who's still free and the two of them find Optera (giant weird caterpillar-ish things, but they don't look like much of anything really). These are descendants of the Menoptera that stayed behind who adapted to life underground. The Doctor and Vicki are mainly with the Animus, with the creature believing that it can harness the Doctor's intelligence for universal domination; they do manage to get away briefly and meet up with the Menoptera to plan an attack on the Animus. Eventually, everyone works toegther to destroy it with the Menoptera scientists' doomsday device, the Isop-tope. The TARDIS is freed and the travellers leave, the planet starts to return to normal, and every insect lives happily ever after together.
Context:
As ever with my lifetime's collecting of Doctor Who stories on tape and shiny disc, I had the Blu-ray box set of season 2 - William Hartnell and the show's second year, originally broadcast 1964 / 65 - on pre-order, and received it on its day of release in December 2022. Though it's a big ol' season (see Deeper Thoughts section below for more on that), I'd already blogged every one of the stories bar two. As usual, I introduced a random factor as to whether I should blog a story at all (it came up 'Yes') and which it should be. So, paenitemus The Romans, it looks like you'll be the last of season 2 to be blogged. The Web Planet it was. I watched from said Blu-ray version, an episode an evening with a break in the middle for one day, over a week of January 2023. People occasionally came into the living room and commented, but nobody sat down to watch. The Better Half asked what the name of the giant wasp people was. When I pointed out that they were butterflies, she asked me how I knew this, as they looked more like wasps to her. I realised she was right - the bodies are striped, and the wings transparent. Nowhere in the dialogue does any character compare them to butterflies, and the order of insects hymenoptera, from where the creature name seems to be derived, includes wasps but not butterflies, who are in the order lepidoptera. Why has Doctor Who fiction and non-fiction since then convinced itself that they are modelled on butterflies instead of the wasps they most resemble?!
First Time Round:
Like the last story blogged at the end of 2022, The Web Planet was one I first saw on VHS in the early days of the releases. That last blogged story The Robots of Death came out in the 1980s: from 1986 to 1989, Doctor Who tapes at affordable prices appeared on the market in fits and starts. If you were lucky enough as I was to be able to find them and buy them all as they came out, you would have had a dozen titles by the end of the 1980s. That was a veritable collection in itself, but any fan of the time knew there were hundreds more stories that could yet be released. From 1990, the releases finally became regular, with pairs of tapes coming out every couple of months. Things were taken a little bit more seriously: stories no longer had their intermediate credits edited out, and specially commissioned artwork covers replaced the photos that had been used up to that point. BBC Enterprises (as they then were called) went way back into the back catalogue: most of the releases in 1990 came from the early black-and-white years of the show. The Web Planet was one of the final pair released in September of the year. As with all stories of six or more parts back then, the story was released in two boxes that had to be purchased together - the innovation of double tape boxes did not come in until the following year. I bought the tapes from W.H. Smiths in Worthing, and took them home and watched the story in full on the same day. It has a reputation for being a snooze-fest, but I don't think I knew that at the time, and didn't feel it once I'd watched the episodes - I was too busy staring in wonder at Who history.
Reaction:
The Web Planet is still to date the only Doctor Who story with a guest cast comprising of wholly non-humanoid characters. The only people who look anything like humans in the story are the regular cast, with everyone else in an outre costume and make-up job. It has never been attempted in the series again. Why might this be? There's one likely reason from a production point of view, and another from a narrative point of view. The production reason is that it's a very expensive thing to do well. It's hard to perceive now, so much time has gone by and it looks so dated, but The Web Planet was one of the bigger budget shows of its time, and every creative department is pushing the boat out in a way they couldn't do every week. If one considers that in the next futuristic, space-based episodes two stories after this (The Space Museum) making an actor look alien was reduced down to dressing them in a single-coloured uniform and sticking on some bushy fake eyebrows, the Zarbi story is clearly one that busted the budget. A lot of work has gone into making the landscape and creatures of Vortis as other-worldly as possible: the distinctive soundscape created for the planet including echoing dialogue plus stock music by Les Structures Sonores, the Vaseline-smeared camera lens to produce atmospheric blur, the choreographed ways the Menoptera move, and the consistent way they speak (them not being able to manage Ian and Barbara's names and it coming out as "Heron" and "Arbara" is a nice detail).
The Optera and Animus are not as successfully realised as the Zarbi, Menoptera or Larvae Guns (these last are rather fun grub-like creations played by people laying flat on a wheeled platform and pushing themselves around), but they still have their moments. The cliffhanger where a prong extends from the wall of the Animus's lair and sprays the Doctor and Vicki with web is great. As well as the distinctive imagery of the planet Vortis and its inhabitants, there's little bits and bobs of TARDIS lore too. The Atmospheric Density Jackets (the Doctor's advanced take on spacesuits) are instantly recognisable, and there's some nice hints about the powers of the Doctor's jewelled ring. The fantastic worlds of the story have been thoroughly thought out. Even in Doctor Who's later radio and animation one-offs, though, when budget would have been less of a concern, it never attempted anything as fantastic as The Web Planet. So, maybe it's more to do with the narrative reason. This is that, for an audience watching, too much that's alien can be, well, alienating. Doctor Who, though, is about exploring the unknown, particularly in this early era. So, there's clearly a balance to be struck. There needs to be some grounding of the exploration to make it relevant as a piece of drama for its intended audience. When he was planning the first year of the restarted Doctor Who in the 2000s, Russell T Davies put together a pitch document that included the phrase “If the Zogs on planet Zog are having trouble with the Zog-monster [...] who gives a toss?” It feels a bit close to home where this story is concerned: if the Menoptera on Vortis are having trouble with the Animus, why should we care?
There's a couple of ways the writer can try to make people give a toss. One is to lean in to the genre and how its associated story beats will impact the protagonists. The four regulars do all take part in an adventure story with a few fights and escapes. Like most of director Richard Martin's work for Doctor Who, the film work captures this adventuring in an exciting and fluid way (there's some beautifully balletic moments of Menoptera flying on Kirby wires shot at Ealing), but in the TV studio things are much more clunky as Martin struggles to work within the constraints. Nonetheless, one is carried through the action for the most part, despite the story's reputation for having many longueurs. It would have worked out fine for a four episode story, but for six, it's not enough. Another way the writer could have made the action hit home is through some allegorical resonance. It's not enough just to have ants versus butterflies, but there is a theory that the ants represent conformity and maybe even communism, and the butterflies stand for freedom of thought and politics. This would however only power a narrative through, ooh, the length of a haiku, maybe. It was a fairly hackneyed metaphor even in the mid-1960s, and the script doesn't do anything with it. In summary then: if you're going to have the Doctor and friends visit somewhere really weird, keep it relatively short or think of some way it can be relevant to the people watching.
Having said this, it must be pointed out that the story was wildly successful when it went out. It initially captured and then more or less sustained a phenomenal size of audience (the number of people watching the first episode would not be bettered for a decade). Though not anywhere near as popular as the Daleks, the creatures from this story did have multiple items of their own merchandise, and the story was one of the first three selected to become a tie-in novelisation. The imagery clearly had an impact. There's some nice interplay between the regulars early on too, particularly in the scenes between Ian and the Doctor, the former annoyed that the latter has melted his old school tie to test the corrosiveness of a pool on Vortis. There's also a good scene between Barbara and Vicki, where the cultural differences of the different periods they originate from are explored. More of this might have also helped offset the alien nature of the surrounding material, but everyone soon gets split up. Some dramatic moments for the insectoid characters manage to cut through the surrounding costumes: a Menoptera sad that their wings have been cut off and they'll never fly again, the matter of fact death of the female Optera, stoically staying still in a torrent of acid to block it from reaching the rest of the party. Martin Jarvis appears at a very early stage of his career in the role of Menoptera military leader Hilio, and he's wonderful. His slightly sneering delivery ("Codeword?") is a joy.
There are some other moments that don't work so well: the Doctor betrays part of the Menoptera's plan to buy time to fight the Animus, and elsewhere they work out that he must have done this. When they finally meet him, though, it's all smiles and nobody says a things about it. When Barbara arrives at the Temple of Light, she waxes lyrical about how beautiful it is, but it is just a quite tatty set. The characterisation that actor Ian Thompson chooses for the main Optera Hetra is... questionable. To my ear, he seems to be doing a Mexican bandit accent. The youngest child (girl of 10) came into the living room at one moment when the Optera were on screen and said the voice sounded like Robin the caveman from the BBC comedy Ghosts. Maybe it was primitive that they were going for, but it's a bit disconcerting (even before one sees them hopping about the place). It also took me out of the action when one of the Menoptera describes the Optera as being "like slugs". Somehow, creatures that look like (but aren't called) butterflies, ants and spiders shouldn't know of slugs, and even if they did shouldn't call them that, but should call them Gastropoda or similar. A more significant issue is that the Animus repeatedly threatens the Doctor with death, but then repeatedly doesn't follow through; this undermines the central threat. It's almost as if it knows that there are six weeks of action that need to be filled. Perhaps some or all of these issues wouldn't be so apparent if I'd watched the story an episode a week as it originally went out (I tried this experiment with another 1960s Who story recently), but I didn't have time: it's taken me the best part of a month to get through watching and posting about the story as it is. On balance, though, I'd say the story's reputation for making time pass slowly is definitely exaggerated.
Connectivity:
Both The Web Planet and The Robots of Death feature a relatively new female companion in their first TARDIS trip to an alien planet (though both of them had been picked up off-Earth). Aspects of both stories were referenced in the first Russell T Davies showrunner period of new series Doctor Who (the Host are a homage to the robots from Robots of Death, and the Isop Galaxy turns out to be the Face of Boe's home, as well as the Animus's). In both stories, a group of alien characters have been conceived in more extensive detail than usual, from the look and feel to how they'll move and speak.
Deeper Thoughts:
Animus-ity! Doctor Who: The Collection - Season 2 Blu-ray box set overview . I didn't get to the BFI event last year that tied in to this set's release (they showed The Time Meddler), but thought it was worthwhile doing a quick review of the contents here. The limited edition sets seem lately to be available longer before selling out, and - perhaps a reason why they're available longer - sets are rapidly coming out as more affordable standard releases after the initial release too. As such, my feelings about the set may be useful to any potential purchaser reading this who might be wavering. After having reminisced in the First Time Round section above about amassing 12 Doctor Who video tapes in the 1980s and feeling that definitely constituted a collection, I note that this is the 12th Blu-ray box set release. The shelf space required for them all to be lined up in broadcast order is growing, and these 12 boxes represent almost half of the classic era. It would be exactly half if the usual three sets had been released last year instead of two, as I grumbled about in the last blog post. I realised how ungrateful I was being as I dug into the contents of these discs more, though: this series comprises a mighty 39 episodes, substantially more than on any set released before this one (seasons of Doctor Who were longer in the 1960s) and almost three times as many episodes as some of the sets that have come out (for later seasons in the classic era starring Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy).
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| David Whittaker, subject of "Looking for David" |
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| One of the "Behind the Sofa" companion groupings |
In Summary:
If it were four episodes long, it would probably be thought of as a classic. But it's not.
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