Doctor Who (TV Series) The Web Planet (1965) User Reviews

Bizarre Alien Pantomime Landscape!

[profh-1 · 5/10 · 22 January 2009]

I think THE WEB PLANET must rank-- absolutely must-- as the single most bizarre alien planet The Doctor ever visited in the entire history of the series! During the 1st episode, The Doctor is in unusually high spirits, delighted by every new phenomena and experience he encounters, and keeps laughing & muttering to himself in a manner that reminded me very much of Yoda from THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK! It's obvious the TARDIS control room has been rebuilt between seasons. Apart from a few "roundels" near the doors, it looks almost nothing like it did during the 1st season. All the intricate computer banks are gone, replaced by mostly blank walls, and a section stuffed with unusual gadgets, including a movable "star map" which over the course of the story seems to double as a long-distance communications system.

Part 1 ends on a multiple cliffhanger, as Barbara, entranced, is walking straight for a pool of acid, Ian has been grabbed by a bizarre "web", Vicki, knocked about inside the TARDIS, begins hitting switches at random, and The Doctor is horrified to find his ship has-- disappeared! Ian & The Doctor soon find, in a bit somewhat reminiscent of the film THE TIME MACHINE, that someone has dragged the TARDIS away, and they follow the tracks on the ground. Before long, they find themselves in one of the WEIRDEST-looking sets ever (the production designer really went wild on this one!). Barbara, meanwhile, encounters The Menoptera, a race of butterfly-like people. The design, the performance (both speaking and movements), everything about them is just so "alien". Depending on your point of view, this story can either be looked at as the realization of a truly alien landscape on a microscopic budget, or as a children's pantomime-- maybe both. I was reminded quite a lot of watching the PETER PAN stage play. It's the sort of thing that may be difficult for anyone over a certain age to deal with, but I think it just takes deliberate effort on one's part to "get into" it. One thing I would highly recommend, DO NOT watch this in one sitting. It really works best in smaller segments-- like, one episode a day.

Late in the story there was much emphasis on The Doctor's ring, which is supposed to have some unusual properties (or powers). Was this the first time it appeared? I do recall reading about how it slipped off Patrick Troughton's finger when he regenerated. I don't suppose it was seen after that...

It's a pretty interesting first episode.

[Sleepin_Dragon · 7/10 · 25 October 2019]

Something is holding The TARDIS on the planet Vortis, unable to take off, Ian and The Doctor explore.

The set manages to create the sense of space and depth, it's very cleverly designed. The funny alien beings are slightly less successful, possibly the worst case of Monsters by Blue Peter. They don't appear to be the greatest design on first viewing. The sounds are a bit irritating.

Some nice scenes between Barbara and Vicki, as she discusses her education, the gulf in education over the years. Ian doesn't have much luck, he loses his pen first, then his tie, both are nice scenes.

It's actually not a bad start, it's certainly imaginative. 7/10

Television Had Never Done Anything Like It Before Or Since . There's A Reason For This

[Theo Robertson · 5/10 · 9 August 2013]

Suggestive spoilers to all six episodes

The Tardis lands on the Planet Vortis and almost immediately falls under control of a mysterious force . Splitting up in to two groups Vicki and Barbara go one way and The Doctor and Ian the other on the desolate planet . Returning to the spot he left the Tardis the Doctor finds the ship gone

Before this story was released on video and before its broadcast on UK Gold this had an almost legendary reputation amongst fandom and it's not difficult to see why . While the Daleks were in danger of becoming as big if not bigger than the programme that spawned them it was The Web Planet that held the biggest viewing figures of the 1960s of almost 14 million viewers a week a record that stood for almost ten years . It's also unique in that apart from the series regulars no humanoid characters appear and all the other characters are non human , the Zarbi who resemble giant bipedal ants and their Venom Grubs , the Butterfly like creatures the Menoptera , and the Opetera which resemble caterpillars . Actually I'm being somewhat charitable because the latter species look like men dressed up in something designed by a hard core LSD abuser in a story that looks like it was filmed at the annual school pantomime . You can't help noticing the constant clump clump clump of the actors shoes as they walk across the wooden studio floor and you get the feeling 14 million watched it every week for a laugh

I'm not telling anyone how to live their lives because I'm something of a libertarian but I've got to warn you too much substance abuse can lead to this . Or maybe you're supposed to mainline magic mushroom soup in to your veins in order to appreciate this story in anyway . As soon this story became available to fandom it quickly stopped being one of the highest rated stories of the 1960s and became one of the most panned . You can defend it on the grounds that it's trying to be different but you're also aware as to why this type of experimental story remained a one off . The story is slow and plodding almost to the point of being unwatchable and that's before the absolutely atrocious directing by Richard Martin is taken in to account . Several scenes have Zarbi banging in to camera and some action scenes don't even begin to make sense , the only competent scene is the cliffhanger to episode one which ironically contains Hartnell at his greatest in the role where he finds the Tardis has vanished . Apart from that it's one of those stories you MUST watch to understand why politicians banned LSD in the 1960s . The concept might deserve 10/10 for the concept but the execution and the dated nature means probably deserves 1/10 so I'll compromise by giving it 5/10

The Web Planet

[ametaphysicalshark · 15 July 2008]

I want to love "The Web Planet". I came to terms with thinking it was rubbish as a script ages ago but I so badly want to find the entertainment others do in it that I am incapable of finding. I mean, you can only laugh at the worst bee-like costumes in the history of film or television for so long, right? When the ordeal lasts two and a half hours it expectedly gets unbelievably trying to sit through, especially as the 'plot' here is so bewilderingly, bizarrely dull and pointless. For whatever it's worth I actually kind of like the Zarbi design. For 1965 on the BBC it's not horrible. I kind of like the Zarbi in general. Hell, I even like Vortis as a setting. I like the idea of this story much better than the outcome. Luckily, Big Finish productions would exploit the potential this story had in "Return to the Web Planet", an audio drama featuring the Fifth Doctor which is far from great but fairly entertaining.

The first episode here, titled "The Web Planet", is really quite good. Vortis is quite decently realized and a sense of menace builds quite well. It isn't without its moments of cheesiness, but it is more than tolerable, it's enjoyable. I even like the second episode a bit, although it is mediocre, since it is still introductory and decently paced, I suppose. The third episode slips into 'bad' territory but isn't quite 'terrible' yet. Fourth onwards? Really quite unbearable. Just boring. BORING. Unbelievably... boring. Really, really boring. There are very few if any positives about these episodes.

Like the rest of fandom has said: what was Peter Haining thinking?! "The Web Planet" is not the worst "Doctor Who" story of all time thanks to its first two episodes. They make a nice little story with no conclusion. It is really unbelievable that out of all the First Doctor stories, somehow, SOMEHOW, this little 'gem' survived while "Marco Polo" went missing. How unjust is that? I can understand some defending this as entertaining (no, I can't really UNDERSTAND it, but I'll forgive it), but to think there's still people out there who think this is some sort of avant-garde masterpiece? They should try watching this without LSD...

Episode 1: 7/10, Episode 2: 6/10, Episode 3: 4/10, Episode 4: 2/10, Episode 5: 2/10, Episode 6: 2/10.

Average: 3.83/10

The Web Planet Part 1: Ambitious but sadly unsuccessful.

[A_Kind_Of_CineMagic · 6/10 · 6 July 2014]

This story gets a lot of bad reviews and dislike but it also has fans who defend it vociferously. I do not hate it like some people but I also certainly do not love it or really enjoy it very much. It isn't particularly entertaining for me.

Surely it deserves points for ambition as it attempts to show us a completely alien world with insect-like aliens which look and behave in a very non-human way. I applaud it for such a brave attempt but overall this is the weakest Hartnell era adventure in my opinion as it just drags too much for me.

The effects were acceptable for their time given the low budget and time constraints but the problem is there is too much reliance on the effects even though the budget was not nearly enough to create the effects required. The story puts all the emphasis on the creation of alien beings in insect form on a very alien landscape. It neglects giving us an exciting enough adventure to keep me interested.

The costumes and effects look silly to many modern viewers and give it all a pantomime feel but this would be forgivable if the story and script were strong enough to stand up on their own. Sadly, while it is far from awful, I do not think the story or dialogue are strong enough. If you imagine overlaying modern CGI effects onto this to make it all look plausible I am afraid it would still leave a lacklustre story in my opinion.

I am sad to say I find it rather boring and repetetive for too much of the time. It is very stretched and lacking in content. It is filled up with ear splitting sounds going on for too long and events going a bit round in circles. It has good aspects but is a weaker than average story by comparison to the great adventures in the history of Doctor Who.

However, it is saved from total failure by its ambition in presenting a strange world full of non humanoid aliens and the better parts of script, story and acting. It is not all bad and it is an interesting idea but it is badly realised and becomes boring. It is what I would call a brave but ultimately disappointing misfire.

My Ratings: Episode 1 - 6, Episode 2 - 5/10, Episode 3 - 4.5/10, Episode 4 - 4/10, Episodes 5 & 6 - 4.5/10.

Overall average rating : 4.75/10.

The Web Planet

[guswhovian · 8/10 · 16 July 2020]

The TARDIS is forced down on a strange planet called Vortis. The Doctor and Ian explore the terrain, while Barbara finds herself possessed by her gold bracelet.

The Web Planet has gotten a lot of flak over the years from Doctor Who fans. While it is certainly not the best story of all time, one has to admire the audacity of the production team to attempt such a unusual story.

Richard Martin's direction is, surprisingly, quite good. The set design, the weird stock music and the camera filters add an eerie quality to the scenes set outside the TARDIS. There's some quite nifty special effects, such as Ian's tie disintegrating in a pool of acid. It was also a nice idea to have the bracelet Nero gave to Barbara play a part in the plot. Overall, a good start to the story.

The Longest Web

[timdalton007 · 3/10 · 15 June 2020]

(Note: A review of the entire serial)

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. Fill it with beings who aren't just humanoid but make it full of 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-Tope (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 director, 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."

One of Peter Capaldi's favorite episodes

[wetmars · 8/10 · 2 September 2020]

On the planet Vortis, the Doctor, Ian, Barbara and Vicki are swept up in the struggles of the butterfly-like Menoptera, the original denizens of Vortis who were forced to flee the planet for the moon Pictos to escape the encroaching web of the Animus and its mind-controlled minions, the ant-like Zarbi, and their living weapons, the larvae guns.

Review of six parts -

I see that people didn't like this story because of the "worst bee-like costumes", yeah I totally get that, and the plot's very weird due to the story aging badly, yeah yeah I get it. But I have to say and I'm sorry, that this story is very underrated. You just have to FULLY pay attention to the story or else you will be like those "oh yeah classic who stories are so hard to follow" guys, which I am doing.

Anyways, about the episode. I quite enjoyed it, it had a very interesting plot, loved the good old special effects (( Yeah, get used to it! )), loved the beeping noises, it just I don't know, relaxes me? Ian was the best in this episode, obviously I don't have to tell how he's the best in this episode, just go watch it yourself!

8/10, one of the most underrated stories of Doctor Who.

Smearing Lenses with Vaseline

[JamesHitchcock · 4/10 · 20 March 2024]

The First Doctor and his companions Ian, Barbara and Vicki find themselves on the planet Vortis, which seems to be the home of giant, human-sized insects- the ant-like Zarbi, the Menoptra, who look like a cross between bees and butterflies, and the Optera, a degenerate form of the Menoptra who live underground and look liked gigantic fleas. The planet has been taken over by an evil intelligence known as the Animus who has enslaved the Zarbi and driven the Menoptra into exile. The Doctor and his companions arrive just as a force of Menoptra arrive on the planet bent upon reconquering their former home, and are caught up in the ensuing conflict, allying themselves with the Menoptra. Despite the title, webs do not play a large part in the story, although the Animus is eventually revealed to be a spider-like being.

I won't set the plot out any further because "The Web Planet" is far from being one of the best in the history of "Doctor Who". The acting is not particularly bad, but writer Bill Strutton had no previous experience of writing science fiction, and it shows. The plot is not only confusing but also overlong; six episodes are dedicated to a story which could have been told in three or four. The director Richard Martin apparently overspent his budget on visual effects, which doesn't always show, except perhaps where the elaborate costumes are concerned. We are told about a massive invasion of the planet taking place, but never see anything of it; the budget clearly did not run to convincing recreations of interplanetary warfare. I couldn't really understand just why the contending armies were so determined to secure control of Vortis as it seemed like a barren and unpromising place, less a habitable planet than an uninhabitable corner of the Beeb's studios. Martin took to smearing the camera lenses with Vaseline in an attempt to make the place look more alien. He didn't succeed. All he succeeded in doing was making it look as though something had been smeared on the camera lenses and the cameramen had neglected to clean them. 4/10

Some goofs. If Vicki is, as she claims, medically trained, she would realise that aspirin is not a sedative. And why does she express surprise that Barbara and Ian were in Nero's Rome? She was there with them! (See the previous serial).

Perhaps the most imaginative and peculiar serial* in the Doctor's long history

[jamesrupert2014 · 8/10 · 11 February 2024]

The Doctor, Ian, Barbara and Vicki arrive on Vortis, a strange, surreal, seemingly barren planet only to encounter a variety of arthropoidal aliens, the ant-like Zarbis, the moth-like Menoptra, the billbug-like larvae-guns (?), and the grub-like Optera, all of whom are being forced into an existential struggle by a deadly, telepathic creature called the Animus. This is likely the most bizarre, imaginative, and outright weird serial in the Whovian canon. I found that to enjoy this opus, I had to watch with the same 'perception' as that with which I watch suit-mation kaiju - yes, obviously they're people in costumes but so what? - they're still engaging, intriguing and entertaining. The actors playing the Menoptra and the Optera deliver oddly cadenced lines in distorted voices accompanied by strange body movements, all of which contributes to their endearing otherworldliness and I thought that it was quite tragic that, when enslaved, the Menoptra had their wings torn off and could never fly again. Admittedly, the plot doesn't make a lot of sense but the imagery is novel and fun (scenes on the planet surface are blurred to suggest strange atmospheric conditions) and the characters/cast (hominid and otherwise) are great. Unusually, the Doctor is not as 'on top of the situation' as usual - perhaps having met his match in the Animus (until help arrives). All in all, one of a kind and one of my favorites. Score and comments pertain to the six-part serial collectively referred to as 'The Web Planet'