The Web Planet.



TV My favourite moment in The Web Planet occurs during the opening episode. The Doctor and Ian are standing at the Tardis console discussing exactly what's gone wrong with the ship again.
"Somewhere, somehow we're being slowly dragged down." notices The Doctor.
"Dragged down? To what?" Ian asks.
Cut to a landscape. And the title caption.
"The Web Planet."

Is this is the only in the history of the series when a character's question is answered by the title? How very metafictional. Elsewhere it's all a bit tedious. Well, alright some of the interaction between Barbara and Vicki related to Rome and the futuristic National Curriculum is fun, but Ian mostly walks around as though everything is a surprise and The Doctor's acting like a pissed pensioner. Which he probably was. Welcome to a world of fantasy and adventure and subliminal education kids.

About the only other exciting moment is when The Doctor and Ian leave the Tardis after the malarkey with the whatnot. As they pass through the doors are wide open. And then they close themselves. Many is the episode when we've watched this happen from the outside and that big blue door has flapped there waiting for a passing Sontaran to get lost in the ship's innards. There's a particularly good example in Logopolis. Now we know that those doors are on automatic, like the ones in Tesco, and they'll swish close when you're not looking. Ship can't navigate itself properly, but at least it has this safety feature. I wonder if it was something The Doctor had to fit because of a regulation on his insurance policy.

You can tell the lesson about good narrative tension wasn't learned from any of the Dalek stories when the monster's being introduced to hardly any effect five minutes in and then doesn't return for the next fifteen minutes except in the shadows, and when it does appear, for all the comments in the commentary about how brave the design is, it still looks less like a giant ant and more like a studio runner in tights carrying a weirdly shaped canoe on his head. That's hardly going to strike fear into anyone other than psychologists wondering what condition the minds of the production team are in. You need to keep this stuff for the cliffhanger, which instead here consists of the stock maneuver from the Colin Baker era, a quick zoom into The Doctor's nostrils.

"My ship" he says, "My Tardis" Typical man. Cares more about his vehicle than its passenger.

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