YMMV / Doctor Who S2 E5 "The Web Planet"

• Critical Dissonance: The serial was immensely popular when it aired - four of its episodes are still in the top twenty most-watched Doctor Who episodes ever (and the other two still make the top fifty), it was the subject of the third ever novelisation, and it got a sequel in TV Comic just weeks after airing and followup stories in the Annual. These days, it features in the bottom quarter of Doctor Who Magazine's 2009 and 2014 fan polls. Critics tend to be even-handed, criticising the slow plot while loving the mad ambition and absolute strangeness of the whole thing. Peter Capaldi recalled watching it as a child and being captivated by it.
  Peter Capaldi: But those old shows were only made to be watched once, on a flickering monochrome telly that smelled of valves and furniture polish. In that context, they succeeded immeasurably. They were triumphs of imagination. It may surprise you now, but something like The Web Planet lived powerfully and expansively in my head for decades… until the DVDs came along and spoiled the party. But I’m glad to say that the Menoptra eventually flitted back into my dreams, where they belong.”
• Fight Scene Failure: The serial was forced to have some seriously awful fighting scenes in it, as the monster costumes used were so delicate.
• Narm:
  • Mostly in regards to the insect Halloween-costume getups and ridiculous mannerisms of the bee-like Menoptra and grub-like Optera as well as the enemy Zarbi, who look like giant ants with a single pair of human legs and two pairs of useless ant legs and make siren noises at each other. Also, one of the Menoptra constantly calls Ian "Heron" for no apparent reason (they also tend to refer to Barbara as "Arbara", though this sounds way less ridiculous).
  • In his review of the story, Nash Bozard remarked that the substance used to destroy the Great Old One was essentially giving it cancer.
• Retroactive Recognition: Hilio is played by Martin Jarvis, who later had a larger role as the governor in the Sixth Doctor story "Vengeance on Varos", and later still became noticeable as the later voice for Nergal from The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy.
• Special Effects Failure:
  • The Zarbi would look unconvincing even if they didn't have two obviously human legs in trousers and shoes sticking out of the bottom and even if they didn't constantly make incredibly synthetic beeping noises.
  • The Larvae Guns are fringed with rags.
  • The Animus and the Menoptra are better-looking, but the Menoptra's wings, which look striking when stationary, rustle in a plasticy way when they move them, and the Animus is obviously just a bunch of hoses glued to a hula-hoop like structure and hung off the ceiling with wire.
  • The tube-like structures the Animus uses to communicate with the Doctor are supposed to look like webs, but instead are just clear plastic drums with some web stuff glued on them — Lampshaded when the Doctor calls one a 'silly hairdryer thing'.
  • There's also the famous Blooper where one of the Zarbi accidentally bumps into the camera...
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Political?: The general line in fan analysis is that the story is a Red Scare allegory, because it's about the Zarbi workers rising up against their Menoptra masters. But it's a really big reach — there's no absolutely no indication the Zarbi are any more intelligent than farm animals, and even though the monster in the story has the power to control gold it doesn't work in any way analogous to any kind of economic system, which seems like it'd be a no-brainer for an anti-communism story. Maybe it's just a Planetary Romance Xenofiction runaround with pretty butterfly people fighting the ant people? Not only that, but if you do approach the story as an anti-Communist parable, it says that the workers were totally content until an evil outside force stirred them up and expects us to root for aristocrats who compare the working class to cattle. A flaw in this analysis however is that the Zarbi are never shown to be anything more then animals, and there is no indication that they were exploited by the Menoptra before the Animus' takeover.

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