‘THE WEB OF FEAR’ (PATRICK TROUGHTON’S DOCTOR WHO)

First broadcast Feb/Mar 1968
Written by Mervyn Haisman + Henry Lincoln 

PLOT SPOILERS lie ahead, as likely as line delays! 

“It’s like a spider's web, ain't it?”
“Yes. And we're the flies, all right. But where is the spider?”

Yeti on the Circle Line

A mere three stories after ‘The Abominable Snowmen’… this is the fastest reappearance so far. Which takes us to a poser. As we’ve seen before, ’Doctor Who’ is often torn between the requirement of individual stories to do their own thing and the imperative to build up a rogue’s gallery of monsters. Repeat performances can lead to diminished returns. And yet the Yeti…

Their first appearance was, if not bad, not better than okay. While this, their second, is widely regarded as a classic. Despite retaining the original writers, Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln. What can have caused this uptick in quality?

One answer is setting. Classic ’Who’ spends so much time hanging round the same few sets, getting those sets right is significant. And this is of course the one where they decided to take the Tube. Which makes a virtue out of the necessity for limited and confined spaces. And of then throwing everything into semi-darkness so you don’t see quite how limited and confined they are.

Even the one above-ground sequence in the fourth episode, though shot at least partially in the streets, is normally made up of close-cropped shots - rarely including any sky, keeping things claustrophobic. (Taking the Yeti out of the shadows, alas, works less well.)

But there’s an extra element… At first, the travellers don’t know they’re in the Underground. And while of course we watch with hindsight, surely even contemporary viewers would have recognised it before them. Or at the very least Londoners would, at a time the Beeb was London-centric. And they were supposed to. The original plan, after all, had been to shoot on location.

So familiar names like ‘Holborn’ and Charing Cross’ have been taken over by this alien entity, it’s remorseless progress displayed on the regular Tube map. (Wyndham does something similar with above-ground place names in ‘Day Of the Triffids’.) This may be so widely seen as a classic story because it does such a classic ’Who’ thing - defamiliarise the familiar, turn it into something sinister.

And, whether the setting inspired, whether new script editor Derrick Sherwin had a hand in it, or whether it was just a case of second time lucky… Haisman and Lincoln also turn out a significantly better script this time round.

In the big scheme of things this may follow in the wake of ‘The War Machines’ in establishing the ‘aliens head for the Home Counties’ story type. But it’s eerily empty settings are actually a more similar experience to ‘Dalek Invasion Of Earth’. And like that story only more so, everything is stripped down for action, pressed into service. It feels less meandering, more compelling.

As is not unusual, very little makes sense. (If what the Great Intelligence wants is the Doctor, who go to so much trouble to take over the whole of London?) But pressing questions are constantly thrown at you, to snatch your attention from this.

As has happened before now, the Doctor couldn’t be in an episode because Troughton had gone on holiday. Normally, everyone else keeps talking and hopes you don’t notice. This time his absence is foregrounded. The first episode cliffhanger essentially tells you itself how he escapes, even if we were likely to conceive he might be killed off. But with everyone constantly talking about him, you cannot help but wonder where he is or what he’s up to.

Though the overriding question, who is the traitor, suffers from hindsight. We all now know it can’t be the main suspect, because it’s the Brigadier. (Here still a Colonel.) Which, unfortunately, it mostly seems to be set up for. The eventual reveal seems both arbitrary and guessable. The Staff Sergeant dies then gets better again, even when the Private who died with him doesn’t? Mmm.

(There are admittedly set-ups. When Driver Evans, the comedy Welshman, gives the Doctor a Yeti figure which brings their bigger brethren to your door, he says this is on the Staff Sergeant’s order. Yet how he steals the web sample from the tobacco tin remains a mystery. And the most useful takeover for the Intelligence would be one person the Doctor never seems to suspect, the scientist Anne Travers. That way he’d know the lab findings straight away, without waiting for them to be passed on to the military.)

All-Out For the Otherly

More than most of the Troughton era, this story is saturated in the Cold War era, marinaded in paranoia. In the tradition of spy movies, what the Great Intelligence is after is intelligence. Intelligence inside the Doctor’s head rather than encrypted onto microfilm, but still intelligence.

Then there’s the deliberately inconclusive ending, when the Doctor’s rather Doctorly and Jamie’s more action-packed solutions conflict - allowing the Intelligence to escape. This of course sets it up to come back and be bad another day. But that was never so foregrounded with either the Daleks or the Cybermen. The lack of triumphalism is striking, and does suggest the way the Cold War didn’t just mean war, but war without end. (Early publicity shots of Jon Pertwee involved Yeti, so sure were they of a third outing. As it happened, quarrels over the rights ensured they never came back.)

Yet at the same time, again more than most of the Troughton era, looking for exact Cold War analogies won’t get you all that far. The Cybermen, as we’ve already seen, were a bad fit for stand-on Reds. The Great intelligence would be an even worse one. For that matter, it doesn’t really lead to any kind of analogies. ’The Abominable Snowmen’, as we saw, led naturally to talk of psychology and Buddhism. This story is so tightly woven it seems impervious to that sort of thing. Analogies bounce off like bullets from a Yeti’s hide.

Instead… Yes the Yeti are back, but this is the story which goes all-out for the otherly, ’Doctor Who’ as (capitalised) Weird fiction, if ever there was. But that Weirdness is conveyed through reference to things to be found here but which still feel otherworldly, on the borderline between being tangible and nebulous – webs, fog, pulsing fungus. The Intelligence is described as “a formless, shapeless thing, floating about in space like a cloud of mist.” The last story was titled ’The Abominable Snowmen’. Whereas this time that non-stuff even takes over the name. And not content with that it reappears in the end credits.

The vanishing fungus sample, however awkward a part of the whodunnit, fits neatly into this, as if the stuff is inherently ungraspable. Compared to them the Ice Warriors and Cybermen are solid, material things. They may well beat you in a fight. But at least you’ll recognise what’s going on while it happens.

In fact the image which will most likely will stay with me isn’t a rearing Yeti in a dark tunnel, even if that’s where Google searches go. In fact it’s Jamie and the Colonel opening a door. They fear there might be Yeti lurking the other side, as happened earlier. Instead they come across the pulsing fungus. It doesn’t look like the next room has something strange in it, it looks like the door opens to strangeness itself, one reality system invading another. It’s not entering our reality to enact some plan against us, the mere act of it entering our reality is inherently destructive.

Writing about an ‘Outer Limits’ episode he doesn’t even like, Mark Holcomb hits on the term “clinical weirdness”. And much of ‘Web Of Fear’s atmosphere comes from the matter-of-fact military mindset being held up against the all-out weird.

Moving the action forward a few decades, formally speaking this follows on from ‘Tomb Of The Cybermen’. Yet because of this sheer otherly business, it’s perhaps more akin to ’Web Planet’, even if the style is less interpretative dance and more Expressionist sketch. Count the ways - all a plot to trap the Tardis/Doctor (delete as appropriate), drones mysteriously carrying out the will of an alien intelligence, whose voice we don’t hear for some while. Not to mention the re-use of webs!

The Troughton era has a reputation for being formulaic. And it’s true that foes recur more frequently than with Hartnell. But just as the Cybermen were reworked in order tell new stories about them, so here is the Great Intelligence.

Yetis On the Loo In Tooting Bec

Among many other things, this is the story which establishes the meta gag “all these tunnels look the same to me.” You could perhaps argue for a long time over whether this is iconic and so became an establishing story in the show’s history, or it was establishing so now feels iconic. So let’s not.

Let’s note instead it doesn’t start in the standard way, with the Tardis landing somewhere new and their crew finding their way about. They’re travellers, after all, not secret agents. Instead the Intelligence makes a grab for the Doctor. There’s nothing that automatically associates that with repeat foes. In fact, ’Web Planet’ used it for an entirely new adversary. And ‘Celestial Toymaker’ for a retconned one. But it was also used with the Daleks, in both ‘The Chase’ and ‘The Evil Of the Daleks’. And a rise in repeat foes made it more likely.

But it’s generally agreed that more was being established here than ‘rogues gallery on rota’. It was also a prototype for stories set on contemporary Earth.(Well, England. Well, London. Well, North London.) Which came into their own with the next Doctor. (Even if they made full use of colour, while this is in every inch a black-and-white story.)

And so we inevitably head to that well-known Jon Pertwee comment: “All the threats should come to Earth… There’s nothing more alarming than coming home and finding a Yeti sitting on your loo in Tooting Bec.” (And I would indeed be alarmed at that thought. My loo being in Tooting Bec, that’s going to get inconvenient.)

An idea which Wood and Miles, in their ’About Time’ guide, pillory as “the worst idea ever.” They make one valid point, that incongruity is primarily a visual motif and less a a story idea. (You see much of it in Surrealist art, for example.) But ’Who’ is often bog-standard plots set on repeat, enlivened by some iconic visuals.

And how do we respond when we get that? Firstly children often perceive ‘imagistically’, taking in a cascade of images, rather than try to follow involved plots. I for one, if looking at old TV shows or comics from my youth, often stumble on an image embedded but isolated in my brain, and think “oh, that’s where that came from.”

Further, memory is primarily visual and highly selective, more a still camera than a CCTV recorder. Where ’Doctor Who’ remained alive, before re-releases were even conceived of, was in people’s memories. The disappointment some feel when re-united with those classic stories may be that their association was only ever with a few images, but became misattributed to the surrounding three hours.

But more importantly, both sides in this debate suppose the link between creating incongruity and Earth-set stories. Which isn’t necessarily the case. What we need is the juxataposition of familiar and unfamiliar, which is quite distinct from saying that we’re English so can only relate to English settings. The important feature in the example above is that the ordinary-looking door opens from an ordinary-looking room. And for that to happen things don’t need to be set on Earth. The earlier story 'The Macra Terror’ worked in a very similar way, despite being set on an unspecified colony which was quite unlike everyday Earth.