I think it’s safe to say that there isn’t a single Doctor Who story out there that fully makes sense. I’m very certain that if you sat down and looked at the actions of characters, sequences of events that must take place off screen for the on screen parts to happen and how things relate to the bigger universe in terms of timelines etc you’d have a nervous breakdown trying to make it all make sense. I’m also sure that this applies to pretty much every drama series ever written and, with pretty much every passing day at the moment, I’m getting to the stage where I’m wondering why the real world doesn’t seem to make sense any more either. But some stories don’t have too many problems and some of those problems can be hand waffled away with a variety of explanations that at least sound plausible. Then there are stories like “The Web Planet” which seem to pack as many confusing developments, unlikely actions and continuity shattering revelations into each scene as possible. Yes, there’s the “oh just ignore it” attitude that could be taken, but how do you decide which lines can be discarded and which ones kept? What on screen facts are ignorable, and why will everyone have a different list to go with of what the key developments are? When it comes to “The Web Planet”, the ramifications of what we see on screen are enormous and throw confusion into things we thought we knew. Weirdly it also sets up things in future stories that some fans routinely complain about but don’t seem to mention here. I know, I know, they’re making it up as they go along and this blog takes things too seriously. But at the time of writing today’s blog, RTD is putting out statements trying to explain away lines in his own scripts because people have read so much into them, so I think a closer look at this trip to Vortis is long overdue.
We hit the ground running with the weirdness with the cliff-hanger at the end of “The Romans”. Admittedly it’s not all that weird compared to what’s ahead and it depends on how literally you want to interpret a line from Vicki BUT it’s alleged that the Doctor has been at the controls for hours (leading to Vicki wondering if he really knows how to fly the ship). We then get the Doctor’s confession that they’re being pulled down to an unknown destination and he can’t break the hold. Yup, nice lead in to “The Web Planet” but let’s see what we can get from it. The TARDIS materialises for a split second but not on Vortis itself. So, not only does this story establish that the TARDIS doesn’t necessarily fly through any sort of physical space, it also ties in with “The Web of Fear” in that the ship can land in space (what is it about landing in space and stories with Web in the title?). As we later learn that Vortis isn’t even in our galaxy, we get confirmation that distance and speed are not concepts that the TARDIS needs to worry about for journey times and we know that the ship can be caught by some sort of tractor beam type affair (interesting to note that “The Masters of Luxor” would have featured quite a lot of this information). The first question though is “where does the TARDIS actually land if not on Vortis” in that split second. If it lands in space, as the dialogue suggests, why do we later see it materialise on the planet’s surface as normal, rather than have it come down out of the sky as if it were being pulled (other than 60s budgetary restraints). As we’ll find out through the story, the main baddie has some decidedly odd powers when it comes to manipulating a TARDIS so does the Animus end up giving it a controlled landing? The fact that it materialises conveniently close AND near a group of Zarbi who have some sort of living gun that can disable the ship would certainly suggest that the Animus had some say in the landing. Whatever the reason, it’s seemingly unconcerning enough that the Doctor and co are happy enough to take time to change into 20th century clothing again (by this stage have have to assume that either the TARDIS is making new outfits for the regulars at an alarming rate or that the “clothes in Barbara’s size” rail was fortuitously long). Oh and why he bothers keeping a selection of atmospheric density jackets in there at all is a mystery, as we later learn that he also carries medication in the ship that seemingly allows you to reduce your need for oxygen. I’m guessing he hasn’t yet learned his “Terror of the Zygons” hypnosis trick which seems to pretty much remove the need for it altogether.
Remember back in “Marco Polo” there was a big question mark over how the TARDIS handles heat exchange between the inside world and the outside world (which we will come back to in season 4)? Well in “The Web Planet” we have to question how sound gets in and out. Vicki and her tollerance to high pitched sounds raises a couple of problems. I suppose it could be coming through the speaker of the TARDIS scanner? Except that would make the Doctor seem like a total git for not hitting the mute button. The vague implication is that it’s something to do with the noises that the Zarbi make… except it’s only in this first episode and doesn’t seem to happen when she’s remotely near any loud Zarbi in the other episodes. Therefore we need a new suggestion and it’s one that will help us build up into another one of “those” suggestions at the end of it all. I’m thinking that the noise that first Vicki, and then the others, react to is more likely something that the Animus creates as a side effect of breaking into the TARDIS’ control systems. It’s once the noise really gets going that all hell seems to break loose in the ship, so is this some sort of Animus attack to potentially try and disable the spider that it has trapped in its web?
Somewhere down the line we will get around to discussing the layout of the control room in some detail, so we’ll skip over the sudden (and convenient) appearance of the supplies alcove in this story and only briefly mention the “emergency door opening device” as it’s actually vaguely plausible to explain away. The ship is out of power, so its appearance is probably akin to an “in case of emergency, break glass” type thing where a part of the wall vanishes when the power goes out and gives you access to the TARDIS equivalent of the fire alarm. Instead, let’s focus on this weird idea of the ship losing all its power (which we will also come back to a LONG way down the road when we get to the 10/Rose era). The Doctor makes it very clear indeed.
“There’s no power in the ship. It’s useless.”
Trying to decide if the Doctor is telling the whole truth here is a challenge. Certainly the engines are out of action (we don’t get the traditional control room background hum whilst the “useless” state is in effect, but there’ll be more on that in future blogs) but what’s actually happened to them? All it’s going to take to “repair” things is for Vicki to randomly flick switches on the console (and the dialogue does pretty much state it’s random, and not the series’ usual “which switch will open the doors this week” random) to get things going again. The doors don’t open when they try and use the console, but the Animus seems to be able to open them at will without access to the Doctors’ ring. Also, all the lights are still on? Or are we supposed to think the TARDIS has fluorescent walls? If that were the case then you’d think that Barbara would have been used to that sort of thing by the time she questions it in “The Space Museum”. No, it’s more likely that this is the influence of the Animus and its ability to work across multiple dimensions just turning the engines off and Vicki eventually finding the anti-Animus force field control in her frantic flicking. It’s pretty clear that the Animus is at least somehow involved with other dimensions as even when the doors to the outside world are closed, it still has the power to influence things. If you remember, back in “The Sensorites”, physically trying to break down the doors would disturb the field dimensions of the ship. Whatever the Animus is, it can clearly bypass those dimensional issues.
Quite by chance, in a twist of science that David Whitaker would be proud of, the next few episodes accidentally tell us not just a huge amount about the TARDIS but also help to explain away one of the great mysteries of the Tom Baker era AND tie the story in to…. actually I’ll save that for the end as the punchline. We’ll also come back to this first episode in a few stories when “The Space Museum” gets covered (we really do need to talk about Vicki!) and, instead, focus on possibly the weirdest control room moment in the whole of Doctor Who. Yes, it’s time to get in a spin with the console. Other than it having mostly random and unlabelled controls, it’s important to realise that this story makes it clear that the console is not attached to the floor/the ship. This, handily, sets up the first part of the third Doctor era and justifies him taking it out of the police box. It also raises a LOT of questions about the waffle the Doctor gave about the power of the ship being held in place by the central column in “The Edge of Destruction” but, let’s face it, the Doctor really wasn’t thinking clearly in that one. It is, of course, all but forgotten after this story but a spinning control console would definitely make piloting the ship easier for just one or two people (none of this “6 pilots are needed” nonsense that RTD stole from the Virgin New Adventures). Other than looking good on screen as a scary effect, “The Web Planet”’s premise is that the Animus has a lot of control over gold. Suppose the console has a central axle on which it can spin. Suppose there’s gold in the console (imagine the mercury fluid links but with a bit more bling). The Animus reaches across the dimensional field, feels the gold and then tries to pull at it. The console is on an axle though, so it can’t physically pull the console out of the ship and so it ends up spinning. Pull it a bit harder from opposite sides at once and you could, conceivably, use this to explain how it’s able to pull the Police Box across the surface of Vortis with the Zarbi occasionally nudging it around the tricky corners/rocks. We can even use this to (remotely) explain the stuff about Vortis suddenly gaining moons. Suppose they were wandering balls of rock that had deposits of gold on them. They wandered just a little too close to Vortis, the Animus felt the presence of gold and pulled on them really hard. It’s even possible that it pulled lumps of gold out of the moons and drew them to Vortis. Once it had taken what it wanted from the moons, it released its grip on them and the moons settled down into a stable orbit. Well it’s that or Vortis just so happens to have a plentiful supply of its own gold that the Animus could make those control collars from.
So, we have a time and space machine that relies on gold to function (hello 12 and “Robot of Sherwood”), we have gold laden wandering moons and we just so happen to be on a planet that’s currently home to a dimension hopping, gold hungry, evil parasite that wants to expand its empire. Now, I don’t know about you, but if I was the society that had made these time/space machines and I knew of a handy wandering moon that had an abnormally high concentration of gold on it, I’d be very tempted to set up a deal with them. You know, offer them protection if they were under attack in exchange for the occasional top up of supplies to keep the ship manufacture up. Oh what, you thought it was complete chance that in “Revenge of the Cybermen” the Doctor just happens to accidentally end up in the vacintiy of Voga, the legendary planet of gold, just as the cybermen were about to attack it? The whacking great Seal of Rassilon on Voga is just a very slight give away that it’s all part of the protection racket the Time Lords have set up to protect their interests (see also “The Two Doctors”). If you want the real clincher that “The Web Planet” is part of a huge conspiracy, then the final piece of evidence comes from the Doctor themself. Seriously, the number of stars in a single galaxy is HUGE. Each star could have a dozen or so planets orbiting it. Yet the Doctor just so happens to land on a planet that, from clues so tiny that even Sherlock Holmes would question the validity of the conclusion, he can identify precisely which planet they’re on. Why would he know so much about what was seemingly such a random place? In “The Reign of Terror”, Ian tells the Doctor that he has his important researches to complete. Was the Doctor, at some point, assigned to research the Isop Galaxy and he found evidence of something that could conceivably be a threat to the Time Lords? Either the TARDIS has had some old coordinate setting re-engaged, hence he ended up in the vicinity of Vortis or… well. The Doctor seems to be getting an awful lot of new information appearing in his memory. Could it be that someone “nudged” the TARDIS out of the vortex so that it got caught by the Animus? And rather than asking the Doctor directly to get involved, do it without his knowledge. That way they didn’t run the risk of causing a Division in the TARDIS crew.
Whatever the reason, the mystery of just how the TARDIS ended up on Vortis will probably never be solved. Come to think of it, neither will the other absolutely huge mystery in the story. Given the TARDIS has a seemingly decent sized wardrobe, given that Ian is English and given that no-one seemed to get dressed in a hurry… just why is Ian using a tie to “hold his pants up” rather than a belt????