April 9: The Web of Fear Episodes 5 & 6

The Great Intelligence, using Travers as a mouthpiece, tells the Doctor he has twenty minutes to give himself up to the Intelligence -- and Victoria is seized as a hostage to ensure his cooperation.  And then episode 5 shows us all twenty of those minutes, as the Doctor and Anne try desperately to construct a machine that will let them defeat the Intelligence before those twenty minutes are up.  Yes, this episode is just marking time.

Still, at least it's reasonably entertaining time-marking.  While Anne and the Doctor are tinkering, Lethbridge-Stewart and Jamie decide to try and go after Victoria -- Lethbridge-Stewart believing it's "pointless" after his run-in with the Yeti in episode 4, "but at least we'll be doing something active."  And just in case we've forgotten about the inside man, Private Evans is sure to remind us: "Been working it out, I have, see.  Come to the conclusion one of you two must be working for this Intelligence...  It told us it had another pair of hands working for it.  Well, I know it's not me, see, so it must be one of you two.  Stands to reason, don't it?"  And the script is sure to continue casting doubt on Lethbridge-Stewart -- he seems to know where he's going in the tunnels to find Victoria without being told, and the Doctor doesn't seem to trust him either (in episode 6, for instance, he refuses to mention that they've gained control of a Yeti in Lethbridge-Stewart's presence).

But yes, episode 5 is largely filler.  The most important things that happen are that the Doctor and Anne find a way to block the Intelligence's signal to the Yeti (though only at close range) and reprogram a sphere to obey their commands over the Intelligence, and Staff Sergeant Arnold returns from his apparent death in episode 4, when he went into the web and didn't come back out.  And soon the twenty minutes are up, and it's time for the Doctor to turn himself over to the Intelligence -- just as the web bursts through the wall of the lab in the Goodge Street base.

The survivors are taken to the Intelligence by the Yeti. (The
Web of Fear Episode 6) ©BBC

Episode 6 is also quite slow, as it spends the first half ensuring that all the pieces are brought together for the final confrontation at Piccadilly Circus.  To this end anyone who's run off, like Evans, or at least not explicitly killed off, like Chorley, are forcibly taken to Piccadilly.  Meanwhile, the Doctor is being herded off alone, which gives him the opportunity to momentarily halt the Yeti accompanying him and switch some wires on the helmet they have for him that's designed to let the Intelligence absorb the Doctor's mind.  But finally everyone is brought to Piccadilly, and the Intelligence's agent is revealed to be not Lethbridge-Stewart but Staff Sergeant Arnold.  Er, what?  All right, I guess he had the opportunity to do all the things the agent needed to do, but it still seems odd to take the most sympathetic and human supporting character and make him the traitor all along.  There's certainly no hint of being controlled or acting unnaturally from Arnold before he arrives at Piccadilly.  It just feels wrong somehow.  But oh well.

The Doctor tells them not to interfere with what's going to happen as he's placed inside a plastic transparent pyramid, but Jamie (who has the Yeti control mic) tells "their" Yeti to attack the others, thus creating enough confusion to allow our heroes to pull the Doctor to safety and cut off the Intelligence's link with Earth -- though the Doctor is none too grateful.  "I told you to leave it to me!" he yells angrily at Jamie (though, to be fair, Jamie wasn't there when the Doctor told everyone else that).  "Now you've gone and ruined everything!"  Apparently the Doctor had switched some wires so that he was going to drain the Intelligence's mind, rather than the other way around.  But because of the actions of the others, the Intelligence has only been defeated rather than destroyed.  "You mean it might come back?" asks Evans (though as it turns out, not until 2012; the production team had plans for a third Yeti story, but those plans were scuppered after the fallout from The Dominators -- more on that particular tale when we get to that story).  Still, the threat to London and the rest of the world is over for now, and so the Doctor, Victoria, and Jamie head out on their way.

While it's certainly wonderful to be able to see two more thirds of The Web of Fear, with hindsight it's not quite as thrilling to watch as The Enemy of the World; however, that might be because it's a lot more familiar -- most of the locations had already been seen in the surviving first episode, and the "base-under-siege" plot is also a lot more typical of this period in the show than anything in Enemy.  But it is very well directed, and those first four episodes are quite good indeed, giving us a better siege tale than anything we've seen yet.  It admittedly ends rather badly, as the last two episodes tend to squander the atmosphere that the first four worked so hard to create (certainly the paranoia established in episode 4 doesn't carry over to the next two episodes, no matter how hard they try to bring it up) and it ends with a bit of a bang and a partial white-out rather than anything particularly epic.  But that's honestly not a fatal flaw, and it doesn't detract too much from everything else we get.  It's not quite as brilliant as we were led to believe before we could see most of it, but The Web of Fear is certainly effective at what it does.