The Web Planet today
is regarded as one of the worst Doctor Who stories in existence and often cited
as the worst William Hartnell story. I
happen to disagree with this as I give it a slightly above average 55/100 which
is slightly more than the very first Doctor Who story An Unearthly Child. It is by
no means perfect, but fans today often forget just how popular this serial
actually was. It’s viewing figures at
times were higher than The Day of the
Doctor with critical praise from its audience, so is it really a surprise
that it was decided to do three novelizations this was the second written? Bill Strutton adapted his own work into Doctor Who and the Zarbi doing a
straight novelization job, going so far as to splitting the chapters up into
six chapters that are the names of the episodes of the serial. This sadly is a large problem as the novel is
a lot longer than many of the other novelizations and the long chapters make it
a little bit more difficult to get through.
It’s also a bit jarring as Strutton’s story is one of few novels to
refer to the Doctor as Doctor Who and refer to the TARDIS as Tardis like the
Peter Cushing films. It is really
difficult to take it seriously as that’s how it works in this novel. Strutton’s writing style however is
especially engaging as unlike the television story where the Menoptera were
males and females, gender is unknown in the novelization which makes the alien
setting feel much more alien. He however
does make it feel like a product of the time as he didn’t have Dennis Spooner
and Verity Lambert to tell him not to treat Barbara like a traditional 1960s
woman. Yes she still is very much
responsible for saving the day. Strutton
also does a lot as to not write the Animus by name, but only referring to it as
the Voice. This makes it feel much more
Lovecraftian in nature much like it would be revealed to be in the Virgin New Adventures. The novel also has a lot of illustrations
showing just how Strutton really imagined the sets which are really nice to
look at and beautifully drawn. It still
is a little bit of a drawn out novel as the story really wasn’t suited to the
six episode format, which is what really plagued the television story from the
offset.
To summarize, Doctor Who and the Zarbi is a novel that
really shows just how good the television story could have been. It shows that it isn’t a story that deserves
to be loathed by fandom for what is honestly just a lot of bad execution and
some awful directing choices. Yes the
pacing is still really off for a story and some of the unrestrained Strutton
doesn’t really work here as Barbara is really out of character for the
novel. 70/100
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