Doctor Who and the Zarbi by: Bill Strutton: Doctor Who On the Web Planet

Doctor Who and the Zarbi is written by Bill Strutton based on his own story, The Web Planet.  It was the 2^nd story to be novelized by Target Books.

 

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