The Web of Fear episode 6 discussion:
Cz: I liked it when the Yetis were singing to each other.
<room fills with Yeti whistles>
Cz: It was beautiful.
R: <Dracula voice> Creatures of the subways. What music they make.
P: So I’m kind of surprised who was it!
H: Haha! I didn’t say anything. Success! I didn’t open my mouth!
K: Actually you did, at one point, say “don’t forget about Arnold”
H: It’s because you guys had counted him out because he was dead, but actually he had only disappeared.
R: I just liked “He can’t be the Intelligence” and I immediately thought “Yes, because he’s not Intelligent.”
H: So, were you all surprised.
A: Yes.
E: Yes.
R: Yeah, actually.
P: Nope. Okay, yeah, actually.
R: I was surprised a couple of times.
K: Nope. Because Arnold was dead.
H: No, he was clearly acting as the agent before he went into the web. Who slipped the Yeti figured into peoples pockets. In fact, Arnold actually gave one of the Yeti figured to Evans to bring into the room where the Doctor was. In the script Evans had said that Arnold had given it to him to give to the Doctor.
P: But you can’t trust everything everybody says in a mystery.
K: Basically I hadn’t guessed that it was Arnold for sure, but I wasn’t surprised. I figured at the point it was either Chorley or Arnold. Although if it had turned out to be Anne that would have been really cool too.
Sp: I think I liked that the Doctor’s hubris was his own undoing.
K: The fact that he didn’t share his plan?
Sp: Mmhm. Exactly.
P: The plot didn’t give credence that the webs are now gone, and that kind of bugged me at the end.
K: I guess the fungus all died and the Yetis were all statues or something?
H: The Intelligence was creating the fungus and when it got expelled so did the web, I guess.
K: So now there’s all these statues of Yetis in the London Underground?
P: Well, now they work as musicians.
H: Well, it was 1968, who’s going to notice.
P: What, with all the hair?
R: Get a job you dirty hippies!
Sp: Yetis!
Sp: So, props to Loose Cannon for finding the perfect production stills for our favorite craven traitor.
R: Evans? They were so lucky that they had that incredibly cowardly shot of Evans.
Sp: Those incredibly half a dozen shots of Evans. He was quite a rubber faced coward.
H: Clearly a very good bit of comic acting. The came through in the audio, let alone the stills.
E: I took delight in his fear.
M: I fear your delight.
R: So was anybody else confused when the colonel started talking about Jamie’s disappearance?
P: No, because I read on the screen that his snuck off.
R: I must have actually missed it.
H: You’re thinking of Arnold. They cut away from the screen, but when they cut back Jamie wasn’t with them.
K: What happened was that the Doctor told Jamie to hide. I couldn’t figure out how Jamie hid, but the it seemed to be part of the Doctor’s plan. It would have been nice if Jamie had filled him in on the rest of his plan, however.
P: They definitely showed it because when they showed it I asked the Historian what a “sand bin” was.
H: They definitely showed it, but you asked me that when he was revealed again, not when he actually hid. Which was what Ronelyn was confused about.
R: Yeah.
H: In defence of the Doctor, I think he was kind of making up his plan when he went along, since he didn’t know about the helmet until he saw it. So it would have been a little hard for him to tell Jamie his plan back before Jamie hid.
K: I knew he couldn’t tell him before Jamie hid, but it would have been nice for him to tell him at the earliest opportunity.
H: He didn’t really have an opportunity. They just sort of husseled him right into the machine. He couldn’t talk to anybody.
Sp: He could have shouted out his protest a little more specifically. “Leave me here 30 more seconds and I can defeat him” done.
R: “Ixnay on the elphing me stay.”
M: Out of game, the writers had no doubt had some intention of leaving a hanging thread, even if they didn’t have an immediate follow up on it.
H: Yes. There was supposed to be a third Yeti story. But the writers wrote a story called the Dominators for the following season (that we will see next year) and the BBC treated them really badly, for reasons I will go into next year, which killed the idea of a third Yeti story, since the writers own half the copyrights on the Yeti. Just like Terry Nation owns copyrights on the Daleks, etc. Which is one of the reasons I’ve been ticked off recently to see that Haisman and Lincoln still don’t get credit for something in the new series that they should. They aren’t using Yeti, but they are using…. other things, I’ll say.
K: The Dominators! Har har har.
P: What, chess pieces?
H: Catch up on the new series.
P: The animation of the web breaking through the wall was obviously new, but must have been inspired by something new at the time.
R: <cockney accent> “Right, so we put all the shaving cream behind a thin layer of plaster, right? And then Jimmy boy here jumps on the garbage bag what’s full of the shaving cream and it goes through the plaster and goes fshshshsh, nice as you like.”
H: Yeah. My experience with….
P: Shaving cream!
H: …the Troughtons that exist says “foam machine”
Sp: Continuing my earlier Doctor comment, it was also amusing to see him so defeated and so dejected, and leaving so quickly. “Right, the dude in the skirt’s all F’d it up. Let’s go, let’s go!”
P: I think he just didn’t want to be interviewed.
Sp: Oh sure. It’s just he gave that air of alien exasperation. “I had one chance to get this thing. I’m going to have a chance…
M: I had this awesome thing, and he stole the XP!”
Sp: “…chance to get his thing in like another couple centuries or so.”
H: I have to say, once again, it was really nice that Jack and Deb Watling had some nice scenes together in this episode. The whole fatherly aspect came out with Victoria even more than it did with Anne, for obvious reasons. And I enjoyed it.
K: I noticed that with Victoria too. He put his arm around her shoulder like he never did with Anne, which was weird.
P: I found the Yeti walking by and not actually killing Jamie to be an amusing moment.
K: Yeah, why did Jamie keep getting ignored by Yeti?
P: They had not orders about him.
R: They had what they wanted by that point.
H: Okay. We’re going to move onto final thoughts, and we’re going to talk about not just the episode, but the story as a whole. Since, as a who done it sort of thing, everything kind of tied together.
Sp: Hehe.
H: That wasn’t meant to be a pun.
E: Uuuuuummm…. I did enjoy the story as a whole. I did find the final episode of the story to end rather abruptly. But overall, pretty good. I still take delight in Evan’s fear. I always will. If he ever shows up in a future story and he’s scared about something I’m just going <makes big grin>
A: I enjoyed the whole story as well. I liked the setting of the underground. It’s very similar to a spaceship, because you have rooms and corridors, but it’s refreshingly different as well.
P: I liked the story arc as a whole. There definitely parts of the story that were not as pretty as the rest of it as part of the plot continuity. I liked shooting in the tube for other reasons, although I kept expecting someone to die with the third rail.
H: Yeah. They make a big deal in mentioning it in the first episode and then nothing.
K: They came back to it at the very end though “what if the trains are running again” and all that.
P: I still think one of the more brilliant moments in the plot was the colonel going “Well, that’s enough diplomacy for today.” I going with the Owlbear approach in that these are Owlbears, not Yeti. Also, the talking Yeti was interesting, when they asked it a question.
K: I really liked the Yeti growl sound this episode.
H: Brian Hodgeson, of Radiophonic workshop.
P: I was kind of surprised that… Evans actually survived, given all of the running away into danger.
K: That’s because by the end it would have been just tearfully tragic if Evans had died.
R: Really?
H: Yeah. He was great comic relief.
R: To quote another BBC series “The man’s a maggot”
K: Good or not, you don’t kill comic relief on the last episode, especially on a family show.
H: Yeah. If he had died in the 4th or 5th episode maybe, but in the last episode it would have been a bit much.
M: I didn’t see a sufficient amount of this story to have anything cogent to add, however I appreciate having the opportunity to use the word cogent.
Sp: I only saw slightly more of this story than Mister Mother did. And my main comment about this story as a whole was going to involve the word cogent. But he took it. So I have nothing to say.
H: I can’t believe that. Nothing.
Sp: Well, I did seem to miss the exactly couple of episode worth missing, because what I saw of diving in and out of the story still held together rather… well… um… cogently.
M: Lawsuit!
Sp: Gesundheit.
R: “Thank you for watching this week’s episode of Doctor Who, ‘the Fungus Amongus’. Stay turned for next week’s episode, ‘Water the Odds!’”
K: How do I follow that? I almost wish I saw this like Spoo, as I think I would have enjoyed it more if I saw just a wee bit less of it. Overall I liked the story. The ending was good. And not predicable, but not a shocker either. But it did drag a bit in the middle, as tends to be the case with six-parters that don’t involved hopping between various planets and visiting the Empire State Building. No, this was certainly better than the Chase. More Nick Courtney. I want to drag out my old John and Tom episodes now!
H: So, this story is on my top 10 missing stories that I want to see. It’s probably number 2 on my missing stories that I want to see. I really, really like this story. I like how it’s put together. But it’s been a while since I’ve seen it, and honestly I had forgotten about quite how high the body count was. I didn’t remember Captain Knight dying as early as he did. So this was just cool to see again. And it was awesome to share it with you guys, because I like sharing my favorite stories with you guys. <goofy Historian grin>
Sp: D’aww!
K: When you saw it the first time, you saw it all at once, right?
H: I honestly can’t rememeber. It might have been an episode a day.
K: But it wasn’t split up with a solid week or more between episodes.
H: No, it was not.
K: So, what was the difference seeing it this way? Because we have a good feel now for the difference for earlier seasons, where stories were more slower paced and less “traditional” Doctor Who. But now we’re really solidly into the kinds of pacing that we’ll see more of in the 70’s and 80’s. So, given this story both ways, how do you feel it is different this way?
H: It’s a hard question with this story. Because I thought it worked both ways. I think the individual episodes are strong enough to stand on their own, as far as pacing goes. I’m going to saw that it made a lot less of a difference watching this story week to week than it did with say, “The Dalek Invasion of Earth,” but… it’s really hard to say for me. Because with the Hartnells that exist I’d seen them multiple times and so they were fresher in my mind. And with this I’d only seen it once, probably about 7 or 8 years ago. I can’t remember how I watched it then. But it worked perfectly well episodically week to week for me. I think we’ll have a better idea when we get to next year, and the existing Troughtons that you and I have seen more than once, Ketina.
K: Cool. Thank you for the answer. I’m looking forward to those.
H: Except for the Dominators.
K: Spoilers!
