Whatever power has got hold of the TARDIS has taken your pen! Of course, ha ha! Now then, there’s something for us to solve!
No sooner do our temporal travellers extricate themselves from a web of Roman palace intrigues then they find themselves in a literal web, with the TARDIS trapped by an unknown force on the planet Vortis, better known as “The Web Planet” (Story Production Code N).
From the start, this story attempts to break new ground by creating an entirely alien world, both physically and narratively, with uneven results. One can see obvious seam lines in the background flats, and in an effort to provide a sense of space, the camera occasionally pans a bit too high, revealing the two-dimensionality of the background. Plus a man in an ant costume (a Zarbi) runs into a camera.
There’s plenty of running through corridors, multiple scene changes in each episode (since, of course, Ian gets separated from the Doctor and Vicki, and the three of them are separated from Barbara, all by the third episode), and often the scenery is jostled by actors. But given the limitations of studio shooting—not just spatial but temporal and financial as well— one can only applaud their willingness to go for it. In particular, the sound work, with an ominous chirping whenever the Zarbi appeared, helped strongly to carry off the ambitions of the visual effects team.
Speaking of the second episode of the story, “The Zarbi,” producer Verity Lambert noted:
This was an extremely difficult episode to do technically, in that there had to be a tremendous amount of scenery in the studio, and apart from the breaks necessary because of scene changes, there was the added problem that we had not used the Zarbi, except briefly in episode one, and it was impossible to tell until we got into the studio the kind of difficulties we would run into with dressing them and moving them from one scene to another.
(Quoted in Howe-Stammers-Walker, Doctor Who: The Handbook: The First Doctor)
They were, essentially, making it up as they went along in terms of putting an ambitious science fiction show on air in a tight time frame and an even tighter budget. So we can rightly forgive them any wires we see pulling the butterfly-like Menoptra through the air or the odd extra limbs on the pillbug-like Optera.
But can we forgive them for the plot?