The Web of Fear - Episode 6

The final episode sees us find out who is working with the great intelligence. I’m usually rubbish at guessing who the person is so I don’t tend to guess but usually it’s the person that’s least obvious. The one that hides in plain sight are the ones that it tends to be so it wont be Evans or Chorley. In this episode we finally get to see the Yeti’s base for the first time. It’s also the first time for a few episodes that we have seen Chorley and when we do see him he doesn’t act like he’s been running around the tunnels for ages. After a lot of running around and the Doctor and Ann hiding the fact that they control one of the Yeti from the others, we finally get to see who has been used by the Great Intelligence but its not a straight forward thing as there is a bit of a mini red herring because Chorley is firstly accused before the true figure was revealed.

Arnold is the one being revealed as working for the Great intelligence and its actually quite a logical choice because he’s been in plain sight and hasn’t been right in the centre of suspicion like Chorley has. Quite amusingly, Arnold’s accent goes from a cockney to the Queens English. It’s a shame though we he dies because you feel that he wasn’t really in full possession of his own body and what we saw of the character before this was quite nice and fun and so his death was quite sad. Though I suppose the fact that it bothers me like this means that the character worked and that’s always a good sign. The performances are all pretty good but I still think that the best pairing in the story is the one between Ann and the Doctor which makes her not joining the TARDIS crew even harder to get over.

There’s a fun line where the Doctor hopes that Jamie doesn’t suffer from claustrophobia and its obvious that he doesn’t considering he’s spent the last five episode in the tunnels and very small room. In one shot there seemed to be a bit of product placement with a poster for a film called Blockbusters starring Rod Steiger and Sidney Poitier but this film doesn’t seem to exist. However according to IMDB the same poster that appears in episode six is the same on that on IMDB is called ‘In The Heat of the Night’ was released in 1967 so that rule about Earth stories or UNIT stories being set five years in advance would seem a little wrong here.

The big action sequence with the Yetis attacking each other is a little disappointing and is by far the least interesting part. The Doctor wanted to effectively stop it but due to Jamie’s eagerness the ‘connection’ has been cut off. I would have liked to see more in this set because it was the most modern bit of the set that we have had and it was quite a nice looking one with lots of space and light. I thought it was a slightly disappointing ending to the story. I suppose that there wasn’t much they could do once it was said that that Arnold wasn’t really aware of what he was doing. I just wish that they had done more in that final part of the episode. That said overall it was a good story, I think that they managed to keep the interest in the story going by switching the potential candidates and also by using the Yeti effectively. That’s it for the recently found episodes and I think that they have helped make the stories better than they were on audio. I think that this story benefited more from being on audio due to the claustrophobic nature of the story. Sadly that’s it for full stories on dvd/itunes for the fifth season as we are about to say goodbye to Victoria Waterfield.