2 out of 5

Directed By: Richard Martin

How is this serial not lambasted more?  I agree that there’s an interesting sense of scope here, and there was a ton of material to cover, so I’m forgiving of the stage play lookin’ costumes, but at some point in the fifth episode, when the ‘bees’ (Menoptera) are attacking the ‘ants’ (‘Zarbi’) and punctuating their attacks with cartoon like buzzing noises, I realized that this is what it would be like if I’d let my mom write a science fiction story.  Jacqueline Hill (Barbara) and William Russell (Ian) definitely deserve some credit for trying to muddle through this, but their paused deliveries make it apparent that this must’ve been an even odder shooting experience than usual, and while William Hartnell and Maureen O’Brien (Vicki) get a bit better deal by at least having a fellow human with whom to have repartee, even the Doc’s whimsy stumbles at points and Vicki – whose enthusiasm and intelligence definitely shone in the last serial – seems conflicted sometimes between laughter and boredom.

The initial setup is also quite erratic.  The TARDIS lands and we get some jump cuts between staring at the monitors and the planet surface where there are weird going-ons – ant-like insects gathering and making noise, cool, crawly-bug things – and these types of cuts are normally cues that the people staring at the monitors are seeing what we’re being shown outside… and the Doc and crew do seem to have some type of response to whatever they’re seeing, but then a few seconds later its clear that whatever they were staring at wasn’t an insect party.  Combine this oddity with the already notably stiff bug costumes (and frankly unimaginative, since they just look like giant insects…), and you know you’re going to be stepping into some, er, unique territory.

Doc and Ian go exploring in atmospheric suits, as something is “holding” the TARDIS down and they need to find the source; Babs and Vicki hang out on the ship.  Doc recognizes some fossilized remains and so knows the planet, but the moon(s) look different, and the planet seems empty.  Babs and Vicki have some interesting dialogue filling in some interesting differences between Vick’s planet and ours, and then Barbara seems “mind controlled” by a metal bracelet she’s wearing and wanders out of the ship, coming across the bee-suited Menoptera.  Doc and Ian are captured by ants and taken back to a plant-like enclosure into which Vicki has also wandered.  Soon Babs is battling side by side with Menoptera (whose suits reek of highschool play – except for some nifty wing mechanics – and whose breathy, drawn out manner of speaking is all sorts of god damned annoying), whom she comes to understand are under control of the Zarbi, and Doc is all mentally communicating (via a cone of silence that lowers from… somewhere) with a presence that appears to be controlling the ants, and he goes for a delaying tactic of rigging some stuff from the TARDIS to help the presence quell an uprising from the Menoptera.  Ian is sent out on a superhero mission to… like… help stuff.
None of this is any more or less out there than any other story, but the six parts are not very forthcoming with information… we’re waiting through the dodgy acting and costumes for more than half the serial before they start to connect the dots.  And while the ‘negative’ effect that was used to represent the Daleks guns was cheap but you understood it, here they attempt to use some actual live effects, but the timing is so off that it just never feels very threatening or effective.  Similarly, the Daleks were metal (or… Dalek..enium, or whatever), so the design could look stiff and we’d buy it.  The Zarbi and crew are meant to be “organic”, but its either so obviously foam with two legs sticking out (the ants) or so obviously spandex (the bees) that… yeah.  Suspension of disbelief is a tough sell.

Ian stumbles across an under-developed class of grub-like Menoptera, and they too have high-school play costumes and annoying accents.

The revelations of the whys of all of this – what the presence is, why the mind control, why the TARDIS is stuck – are worthwhile, but again, you have to wait through a lot of padding (and blind stumbling of people in ant costumes while their obnoxious acccompanying sound effect bleats through your speakers) to get there, and by then, its certainly not enough to dismiss your boredom.

Big ideas, clumsy execution.