Written by Terrance Dicks, based on Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln’s scripts for the 1968 TV serial.

As the first episode to feature Nicholas Courtney as Lethbridge-Stewart, and the inspiration for an entire genre of Doctor Who “Yeti on the Loo” stories, The Web of Fear is probably the milestone Patrick Troughton serial. Terrance Dicks’ adaptation is clearly conscious of this, presenting a first meeting we never actually saw on screen, and including several acknowledgements of the Doctor and Lethbridge-Stewart’s future friendship, such as when the Doctor is “curiously pleased” to have won his trust. “Starchy sort of fellow,” he reflects, “But a man you could rely on.”

Elsewhere, it’s pleasing that Dicks adapted both this and The Abominable Snowmen, as it provides a nice sense of continuity between the two. He inserts some details explaining Professor Travers’ experiences since first meeting the Doctor in Tibet 40 years earlier (no one, understandably, believed his story of alien intelligences and robot yeti, and he ended up broke and forced to sell his collection). Having been the one casting suspicion on the Doctor in the earlier story, here Travers is the Doctor’s staunchest defender, dismissing his daughter Anne’s doubts and providing much-needed credentials to smooth the Doctor’s introduction to the Goodge Street Fortress.

Dicks’ account of Doctor Patrick is as infuriatingly cagey and mercurial as ever, with authentic squabbles between him and Jamie (“I don’t want to reach that surface”), particularly in the climax where his failure to explain his plan to foil the Great Intelligence leads Jamie to wrecking the chance to defeat it forever. It’s a clear influence on the presentation of the McCoy Doctor. And there is generally a good job done in building up the secondary characters just enough that they’re all potential suspects when it turns out there is a spy in the camp. The reporter Chorley is especially unlikeable, vain and spiteful; forever trying out conspiracy theories and encouraging sensational action while conspicuously avoiding any displays of actual courage.

Any downsides are there in the scripts: without Douglas Camfield’s direction, a lot depends on Dicks describing the characters creeping around Underground tunnels or battling Yeti in Covent Garden. He mostly succeeds, but the climax is as scrappy as on TV, as the Doctor builds a thingamajig and there are lots of bangs and flashes to try to paper over the lack of a proper showdown with the Intelligence. Dicks does make it clear that the “Intelligence” in UNIT specifically refers to the Task Force’s expected role in defending against an expected third Intelligence incursion: “What the world needs is a permanent International Organisation to deal with this sort of thing. A kind of Intelligence Task Force”.

If it doesn’t quite reach the heights of Doctor Who and the Abominable Snowmen‘s atmosphere, this is a very worthy follow-up. Grade 2.

Next Time: Doctor Who And… The Space War.