This is quite a come-down after Doctor Who, so uninspired that it’s the second consecutive book (in a series so far of two) to use static electricity (3) and the chapter title ‘Escape to Danger’ (4). Strutton’s approach to exciting prose in sentences like ‘He whipped the treated gold circle from his own throat and thrust it at the Zarbi’s thin neck, between the evil head and the sleek body’, where bland adjectives are simply inserted before each noun as a matter of course. It could almost be The Da Vinci Code.
    It’s also the template for the Target range to come, ‘resembling home video’ (5) in an era before such things existed, even down, as David J Howe observes, to ‘its six chapters corresponding to the six televised episodes’ (6). With the realisation, as Elizabeth Sandifer puts it, that the ‘purpose of the book was to spur memories of the popular serial The Web Planet’ (5) comes the introduction of the Jackanory narrative style that will persist through many future books – to give just one example, when the hypnotised Barbara walks blindly across the surface of Vortis: ‘Barbara was now at the brink of the pool. It seemed certain that her next pace or so would carry her into its unseen depths’. Whilst clearly not from any specific point of view, the use of ‘now’ and ‘it seemed certain’ make the effect too immediate to suggest an omniscient third-person narrator. This is writing to be read out loud like a bedtime story.
   For all its fidelity to the TV episodes, though, Doctor Who and the Zarbi shares its predecessor’s distinct characterisation of the male leads. Ian becomes a knuckle-headed idiot who instinctively dismisses anything alien (8), impotently wriggling and fighting on every occasion he encounters Zarbi (9), and the Doctor’s not far behind in his attitudes, judging the non-humanoid creatures ‘revolting’ (10). Maybe Williams Hartnell and Russell were solely responsible for their characters’ level-headedness?
   The leads’ behaviour isn’t the only thing turned strange in Strutton’s unconstrained hands. Attempts to offer more detail on the exact nature of the villain of the tale create many more questions than answers. It might be a ‘cosmic spider’ that ‘draws its victims in, and when it feasts, it acquires their knowledge’, which would make sense of all the webs on a planet ostensibly populated by ants and bees and of the fact that the Zarbi are so afraid of Vicki’s little spider (11). The only problem with this comes when we meet the Intelligence and it’s ‘an enormous oval bladder […] composed entirely of light [which swells and shrinks] like a living lung’. This would suggest that the Zarbi have an overdeveloped sense of metaphor, able to fear a thing because it behaves vaguely like how their ruler operates. 
    As well as a spider, a bladder and a living lung, the Intelligence is a ‘parasite’, a ‘super-parasite’, a ‘super power!’ and a cancer (12). The weapon designed to defeat it, the Web Destructor, is described in similarly carcinogenic terms (13), triggering a further mutation rather than simply eradicating the ‘evil’, suggesting that a tumour might be the most accurate analogy. Only problem is, excepting the key detail that the Web Destructor seems to actually work, there are strong hints that the Menoptera have no idea what they’re doing, most notably their insistence that their weapon must be aimed at the dark side of the Intelligence to work (14), something it would be unusual for a light-emitting object to have and something Barbara confirms it doesn’t have (15). However the Web Destructor worked, it could easily have nothing to do with how the Menoptera thought it worked.
   Which leaves the that the Intelligence might be a more elemental force (16), equivalent to the Tardis and in some way employing magnetism. Aside from the fact that Vortis seems to have just the one ‘magnetic pole’ (17), and that this would rather disappointingly make the force at the heart of the Tardis a magnet (18), the big problem with this explanation is that, in Strutton’s world, magnetism is actually gravity, responsible for drawing moons into orbit around the planet (19). So, the Intelligence is a parasitic super-power carcinogenic bladder that harnesses the force of gravity (the opposite of which powers the Tardis) by sitting on a planet’s magnetic pole and spreading webs across its surface to absorb the surface and feast on the knowledge and skills of its inhabitants, which can only be defeated by maybe giving it cancer with a gun that destroys webs.
    One thing, however, does benefit from Strutton’s novelisation and it’s fortunately far more important than all these dodgy details. Elizabeth Sandifer suggests there’s no politics in ‘The Web Planet’ (20) but, at least in the book, there are definite grounds to think Strutton is ruminating on the relationship between rulers and workers. The key is to look not to the Zarbi for your proletariat but instead among the different Menoptera. The Menoptera introduce themselves as ‘Lords of Vortis’ and behave accordingly, certainly in as much as the idea of work is a threat worse than death for them (21). Being a lord on Vortis is tied to the ability to fly, something that bestows a ‘god-like […] confidence’, so that the Zarbi slaves and the Menoptera’s underground descendants, deprived of this ability, can’t hold this status (22). However, the Menoptera come to realise that being a lord is not a positive thing because flight allowed them to ‘rise above any difficulty, instead of solving it’ – in other words, lords are useless when it comes to actually doing anything. It is the slaves who have been ‘forced to use [their] brains’, and it is Prapillus, the main slave protagonist, who, at the end of the book, is recognised as possessing ‘the wisdom of a ruler’. The slave becomes the king of the lords.
    There are problems with this reading, not least that Prapillus is anointed by the lords and that it happens because they recognise some innate quality in him rather than because they intend to invert the whole pyramid of rule but, after Whitaker taught the nation’s children that it’s unnatural to prefer not to fight and that it’s best to attack anything ugly before it inevitably attacks your noble, beautiful self, it’s refreshing to have a more counter-cultural message where readers are told that the social order needs a good shake every now and again and that the last group you can trust to deliver this are the beautiful people floating above all society’s problems.