Two Yeti burst into the fortress, and everyone is horrified to see the missing Professor Travers accompanying them - now possessed by the Great Intelligence...
Through Travers the Intelligence informs the Doctor that he has been brought here deliberately, but not as revenge for what happened in Tibet. The Intelligence has been observing his travels and it wants to acquire his knowledge. This will leave him physically unharmed, but with the mind of a child.
If he refuses to co-operate, it will take what it seeks elsewhere, beginning with his companions. The Doctor must submit willingly. It also lets slip that it has other human agents at its command.
Travers then seizes Victoria and gives the Doctor an ultimatum. He has 20 minutes to agree to what the Intelligence demands, and the girl will be held as hostage until he does so.
Travers drags Victoria out, followed by the Yeti. Jamie insists on going after them, but the Colonel cautions that the Yeti will be waiting outside.
Evans then suggests that they do as the Intelligence wants, and allow the Doctor to be taken.
The Doctor tells them that if he cannot come up with any other solution in the time available then he will indeed hand himself over. He tells Jamie that he and Victoria will have to care for him until his mind develops again.
They discover that the Yeti have gone, so the Colonel organises a search of the fortress with Jamie and Evans whilst the Doctor and Anne hurry to complete their work in the lab.
The Colonel and Jamie then decide to go in search of Travers and Victoria, leaving Evans to guard the Doctor and Anne. They are working on a means of overriding the control signal to a Yeti sphere, so that they can give it their own instructions.
Jamie and the Colonel get only as far as the main surface entrance when they find a wall of web behind it.
They return to the lab where the Doctor is testing their control box. He is sure they can now block the signal to a Yeti to immobilise it, then replace its sphere with the one that they now control.
Evans is now sure that either Jamie or the Colonel is the Intelligence's agent, but the Colonel dismisses him out of hand. He and Jamie are going to use the tunnel exit to go look for their missing friends.
They, meanwhile, are at Piccadilly Circus station, guarded by a Yeti. The Intelligence has released its hold over the professor and he is trying to comfort Victoria. They attempt to slip away - only to be confronted by a second Yeti as it emerges from the tunnel.
As time ticks away, the Doctor and Anne have completed their work, but the control box only has very short range. They will at least have voice control over their adapted sphere but will have to get very close to one of the Yeti to use it.
Jamie and the Colonel find a handkerchief of Victoria's in the tunnel and realise she has dropped it as a clue to the direction they have taken.
As they sit on the platform by the tunnel entrance, Travers and Victoria hear a whispered call. Hiding in the shadows is a bedraggled Staff Sergeant Arnold. They ask him to return to the fortress to tell the others where they are being held.
After testing out their sphere on an alarmed Evans, the Doctor sets off to find a Yeti to capture - and Anne insists on accompanying him. The cowardly driver refuses to come with them.
The Colonel and Jamie encounter Arnold, who tells them about finding Travers and Victoria. All he can recall about his earlier disappearance with the trolley party was becoming smothered in web then blacking out.
The three head for the fortress to find the Doctor, only to learn that he and Anne have already left. They then see that the web is continuing to close in on them, moving inexorably down the Northern Line. Warren Street falls, and Goodge Street is next.
At Piccadilly Circus, the Yeti move Travers and Victoria away from the platform.
The Doctor and Anne encounter a Yeti and are relieved to find their device works. The Doctor removes its control sphere and replaces it with the adapted one.
The robot now obeys his verbal commands.
Evans is tending to Arnold's wounds when they see the wall of the ops room begin to bulge inwards. Within seconds it cracks open and a mass of glowing web pours into the fortress...
Written by Mervyn Haisman & Henry Lincoln
Recorded: Saturday 10th February 1968 - Lime Grove Studio D
First broadcast: 5.25pm, Saturday 2nd March 1968
Ratings: 8 million / AI 55
VFX: Ron Oates
Designer: David Myerscough-Jones
Director: Douglas Camfield
The only changes from the draft script for this episode were that Victoria would leave an item of jewellery on the tracks for her friends to find, instead of her handkerchief, and the nervous Evans placed a dummy in the ops room as a decoy should the Yeti return to the fortress.
Later, Derrick Sherwin made some additional changes, one of which was the Colonel's speculation that Arnold was somehow immune to the web-like fungus. After having immobilised the single robot, the Doctor also realised that his control box might be made to block the signals to all of the Yeti, if he could get back to the fortress in time to perfect it.
A well known convention anecdote from Frazer Hines derives from camera rehearsals for this episode. It's the scene where Jamie finds the hankie belonging to Victoria, so he knows they are (literally) on the right track. During rehearsals he produced a pair of ladies underpants and held them up claiming "These are Miss Waterfield's. I'd know them anywhere!" - thus embarrassing Debbie Watling in front of her dad.
One of the visitors to the studio that day was Justin Richards, who would go on to write a number of original Doctor Who novels and edit the range.
For the scene in which the Colonel and Jamie tried to get through the door to street level, a physical prop was used to represent the web. This was made from transparent plastic with a light source behind, manipulated from the rear by stagehands.
The radio-controlled sphere which had first been used in The Abominable Snowmen was utilised again.
Only two Yeti were required in studio, played by John Levene and Gordon Stothard.
The episode opened with a re-enactment of the final scene from the previous instalment.
The climactic scene of the web bursting through the wall of the fortress was model work filmed on Monday 8th January. Two small sets were created - the ops room and a corridor - with firefighting foam representing the web.
It's the penultimate episode, so this week is mainly concerned with getting everyone into position for the finale. The Doctor has developed his device which he hopes to use against the Yeti, and the fortress finally falls to the web - so we won't be revisiting it again. The action has to move elsewhere.
This episode is interesting in that once again we see the Doctor spending a considerable amount of time with a more mature female character. We saw this previously with Astrid in the previous story, and will do so again before the season is out. Troughton seems to work well when he has adult characters to work with, and not just interacting with the juvenile companions.
One problem with this episode is the timeframe. We are told only a minute or two into it that the Doctor has 20 minutes to surrender himself. Yet towards the end of the episode, just before he and Anne set out to use their control device, only 8 minutes have elapsed. The episode, with a running time of 24' 19" ends with some of the 20 minutes still remaining, as we'll see when we get to the final instalment. Unless we have been viewing scenes which have actually been overlapping with each other, the timing is out.
It's a minor irritation, but once you notice it you can't un-notice (sorry). It could so easily have been avoided if the Intelligence had stuck to the good old "one hour" deadline. Besides, it would take more than 20 minutes to walk from Goodge Street to Piccadilly Circus - so the Doctor would almost have had to set off before the Intelligence had even issued his ultimatum!
(This timing business isn't unique to this story - just watch any story where the Daleks have a countdown).
We know the identity of the Intelligence's human agent, but viewers at the time would still have been pondering.
As far as they would have been concerned, further suspicion grows for it to be Evans - keen to see the Doctor hand himself over and thus let the rest of them go free. Or is this just his cowardly nature? Chorley is still missing, and now Arnold turns up out of the blue - unharmed save for some minor wound whereas everyone else has been killed by contact with the web, or the Yeti which lurk within it. As for the Colonel, he seems increasingly unlikely to be the agent - mainly because neither the Doctor nor Jamie seem to be treating him like a suspect.
- The ratings had peaked for this story the week before but remain healthy at 8 million viewers, whilst the appreciation figure increases.
- Radio Times featured another small item on the series this week, this time looking at the Watling family, as Debbie's sister Dilys was also appearing on TV:
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