complained about the "pointless, noisy, bleeping" of the Zarbi. Following the broadcast of the second episode, Patrick Skene Catling of Punch wrote that the serial was guilty of "ludicrous bathos". After the third episode, Bill Edmund of The Stage and Television Today described the lighting effects as "pointless and annoying". Following the fifth episode, the Sunday Mirror received a complaint from A. N. Thompson that the show was "slipping" due to its newly-comedic nature. At the BBC Programme Review Board in March 1965, Alasdair Milne said that the series was "difficult to follow, unless one watched every edition"; at the following Review Board, controller of programmes Huw Wheldon said that the serial was going well, while BBC1 controller Michael Peacock felt that the series had too much "mumbo-jumbo" and that the character names were difficult to follow. In April, The Scotsmans Peggie Phillips considered the serial to be a flop. An audience report prepared following the serial's broadcast indicated satisfaction with its conclusion and choreography, but confusion regarding the action and criticism of the costumes and blurred lens. Retrospective reviews were mixed. In The Discontinuity Guide (1995), writers Paul Cornell, Martin Day, and Keith Topping praised the serial's imagination and ambition, but noted that it was "slow and silly looking" by modern standards. In The Television Companion (1998), David J. Howe and Stephen James Walker said that the story's ambition "may be seen as its great strength or its great weakness, depending on the spirit in which it is approached". In A Critical History of Doctor Who (1999), John Kenneth Muir described the serial as "a noble experiment" despite its mixed execution; he praised the costumes for the Zarbi, but criticised the Menoptra suits, alien voices, blurred lens, and Strutton's unoriginal scripts. In 2008, Mark Braxton of Radio Times acknowledged the costume design efforts and "superbly atmospheric" sets, though felt that they had not aged well; he felt that the story had an "almost total absence of excitement", but enjoyed its ambition and deeper meaning about good versus evil. In 2009, Den of Geeks Cliff Chapman ranked The Web Planet among the most underrated classic Doctor Who serials, noting that it "is a joy for being so different" even if "the ambition might outstrip the execution". In 2012, Neela Debnath of The Independent found the story "enjoyable" with ambitious writing that "lacks impact given the poor quality of the visuals".