Doctor Who: 5 Monsters That Shouldn't Have Worked (But Did)
3. The Wirnn From Ark In Space (1975)
Bugs are creepy. Giant bugs even more so. And when said bugs are able to lay their eggs inside your body to give their precious little angels a ready-made food supply and a font of human knowledge, they're downright pants-wettingly horrific. Trying to realize such a creature on the budget that Doctor Who had in 1975, though, must've been a different sort of horror for the producers of the show. Nowadays, the Wirnn would be easily created with a few clicks of a mouse (and a few thousands man-hours on a very powerful computer), but creating a sentient bug with four spindly legs out of thin air wasn't an option then, so naturally they had to make a suit and put a guy in it. There are many reasons why that shouldn't have worked: producer Phillip Hinchcliffe couldn't get the lighting technicians to understand that this story needed to be underlit, for one thing, meaning that most of the shots of the costume are under blazing bright lights like the ones in the picture above. And if you've got a bug creature whose only method of locomotion is those spindly legs, how do you hide the fact that there's a guy with very human legs inside it? There's not much that could be done about the lighting problem, but the director took the simple expedient of never shooting the Wirnn costume in full - the game would've been up if he had, and you can imagine just how silly the beast above would look with two human legs sticking out the bottom. (There's a joke in there, but I'm too freaked out by this story to think one up.) Thus when we later see puppet versions of the Wirnn moving in a genuinely creepy-crawly way across the hull of Space Station Nerva, it never occurs to us that we haven't seen their bottom halves. And then there's the story's creative use of bubble wrap - yes, that bubble wrap, the one you piss your loved ones off with whenever a package comes in and you pop it between your fingers for hours on end. The makers of this story, though, had more interesting uses for it, such as showing the step-wise process of what happens when a human is slowly converted into an insect: Yeah, that shouldn't have worked. It does, though, and I can guarantee, you'll never look at bubble wrap the same way again.
Tony Whitt has previously written TV, DVD, and comic reviews for CINESCAPE, NOW PLAYING, and iF MAGAZINE. His weekly COMICSCAPE columns from the early 2000s can still be found archived on Mania.com. He has also written a book of gay-themed short stories titled CRESCENT CITY CONNECTIONS, available on Amazon.com in both paperback and Kindle format. Whitt currently lives and works in Chicago, Illinois.
Bugs are creepy. Giant bugs even more so. And when said bugs are able to lay their eggs inside your body to give their precious little angels a ready-made food supply and a font of human knowledge, they're downright pants-wettingly horrific. Trying to realize such a creature on the budget that Doctor Who had in 1975, though, must've been a different sort of horror for the producers of the show. Nowadays, the Wirnn would be easily created with a few clicks of a mouse (and a few thousands man-hours on a very powerful computer), but creating a sentient bug with four spindly legs out of thin air wasn't an option then, so naturally they had to make a suit and put a guy in it. There are many reasons why that shouldn't have worked: producer Phillip Hinchcliffe couldn't get the lighting technicians to understand that this story needed to be underlit, for one thing, meaning that most of the shots of the costume are under blazing bright lights like the ones in the picture above. And if you've got a bug creature whose only method of locomotion is those spindly legs, how do you hide the fact that there's a guy with very human legs inside it? There's not much that could be done about the lighting problem, but the director took the simple expedient of never shooting the Wirnn costume in full - the game would've been up if he had, and you can imagine just how silly the beast above would look with two human legs sticking out the bottom. (There's a joke in there, but I'm too freaked out by this story to think one up.) Thus when we later see puppet versions of the Wirnn moving in a genuinely creepy-crawly way across the hull of Space Station Nerva, it never occurs to us that we haven't seen their bottom halves. And then there's the story's creative use of bubble wrap - yes, that bubble wrap, the one you piss your loved ones off with whenever a package comes in and you pop it between your fingers for hours on end. The makers of this story, though, had more interesting uses for it, such as showing the step-wise process of what happens when a human is slowly converted into an insect: 
