The Sensorites

Chapter the 294th, covers a pair of Hartnells, one from early on, and one that's brand new.

Plot:
The Doctor, Ian, Barbara and Susan materialise on a 28th century spaceship in orbit around the planet Sense-Sphere. Two members of crew appear dead, but they are instead mind-controlled by the Sensorites on the planet below, who are keeping them in orbit. The TARDIS team manage to wake them up. There is also a third crew member John who has been driven mad by the creatures. The lock mechanism from the TARDIS is taken by the Sensorites, preventing it from leaving; the Doctor soon works out the weaknesses of these seemingly fearsome creatures. The Sensorites explain that they are fearful of exploitation of their planet, which is rich in the vital element molibdi- molybdu- molydem- ... iron, let's just say iron. Years before, a group of Earthmen arrived and caused trouble, but they're now missing presumed dead. Since, Sensorites have been dying from a suspected infection. If the Doctor can cure this, the Sensorites will allow him access to his TARDIS again, and will fix John. The Doctor, Susan and Ian go down to the planet with John and another member of the crew, his fiancé Carol. Barbara and the captain of the ship stay behind, though Barbara joins them on the planet later. Despite the City Administrator Sensorite working against them, and despite Ian falling ill, the Doctor works out that the water supply is being poisoned and provides the antidote. Ian and John are both healed. In some tunnels, the Earthmen are discovered to be still alive and poisoning the water supply with Deadly Nightshade. They are apprehended, and the TARDIS travellers are free to resume their journeys in time and space.

Context:

The plan was to watch an episode a day across six days in late February and early March 2024. Such is the reputation of The Sensorites as being a bore-fest that if I told you I enjoyed it so much I tore through it much quicker than that, you wouldn't believe me, but that is five-sixths true. The first episode proved a hell of a chore, such that I couldn't keep watching it on first attempt and instead split my viewing over two days, 10 minutes on the first, the remaining 15 on the next. After that, though, the story picks up, and though I didn't exactly binge them, I got through through the rest of the episodes much quicker than originally planned.

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now closing in on the point where I finish everything and catch up with the current stories being broadcast serially. This post marks the 22nd season completed out of the total of 39 to date (at the time of writing). In full, I have now completed classic seasons 1, 3, 4, 7, 8, 10, 12, 14-18, 20, 21, 23 and 25, and new series 2, 6, 9-11, and 13).

First Time Round:

I met fellow Doctor Who fan, David, mentioned many times before on this blog, at university in the early 1990s and we've remained friends ever since. In the immediate years after my graduation, when none of my peer group had serious jobs or partners or families, there was a lot of time for visiting each other. Usually for no particularly special occasion apart from having a day or two of leave, we would traverse the country and meet up. In November 1997 (I can date this as I remember us both sitting eating breakfast in his kitchen with BBC Radio 1 on and hearing the first radio play of Help the Aged by Pulp) I was on such a visit to him. David had through various contacts and sources collected a video copy of pretty much every Doctor Who story that existed in the BBC's archives at that time. I only had collected what had been commercially available, though I'd borrowed some of his tapes from time to time. Being together and both fans, it must have seemed a good and obvious idea to sit down and watch some Who, probably with a beer and some snacks. Why we chose The Sensorites, I do not remember. Maybe it was the best of what I hadn't seen by other means by then. But all the available evidence - see the First Time Round section of this blog post for more details - suggests I hadn't seen Horror of Fang Rock by November 1997. Why didn't we watch Horror of Fang Rock? We got to watch that story together on a big screen recently at least - see the Deeper Thoughts section of this blog post for more details. It can be hard to remember details from that long ago, Was this the trip where David persuaded me to purchase his entire Target Doctor Who book collection from him, as he needed the space, and I had a challenging time getting it back home? Maybe that was a few years later. Jarvis Cocker isn't always around to help me date stuff, unfortunately.

Reaction:

Stories from Doctor Who's first 1963/64 season can't help but innovate in some way or other. The series was shiny and new, and trying out different types of stories each time, seeing what best fit. The Sensorites, though, innovates in a rather profound way in that the titular alien race are complex; individuals within the ranks of Sensorites have different motivations and form different factions, there's disagreement and dissent. They are not a monoculture, and they are the first aliens presented that way in Doctor Who. You don't get that with Daleks or Voord, and you won't get it with Zarbi or Cybermen. Most of the time in Who, alien races are there to be monstrous forces of antagonism, usually unreasoning, blank and implacable. There is a story type that would be used later, though, that is very like The Sensorites, such that the Hartnell story feels like a try-out. That is the suite of 1970s stories often of six episodes length written by Malcolm Hulke. In these stories, the 'monster' races had understandable viewpoints and different factions (The Sea Devils, The Silurians), or the antagonism comes from the machinations of humans instead (Invasion of the Dinosaurs), or all of the above (Frontier in Space). Put it in colour, swap in the appropriate TARDIS pilot, and The Sensorites would not look out of place during the Jon Pertwee era. Exploring this race of creatures provides lots of story potential for the portion of the narrative that takes place on the Sense-Sphere. It also provides a great villain in the City Administrator, who obstinately refuses to believe any good of the aliens visiting his planet. He may be a villain of the more hissable panto kind (so were Hulke's), but his presence lifts the scenes he's in.

That first episode really was a chore, though (see Context section above) and a fair part of the second episode isn't much better. Again, in line with many a 1970s story, it has the typical 6-parter blues, not quite having enough plot for the duration. Like many a 1970s 6-parter, generally after Hulke's time, it has a narrative structured as a two and a four, the first section on the ship, and the second section on the planet. The realisation of the ship in the studio is pretty good, with a nice continuous shot early on of the TARDIS travellers walking out of the console room and into the spaceship; but, the minimal cast can't sustain interest, and the sets don't feel big enough to contain the action. This can be seen when, in order to get into trouble, Susan and Barbara have to miss the very obvious sign saying 'WATER' and instead wander through a door looking for refreshment. They know there is danger elsewhere on the ship, but there's only one flippin' door, so you'd think they'd realise it's the one that leads to the danger. The only thing left for the cast to do to create dramatic tension is some very stagey and very 60s psychodrama about the impact of the Sensorites' mental powers. This has the unintended effect of talking up the Sensorites too much. Aside from the memorably creepy moment at the part one cliffhanger where we see the first glimpse of one floating outside of the ship, they are very disappointing and don't match up to the terrified reactions of the crew earlier.

Everything is fully explained in the script, if you pay attention: they are protective of their planet but didn't mean any active harm to the humans, so just left them in orbit in a sort of mental stasis, not knowing what better to do with them; the crewman John's excitement at discovering riches on the planet dropped his mental defences, and the Sensorites inadvertently altered his mind. All that material comes later, though: in the second episode, this terrifying unseen presence that has turned people into zombies or driven them mad is finally revealed... and it's a set of slightly cuddly creatures who are frightened of the dark and loud noises, and are at risk of tripping over their own feet. It can't help but seem risible. When it settles down to the more grounded conflict of the City Administrator's distrust, it's much more believable. As such, the story doesn't really need the creatures to be telepathic at all, particularly as it creates some plot holes. A lot of the double-dealing relies on the Sensorites not being able to easily distinguish between each other based on sight, but they don't need to - they're a telepathic race, wouldn't they just distinguish each other telepathically? The City Administrator's nefarious shenanigans involve disguising himself with another's sash of office, but couldn't other Sensorites work out his real identity by, I don't know, looking into his brain. The telepathy at least allows Carole Ann Ford to do something a bit different as Susan; her moments of discovering a telepathic link with the Sensorites causing conflict with her grandfather, and the love story subplot between Ilona Rodgers as Carol and Stephen Dartnell as John are nicely emotional scenes, done quite well.

There are other flaws in the story, but none of them felt big enough to trouble me much: the solution to the mystery of the Sensorites' affliction, that their general water supply is being poisoned, is so telegraphed as to be screamingly obvious; the writing out of Barbara, so that Jackie Hill can have two weeks' holiday, is terribly contrived (she spends the time alone on the ship with its captain for no apparent reason, though one could provide one's own subtext, then turns up on the planet with a nice new suntan); some of the dialogue is very on the nose; the schoolroom science of Molybdenum feels a little shoe-horned in. The worst mistake to my mind is that there's no comeuppance scene for the City Administrator, he's unmasked as the villain off-screen. This is because the focus switches in the final episode to the three surviving humans, ragged and mad and still fighting a war that's long over. The scenes with them were fine, with John Bailey's Commander keeping up an insane parody of military discipline, though I would have been fine with them just having been driven over the edge by their desperate situation, rather than there being an explanation included that the Sensorites' mind powers are responsible. I'd still rather have seen an ending where the City Administrator's plans come to a climax, but are roundly defeated. I'm reminded of Captain Dent, the love-to-hate-him baddie of Colony in Space, who similarly disappears from the story in the last episode and doesn't get a comeuppance scene. And who wrote that story? Why, Malcolm Hulke, of course! 

Connectivity:

Both The Sensorites and The Girl Who Died feature a grey haired Doctor played by an actor in his late 50s interacting with a race of aliens who are mostly indistinguishable from one another at a distance without their sashes of office / hologram projections of Norse gods. 

Deeper Thoughts:

From the Sense-Sphere to a realm beyond sense: BFI The Celestial Toymaker animation screening 2nd March 2024. It was a very rainy Saturday in early March as I made my way to the BFI Southbank for another screening. I'd bagged a ticket, and suspected that this one might have a bit less interest than the Horror of Fang Rock screening in February. The animations sometimes have less appeal to our little - but probably representative - band of regular fans than the Blu-ray tie-in screenings, the latter usually having better panel guests, and it's not the strongest story (a couple of our number expressed this opinion). Myself, I was wary of the possible audience reaction. The trailer showed that this was far from the usual style for these animated stories, and it was possible it would divide opinion. The panellists that there are at these events are usually those who've worked on the animated versions; I didn't like the idea of an awkward panel with rude audience questions from people who didn't care for what they'd seen on screen. My concerns were unfounded for a couple of reasons. First, the screening had sold out and the auditorium was full; second, there were no panels with audience questions at all. Our hosts, as usual Justin Johnson and Dick Fiddy, informed us that the animation team are based in Australia, but even if they'd had the budget to fly them over, they wouldn't have been able to come: they were working on what we were about to watch right up to the wire, with the final files having been sent over the previous evening ("They're still drawing the third and fourth episodes," joked Fiddy). As such, outside of the team working on it, nobody had viewed the animated story in advance; those of us in NFT1 that day would be the first.

Aside from the animators, the issue with forming a panel for the story is that almost everybody credited on the original production, both in front of and behind the camera, is no longer with us. They had apparently tried to engage Peter Purves, who played Steven, and one of the non-speaking dancers who appear in one episode, but diaries did not align. They are really the only remaining options. "You've got Dick here," quipped Johnson, "What more could you want?!" In the absence of a full panel, our hosts endeavoured to keep up all the other rituals of these BFI events, including double entendres. Johnson did a round-up of online and social media activity connected to the event, noting that - even though nobody had seen it yet - the DVD release of the Toymaker animation already had many reviews, apparently all either ones or fives out of five. There was also the usual quiz with giveaway goodies for those that could answer trivia questions; one of the prizes, in Fiddy's words, was "One of the rare medium-sized Doctor Who T-shirts." After this, sound supremo Mark Ayres was up on stage, for the first of two times on the day, to introduce the animation. He confirmed that he had still been working on the sound mix the previous day, but said that Fiddy's earlier remark about the latter episodes still being finished was not accurate: the episodes were delivered in reverse order, so it was the first episode that was the last to be worked on. Alas, it wasn't quite done in time. There was a sequence where the watermark 'NOT FINAL' showed over the action, and there were a few parts that had errors that Ayres had spotted in his last-minute review. If there were more that he hadn't spotted, he said, then "Twitter will inform us in due course." He summarised it thus: "You're all going to see something nobody else is ever going to see ... I hope."

Johnson (L), Fiddy (R)

The screenings of the first two episodes then followed, and the first part was fine, not nearly as bad as Ayres had set up. The only previous animation by Shapeshifter Studios, using their motion-capture process, was for one missing episode of The Web of Fear (see the Deeper Thoughts section of this blog post for more details). It was an experiment, and it was not well received. It remains to be seen how people will react this time, but I liked it. Lots more work has clearly been put in, and the overall quality (and in particular, the movement of the characters) has vastly improved. The character designs are of a different type of abstraction than usual for the animation range, which takes a little getting used to; but, once I was acclimatised, I very much enjoyed the style. This is the perfect story to further the experimentation. Only the three regulars and the Toymaker need appear in any way naturalistically (and the Doctor is invisible for half the time, depicted in the animation as a glowing translucent outline); the animators are freer in designing the other characters - human beings turned into toys - and it gets very inventive. The playing card characters have a lovely origami look, and move in a distinctive way (achieved, as Ayres explained later, by them appearing at a different frame rate to everything else). There's a hint of 60s psychedelia in the imagery, with some characters looking like they've walked straight out of the Beatles' Yellow Submarine movie. After the end credits rolled on the second episode, Fiddy made the droll aside: "They still have LSD in Australia then". The scare factor is also increased; the sequence of Dodo turning to ice after sitting in a booby-trapped chair is genuinely unsettling in a way that the original would likely have struggled to achieve.

Johnson (L), Ayres (R)

Ayres came back up on stage for a quick interview in between the first and second half of the story. He talked about how the script, what he thinks of as the only outright fantasy in early Doctor Who (even The Mind Robber having something of a scientific explanation), is extremely inventive. Anyone who can remember my write-up of the story many years ago for the blog will know that I disagree. The scripting is simple and repetitive such that it could only work with ambitious visuals far beyond the resources of the time. On the strength of the first half, the animators were making a good stab of finally achieving such visuals, with Ayres hinting that the third episode went even further and was his particular favourite. He had not been slouching on the audio front either. 1960s productions often let the audio fall back to just actors in the studio, which has a hollow sound, and often the music - pre-recorded and played in to the studio - could drown out the dialogue; he's tweaked things to fix both issues. He's also done an elegant editing job to remove an 'of the time' offensive version of 'Eeeny Meeny Minie Moe'. For the first time, the source for the audio was the so-called Randolph tapes. These were provided to the archives in 2018 after having been found years before in a skip. They have the word  'Randolph' written on the reel-to-reel boxes, hence the name, but who recorded them and how they came to be there is still a mystery. They provide better quality recordings for some stories than exist elsewhere, and may be counted upon for future releases. Episodes three and four followed the interview with Ayres, and a sequence in the third was indeed breath-taking, and very in keeping with the more hyperactive sequences in the villain's recent rematch The Giggle. The nasty schoolboy character Cyril's death got a round of applause from the assembled.

The best kudos I can give to this animated Celestial Toymaker is to say that it makes one want to see The Web Planet animated, or the Sensorites for that matter, or indeed any other story where the ambition for the imagery exceeded what could be achieved in Lime Grove or Riverside by several light years. Obviously, I'm not suggesting they don't animate all the missing ones first - I want to be alive to see them all. The final treat for us that day was another exclusive, and another investment that's going to pay off over a long stretch of time. The first 10 minutes approximately were shown of a bonus feature from the planned Toymaker release; this is the first of a series where seven different teams of three people - themed for each of the first seven Doctors' eras - all grapple with a specially designed Doctor Who escape room. Each team gets their own episode, with the attempt of the First Doctor trio (Peter Purves, Maureen o' Brien and - erm - Lisa Bowerman) going on the Toymaker disc. The remaining six will go on appropriate animation or Collection box-sets in future. As the presenter of the series Emily Cook said in a brief onstage interview, it could take 20 years to get to the end, but it will be worth it. The concept is one that you can't believe nobody's thought of before, and it looks like a lot of fun based on the excerpt shown. Emily talked about the difficulty of balancing the right tone in her role between being supportive and being gently mocking. The escape room was put together as a set, and all the different sessions were filmed over a scorching two days in the Summer of 2023. The puzzles are styled after various elements of set dressing from classic Doctor Who (references to the Trilogic game from the Toymaker story, the colourful puzzle from the Pyramid of Mars and the gameboard from The Five Doctors were clear from the clip).

Johnson (L), Cook (R)

The Doctor Who-themed escape rooms in the UK (see Deeper Thoughts of this blog post for details of one of them) don't require any knowledge of the show to complete the puzzles, as that would likely be too niche for wide customer engagement. As such, the escape room of the bonus feature series would be much better appreciated by the fans than the stars of the show; alas, the sets have been struck and it is no more, so we will just get to experience it through watching others trying it. This seems like a fundamental flaw, but is somewhat the point, I suppose: it wouldn't be as much fun watching people smoothly and successfully work out a set of puzzles. Cook hinted at some humorous meltdowns: Peter Davison gets somewhat frustrated, and the antics of the fourth Doctor crew of Matthew Waterhouse, Micheal E. Briant and - erm - Toby Hadoke were hilarious according to Cook. After this final interview, the event was done. The three of us (myself, Trevor and Alan) went to the BFI cocktail bar, and met up with Tim and Dave, who I hadn't seen for a couple of years. Then, Chris came out to join us for a drink and some food, though he hadn't had a ticket for the screening. It was almost a full house of our usual group (only David and Scott were not there); the talk was good, the food and drink were good, and I said hello to a few other fans. Having been worried that the event would be negative, I left that evening to travel home in the glow of the most enjoyable and positive BFI session for an animation to date. I'm looking forward to the physical release (date TBC at time of writing) to see the final version of the animation, and to see if Purves and Co. ever manage to escape from that room.

In Summary:

Never mind its reputation, The Sensorites is sometimes as powerful as gamma radiation (inspiration for the incredible Hulke).