The Sensorites
(Season 1, Dr 1 with Ian, Barbara and Susan, 20/6/1964-1/8/1964, producer: Verity Lambert, script editor: David Whittaker, writer: Peter R Newman, director: Mervyn Pinfield, Frank Cox)
Rank: 103
'...I now give you the strongest sentence known to Sensorites. To be locked in a dark room and made to listen to The Sensorite Spice Girls!'
Most Dr Who stories are designed to make you go ‘aaaaaaah!’ and hide behind the sofa. Every so often, though, you get a story that makes you want to go ‘awwwww!’ and move towards your TV so you can pat the cute aliens. ‘The Sensorites’ is one of those stories with a race more ridiculous than The Ood, cuter than Beep The Meep and fluffier than P’ting. The title creatures are only the third alien ‘monsters’ ever seen in Dr Who and couldn’t be less like the first, the Daleks (or the second, the Voord): they’re a sweet, timid, tiny species who are frightened of loud noises and whose biggest fear is being left in the dark. They have big clumsy round feet they’re always tripping over, a face that looks like a squashed Moomin that hasn’t shaved and far from charging round the universe like most monsters shuffle like old men on their way to a Bingo hall. A lot of modern fans who come to this show precisely for the monsters and the explosions see the Sensorites, who look as if they would blow over in a strong wind, and point and laugh. But why not? Before it fell into this formula Dr Who was about exploring worlds before it’s about conquering monsters and they can’t all be murderers. Besides, in these early days Dr Who is about people rather than species and the Sensorites don't act like a mass invading army. They’re made up of clashing opinions, different viewpoints, changing motivations – they are, of all the different alien races we meet in Who’s first year, the most like ‘us’, a variety pack of all that is ‘good’ and ‘bad’ in the universe.
How can they possibly
fill a six-parter with that you might ask yourself – and you’d be right. Like
many a Dr Who story that runs longer than a month its extended not for reasons
of plot but for budget, so that costs for costumes and sets can be offset by
stretching them out across more episodes. A lot of early Dr Who stories can
best be described as leisurely, even by fans like me who enjoy the chance to
explore worlds and characters without the plot getting in the way. This one
though is probably the slowest of all. The Sensorites even arrive slowly,
making their presence felt bit by bit for two episodes before they finally
appear. Occasionally, though, slow is
good, especially if you are watching this story at the time when it makes for a
nice pace change between the intensity of ‘The
Aztecs’ and the rushing around of ‘The Reign
Of Terror’. It’s also the story most like Dr Who as it was originally
intended, at least by creator Sydney Newman: Dr Who, in its first year, was all
about education and exploration before the success of the Daleks meant that
most writers just tried to re-write that. ‘An
Unearthly Child’ is an oddity that wasn’t what anyone was expecting, John
Lucarotti’s historicals were far more realistic and at times brutal than anyone
watching at a Saturday teatime would have been prepared for and The Daleks’ was nearly cancelled before a
single scene was filmed because the script deviated so far from what this
series was originally meant to be – a way of exploring space to find out more
about ourselves. Most writers who came after that then figured it was such a
winning formula they ought to copy it. We don’t know much about writer Peter
Newman (no relation – err, we think) as he has a grand total of one other
finished work to his name (a 1950s play turned into a 1960s hammer horror film)
but he seems to be the one writer that actually read the series Bible David
Whittaker put together after talks with Sydney. This world isn’t about escapes
and jeopardy (not between cliffhangers anyway), it’s a plausible new world to
explore and be taken on its own terms. The Doctor is back to being dark,
mysterious and crotchety, Ian and Barbara are back to being teacherly and best
of all Susan is back to being a weird
eccentric alien with special powers (something ignored by every other writer
but what drew Carole Ann Ford to the role in the first place). Most of all,
though, it’s a story aimed squarely at a ‘child’ rather than a ‘family’
audience as originally intended. The aliens are cute but some of them are just
a little bit naughty, while they live in a nice quiet orderly world with
sensibly laid out hierarchies and jobs for everyone (adult worlds are so messy
and contradictory to children, with everyone after the same jobs because they
haven’t learned to share their toys). The scheming third Elder is told off in
the exact same way as your mum when you nicked your sibling’s trike and
wouldn’t play nicely, in fact, while it’s a surprise to most Sensorites that
anyone would even think of disobeying the rules, the same way it’s a shock that
opens up new horizons of naughtiness when the naughty kid at the back of the
class starts playing up. The overall message, too, is about trust and learning
that just because something looks ‘different’ doesn’t mean it’s ‘wrong’ or
‘bad’, the theme of many a junior story. ‘The Sensorites’ makes you sit up and
behave a little bit, which is also what Dr Who was originally ‘for’ back when
it was purely a children’s serial before writers started adding hairy cavemen,
human sacrifices and Nazi Daleks. That’s the great irony of ‘The Sensorites’ –
looking back now it feels like the odd one out, but only because it’s the only
story doing what Dr Who was designed to do, educate as well as entertain. I’m
not sure the series would have lasted it’s originally allotted thirteen weeks
if it had all been like this, but as a one-off it’s fascinating.
It’s a shame Peter Newman
never wrote more: in these early pioneering ideas he ‘gets’ this series more
instinctively than most, inventing a plausible world and then throwing the Doctor
and co at it to see what happens. ‘The Sensorites’ is an important stepping
stone for the series that never gets nearly enough credit for how many
inventions start here. This is the first time Dr Who looked at Earth’s future
(after jaunts on Skaro and Marinus and more journeys to Earth’s past than UK
Gold) and considering we were still five years away from landing on the moon
for real it gets most things spot on: mankind’s desperate need to search the
stars is stronger than their fear of being confined in close proximity and
these Humans aren’t a Star Trek utopian ideal. In fact they’re not all that
evolved from, say, the cavemen or the Aztecs in recent historicals: they still
squabble, they still follow rank and order blindly even from people who never
deserved to be given authority and mankind is still at the mercy of outside
influences, far easier to break than they realise. In the end it’s all one big
misunderstanding on both sides and this is the first of many many times that
the Tardis crew act as intermediaries and put things right through peaceful
means: as such it’s the first real time the Doctor gets involved and makes
things better because it’s the ‘right’ thing to do (as opposed to the only way
to get the Tardis back or save his skin), even if it takes Susan’s open heart
to make him open his.
The idea of Dr Who as a
series promoting peace arguably starts here too, just five stories after the
Doctor was urging The Thals to stop being pacifists in their fight against the
Daleks, like many a 1950s action serial – from now on this series will get more
and more with the 1960s vibe of peace, tolerance and understanding from hereon
in; I’d argue it still has a really 1960s vibe even now. Not unrelated, it’s
also only the second cold war parable in the show, but unlike ‘The Daleks’ (which was about the threat of
nuclear annihilation from an evil alien race) ‘The Sensorites’ is the first to
that works as a plea for tolerance and how we ought to be able to get along
with people who are different to us. For while audiences have been trained to
identify with Humans and see them automatically as angelic (yes the Thals
aren’t strictly Human but they look close enough for most people to get the
idea) this is the first story that suggests that maybe we can be the bad guys
too. Given the 1964 dating, written somewhere around the Cuban Missile Crisis
and screened pretty soon after it, at a time when people were in danger of
getting jingoistic and talking about a third world war, ‘The Sensorites’ seems
impressively prescient, saying something that not many other series were brave
enough to tackle yet. As it turns out both sides are wrong and the real enemy is
‘fear’ of the unknown, with the entire plot a gigantic misunderstanding. The
Humans are the first aliens The Sensorites have ever seen and they’ve come to
trade, to take some of this exotic alloy that’s lying around off their hands.
The Sensorites don’t know this though and accidentally cause the humans harm
not out of malice so much as by accident; they assume having never met any
other creatures before that Humans are every bit as telepathic as they are and
don’t understand why they’re clutching their heads in pain and going a bit
bonkers. The Humans think they’re under attack and, now slightly mad, retaliate
by contaminating the Sensorite water supply to kill them off. I’m not sure
which are the Americans and which are the Russians but that’s surely the idea:
we don’t need to be so untrustworthy and can live in parallel despite our
differences, rather than trying to make the others like us. It’s also, like
many an early Dr Who futuristic story, clearly modelled on history, but done on
a typically cosmic Dr Who scale (I like to imagine Peter Newman sitting down to
watch ‘The Aztecs’ and wanting to carry
on the story after the point when the Tardis leaves, as this is more or less
what happens when the Spanish arrive in Mexico). That way of thinking really is
remarkably ahead of its time and very different to what Terry Nation had been
writing for his two futuristic stories, though it’s one many future Who writers
will copy.
This story makes more
sense when you learn a little of the writer’s history. We didn’t know much
about Peter Newman at all until ‘The Sensorites’ came out on DVD in 2012 with a
‘bonus’ feature about him attached but it makes perfect sense that he had a
mixed experience in WWII. Before the war Peter was a good patriotic lad who
rushed off from school to join the navy (being young and naïve he agreed to
switch clothes with a deserter, then got pursued for desertion himself before
things could be cleared up – he was sent back to school, who promptly expelled
him for running away). He had dreams of fighting for his country and attacking
these awful enemies he’d been told about. Then on singing up properly (to the
RAF) he found he’d made a great mistake: the turning point is said to be when
he was posted to Japan and made friends with a local ‘enemy’ who to his shock
was just like him (just shorter. And possibly hairier. You see where this is
going). Disillusioned, Newman tried to quit – then WWII broke out and he found
everyone he knew was swept along in the same jingoistic verve that had once
swept him up, while he knew it was all a lie and he was now forced to fight his
‘friends’. He ended up in a Japanese prisoner of war camp for a while, where he
actually made friends and recognised his ‘enemies’ were only doing to the
Allies what their side was doing to the ‘Axis’. Once war ended Newman tried to
undo the damage he felt he had done in the war by writing about it, taking a
course and breaking big almost straight away with a play ‘Act Of War’ that’s
paced very like ‘The Sensorites’: the first act is a typical war play about the
British conquering Japan. But then at the end of the first act something odd
happens and Act Two is all about Japan conquering Britain and showing the
mirrors between the two cultures, showing how similar they are (you might know
the story better as the hammer horror film ‘Yesterday’s Enemy’. Newman signed
up to make lots of other films with them, which never happened for one reason
or another). Back in these early Dr Who days when it was a children’s series no
one wanted to know getting a writer who’d actually written a successful play
was a big deal but it fits perfectly with what Newman wanted to do: teach the
young that war isn’t all it’s cracked up to be before they become of an age to
fight one.
On this level Newman also
touches on something we’ve mentioned a lot in our 1960s reviews, about what
sort of a world the children of the day are going to inherit when they come of
age. WWII happened roughly a generation after WWI so it was a natural
assumption WWIII was going to happen any day now: the question was would the
children of the day fight it. As virtually the only series parents watched with
their children Dr Who juggled the views of both the war generation and the baby
boomers, a safe space to discuss possible futures. We’re a bit early, in this
era of peak Merseybeat, to be talking about hippies but there was already a
growing peace movement in America, of teenagers who refused to die ‘for their
country’ in cold war battlegrounds like Vietnam and Korea and Newman seems to
wholeheartedly approve. For this story
isn’t just a cultural clash but a generational one. The Sensorites are surely meant
to be 1960s teenagers? They have longish hair, have their own ‘secret language’
(telepathy) and talk to each other through a device that to today’s viewers
looks like a compact disc on the end of a stethoscope but was surely meant as a
tiny vinyl record. The ‘awful noise’ they make makes the ‘Humans’ (the adults)
go a bit bonkers and makes their hair turn white/grey prematurely (the common
complaint of many a parent about their offspring, in all generations) while the
Humans are obsessed with money and trade and commerce, things that don’t
interest the young at all. To adults/humans they ‘all look alike’ (a common
catcall to the 1960s youth by adults who mostly acted alike, along with ‘are
you a boy or a girl?’) and act weird and unearthly (as it were) but to the
children the adults are every bit as alien, with rules they follow blindly and
a hierarchy they stick to even when it drives them mad. Both sides are fighting
out of mistrust for each other’s motives, but really they both want the same
thing: peace (they just have very different ways of going about it that’s all:
WWII was fought on the grounds that it would be a final war that brought peace
and without fighting the Nazis would win and war would reign forevermore’; to
the children who’ve grown up evacuated and played on bomb sites and probably
lost loved ones or homes and seen what it did to people they’re never ever
going to have a war again under any circumstances). We miss it because the
actors chosen to play the Humans are on the young side (I guess they’d have to
be being astronauts) and the Sensorites are like wisened old men, but this
wouldn’t be the first Dr Who story to flip things upside down like this. Just
look at how the Sensorites are portrayed as overgrown toddlers, easily
overwhelmed and scared by loud noises and bright lights (to a lot of their war
generation parents their wimps who need toughening up with national service,
but it’s probably PTSD from growing up with bombing raids and the threat of
nuclear war their parents never had when they were little – and surely the
‘disintegrator gun’ is another Dr Who metaphor for the atom bomb). The Humans,
by contrast, are a child’s idea of an adult: contradictory, confusing, sneaky
and blindly following rules even when it’s caused them harm (my guess is that
Newman writes the ‘broken’ Humans contaminating the water supply as like his
fellow serviceman, mentally unstable after years of fighting. Just look at the
way John, a nice chap when we first meet him, talks about ‘keeping up morale’
in a very war generation way after the Sensorite music drives him mad).
The key comes when Susan,
the Tardis youngster, realises the truth of what the Sensorites are doing and
starts to hear their music and become ‘one of them’, finding her voice to stand
up to her teachers and grandfather (back in the days when we really did think
of him as ‘elderly’ rather than ‘a youngster on his first regeneration’,
remember) to say that they’re not so bad, honest. The Doctor can’t understand it, because she’s
been such a good loyal moral kid, but that’s why she feels she needs to speak
up: because the Sensorites are ‘right’ morally and she can ‘hear them and
understand them in a way her elders can’t – morally she knows they are right. The
Doctor, weird as it might seem sixty odd years and 320 stories on, is too
xenophobic to see what’s really going on, automatically siding with the Humans
(he’ll learn). It’s by far Susan’s greatest moment in any story: while Ian and
Barbara are understanding and more open to listen than any teacher I ever had
you just know The Doctor’s going to get into one of his moods. Barbara softens
the blow by explaining to him that Susan’s just ‘growing up’ and that’s how
things should be, which also feels the message Newman is trying to pass on to
the people at home. Don’t hate on the kids for hating on war, because I’ve been
there too and no difference is worth that. In this context the poisoning of the
water supply is interesting. To modern
viewers that looks like adult fears that the children are going to contaminate
water supplies with LSD (half-seriously discussed as a way of getting adults to
live in ‘peace’ – of course it’s a teacher who gets hit by it first) and
accidentally cause some ‘bad trips’ and overdoses, but we’re a bit early for
that; instead it feels like a typical World War II ploy of killing off as many
people as quickly as possible without having to look them in the eyes (there
was a lot of this going on around Japan, where Newman was stationed. On both
sides).
This is easily Susan’s
best story from her ten story run as it gives her something more to do than sob
like a child or pout mysteriously like an alien and she turns out to be more
than a little telepathic herself. This leads to all sorts of questions in
future stories as the Doctor isn’t (‘much’) and no other timelords we ever meet
seem to have that gift, but it was a big part of the original pitch to Dr Who
series writers and one of the reasons Carole Ann Ford took the part. She’s
brilliant here, no longer the junior member of the Tardis crew falling over and
getting into trouble but an actual teenager trying to become an adult, stepping
up to do the right thing even if her inexperience still means she makes
mistakes and trying to be independent of her, let’s face it, often overbearing
grandfather. The Doctor-Susan clashes bring out whole new aspects of both their
characters and both Carole and William Hartnell excel like never before as
their family bond is tested almost to breaking point. Fittingly too for a story
about family, this is also the first time we properly hear about Gallifrey:
though it doesn’t have a name yet Susan’s description of it will dominate the
way future creators depict it for decades to come (mind you, just to confuse
matters The Doctor discusses ‘we Humans’ at one stage: was he originally meant
to be a Human born on another planet from a time when we’d colonised most of
the universe? In which case you’d think he’d be more tolerant in this story!) For
once Ian and Barbara, the strength of so many stories in the first two series,
take a back seat – to the point where Barbara disappears for a week on the
Sensorite spaceship and isn’t seen at all when Jacqueline Hill goes on holiday
(she’s not in the last episode much either, as if the writer couldn’t work out
a way to get her to fit back in again; the Sensorites also need to check the
radiation levels on their ship as Barbara is only gone a few hours in story
terms yet comes back with a great brown tan as if she’s been holidaying somewhere
nice).
Of course not all
Sensorites think the same just as not every teenager thought the same and
Newman is most scared, not of the ‘Sensorite kids’ as a whole (with whom he
sides) but the one lone war hawk in their midst. The other Sensorites don’t see
his betrayal coming because it’s never occurred to them that someone would
disagree, but the Third Elder sees war and mistrust as a way of holding onto
power. He’s another little Hitler (or maybe Napoleon given the height) superbly
played by Peter Glaze in possibly Dr Who’s first bit of stunt ‘anti-casting,
the sort of thing that will later see Carry On comedians dressed as time-meddling
monks or giant green reptiles (‘The
Time Meddler’ and ‘The Ice
Warriors’) and reach its nadir when veteran comic Beryl Reid is asked to
play a grizzled freighter pilot (‘Earthshock’).
Glaze is superb, giving the role his all back in the days when most ‘stars’
were still reluctant to do Who or did ‘children’s TV acting’, making the Third
Elder out to be sadistic, cruel and ruthless. All things he had never ever been
called on to play before, his day job being saying ‘doh!’ decades before Homer
Simpson and making small boys and girls hold cabbages without dropping them (seriously
you think today’s children’s programmes are nuts but they had nothing on
‘Crackerjack’!) Glaze probably got the job after someone saw a Crackerjack
spoof of him playing ‘The Doctor’ and figured having a second fussy pompous old
man who thinks he’s right would be fun (though sadly Glaze and Hartnell don’t
get many scenes together so don’t have the square-off you’re hoping for). While
the rest of the cast are a bit wet (especially the Humans – Stephen Dartnell is
particularly disappointing after his moustache-twirling turn as Yartek, Leader
Of the Alien Voord’ in ‘The Keys Of Marinus’, the
first returning actor to play a completely different part, given that in his
first he was behind a mask and covered in rubber) the camera can’t take its
eyes off him, even behind one of the weirdest costumes in Dr Who history.
Admittedly some things
really don’t work. The Sensorites are not the costume department’s greatest
moment: it’s basically a white baby grow with a hole cut for the actor’s eyes and
an extension for a bald head, while there have been few evolutionary
cul-de-sacs as daft as those feet. You can see a few moments where the
Sensorites trip over each other because they can’t see and apparently there
were far worse in outtakes (all of which are long since wiped, alas). Adding
some whiskers to the sideburns and a visibly white beard just compounds one
felony on top of another. Even for a script where you’re not meant to be
frightened of The Sensorites they look silly, a pushover even for a
particularly weak-kneed bunch of space Humans. The plot has often come in for
mocking from less patient Whovians as so much of it revolves around what seems
an unlikely plot development: The Sensorites don’t just look alike to us but
can’t tell themselves apart without the sashes they wear around their arms (That’s...ridiculous.
Especially given that so much of their society is driven by a class system –
you’d think somebody would have bumped off their rivals and pretended to be
someone else to get the top job by now. Plus they all have very different voices).
Then again the Sensorites make no evolutionary sense anyway: normally in
species not used to the dark who nevertheless need to go out in it sometimes (Humans
for instance) their pupils get bigger to take in more light; The Sensorites’
eyes do the opposite and get smaller, making it harder to see, making them more
afraid (script editor David Whittaker sort-of explains this in the Dr Who
annual, but still not enough for it to make sense). Spending two episodes
without seeing the Sensorites is at least one too long and the reveal (panned
from their big clumsy round feet upwards) seems almost designed to ridicule
them. Usually I love the Hartnell ‘Billy fluffs’ but by accidentally
mispronouncing ‘ineer’ as ‘inner’ he ruins an entire sub-plot (to this day a
lot of fans think the Humans contaminating water are from a secret sect, rather
than a crashed ‘engineer’ from the earlier ship). We also have two plotholes
big enough to drive a double-decker bus through on its way to an alien desert
planet: what happens to the Sensorite who takes the Tardis lock and how did
they arrive without the Human hearing given what a whacking noise the Sensorite
space shuttle makes at the end of episode two? While, if the humans were behind
the contamination of the water all along, what creature roars and claws at the Doctor
in the episode four cliffhanger? It’s unusual for Whittaker to be asleep at the
wheel like this (then again he doesn’t seem to have paid much attention to this
story all round – once again see the ‘sequel’ below from the first Dr Who
annual, such as it is). Plus the BBC really messed up by putting the story on
hold between weeks two and three to accommodate a longer edition of ‘Grandstand’
(Wimbledon and test cricket in the same week!) and thus making a long story seem even longer –
the only time in the show’s history that Dr Who is interrupted mid-story like
this (and a sign of how little the high-ups still thought of it, even with the
success of The Daleks).
There are lots of good
reasons why modern viewers skip ‘The Sensorites’ then although the biggest one
by far is the pacing: other six part Dr Who stories feel just as slow for an
episode where not much happens but in this one not much happens all the way
through. There are times when it feels as if you’re stuck in a ‘Meglos’ style timeloop. It’s a real shame
they gave such a young, fresh take on things to Mervyn Pinfield to direct as
his lone Dr Who story, by far the oldest director the show ever had (he’s not
even of the war or even the silent generation but what they call the ‘great
generation’ born just before ‘the great war’); though as Dr Who associate producer
he deserves all the credit he can get
(not least for letting Verity Lambert, a young female producer, have her way so
often when so many looked down her) he’s not the right person for this story.
Mind you, I never skip
this story even when it tries my patience as it’s just too important and
slowness isn’t the biggest crime the series ever committed as this is a story
full of imagination and ideas, just not the pace to make the most out of them. Of
all the babysteps Dr Who took to becoming what we know it as today this is the
biggest in the first year after ‘The Daleks’
wrote what monsters were and ‘The Edge Of Destruction’
rewrote who the characters were, by rewriting what the stories are. I love the
fact that, while the Daleks and the Voord are made to be as alien as possible,
The Sensorites are the first Dr Who race to be ‘just like us’, flawed and
fragmented. I love the twist that both sides are wrong: that the only real
thing to fear is fear itself and that the story would have been cleared up
before the Tardis arrives had both sides met up and actually discussed things, instead
of hiding behind their disintegrator guns and contaminated water(if someone had
mentioned the idea of a ‘trade deal’ on first meeting none of this would have
happened). I love the way this story flies in the face of past stories and says
that peace is better than war, despite the success of ‘The Daleks’. I love the fact, after future
stories equating being tall with being evil as per The Cybermen, Ice Warriors
and Sea Devils, that this story features a bunch of scheming short-arses. I
love Ray Cusick’s designs for the story and how he makes the Human sets and the
Sensorites sets so different to one another before we’ve even met them (the Human
ship is all right angles, a cluttered mess with few lights to save fuel this
far in space while the Sensorite city is full of soft gentle corners and well
lit areas, based on the architect Gaudi; no designer sat down to think about
the worlds he was planning more than Cusick, one of the show’s unsung heroes). I
love the one great shot of Pinfield’s, who chose to have the Tardis set erected
next to the Human spaceship so that we actually follow the travellers out of
the doors of one onto another (‘see’, a generation of youngsters cry, ‘I told
you the Tardis was real!’) There’s a lot to love in this story and it’s one
that’s impossible to hate even when it’s boring you slightly. Certainly there’s enough to make Peter Newman
a really promising talent, a discovery that deserved to be writing for Dr Who
for years to come: alas he suffered colossal writer’s block with his next
project (a spy drama), never recovered and retired to become a tourist guide at
the Tate gallery, before dying in a fall in 1975 after hitting his head on a
radiator (there seems a statistically higher than average chance of this in the
Dr Who community for some reason, it’s how we lost Michael Craze who played companion
Ben and quite a few supporting cast members and crew). If it’s admittedly a bit
creaky in places then it still holds up better than practically any other TV on
in 1964 (showing just how ‘modern’ the other season one stories are, by and
large) and if it lacks the fright factor of all the famous Dr Who stories then,
well, this story is so early they hadn’t created that formula yet. While I
suspect a series that looked like ‘The Sensorites’ every week wouldn’t have
lasted anywhere near sixty years, there’s a lot to love about this quieter,
calmer approach and of all the wild and weird worlds the Tardis has landed on
The Sense-Sphere is one of the most ‘real’, if only because we have the time to
properly explore it for once. In short, this is another of Dr Who’s most
neglected gems. Though even I, as one of its biggest fans, confess it would
have been an even better four parter than a six.
POSITIVES + The first
cliffhanger is great. Unseen by The Doctor an unknown hand has taken away the
lock from The Tardis, stranding everyone far from home. It must be race of immense technology to be capable of
doing this (indeed, we never see anyone with the same power again) and we know
that even The Doctor is going to have trouble getting out of this one. After
all, the extra added thrill of series one was about stranding everyone from the
Tardis so that they couldn’t ever get home – something that gets quietly
abandoned by series two, partly because this one inspired them to re-write the
Doctor as being a help to the people he meets rather than a passive observer,
but it’s a key theme of all these early plots. Then the human space crew we’ve
been talking to all go to sleep, as if in a trance. And then a face looks in at
the window and it looks unlike anything else you’ve ever seen (and in this
first shot you can’t see how small it is or how silly its feet are, so for all
we know this alien race are scarier than The Daleks). Of course you’re tuning
in next week.
PREQUELS/SEQUELS: The Doctor
meets the (oddly unmentioned in the TV story) great Sensorite rivals The
Zilgans in ‘The Monsters From Earth’, a story from the first (and arguably best)
of the Dr Who annuals. It was the book released for the Christmas 1965 market
(and thus generally referred to as the ‘1966 annual’ even though the date isn’t
included anywhere). A wordy David Whittaker story aimed for a young rather than
family audience, it features two curious children and their dog walking into
the Tardis in 1966, accidentally locking themselves inside a side room (and you
thought Harry was clumsy!) The Doctor, you see, was out asking for directions
and uncharacteristically left the door open – this isn’t one of his better days
to be honest as he doesn’t notice he has visitors and the Tardis takes off with
them still onboard, materialising somewhere in the pitch dark. The Doctor sets
off, torch in hand, and thinks he’s walking along a rope but really…it’s a
giant spider’s web! The Doctor outwits it (after more of a struggle than you
might expect, actually) and on walking through a door and meeting some
Sensorites (neither side recognises the other) instead of being thankful they
call him a criminal: the supposedly invincible
spider Zilgan was considered sacred despite being their keeper and they’re
worried about the repercussions. They capture The Doctor before he can cause
them any more harm (or to put it in their oddly bloodthirsty words ‘you must be
destroyed, monster from Earth!’) Only The Doctor discovers quickly that they‘re
sensitive creatures who can’t abide loud noises or strong light and defeats
them with his torch and some cyanide he happens to have with him (Whittaker is
much crueller towards the Sensorites as a writer than he was as a
script-editor!) How do these people and their new chosen one celebrate their
newfound freedom? By, err, having a nap (well there are two suns burning bright
in the sky to be fair). The Doctor still thinks he’s dreaming when the two
children arrive and wake him up! We then get a grand finale where The
Sensorites recoil at the sound of the children’s yapping dog. If only he’d had
K9 with him in his first incarnation the TV ‘Sensorites’ could have been over
with so much quicker! You have to wonder how much attention Whittaker paid to
the story given that the only thing that links these Sensorites to the ones we
see on screen are their bald heads and susceptibility to light and noise as otherwise
they’re very different, bloodthirsty even. At least the story explains one
thing: the Sensorites keep their criminals in the kitchen because, back in
these early days, the ‘larder’ was where the giant killer spider lived!
Previous ‘The Aztecs’ next ’The Reign
Of Terror’
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