Doctor Who A-Z #07: The Sensorites (1964)

One of the questions this rewatch has made me reconsider is this: when did Doctor Who start to make its monsters complicated? In the new series, it’s commonplace: Peter Capaldi’s final season kicks off with five back-to-back episodes where an apparent monster turns out to be merely misunderstood. The trope certainly predates the Ice Warriors’ babyface turn in The Curse of Peladon, though that remains the most dramatic example. Was The Silurians the first to do it? No – as The Faceless Ones shows, it wasn’t even the first Malcolm Hulke story to do it. And let’s not forget the morality play of Galaxy 4, and its message that not every ugly monster is evil.

Incredibly, it turns out that the first example is The Sensorites. The only two stories preceding this that can possibly be called “monster stories” are The Daleks and The Keys of Marinus, and the introduction of the alien Sensorites certainly suggests we’re about to get something in the same vein. We know they can control the minds of humans, putting them in a trance so deep even the Doctor mistakes them for corpses. The human astronauts are terrified of them, understandably so. Then, just like the Daleks, they make their bow at the end of the first episode, a monster tapping on a window in a striking visualisation of a common childhood fear.

But the Sensorites turn out to be something other than a monster, and The Sensorites is something other than a monster story. Little clues to this are seeded in the design. Despite a key plot point hinging on humans being unable to tell the Sensorites apart, they actually have visibly different masks with differing facial structures and hair, and some care has been taken to cast actors of different heights and body shapes. This means that when things get down to “squabbling rubber” – as Gareth Roberts’s dad described Doctor Who‘s many scenes of alien arguments – we already believe in these creatures as distinct individuals. It helps, too, that their voices aren’t subject to any electronic distortion, and we can hear everything the actors – including a pre-Crackerjack Peter Glaze! – are giving to their characterisations.

In many ways, it makes sense that this is happening so early in the show’s lifespan. If the Sensorites had pitched up a year or two later, they might have been stripped of their moral ambiguity to become another link in the endless chain of attempts to create the “next Daleks”. By the end of Season One, while the production team are aware the Daleks have been a hit, they haven’t had time to re-route the direction of the series much. The changes that are rung in The Sensorites are mostly ones that the series has been building towards for a long time, most obviously in the Doctor’s character. There is still an odd subplot about the Sensorites stealing the TARDIS lock, which is the sort of thing no-one would be able to do in later episodes, and is presumably meant to be this week’s explanation for why the TARDIS crew don’t just cheese it as soon as things get scary. But it’s unnecessary. For the first time, the Doctor is written as someone who delights in solving mysteries and helps people because it’s the right thing to do, and Hartnell rises to the occasion with one of his most authoritative, commanding performances.

The Sensorites was written by Peter R Newman, who for a long time was one of Doctor Who‘s great unknowns. He never wrote for the show again, partly because of the lack of guidance he received when writing this script. Normally this has disastrous results, but Newman seems to have taken the opportunity to look at the show’s format and take it more seriously than many of the Season One writers who would go on to be show stalwarts. He is arguably the first writer since Anthony Coburn to write Susan as an intelligent alien, placing her latent psychic ability at the heart of the plot. He also takes her status as the Doctor’s grandchild unusually seriously, writing believable family arguments when they disagree and seeding her departure in The Dalek Invasion of Earth when she expresses ambivalence at the idea of spending her life wandering with her grandfather.

We’re still some way off from Doctor Who introducing the concept of a season finale; if you ask me, The Evil of the Daleks is the first story that seems unmistakably designed to end a season with a bang. Presumably this is why The Sensorites is the penultimate story of Season One, as later production teams would surely recognise its potential as a finale. As well as refocusing the series’ attention on the Doctor’s relationship with Susan, it completes the Doctor’s journey from strange, suspicious wanderer to righteous adventure hero. It even begins with a cute little TARDIS scene as the Doctor, Susan, Ian and Barbara reflect on all the wild times they’ve had since they met in Totter’s Lane, culminating in the Doctor’s flubbed but weirdly right description of their friendship as “starting out as a mild curiosity in a junkyard, and it’s become this great spirit of adventure!“

There are, as is often the case in the early years, a few dialogue fluffs here and there, as well as some rather more unexpected flaws. I’m not quite sure why, in this serial, the incidental music always stops sharply when the scene changes, as though the music was being performed in the same room as the actors. The Sensorites doesn’t always mix its ambitious ingredients with the panache that later attempts at the same terrain would pull off, but – if you’ll forgive me over-extending the metaphor – it deserves much credit for figuring out the recipe this early.

Next: The Reign of Terror (1964)

Graham’s Archive – The Sensorites

Full Doctor Who Archive Here