Synopsis:
As she crosses the palace courtyard Carol is seized by a Sensorite and dragged away...
She is taken to the disintegrator weapon room where she is confronted by the Administrator, now Second Elder, and his Engineer henchman. She is forced to write a note claiming that she has gone up to the spaceship, to divert her friends from searching for her.
Barbara has arrived in the palace. She, John and Susan notice immediately that this must be a forgery and take it to the First Elder, who confirms that he gave no permission for anyone to travel up to the spaceship.
He is forced to admit that the Doctor and Ian have gone into the aqueduct.
There, the Doctor is marking their route with chalk as they travel deeper into the network of tunnels.
They are attacked by a figure who quickly flees into the darkness. Ian manages to tear off a shoulder flash from a uniform, containing the partial word "--INEER" - suggesting "ENGINEER".
On learning of the disintegrator weapon room beneath the palace courtyard, John goes there and finds Carol held prisoner by the Engineer. The two fight and the Sensorite is forced to surrender. The Chief Warrior assures him that he will never escape again.
The captive does not implicate the Second Elder, but does admit to having sabotaged the weapons and map given to the Doctor and Ian.
Susan and Barbara devise a plan, utilising Susan's telepathic abilities. She is given a model of the aqueduct and will guide Barbara and John through it remotely to find the men. Barbara will use one of the Sensorite telepathic devices to pick up her directions.
The Doctor and Ian are confronted by a pair of humans, dressed in ragged uniforms and armed with sharpened stakes. They take them to their headquarters, where they meet the third member of the party, their Commander.
They are the survivors of the previous Earth space mission. The Commander had killed his other crew members by sabotaging their ship when they had tried to flee the planet. Years of isolation have driven the Commander and his men paranoid and deranged. They are fighting their own war against the Sensorites by poisoning the water supply.
The Doctor and Ian humour them, claiming to have come to find them and tell them the war is over, and they can now stand down. However, the Commander turns against them when he is told that others have entered the tunnels.
Barbara and John arrive and distract the Commander - the Doctor claiming that they are part of a welcoming committee, come to take them out of the aqueduct to celebrate their victory.
As they emerge from the tunnels into the light, the waiting Sensorite warriors stun them with their weapons.
The new Second Elder's involvement in the death of his predecessor is revealed.
The humans will be taken back to Earth by Maitland and his crew, whilst the Second Elder is banished to the wastelands.
Susan is disappointed to learn that her telepathic abilities aren't as great as she thought, as they were being boosted by Sensorite technology. The Doctor assures her that they will look into this further, should they ever manage to get home.
Later in the TARDIS, the Doctor and his companions watch as Maitland's ship departs for Earth. Ian makes a comment about them at least knowing where they are going, which the Doctor interprets as a slight against his navigation skills. He angrily states that Ian and Barbara will be let off at their next destination - irrespective of where - or when - that might be...
Next episode: A Land Of Fear
Written by: Peter R Newman
Recorded: Friday 10th July 1964 - Lime Grove Studio D
First broadcast: 5:15pm, Saturday 1st August 1964
Ratings: 6.9 million / AI 57
Designer: Raymond P Cusick
Director: Frank Cox
Additional cast: John Bailey (Commander), Martyn Huntley (First Human), Giles Phibbs (Second Human).
Critique:
Finally, the mystery of the "monster" in the aqueduct and the cause of the belladonna poisoning is revealed. Earlier there had been mention of a spaceship from Earth which had visited the Sense-Sphere some years in the past, but it blew up on lift-off and all of its crew were presumed dead. Not every viewer at the time would have recalled this piece of information as it was mentioned three weeks ago.
Three of the humans are still alive and it is they who are poisoning the water, in the deranged belief that they are fighting a war against the Sensorites.
Both sides - City Administrator and Commander - are suffering from paranoia and xenophobia, driving both to take extreme, irrational actions. Each is prepared to kill to defend their warped views.
This is where Peter R Newman's play / film Yesterday's Enemy comes in as an inspiration. It told the story of a British war crime committed against native villagers in the Far East during World War II. The soldiers believed that the ends always justify the means, only to discover to their cost that this is never the case.
The Commander and his men are waging a conflict and they believe that anything they do is justified in these circumstances - including the indiscriminate killing of civilians.
Another inspiration for the Commander might be Japanese soldiers such as Hiroo Onoda, who remained at his post on a small island in the Philippines until 1974 as he didn't know the war had ended. It took his elderly commander to come and convince him to stand down. In 1972 another soldier named Shoichi Yokoi was found in hiding on Guam, unaware the war was over.
Something which isn't made clear on screen: did their isolation alone cause the Commander and his men to go insane, or had their minds been affected by the Sensorites in the same way that John's was?
It is disappointing that we never actually get to see the ex-City Administrator's downfall. His unmasking and exile occur off-screen.
When she accepted the role of Susan, Carole Ann Ford had been led to believe that the character would have been far more interesting than it turned out to be. She thought it might have been more like The Avengers' Cathy Gale, and she would have special skills such as telepathy.
This is the only story where she demonstrates any kind of special ability, although the dialogue states that her natural telepathy isn't all that great.
As we've already mentioned, the Doctor's claim to telepathy was more that he could anticipate someone's actions from their expression than a real paranormal ability, and he seems genuinely surprised to learn that Susan might have skills in this area - so it isn't a natural ability of their people at this stage in the programme.
The Doctor tells Susan that her powers are something they might develop further should they ever get home.
This is the first reference to their home planet since the very first episode. Susan describes silver leaved trees and burnt orange skies at night. The Tenth Doctor will paraphrase Susan's description in the episode Gridlock, and all representations of Gallifrey's exterior have featured orange skies, though Susan only mentions these as a nocturnal phenomenon.
This episode sees the first ever model spaceship of the series - something which will become very common in future. The model work was actually a remount of a shot recorded at Ealing in May. It was the work of the director of the following story - Henric Hirsch.
The shot throws up an interesting question about the TARDIS scanner. Up to now it has simply been suggested that there is some invisible camera somewhere on the TARDIS exterior. However, if this is the case, how can the scanner be showing the departing spacecraft in space? Either the TARDIS is floating in orbit above Sense-Sphere - which should be impossible for the un-navigable ship - or it can tune in to distant images. If the latter, why is it not used to fully explore the local area when they first arrive, to cut down on the dangers of going outside to explore?
The ending also seems to undo all the good work achieved by David Whitaker in The Edge of Destruction in bringing the TARDIS crew together as friends. A fairly innocuous remark by Ian causes the Doctor to throw a temper tantrum and threaten to throw the schoolteachers off the ship. Ironically, the story had begun with them reminiscing about their travels to date, and how they had brought them closer together.
There is a very obvious fluff from Hartnell in this episode - made more noticeable as we actually get to see on screen what he is supposed to be saying. The shoulder flash which the Doctor and Ian find clearly has "--INEER" written on it, but Hartnell reads it as "--INNER".
The Sensorites proved to be Peter R Newman's final work. He was due to write a drama for the new BBC 2 service but suffered from a severe case of writer's block and was unable to develop any further ideas to completion. He ended up working as a porter at the Tate Gallery on London's Millbank (now Tate Britain).
In 1975 he fell down some stairs at work and hit his head on an iron radiator, dying from a cerebral haemorrhage in hospital soon after. There is an excellent documentary about him on the DVD of this story.
Trivia:
- This is the final episode of the story which has always been known as The Sensorites. At one point this was to have been the final episode of the first season.
- Both audience viewership and appreciation figures are the same as the previous week.
- Ken Tyllsen and Bartlett Mullins were both credited on this episode, despite neither appearing in it. Mullins was originally going to be seen, but a late rewrite led to his Second Elder being killed off in the previous instalment.
- Joe Greig was the Chief Warrior, with Gerry Martin and Anthony Rogers once again playing non-speaking Sensorites.
- John Bailey would return to the series on two occasions - as Edward Waterfield in The Evil of the Daleks, and as Sezom in The Horns of Nimon.
- Martyn Huntley also made a further two appearances, both in the Hartnell era. He was the Roboman who confronts Ian and Larry when they first meet Wells at the mine workings in The Dalek Invasion of Earth, and he was the doomed Warren Earp in The Gunfighters.
- After one week in Studio G, the series returned to Studio D at Lime Grove.
- To imply John's recovery, Stephen Dartnell's hair had fewer white streaks added to it.
- Jacqueline Hill's holiday tan is quite noticeable - suggesting that Maitland's spaceship must have sunbeds.
- This was the final episode to be directed by Frank Cox. He was the only Doctor Who director of the classic era never to have worked on an entire story. His wife, Bridget Turner, played Alice Cassini in Gridlock. Cox died in April 2021, aged 80.
- The original recordings were scrapped in two batches - in August 1967 and in January 1969. We are able to enjoy the story today as the film copies for overseas sales were returned to the BBC.
- An interesting letter appeared in Radio Times during the broadcast of this story...
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