"The Unwilling Warriors" directed by Mervyn Pinfield, 27 June 1964
"Hidden Danger" directed by Mervyn Pinfield, 11 July 1964
"A Race Against Death" directed by Mervyn Pinfield, 18 July 1964
"Kidnap" directed by Frank Cox, 25 July 1964
"A Desperate Venture" directed by Frank Cox, 1 August 1964
Written by Peter R. Newman
Script editor: David Whitaker
Produced by Verity Lambert
Associate producer: Mervyn Pinfield
William Hartnell as the Doctor
William Russell as Ian Chesterton
Jacqueline Hill as Barbara Wright
Carole Ann Ford as Susan Foreman
The TARDIS materialises aboard a spaceship that at first appears lifeless. In its control room, they find two crew members--a man and a woman--who at first appear dead.
But they're not dead, and after a few moments they wake up. They're terrified at the arrival of more humans, insisting that the TARDIS crew must leave right away. It's not themselves they're terrified for--it's our heroes. With some effort, the TARDIS team manage to drag the story out of them: their spaceship is in the vicinity of the Sense Sphere, home planet of a race of telepaths called the Sensorites.
The Sensorites have used their mental abilities to trap the ship there, playing games with them: making them hallucinate, preventing them from ever setting a course for home, that sort of thing. They've never actually seen the Sensorites; whenever the aliens decide to make a trip to the spaceship, they first send the crew into a deep trance--they were just recovering from such a trance when the TARDIS crew happened upon them.
It's then that the Doctor makes a discovery: the Sensorites have removed the TARDIS's lock, making it impossible to open the door. Our heroes are now just as trapped as the spaceship crew.
(Out of curiosity, what happens if a TARDIS has a working chameleon circuit and adopts a form that doesn't have a lock on it?)
Barbara and Susan need a glass of water, so Carol, the female crew member, directs them over to a far corner of the control room. They follow her directions and somehow walk right past a sign marked WATER in large letters, instead heading through a doorway into a darkened corridor. The door closes behind them and, unnoticed by them, a human hand reaches into frame and locks it.
This has escaped the attention of the Doctor, Ian and the two crew members still on the bridge, because all of a sudden, the spaceship is hurtling toward a crash on the Sense Sphere's surface. All it would take to avoid it would be for Maitland, the male crew member, to pull back on his controls, but he's been so conditioned by the Sensorites' psychological warfare that he just sits there, terrified. At last it's Ian who reaches across and pulls them out of their dive. The Doctor theorises that the Sensorites wouldn't have let them crash, anyway; their goal seemed to be more to terrify the humans than to destroy them.
As he's talking, though, Carol and Maitland fall into another deep trance, and he and Ian realise that the Sensorites are approaching and are about to board.
Two Sensorites land in the ship's shuttle bay. They have blank, wizened faces, covered in wisps of white hair. Their eyes are narrow, dark slits, and they have no visible mouths or noses. (The no-mouth thing, I think, is an accident of their being covered up by the white facial hair, because their mouths can clearly be seen moving through the wispy hair whenever a Sensorite is shown in closeup while talking. Whatever. It's a neat effect. I'm keeping it.) Face to face, they communicate by speech, but they also carry silver disc medallions that they can hold to their forehead and communicate with each other telepathically over interplanetary distances.
Up on the bridge, Susan and Barbara's absence has finally been noticed. Carol and Maitland become frantic when they realise the two women have entered the bowels of the ship: that means they're trapped with John, the third member of the crew. John, they tell the Doctor and Ian, has suffered more from the Sensorites' conditioning than they themselves have. He's become totally the Sensorites' tool, and that experience has driven him insane.
Cut to Barbara and Susan, who by now have realised that they're locked inside the darkened chambers that they've stumbled into. They turn and find John approaching them menacingly. But rather than attack them, he collapses at their feet and sobs. Barbara and Susan comfort him. He seems to be in constant communication with the Sensorites, who are telling him to harm the newcomers, but he defiantly refuses.
The others finally manage to get the door open. John gets put to bed, and Barbara and Ian go to find the Sensorites. They find them, and Ian waves a hammer menacingly at them. Neither Ian nor the Sensorites attack, but the aliens advance on him menacingly, and slowly he backs up. In this manner they force him all the way back to the bridge, where the crew take refuge, slamming the door on the Sensorites and locking them in the corridor outside.
The Doctor, meanwhile, has found why the crew are being held against their will in orbit of the Sense Sphere. John, the ship's mineralogist, had discovered that the Sense Sphere is tremendously rich in molybdenum. The Sensorites must have sensed his discovery and that and wished to prevent the spread of that knowledge.
While the Doctor and Ian are discussing this, Susan suddenly starts holding a conversation with thin air. She's communicating telepathically with the Sensorites--proximity to the Sense Sphere has unlocked some sort of latent telepathic capability for her. Without consulting the Doctor, she agrees to accompany the Sensorites back to their planet, in exchange for which the others won't be harmed.
The Doctor, of course, refuses to abide by such an agreement. If Susan is to go to the planet, then he insists that he and Ian accompany her. Carol and John also go, with the Sensorites promising to reverse the damage they've done to John's mind. Maitland and Barbara remain on the ship
Once they make it down to the planet, the whole tone of the serial changes. The Sensorites are an open, peace-loving society. But they're dying, from a disease that they can't identify. Their working theory is that it's some sort of poisoning from a second Earth ship. That ship had been the first to visit their planet. When its crew discovered the molybdenum, they took off so hurriedly that their ship exploded, but not before the Sensorites saw the images in the crew's minds--of a fleet of spaceships returning to plunder their world. So they knew that when the second ship came within the vicinity of their planet, they could not allow it to leave again.
When Ian falls ill too, the Doctor is able pretty quickly to identify it as atropine poisoning, delivered through the city's water supply. The Sensorites are sceptical; they've already tested the water and found nothing wrong with it. But the Doctor realises that whoever is poisoning the water is making sure to shift the poison between each of the ten different pipelines that take water into the city, so that if you only sample from one pipeline, you've got a ninety per cent chance of taking a clean sample. He therefore has all ten pipes tested simultaneously, and one of them tests positive for atropine.
(Why didn't the Sensorites think of this themselves? Well, Ian falls sick within two minutes of drinking a glass of water, so it's probably the same reason it never occurred to the Sensorites to test the water people were drinking every time they fell sick.)
The Doctor's efforts to combat the poison and develop an antidote are complicated by a conspiracy amongst the Sensorites. A junior official, the City Administrator, is convinced that the Doctor and his friends are in on the plot to poison the population and are in fact planning to wipe the Sensorites out, so he diverts the Doctor's antidote from ever reaching Ian.
(How it is that the Sensorites can tell exactly what possibilities the discovery of molybdenum awakes in one crew of humans, but can't read in another that their efforts to cure the poison are genuine, is never explained.)
As part of their plot, the City Administrator and his minion kidnap the Second Elder, one of the Sensorites' two supreme leaders, and then the City Administrator masquerades as the Second Elder to Susan. He can pull this off because, as Carol observes, all the Sensorites look identical to the humans; they can only tell them about by the different patterns of black stripes they wear on their clothes to indicate their ranks. This is either a profoundly unaware view of native peoples from a writer who must still, in 1964, have yet to have had the "post" added to "post-colonial", or an amusing parody of such a view, or a delightfully post-modern comment on the limitations of television makeup. Let's be charitable and assume it's the latter two, even though I doubt that's the case.
The City Administrator is, of course, eventually found out, and Ian and the rest of the Sensorites are cured. The TARDIS team travel into the caverns beneath the city, where the water pipelines are located, and find the source of the poisoning: three survivors from that first human ship that visited the Sense Sphere and crashed, ten years ago. They've gone insane, and they believe they're waging a war against the Sensorites. The Doctor is able to lure them up into the light, and the Sensorites apprehend them. The Doctor, Ian and Susan are reunited with Barbara, and the crew depart in the TARDIS.
What Lisa thought: There's a lot of interesting sciency stuff in "The Sensorites", starting with the molybdenum and the atropine poisoning. You can see the programme still being fully in touch with its roots as an educational vehicle for pre-teen children. One touch I really like is the Sensorites' sensitivity to light. The Doctor notices that their pupils dilate in light and contract in darkness, so in the early episodes, he's able to use that as a weapon against them: he lowers the lighting aboard the spaceship, and the Sensorites are rendered effectively blind in what is for the humans only an uncomfortable dimness.
But really "The Sensorites" revolves around that transition in the opening minutes of episode three, when the Doctor, Ian and Susan head down to the Sense Sphere and everything about the Sensorites and the story's tone changes. Lisa had found the opening two episodes fairly tiresome, but she really liked the four planet-side episodes, which dabbled in medical mysteries and global politics.
I, on the other hand, thought the last four episodes were fairly passé, by the numbers stuff. The opening two episodes, though, I had thought were brilliant--genuinely creepy, disquieting science fiction, as we were locked inside this claustrophobic ship and psychologically tortured by unseen aliens for their own amusement. Watching it was for me an experience very like the first time one reads Harlan Ellison's 1967 short story "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream".
The next story is "The Reign of Terror".
I
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