Over the years I’ve seen numerous comments about The Sensorites. Many have been less than polite about the nature of the sensorites themselves, stating how unlikely it is that a race so blind as to have to rely on strips of black material to tell each other apart would have ever made it this far technologically (especially as they’re one of the few races where pretty much every sensorite we see looks different… it works soooo much better on audio!), how decidedly bold it was to have them have feet and/or shoes that looked like frisbees and just how weird the idea of such a peaceful race having some sort of remote killing beam, the controls for which can be beamed into different rooms (yay, Doctor Who once more gets onto the teleport trope long before Star Trek does it). Others have focussed on the plot and how it’s the first time that the Doctor actively chooses to get involved when he doesn’t need to. Personally I’m very undecided on that, the end of “The Dead Planet” seems to suggest that the Doctor and co hung around for a while after the weird killing of all the daleks in the city, not because he had to but because he felt it was the right thing to do when it came to the Thals (note that the end of this story has the Doctor making some very weird comments about birds returning to the skies, suggesting that evolution and/or biology really is not his strong point). What I don’t see commented on too often is the fact that this story seems to soft-reboot some of our leads without really drawing any attention to it. It’s subtle, it’s important and it sets in motion the creation of the Doctor that we take for granted these days. So, listen very carefully, though I expect I’ll be saying this a lot more than just once.
Doctor Who has never been consistent. At the time of writing this article, RTD is repeatedly playing fast and lose with the show’s continuity, Moffat couldn’t even be consistent or maintain logic from one story to another and the wilderness years were a riot of contradictions. But at the heart of all the chaos, there’s always been a vague sense that the Doctor is the same person that they’ve always been, no matter what face they’re wearing. In the first season though there’s a continual change of attitude and actions of the Doctor. Partially this was deliberate, showing the influence that Barbara and Ian have on him. Partially this was due to behind the scenes issues, with scripts being hastily re-written almost on the fly for one reason or another and re-writes not being checked thoroughly. But more by chance than any seemingly deliberate choice, along comes “The Sensorites” and it becomes something of a template for the next 60 years. There’s so much in this story that still lingers to this day and it’s strange to think that it’s not until series 4 comes along and the Doctor and Donna get to participate in a sort of sequel. And we’re not just talking about on screen activities, this story appears to tell us that things are definitely happening off screen between stories. Unlike the gap between “Marco Polo” and “The Keys of Marinus”, which through the use of costume is implied to not be that big a gap at all, here we have a mysteriously long gap. Exhibit A is that everyone is in totally different clothes. Admittedly this doesn’t automatically lengthen the gap significantly (same as the outfit changes at the end of “An Unearthly Child” don’t mean that a lot of time passes before “The Dead Planet”) but when taken alongside Exhibit B, the dialogue, where we learn that Barbara is over her experiences with the Aztecs, this gap suddenly starts to feel a lot more significant. Now, Barbara has been shown to hold a grudge and also been shown to be pretty caring and humane. This isn’t just something that we’ve seen on screen, way back in “An Unearthly Child” we know that Ian sees her as soppy and the sort who’d take in stray animals. To me, add up everything we’ve seen and this doesn’t feel as though “The Aztecs” happened particularly recently. I really don’t see Barbara waking up the following morning and being all smiles and light about her experiences. Unfortunately, exhibit C, when they list “all” their adventures, seems to suggest that they’ve not been up to much since “The Aztecs” so it looks like they might have had a few days of downtime, either lounging around in the TARDIS or landing in a few places and doing some uneventful sightseeing. 21st century audiences might also wonder why none of the off screen adventures such as the Big Finish ones or the Virgin Novels get mentioned but that’s very easily explained away. So easily, in fact, that I’ll leave it for another blog once I’ve had time to work it out. The sightseeing option would also help to explain just how blase Ian and Barbara seem to be about stepping out into a full on spaceship. I’m an ex science teacher myself and seriously, you put me on a futuristic spaceship for the first time and I am definitely not going to be calm. I’m going to be asking the Doctor a zillion questions a minute (whether he likes it or not) and I’m going to be running around looking at every last detail, saving the dead bodies till I’m bored of dials and switches. I certainly wouldn’t be completely at ease operating the controls in a panic, as Ian seems to be when the sensorites take over control for a laugh. Therefore, soft-reboot part one is that we’re no longer seeing everything that happens to our leads, from now on we get adventures that are sort of close together but with plenty of scope for missing stories where characters get to pick up knowledge and skills that are needed for the adventures we do see.
And what about the leads themselves. Let’s start with Susan, as the reboot is very much a case of too little, too late. It’s a shame, as for the first time since “An Unearthly Child”, we actually get the Susan that Carole Ann Ford was seemingly promised. A slightly mysterious teenager, definitely unusual and clearly someone who’s more than just a giggling schoolgirl. But just how old is she and what sort of lifestyle has she had? Up to this point her age was 16 (stated in “Marco Polo” in a scene where she didn’t seem to be needing to tell lies). She’d been on the Earth for 5 months or so (“An Unearthly Child”) and if, as is later implied, that first story takes place in November (give or take), then she was either 15 or 16 when they arrived in London. We’ve had indications of pre-1963 adventures already and here we learn that both the Doctor and Susan had a meeting with Henry VIII, so early to mid 1500s. On top of that we are told that this encounter was “long before” Ian and Barbara started travelling with them. This now starts to get a bit worrying as this means the Doctor was seemingly putting Susan into danger at the age of 12 or 13 at the most. Unusually, we then get details of ANOTHER landing, this time on the planet Esto (which helpfully gives us back story to Susan’s telepathy). Throw the Doctor’s comment about learning to not interfere in the affairs of others “years ago” and we really have to wonder just how long they’ve been travelling together (or, as I have suggested elsewhere, the Doctor travelled on his own for a while before returning to pick up Susan and do the final runner). In “The Sensorites”, the Doctor looks at the guest character called Carol and decides that Susan is only a few years younger than she is. A quick check on IMDB puts the actress playing Carol in her early 20s and this means that either pilots get their wings at a very young age in the current continuity of the future or that Carol is a couple of years older than the actress playing her. Either way, the Doctor’s comments suddenly start to put Susan maybe in the 18 year old age bracket (which would also tie in with this story showing Susan being fed up with people thinking she’s still a mere child).
I think it’s also very telling that the Doctor isn’t totally freaked out by the knowledge that Susan is at least partially telepathic on some level. Admittedly, the two examples of her telepathy prior to this seem to have involved plants rather than humanoids but it a) confirms that telepathy is a genuine thing in the Doctor Who universe (plus “Marco Polo” suggested that other psychic powers were genuine too) and b) it’s not unheard of in whatever race Susan belongs to. Eh, what’s that I hear you say, “whatever race”? Well yes, with the Doctor seemingly not (in this story anyway) being telepathic, we have a number of options open to us. The first and, I suppose, dullest option is that telepathy is a recessive trait for the genetics of Susan and the Doctor’s race and it just so happens that it’s not been activated in the Doctor but the genetics from her four grandparents are such that it’s present in Susan. She’s his granddaughter, nothing in any of the stories contradicts that and so yes, as far as I’m concerned / for the purposes of this blog, the Doctor did, at some stage, have a partner, he and the partner got it together and children and then grandchildren were produced. More fun is option two which is, at heart, similar to option one (the Doctor’s genetic structure doesn’t give him telepathy) except rather than it being a recessive/dominant genetic trait, at some stage of the family structure, someone got into a little cross breeding with a species that is telepathic and it fed through the generations to give Susan her powers. And fine, for those of you who don’t like the idea of the Doctor having any kind of romantic life (seriously, Barbara was not the only one with some heavy duty “moving on” to do after “The Aztecs”, the Doctor was clearly besotted with Cameca), Susan isn’t his biological grandchild but some sort of adoption took place in the tree somewhere and someone adopted Susan from a race that’s telepathic. In a few stories we will revisit our three options, but till then, it’s something Susan can do but only with help.
The Doctor. Universal man of mystery. Up until now we didn’t know too much about him. We’ve got a rough sort of list of where he’s been before he turned up in a junk yard, a few subtle hints about what type of scientist he is/was and other than that, not a lot else. “The Sensorites” took this memo and plays fast and loose with it, deciding to give us a few nuggets to play with that look like nothing but turn out to be bizarrely useful, if only on the giving-us-even-more-weirdness front. One of the things is so vital to the plot of the story that it’s secondary relevance gets overlooked, one begins a very long tradition of baffling inconsistencies, one seems so highly unlikely that is simply must be relevant and the fourth is really, and I cannot stress this enough, REALLY major for the Doctor’s life. Plot heavy one first. The Doctor, within an exceptionally short space of time, is able to identify the fact that the Sense Sphere is molybdenum rich, just by looking at a picture of the spectrograph lines. This might not seem much to you (depending on when you did your GCSEs you may not even realise what spectrograph lines are) but, as a physicist, please take it from me that this is damn impressive. A very brief explanation… set fire to something and look at the flame through a device called a spectrograph and you will see a set of coloured bands. Every element has its own unique set of bands, with some line sodium having just one band and others, such as iron, having close on 250 bands. Look at the light from a star through a spectrograph and you will see the bands corresponding to every element present in that star, just all overlaid onto each other. Therefore to be able to take a look at a readout and tell more or less at a glance that there’s molybdenum present is a real skill and one that it must have taken quite a bit of work to perfect. Combine this with the quartz bits in “Marco Polo” and quite a lot of things ahead of us in season two and we will have sufficient evidence that the Doctor’s specialism is geology. See, I told you he’d got his rocks off 😉
Plot relevant, though more to kick start the plot rather than be a vital piece of it, is the fact that the TARDIS has landed inside another spaceship. This is, a very common occurrence over the last 60 years BUT, in the “cliffhanger scene” from the end of “The Aztecs”, the Doctor seems utterly incapable of deducing this from the instruments. Two things make this important. First up is, well, how the hell has he never managed this before? If, prior to London 1963, the Doctor had been a wanderer in an out of control TARDIS, surely he would have done it at least once before (especially given the ever increasing number of years that he seems to claim that he’s been time travelling). This definitely seems to add weight to the idea that “pre-historic Earth” was his first out of control flight and that all the other stops had been vaguely intentional. Factor in the second spaceship relevance in this story as well (plus a throwaway line in “The Web Planet”) and things get all the more structure to them. The Doctor can, without having to refer to instruction manuals or whatever the future version of google happens to be, fly the spaceship when it’s out of control. Initially this doesn’t seem to be too significant but, when you start to backtrack along events that have lead to this point, we start to have to question certain things… specifically, when did he get his pilot’s wings, not just in terms of in his lifetime (ie how long before London 1963) but also, in which century did he get them? I’m sure some aviation expert will tell me I’m wrong on this but I’m pretty sure that (in 20th/21st century terms) the skills needed to pilot concorde would have been very different to those needed to pilot one of the craft that the Red Arrows use and just ever so slightly different to the controls used to get one of the Wright Brothers numbers off the ground. Yet here the Doctor can take control of the spaceship and identify the relevant terminology to instruct others. Either, against the odds, the make of spaceship that they’ve found themselves on just happens to be the one type of craft the Doctor knows how to fly OR he’s got a wealth of knowledge of different ships and just selected the right things from his mental catalogue. I’m guessing the TARDIS wasn’t disguised as an ionic column whilst he was doing this and that the sedan chair look wasn’t in fashion in that time period.
Put all the pieces together so far (list of known trips and Susan’s age especially) and I’m thinking that his repeated comments about “all the years I’ve been travelling” (or words to that effect) do not refer to his time as a wanderer but to the years in which he was doing official research. He would probably learn the relevant skills on his home planet/in his native time, he would take “the” TARDIS to the relevant point, park it somewhere out of the way and with a suitable disguise enabled, before getting into a spaceship and launching, piloting and landing etc. This would definitely justify his uncertainty about landing a TARDIS inside another spaceship and it would also start to explain what will, over the next 60 years, become a seemingly never ending list of skills he just happens to have and explain what he was getting up to for the first 700 years of his life or so. Does it explain everything? Not by a long way. It won’t be too long before we don’t start to question the Doctor’s knowledge but more why he has such huge holes in it. And the first time it comes up, it’ll be at the very core of a problem that the next blog entry will start to address.