SENSE AND SENSIBILITY

The Sensorites v. The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe

This week I have been watching First Doctor tale The Sensorites, written by Peter Newman and first broadcast in the summer of 1964, and the 2011 Eleventh Doctor Christmas special, The Doctor, The Widow and the Wardrobe, written by the series’ showrunner of the day, Steven Moffat.

The Sensorites

The Sensorites is a six-episode story, the first two and a bit of which take place in a spaceship, and the rest in an alien city. There’s a distinctly different feel to these two parts of the story. The first part – in which the TARDIS travellers must make some sense of some disturbing discoveries on board the humans’ ship, while gradually becoming aware that they are not alone – has an unsettling, alien air to it; the second part seems more traditional Doctor Who fare as they are caught up in political manoeuvring on the Sensorites’ homeworld, the Sense Sphere.

That unnerving feeling on the spaceship of things being not quite right – almost like something from a bad dream – is helped, probably unintentionally, by the actors operating on a rather cramped set. When Susan and Barbara wander off to explore the ship, encountering and menaced by the psychotically disturbed mineralogist John, it feels as though it’s all happening just a few feet away from Ian and the Doctor on the bridge. Similarly, it’s hard to believe that no-one notices the Sensorites removing the lock mechanism from the TARDIS doors when it all happens in the same room as them. Strangely though, I found this impression of something happening unnoticed just behind them quite satisfyingly creepy.

The story is about trust, or, rather, the lack of trust: suspicion. The TARDIS crew seem still unsure of each other. Ian and Barbara don’t trust the Doctor, there are tensions between the Doctor and Susan, and the Doctor is constantly irritated by everyone. The Sensorites are terrified of the human visitors because of the previous earthmen’s attempts to rob their planet of the mineral molybdenum. They listen in on human thoughts, and plant messages and ideas, as a form of spycraft. The City Administrator does not trust the First Elder to rule strongly. And in the aqueduct beneath the city lurks a bearded band of humans convinced the Sensorites are waging war against them.

The themes are not dissimilar to those in Inside the Spaceship, from earlier in this first season of Doctor Who. When reviewing that story I noted the Cold War context in which it was written; I wonder whether those same circumstances influenced the writing of The Sensorites (script editor: David Whitaker, who wrote ITS). There is an overriding sense of paranoia in both stories.

Towards the end of the story the First Elder tells Susan that the Sensorites’ whole civilisation is based on trust, to which Susan replies that trust can’t be taken for granted – it has to be earned. Which seems rather depressing, but true, I suppose.

I feel a lot of sympathy for the Sensorites. It seems that they had a well-ordered, peaceful and functioning society until the humans turned up, greedy for the Sense Sphere’s mineral wealth. They are quite a cool-looking bunch too, with those flat faces and wild, up-growing beards. Up to this point in Doctor Who, the ‘monster’ races – Daleks and Voord – had been fairly homogenously evil, so it’s interesting to see a race of aliens with some texture: a caste system, and more nuanced personality types.

The Sensorites is an important story for Susan. It’s the seventh of her ten-story run at the very start of Doctor Who’s run, and the signs are here that she might be ready to move on. The First Elder, who has some access to her inner thoughts, says he can feel a tension within her – a wanderlust desire for adventure, but also a wish to see her home again. Earlier in the story she is clearly frustrated by the Doctor’s paternalistic control as she wishes to take independent steps to save the day.

We see more sides of the First Doctor in this story too. At times, One can be the ‘well hard’ Doctor: ‘If they try to harm us then I shall fight them.’ On the Sense Sphere he is the elegant and genial statesman. At another point he takes on the guise of the mad-eyed scientist, fiddling gleefully with his test tubes. Then, at the very end of The Sensorites, he flips into irrational, violent anger, swearing to throw Ian out of the TARDIS at the earliest opportunity. It’s quite the ride!

There were a couple of laugh out loud moments. At the end of episode four, the offscreen roar that scares the Doctor in the aqueduct tunnels sounded rather like my bowels after dinner – and the Doctor’s startled expression looks rather like the face of whoever I am with at the time. And in episode five one has to feel some sympathy for Carol. Reunited at last with her lover John, she longs suggestively for happier times ahead: ‘Oh, won't it be wonderful when we get back to the Earth, John? How I long for a thick, juicy steak.’ ‘Well, you'll just have to make do with a small, juicy fruit,’ replies John, who clearly hasn’t yet completely recovered.

The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe

Rather like The Sensorites, The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe is a story of two halves. It starts promisingly, with a lot of fun in the Doctor’s dramatic fall to earth from an exploding spacecraft, Madge helping him find his TARDIS, and his ‘crackpot caretaker’ act when showing the Arwell children around their converted Christmas home. Cyril, Lily and the Doctor enter the snowy forest world through the Christmas present ‘portal’, and everything seems magical and Narniaesque and lovely.

But then the story starts to deflate. There’s a lot of fast-talking exposition, and shoehorned reasoning for the existence of a tower with a sphere on top in the middle of the forest, and the scary living wooden sculptures of a king and a queen. I found it all a bit irritating – a grand idea visually, but not really strong enough to hold a story of substance.

TDTWATW features a promising trio of guest stars in Bill Bailey, Arabella Weir and Paul Bazely, but they also seem extraneous to the plot. They’re like those impulse-buy Christmas decorations which you don’t really need, and just make the tree look overcrowded. Thinking more about it now, I’m a bit confused as to who they were meant to be. They had big guns, one of them had the rank of Corporal, and Droxil described their encounter with Madge as ‘a military engagement’, but ultimately they’re managing a tree farm. Perhaps they’re the Androzani army’s branch branch.

Oh dear, I seem to be Scroogeing about this one. I was, genuinely, enjoying it until about half-way through, but then it started to get me down. As a bit of personal context, it reminded me of some bad feelings the episode gave me the first time I saw it, on its original broadcast on Christmas Day 2011. In late autumn of that year I had separated from the mum of my two children. We sold our house and were both living in new homes. The kids were with her on Christmas Day, so that was the first Christmas of either of their lives that I had been absent. We made it work, but obviously that was difficult emotionally, and the whole ‘Father won’t be here for Christmas’ storyline for Madge, Cyril and Lily resonated badly for me. I expect it will always carry that association for me. Not the story’s fault – just the way it is. I mention this partly because this is a personal blog in which I examine what Doctor Who stories mean to me, but also for the general observation that our feelings about particular stories can be influenced by external factors as well as the qualities of the programme itself.

The central theme of the story is motherhood; the almost magical power of maternal love, the strength, resilience and unconditional commitment of mothers, and the tortuous pain that it can sometimes bring to. Madge is presented as a paragon of all these virtues, so much so that it verges on hagiography, but modern Doctor Who hasn’t been averse to a bit of that. Normally it’s the Doctor portrayed as bordering on the divine, but this time (in this incarnation at least) he can’t provide the magical assistance. ‘You and I, Cyril, we’re weak. But she’s female. More than female, she’s mum. How else does life ever travel? The Mother ship.’

That’s all good, but I felt the worthy sentiments of the story were tarnished slightly by making a running gag out of Madge being a terrible driver – that old trope – and also by that rather awkward scene in which she first encounters the Androzani soldier-farmers. Billis ‘respects her as a woman’ by laying down her gun. Delivered as a comedy line, by one of a group of two-dimensional throwaway characters, this seems like a parody of feminist solidarity rather than a statement of any substance. I’m reminded of something I read or heard somewhere (possibly on the Veritys podcast?) about how well Lis Sladen coped with lines written for Sarah Jane Smith in the 1970s by men who ‘thought they were what a feminist would probably say’.

It's almost as if the character of Madge is ‘wonderful’ when defined in relation to her children and her husband, but less laudable (irritable, crap driver) on her own merits. The Doctor rewards her with a return visit in thanks for rescuing him at the top of the episode; in fact, she’s gifted the honour of being able to call on him any time (‘Make a wish.’) like Aladdin with a lamp – but again this is earned by having done something to help/assist another, a Doctor’s handmaiden, rather than inherent qualities of character.

The festive coda to TDTWATW sees the Doctor turn up at Amy and Rory’s house for Christmas dinner. It’s the first time they have seen him in two years, since he supposedly died at the end of the ‘Impossible Astronaut’ arc of the previous series, but only a couple of months since we viewers have seen them all together. It’s probably been quite a while since I last watched a DW story with Amy in it, and she’s one of my favourites of the Doctor’s companions so I enjoyed this doorstep exchange. I remember Amy as funny and nobody’s fool, although thinking back now, with Madge in mind, it occurs to me that Amy’s entire life was formed and rewritten entirely in relation to the Doctor, so it’ll be interesting to consider this all again as her stories start to crop up in the Randomiser’s sequence.

Connections

Are The Sensorites and The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe really stories within the same show? Despite their very different appearances they do share some themes. For example, both the Sensorite race and the trees of the Androzani forest farm communicate telepathically. The existence in the latter of telepathic trees seems less unique in the context of Susan telling Barbara about the telepathic plants she and the Doctor once encountered on a planet called Esto. Moreover, boththe Sensorites and the trees use a companion of the Doctor – Susan in TS, Cyril in TDTWATW – as a medium to communicate their plans and their plight.

And their plights are not dissimilar. The visitors from Earth want to mine the Sense Sphere for the chemical molybdenum; the visitors from Androzani want to destroy the trees for battery fuel.

The death is in the water. Humans hiding beneath the surface of the Sense Sphere have poisoned the Sensorites’ water supply. The sentient trees are attacked from above, with acid rain.

The Doctor gets locked out of his TARDIS in both stories. The Sensorites burn the lock mechanism itself out of the time machine’s door, while the Doctor simply can’t find his key because he’s trapped back-to-front in his alien spacesuit.

Most importantly, and suitably for this post just ahead of Valentine’s Day, both stories have at their heart a love story – a reunion, in fact, of a woman with the man she loves who she thought she had lost forever. Here’s to Carol and John, Madge and Reg. May your steaks be always thick and juicy!