Doctor Who: The Sensorites

This six-part adventure is a great oldie and classic. I first got this one on VHS in the "End of the Universe" collection and I found it quite enjoyable. I'm surprised that it took this long to be released on DVD.

Let me get the bad stuff out of the way first. Episode 3 was kind of boring, but it picks up again in episode 4. There are many stuttered lines in this story. The Sensorites feet look ridiculous. And at one point, you even see a wall in the spaceship start to fall down before it is quickly put back up again. But other than that, this is a great story.

The acting was pretty good - some of it was actually brilliant. The sets look great. The dark spaceship was very spooky as well as the aqueduct on the Sense-Sphere. The Sensorites were very creepy in the first two episodes. Episode 1's cliffhanger was, in my opinion, one of the best in the series. The plot and the story are great. It has a lot of mystery and adventure in it. It has a great surprise ending, and I really enjoyed Susan's character a lot more in this story than in others. Her character should have been like this from the beginning. This is also the very first story that has the Doctor himself taking on the heroic role instead of Ian, and he uses his mind and wits to defeat the enemy instead of brute force. I really enjoyed this one and I'm sure you will as well. Highly recommended!

In The Sensorites, the first Doctor trips over a race of beings who are hypersensitive and they all look alike. Even to each other.
The six chapter serial may seem to drag a bit, but there's enough political intrigue to keep this early adventure watchable.
Barbara is missing for most of the story, but that doesn't matter as the Sensorites are the focus of it.
Misunderstanding leads to fear and treachery and ignorance gets put in its place in this unexpectedly well acted show.
It's not perfect. Early BBC allowed many mistakes and goofs. There's missed cues and at one point late in the story you can see the microphone as if it was meant to be part of the cast of characters.
Those bits aside, William Hartnell is great as ever and Carol Ann Ford is not annoying at all.
There are enough special features, including a documentary about the writer of the episode, Peter R. Newman, to justify the expense.
I'd give it five stars, but the clunky sets are hard to get over.
The writing is fantastic, though.

This long, tedious adventure from the tail end of Doctor Who's first season displays a cast beginning to show signs of fatigue; William Hartnell fluffs his lines so badly that if you turn on the subtitles you'll see it's not your imagination: he really is speaking perfect gibberish. And the mediocre Special Features the BBC includes with this disc do nothing to redeem the package.

The Doctor, Susan, Ian and Barbara land aboard a spaceship orbiting a mysterious planet called the Sense-Sphere. Members of the crew appear dead but are actually being kept in a state of paralysis to prevent them from escaping to Earth with news of their discovery. The Sensorites, a mild-mannered race that communicates telepathically, fear that invaders from Earth will ravage their planet for its mineral resources (an earlier expedition tried to do just that). Meanwhile, the Sensorites are dying of a strange, new illness that strikes Ian, too, after he drinks the planet's water. The Doctor suspects poisoning and promises to find an antidote if the Sensorites will return the lock they've stolen from his TARDIS.

In addition to the interminably boring six-episode script, "The Sensorites" has a lot of production factors working against it. The nearly faceless Sensorites all look and act alike, making it difficult to recognize characters as distinct individuals (the planet's population apparently consists solely of gray-haired old men). Their mouths don't really move when they speak, but if they did you wouldn't see it anyway because their beards grow in all directions, sometimes covering their mouths. The Sensorites are gentle creatures who cower whenever the Doctor (who towers over them by at least three inches) so much as raises his voice. Thus, they never provide the credible shock this story so badly needs. The sets are drab, with wall panels that wobble and sometimes swing open whenever the actors pass through a nearby door.

Little is remembered about the making of "The Sensorites," so the disc doesn't bother to include the customary making-of documentary. Instead, stand-up comedian Toby Hadoke burns 21 minutes of screen time tracing the story's enigmatic script writer, Peter R. Newman. A brief interview with vision mixer Clive Doig offers only momentary glimpses behind the scenes of this ground-breaking series during its inaugural season. Recommended for completists only.

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