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 is definitely a minority opinion, but I think the first season of Doctor Who was the best. William Hartnell's sinister characterization of the Doctor is very underrated, and he was well-supported by excellent companions - particularly Ian and Barbara, who are the most convincing representations of "normal" people in the show's history. Sure, the Doctor's granddaughter Susan was a criminally under-used character; but here in The Sensorites, she gets to shine a little by defying the Doctor's wishes and using some cool telepathic powers.

I'm also a fan of season one because of the (generally) great scripts. And while The Sensorites is far from the best-written story of the season, I do think that Peter R. Newman's script features some compelling ideas. In defiance of Doctor Who conventions, Newman depicted the Sensorite race as mostly benign and sympathetic creatures (an interesting contrast to the show's usual "evil monster" aliens); indeed, the Sensorites only do "bad things" in this story in order to protect their planet from exploitation by humans who want to strip-mine the place. In a sense, then, this is the sort of left-wing (or at least politically aware) story that didn't become commonplace for Doctor Who until the Pertwee era.

The story's production design, meanwhile, is pretty good (given the era and budget). The Sensorites may look a little fake, but to me they're perfectly respectable aliens by 1960s TV standards; certainly, Doctor Who produced much stupider-looking aliens even in the 1980s (like the Ergon, to name one of many). Also, the set design for the human spaceship is effective, and enhances the tense and claustrophobic atmosphere of the opening episodes. Unfortunately, both the set design and the pace of the story take a bad turn once the action shifts to the Sensorite planet, but the drop in quality is not nearly as bad as some critics suggest.

In short, The Sensorites is an interesting story that lacks energy sometimes; it's not a classic, but it deserves to enjoy a somewhat better reputation. Unfortunately, given the lowly status of this tale in the Doctor Who canon, the BBC didn't put too much effort into giving us a great DVD. The special features, though not bad, are rather thin. The most interesting featurette involves Doctor Who fan Toby Hadoke investigating Peter R. Newman's background; he uncovers a surprising amount about the little-known writer, including some genuinely emotional material. Unfortunately, this feature is undermined slightly by Hadoke's snarky "I'm a self-aware sci-fi geek" persona. Also featured is a short interview with Doctor Who's vision mixer, which is less boring than it sounds.

While I wish I could give this DVD four stars, the presentation is pretty bare-bones and the actual story has a few flaws. So I'll settle for three stars, but it's more like three-and-a-half. If this is arguably the worst story of Who's first season, that's a testament to how strong the era really was.