Written by Tom
The Sensorites take the Doctor, Ian and Susan to their home world, the Sense-Sphere, to negotiate the return of the TARDIS lock and the release of the humans. Turns out that the Sensorites are being gravely affected by a disease and will agree to Team TARDIS’ terms if they can find a cure. A small group of Sensorite Elders have decided they don’t like Team TARDIS though and are plotting their downfall. Meanwhile, Ian starts coming down with the Sensorite disease…
Over the course of the past two episodes, we’ve covered a wide range of things that the serial could be said to be about: tribalism, communism, living under fascism, empathy, mental health, the World Wars, the Cold War, British society in the Early 60s, space aliens, etc. With this episode, we get two more -isms to add to the list: racism and, to a lesser extent, colonialism.
I mean, racism has always been a part of the serial. So far, the serial has featured Team TARDIS taking one look at a bunch of people who are different to them and immediately defaulting to the position that they must be evil, using this to justify their poor treatment of them. The entire serial has revolved around them being racist. This fact that been carefully hidden from us though. In “Strangers in Space”, we are given no other way of reading the Sensorites as anything but villains, what with them being literally absent characters prone to mind control, kidnap and torture. They’ve also been drenched in imagery that alludes to the Cold War, this being Doctor Who‘s default way of making something seem villainous. It’s not until they actually appear and turn out to be quite uncomfortable in the evil role that we start sensing that something’s amiss here.
What really solidifies the episode as being about racism though is when we see the Sensorite’s society and realise how much it’s been built around racism. Red flags are immediately sent off when it turns out that the Sensorite’s society is colonialist in nature, being built around a tiered caste system that ranks people according to their perceived abilities. Then we have scenes of the Sensorites critiquing Team TARDIS for being ugly and brutish, using this as their justification for not trusting the Team and plotting to kill them. One of the Sensorites explicitly compares Team TARDIS to animals before invoking the cliched “Would you invite an animal to dinner?” argument that was often used by racists to denounce non-white people. Racist rhetoric and systems get invoked all the time in this episode, and once they’ve being aimed directly at the humanoid characters (i.e. the people who look most like us), the offensive nature of it only become more apparent.
But that’s the rub: what’s the difference between the way that the Sensorites are treating Team TARDIS and the way that Team TARDIS have been treating the Sensorites? By turning the two groups into mirrors of each other, we see that Team TARDIS’ treatment of Sensorites was always as obviously racist as the Sensorites’ treatment of them is. We just missed it as an audience because the Sensorites don’t look like us and so we defaulted to treating them the same way Team TARDIS did for the first two episodes.
Which is the reason for the metafictional leanings of the first episode and the somewhat baroque structure the serial’s used so far: it puts us, the audience, in a position where we initially discriminatory to people who are different to us before putting us in the position of being discriminated against, asking us to thus recognise our initial discriminations as wrong and wonder why we thought as we did. It’s not just a discussion of racism, it’s something of a Racism Simulator that calls on us to understand the racist mindset so we can reject it.
Of course, this reading perhaps assumes that the show is being made for a predominately white audience who will naturally miss the racist themes of the first two episodes. Some of this could be my biases – I’m a white guy who noted the serial’s “don’t judge by appearances” themes but didn’t contextualise them in terms of race until just now. If I lived within a system that was racist against me, I probably would’ve caught onto this reading a lot faster. On the other hand, assuming that Doctor Who is a very white show is not particularly inaccurate. Almost everyone in it is white and anyone who isn’t has a tendency to be Othered. In other words, whiteness is centralised in Doctor Who, even in episodes where you wouldn’t think it’d be. Extrapolating this to assume that Doctor Who is currently being written for a predominately white audience is not the worst leap you could make.
What is particularly interesting though is the positioning of this serial straight after the Aztec one. When discussing the Aztec serial, we went in quite hard on it for being somewhat colonial in its attitudes (or, to put it another way, for being incredibly racist against the Aztecs). In that serial, Team TARDIS started from a position that the Aztecs were a complicated bunch who could be saved from their own worst impulses, only for it to turn out that the Aztecs were a bunch of ignorant savages with a few minor exceptions. Here we get the exact inverse – we start from the position that our guest cast is a bunch of ignorant savages and move outwards to see that they’re actually more complicated. It’s also notable that this episode contains a critique of Othering when this was a large aspect of the Marco Polo serial, and this is only one week after an episode which has the exact opposite morality as the Dalek serial. At this point, the Sensorite serial is beginning to feel a lot like a critique of Doctor Who.
This is backed up by how unlikable Team TARDIS is portrayed by this serial, particularly the Doctor who reverts back to pre-Marco Polo levels of being a dick. This is mostly aimed at his relationship with Susan which, erm… well, I’m not going to call it abusive but it is definitely based on the Doctor using a lot of backhanded compliments, agency denials, and angry rants to ensure that Susan agrees to not having any opinions of her own. Actually, you know what, let’s call that abusive. The Doctor spends a lot of this episode being abusive to Susan. Now, a lot of the scenes between the Doctor and Susan are explicitly played as arguments where the usual niggles in their relationships are being deliberately overplayed, but yeah, what we see here in not healthy. The abuse angle does play into the episode’s hands though and is thus presumably deliberate – by making Team TARDIS that little bit harder to root for, we’re more likely to be able to judge their actions the way the serial wants us to. But you do want Susan to actually be allowed to grow up and move away from the Doctor, this being the only psychologically healthy option.
Speaking of health, we then get to the cliffhanger. The Sensorites are being progressively wiped out by a mysterious disease that, for some reason, doesn’t affect the higher castes. At the end of the episode, Ian starts coming down with the disease. Here’s the thing – Ian was the only person to drink a certain type of water that’s only drank by the lower castes and not the higher ones. Because of this, it’s pretty obvious what’s causing the disease. What isn’t quite so easy to figure out is how obvious this is meant to be. If next episode figures out what’s going on relatively quickly, then this plot point will serve its function and be ultimately alright. If we spend the next few weeks trying to figure it out, that might be a problem.
Nevertheless, despite a few complaints (most of which appear to be a purposeful part of the episode’s construction), the Sensorite serial continues to be really good. Fascinatingly structured with the strongest moral backbone the series has ever had, it is a genuinely clever and interesting piece of 60s science fiction. Hell, I’ll go one step further – based on its first three episodes, this is the best Doctor Who serial so far. More of this please.
FNORD 