Written by Tom
Team TARDIS manage to get out of the aquaduct, the Doctor now convinced that the water supply is being poisoned and that there’s a Sensorite somewhere working against them. The bad Sensorites, having killed the Second Elder for ruining an attempt on Team TARDIS’ life, try to frame the Doctor for it, only for the plan to fail. The situation does end with Team TARDIS accidentally instilling the Evil Sensorite as the new Second Elder though, which ain’t great. John, the guy whose mind was destroyed by the Sensorites, is feeling much better. Between him and Susan, they realise who the Evil Sensorite is and what he’s doing, much to the rest of Team TARDIS’ shock. In order to prove that the Evil Sensorite is, well, evil, they decide to go back into the Aqueduct to find proof. The Evil Sensorite, learning about this, manipulates things so they get non-functional weapons and an inaccurate map. Oh, and Carol (John’s girlfriend) also gets kidnapped. It’s weird that the entire episode is named after the final scene when it’s so disconnected from everything else but whatever.
It’s surprising how many moments in this script are dedicated to softly mocking the Sensorites’ design, whether that be the First Elder bemoaning how difficult it is to live without eyelids or Susan openly laughing at the idea of a Sensorite running with it’s circular feet. While Doctor Who has made fun of its own conventions before (the Dalek serial beginning as a bizarre parody of things established in the Caveman serial; the TARDIS serial making the artifice of Doctor Who visible), this is the first time that Doctor Who seems to have accepted that it’s going to look a bit silly and decided to lean into it with a nudge and a wink. It is also oddly fitting for a species that is defined by not being the hivemind that they look like they are – by reminding us that the Sensorites are people in costumes, it is reminding us that there are people behind the masks, which is somewhat the entire point of the serial.
To be fair to the costumes, they don’t actually feel like they deserve mocking, remaining surprisingly watchable and identifiable. There is one bit this week where things become confusing though. The Evil Sensorite, previously identified by his collar, has spent several episodes dressed as the Secondary Sensorite, identified by his single sash. In order to frame the Doctor for the murder of the Secondary Sensorite, he takes the sash off and puts the collar back on. This happens off-screen though, meaning that he is very easy to mistake for just another miscellaneous Sensorite Guard when he enters the scene. It was only really when the end of the scene makes so much about Team TARDIS getting him the job as the secondary Sensorite that I realised I was missing something. Luckily the next scene features Team TARDIS figuring out what they’ve done in order to reinforce the plot beat for thick twats like me, and it is notable how this is pretty much the only time I’ve lost track of who’s who in a serial that’s 60% conversations between people in almost identical greyscale costumes. The serial should really be commended for the fact that this type of confusion isn’t happening all the time.
Also surprising is just how much plot is got through this episode. You’ll have noticed that my summary of this episode is rather long and goes to a lot of lengths to keep track of who everyone is. The episode is going through as much material as the Marinus episodes did, and those were episodes that had to move at a quick pace because they were all one-offs. This is four weeks into a story which has remained pretty linear by now. Of course, there’s a bit of narrative trick that the serial has used to keep itself so pacey. Despite being five episodes into the serial, it is notable that the story has actually been split between two episodes set on a human ship followed by a four-parter set in the Sense-Sphere, a place which has turned out to have its own unique set of concerns. This is similar to how the Dalek serial split itself into two stories – an attempt to escape the Dalek city and an attempt to break into it – though the balance has been adjusted such that the story becomes a four parter with a prequel rather than a four parter with a three parter grafted onto it. The result is a much stronger structure overall, making for a story which is interestingly fluid in its early stages rather than a story which functionally grinds to a halt halfway through.
It is almost disappointing to spend a review of this serial focussing mostly on aesthetic and technical stuff. The previous episodes having been full enough of interesting implications that I could spend literally thousands of words pulling at them, whereas you can tell that we’re getting to the end of the serial now because of how much it is focussing on moving its plot elements around into its final permutations. Having set up and explored its moral edifice, the serial has reached the point of just having to get to the finish line and wrap itself up. But the complexity of the world it’s created, the richness of the idea that world is built on, and the deftness with which this world’s characters are written is keeping the serial incredibly watchable and satisfying even when it’s a lot of groups discussing strategy.
The temptation is to compare it to those periodic episodes of the Dalek serial which are mostly dedicated to moving characters from where they were at the end of the last episode to where they need to be for the start of the next. The only thing making me hesitate to do so is that the focussed construction on display here is kicking the comparatively messy Dalek scripts to the kerb, allowing this episode to more convincingly make it look like that this isn’t actually what’s happening. The result is an episode which only justifies a relatively surface level review, yet is still capable of twisting this fact into a strange compliment. When you’re resorting to nitpicking the title for anything substantial to critique, you know that the serial is being quite extraordinarily good.
And there is a bit of thematic admin we can perform by considering the bit where the First Sensorite says “We have the perfect society. All are contented”. This is the type of phrase that societies in Doctor Who have a tendency to say a lot, and we usually read it as a glance towards Soviet communism. Indeed, we spent the first three episodes discussing the ways in the Sensorites seem to be a rare positive example of a society which is coded communist. Last episode made us reconsider this, reminding us of the Sensorite’s caste system and how well that the Sensorites work as a comment on racism. If you wanted to make Sensorite society as presented last episode into a representation of anything, it would probably be colonialism. This episode shifts it back to being a communist code society though. Does this wipe out the racism reading though? Well, no – the nature of metaphors is that they can gesture towards multiple things at once. Turns out that treating people differently based on their politics or their race are both wrong at the same time. The basic message of “Don’t jump to conclusions about other’s and use that to justify attacking them” remains pretty robustly baked into the script, no matter who you decide the others are.
And there is something a bit neat about the way that the thematic content and the narrative structures of the serial have been wedded to each other. Another thing that stops the first two episodes feeling so separate from the final four is that the first episodes set on the Sense-Sphere are blatantly playing with the same themes and ideas as the two set on the ship, resulting in the Sense-Sphere material feeling like a development of human ship material. If anything, the serial could be seen as three two parters – one setting up the story’s thematic concerns, another to develop them, then one final one to resolve the serial’s resultant plot threads. This is all just really clever serialised scriptwriting and, again, kicks things like the Marco Polo serial to the kerb.
So yeah, the Sensorite serial is still proving itself to be the best Doctor Who story so far. I can’t find a way of critiquing it that doesn’t keep folding itself back and becoming a compliment, it’s just that good.
Shame that its title being “Kidnap” is kinda rubbish.
FNORD 