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The date is October 23, 2003.

It’s been a while since we were last lingering here in the earliest days of my exposure to Doctor Who. The last time we were here, we were talking about cavemen and first experiences. Although I wanted to preface my own first memories of watching the series, of slowly falling into its strange and surreal monochrome worlds, I didn’t want to get bogged down in resurrecting sixteen year old memories.

There’s a problem with memory—namely, that “memory” is much like history. As we discussed during The Aztecs, there’s a distinct difference between “history” and the “past”—one is an attempt at resurrecting the other, which in Doctor Who manifests in the form of its historical stories which have so far leaned into historical theatre more generally as a necromantic ritual. “Memory” is another means by which we attempt to resurrect the past—often personal pasts—and it’s as susceptible to distortions as history is. As Mary Howes and Geoffrey O’Shea claim in Human Memory, “all memory content involves inference (even if the inference is normally accurate).”

When looking at The Aztecs, I engaged substantively with Walter Benjamin. One key point that Benjamin raised was that “if [one] wished to reexperience an epoch, he should remove everything he knows about the later course of history from his head,” a sentiment which I’ve actually engaged with before under a different name. In The Dead Planet, after all, we tried to remove everything that we knew about what the Daleks would become, instead focusing all of our energies in unpacking the actual episodes as they exist. This was Rudolf Buttman’s process of demythologisation, an act of critiquing “a very specific mode of thinking.” There’s a sense that we’re walking over eggshells here in the earliest days of Doctor Who, trying to remove layers of significance from stories which don’t realise audiences are going to latch onto them as significant.

All of this housekeeping is crucial, because we have finally hit The Sensorites.

The Sensorites is a story whose reputation is very much affected by our knowledge of what eventually happens—this is the monster story that wasn’t. But it’s also a story which exists as a potent flashbulb memory for me. Memory is very susceptible to distortion, however. The point remains though that the cliffhanger ending of “Strangers in Space” buries itself deep in the memories of a ten-year old child and percolates there as years ebb and flow until they become a part of a young man’s self-mythologised history of Doctor Who.

The cliffhanger with which “Strangers in Space” ends is palpably disturbing.

Firstly the Doctor, Ian and two crewmembers of a spaceship stranded in space notice a high-pitched whining noise. The ship’s scanners are reduced to images of white noise, like a television which has lost its signal.

Then, silence.

The camera rests upon William Russell, who over the course of this season has transitioned from a potential leading man into a reliable glue guy capable of anchoring the main ensemble. Through the silence, it passes over first the anxious face of the ship’s captain before moving past the Doctor—a stern, worrisome expression etched into his lined face. William Russell—or, well, Ian Chesterton—continues to move through the studio space, stoically staring ahead at a large window. It’s all that separates the characters from the blank void of space. 

His eyebrows twitch, as he whispers towards the Doctor in a hushed, terrified voice. “Doctor. Doctor.”

Pressed up against the window, climbing around in the void of space, is a ghostly humanoid figure. As a final sting of synethsised noise punctures through the palpable silence, the camera steadily zooms in on this window. The window is no longer a window: it constitutes almost the entirety of the televised screen.

The final image of the episode is of a Sensorite, hands pressed up against the television screen, voyeuristically looking out at the viewer. 

Visually, director Mervyn Pinfield has preempted one of horror’s most iconic images—the pale, ghostly figure of Samara crawling out of a TV screen from The Ring—by almost four decades. Speaking anecdotally, as a ten year-old in 2003 this scene was terrifying. The black and white images of Sensorites climbing out of the TV set appeared to me in shadows over the following weeks: a lingering, unsettling image worming its way into my subconscious. 

Doctor Who has, after only two previous efforts, perfected the art of rendering its monsters as visually terrifying subjects—crucial here, because this is the story where the idea of “monster” is about to be confronted head on.

This, however, is a  flashbulb memory—The Sensorites as a story using both the camera lens and TV screen as a confrontation with the audience. This belies the general arc of the story, which even as early as “Strangers in Space” is clearly trying to undermine the idea of monsters.

So far in Doctor Who there have been two monsters: the Daleks and the Voords. Of the two, it’s the Daleks which have already cast a long shadow over the series—creating a human-Other moral binary where the human is not only “good,” but by speaking in Received Pronunciation are coded specifically with layers of Britishness, and the Other is monstrous and “evil”. The Voords were more incidental to the general plot of The Keys of Marinus in a way that the Daleks just weren’t. The Daleks were the point of The Dead Planet, the plot being shaped by and in response to their presence. With the Sensorites being an overt haunting concern throughout this story’s first episode, with glimpses of their hands as they remove the TARDIS lock and whispers about how they are “hostile” creatures with “some control over [the] brains” of the guest characters, we’re clearly watching a story that appears to be using The Dead Planet as its model—complete with the depiction of the monster as a thing in the midst of the first episode’s cliffhanger.

And yet, for all that the Sensorites haunt this first episode and feature in the most visually disturbing image the series has produced to date, their status as monsters is problematised: 

MAITLAND: They are hostile, these Sensorites, but in the strangest possible way. They won’t let us leave this area of space yet they don’t attempt to kill us.
SUSAN: What had happened when we found you?
CAROL: The same thing that’s happened many times before. The Sensorites have put us into a deep sleep that gives the appearance of death, and yet they’ve never made any actual effort to destroy us.
MAITLAND: Far from it. We both have very hazy recollections of them returning from time to time to our ship to actually feed us.
IAN: Doesn’t add up at all.

Doctor Who, “Strangers in Space,” (Peter R Newman)

On the one hand, then, we have the Sensorites as the first true post-Dalek monsters: an explicit, hostile force within the narrative that our intrepid adventurers will be reacting against. There’s even the same moral binary proposed: the human-like in opposition to the alien and different. 

Yet Peter R Newman refuses to play this as a straightforward monster story.

With his other hand he emphasises, before the audience has even seen a Sensorite in full, how they aren’t violent. They “don’t attempt to kill [the humans]” that they’ve stranded in space, and “actually feed” them. As Ian states, nothing about this adds up. There is a reason for this, and the reason is narrative substitution.

Narrative substitution is a concept coined by media critic Elizabeth Sandifer, whose TARDIS Eruditorum series has been haunting this blog since the word go. I briefly gestured towards an engagement with Sandifer way back in The Dead Planet, before spending more time engaging with Jack Graham’s criticism of that story.) Here, however, there’s no real way of avoiding it. Two potent themes of her own writings—narrative substitution and the problem of Susan—just have to be engaged with in any reading of The Sensorites.

Let’s start, then, with narrative substitution. As defined by Sandifer, narrative substitution is rather straightforward: one story is rejected “typically on ethical or ideological grounds,” with the revelation that a more moral story was in fact being told all along.

The trappings of The Sensorites, especially in its first two episodes, appear to be evoking the narrative concerns of V-effekt—a major theme which has recurred throughout this season, and has usually been a sign that script editor David Whitaker has performed considerable tinkering with another writer’s work. It’s the theatre of performative estrangement, designed to create a dissonance between performance and spectator with the intent of forming a dialectic. Bertolt Brecht, the writer most associated with this form of theatre, termed it epic theatre (in contrast with dramatic theatre, which prior to Brecht had formed the bulk of the Western theatrical tradition.) I might go so far as to assert that, in Doctor Who, we could refer to this mode as Whitakerian dialecticism if I wanted to be particularly arcane. Indeed, referring to Whitaker is incredibly important here: on the one hand, this is the second story in a row seeking to redress an original sin which has formed under his watch, but on the other the setting of these first two episodes evokes The Edge of Destruction.

Once again we are trapped with the cast in a small studio space dressed up as a spaceship, and there’s a seemingly hostile, surreal force attempting to break into this confined space.

The Sensorites, however, has a guest cast. One member of this guest cast, Stephen Dartnell as the unbalanced crewman John, is specifically key to the way Newman and Pinfield actively work to establish a foundation for the narrative substitution that they perform.

Over the course of this first season, the relationship between camera and actor has been fundamentally crucial. We’ve already spoken at length about William Hartnell’s use of the camera to create an alliance with his audience, John Gorrie’s use of the camera to overtly align Barbara’s perspective with that of the audience, and Tlotoxl glowering through the camera while threatening to destroy Barbara.

Here, the camera is aligned with the Sensorites themselves. We’ve already seen this in the way that the Sensorites are transgressive characters, seemingly climbing up to and pushing against the limits of television screens, but Pinfield creates a secondary relationship between his camera and the Sensorites.

It’s rooted firmly in the relationship the camera develops with John over the course of “Strangers in Space.” There, the Sensorites are still a disembodied presence—the stuff of whispers and fleeting glimpses of hands—while John is a physical character and part of the performed narrative. Having wandered into the back-half of the spaceship, Barbara and Susan find themselves confronted by the unbalanced John. Through his mutterings, the audience (and the two characters) are made aware that the Sensorites are telepathically communicating with John, but how John mutters is telling.

He mutters directly to the camera.

John reaches out beyond the television screen, speaking to the Sensorites in his mind. But he speaks through the television screen to the audience. The audience is, through Dartnell’s performance and Pinfield’s camera, aligned with the Sensorites.

It’s worth comparing this to earlier relationships between character and camera. This scene isn’t, as in the case of Tlotoxl in The Aztecs, a moment of confrontation between character and audience:

JOHN: (to camera) Frighten them? No, I can’t do that. No. No. 
SUSAN: Somebody’s talking to him. Inside his mind. 
JOHN: (to camera) No, don’t force me. You can’t. I won’t do it.
(turns away, head in his hands) My head! Pain.

Doctor Who, “The Unwilling Warriors,” (Peter R Newman)

What happens in this scene functions on two layers of narrative, or “diegesis”. According to the French literary critic Gerard Genette, these layers of narrative include “the world in which one tells” (extradiegetic) and “the world of which one tells” (the intradiegetic.)

In “the world of which one tells,” John is clearly directing this line at the Sensorites—they’re reaching out with their telepathic ability with “some control over [others] brains” and John is pushing against this. However, in “the world in which one tells” (ie; 1964 Britain,) John is speaking to the audience itself. The two layers of narrative have been merged in the figure of John, a character speaking both within the narrative and outside of it.

This line, however, goes further than rendering John a transgressive narrative character. By speaking to the Sensorites through the camera, and in doing so speaking directly to the audience, Pinfield and Stephen Dartnell treat the Sensorites and the audience as occupying a similar narrative space: spectators intruding onto the action through the membrane of the TV screen. It’s worth emphasising that this exchange occurs just after the resolution to the “Sensorite-through-the-TV-screen” cliffhanger of “Strangers in Space,” visually rendering the Sensorites as pushing against and into the television screen.

And this is worth emphasising again.

The Sensorites don’t break out of a television screen. They break into it.

If this is the monster story that wasn’t, a story undermining the idea of the Other as different and therefore monstrous, then Newman creates a narrative where this is possible because the monsters are aligned with the narrative space of the audience and literally break into the narrative to force a substitution.

In The Dead Planet I noted that there was a distinct Whitakerian mode to the first episode, a mode further developed in Whitaker’s own solo-script The Edge of Destruction. As an act of narrative substitution, then, Newman and Pinfield begin with these basic elements to establish a narrative in need of being substituted. It’s the Whitakerian story—of worlds which are an experience of alienation and estrangement—complete with a textual recognition of Whitaker’s original sin, that humans are good and the different is monstrous:

SENSORITE 1: We intend taking you down to the Sensphere, but we do not wish to harm you in any way.
IAN: Since we’ve met you, we have no wish to harm you either, but you must get off this ship.

Doctor Who, “The Unwilling Warriors,” (Peter R Newman)

Here, in a direct meeting between the humans and the Sensorites, both sides reject the idea that a meeting between humans and the Other must lead to aggression: a rejection of the racial rot which scarred The Dead Planet. Instead, the arrival of the Other becomes a point of negotiation and dialogue, with both sides establishing a desire for the relationship to be amicable. “We do not wish to harm you” functions as the “ideological or ethical grounds” upon which a monster story is rejected. As a result of the Sensorites asserting themselves onto the narrative, breaking through the television screen and being recognised as audience-aligned, Newman and Pinfield have substituted a monster narrative with something else.

Following Sandifer’s diagnosis that narrative substitution is an ideological challenge to a specific type of narrative, this specific type of story— human and Other thrust into violent confrontation—is rejected “on ideological or ethical grounds” and instead becomes a story about how the Doctor and his companions are invited into an alien society and uncover a previous human expedition hiding in the bowels of the Sensorite city attempting to do a genocide. It becomes, therefore, a story capable of critiquing British imperial values continuing to percolate within 1960s society.

Why then, following a story where these same values caused so much dramatic tension and resulted in failure, is this possible here? Why is this narrative substitution possible?

We can now move onto the problem of Susan Foreman.

Susan is, after all, the character around which this narrative substitution occurs. Newman leans into the character’s alien nature, allowing Susan to communicate telepathically with the Sensorites from the earliest moments of the serial. As the Doctor notes, it is “possible for Susan’s thoughts to reach out to the Sensorites,” later adding that she “obviously [has] a gift in that direction.” If we determined that, in The Aztecs, John Lucarotti found a test-case as to the limits of Barbara (namely, that despite Barbara being a transgressive narrative force unto herself she’s still beholden to the present), Newman seems to be testing the extent that Susan can function as a transgressive character. Because it’s “possible for Susan’s thoughts to reach out to the Sensorites,” her unearthly qualities are emphasised in such a way that she bridges the gap between humans speaking in Received Pronunciation and the medium-manipulating telepathic Others who reject a monster narrative.

This, however, isn’t getting at the problem of Susan. Elizabeth Sandifer describes it as “the problem of sexual maturity in children’s literature,” named after the similarly problematic Susan Pevensie in C S Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia, who is problematised in the following way:

“Oh, Susan!” said Jill. “She’s interested in nothing nowadays except nylons and lipstick and invitations. She always was a jolly sight too keen on being grown up.”
“Grown-up, indeed,” said the Lady Polly. ”I wish she would grow up. She wasted all her school time wanting to be the age she is now, and she’ll waste all the rest of her life trying to stay that age. Her whole idea is to race on to the silliest time of one’s life as quick as she can and then stop there as long as she can.”

Lewis, C S.The Chronicles of Narnia: The Original Novels. HarperCollins, 2005.

Lewis is a writer who ascribes moral value to specific narratives and characters. Within The Chronicles of Narnia, the problem of Susan is a moralistic one: that the life Susan has chosen is morally wrong. The problem of Susan in Doctor Who, as Sandifer describes it, isn’t a moral problem insofar as it is a site of narrative tension—”Susan, at sixteen, is torn between teenage sexuality and being the Doctor’s granddaughter”—that emerges from the same thematic concern. For Lewis there appears to be something morally wrong with a specific type of growing up, and there is a narrative problem within Doctor Who of Susan growing up.

It’s not, however, a moral problem in Doctor Who. It’s a site of tension for sure—the Doctor notes that “we have never had an argument” prior to the events of The Sensorites—but it’s not a problem ascribed moral value. The problem instead is rooted firmly in the limitations written into the character by Anthony Coburn, way back in the early drafts of “An Unearthly Child.”

It’s interesting to discuss the problem of Susan in relation to C S Lewis, because the limitations Coburn builds into the character emerge from a moral position: that it would be morally wrong for the Doctor, an older man, to be travelling with a girl as young as Susan if she weren’t family. Although the problem of Susan is a narrative one—the tension introduced into the narrative by Susan aging out of her role as an unearthly child—the reason for the problem is an attempt to assert a specific set of moral relationships onto the characters at the show’s genesis. The narrative role that Susan occupies, that of “granddaughter,” has proven a limiting one.

We have, of course, seen some writers push against this reductive narrative role and attempt to broaden Susan’s range as a character. So what have the various takes on Susan been like so far? In “An Unearthly Child” she claims to “like walking through the dark” because “it’s mysterious,” she’s been pushed into the realm of performative estrangement in The Edge of Destruction, in Marco Polo she’s been a potentially queer 1960s mod paired up with a romantically frustrated young girl who describes the time she’s spent with Susan as “the happiest time of my life,” and she’s been pushed to the margins and written as younger than she should be in The Dead Planet, The Keys of Marinus and even The Aztecs. 

The reason Susan would be written as younger than she should be is because of the inherent tension in her being a teenager—a 1960s mod, using colloquialisms such as “fab”—and a granddaughter, a role which defines Susan as being the youngest of the TARDIS travellers. With Doctor Who experiencing growing pains over the course of this season—as writers as varied as Coburn, Terry Nation, Whitaker and Lucarotti attempt to figure out how to write the series and define its limits—the character has oscillated all over the place without a singular, defined take.

This oscillation is on display in The Sensorites as well. Newman seemingly writes Susan as a 1960s mod youth using colloquialisms such as “this is bliss,” whilst also exploring the character as an unearthly child with latent telepathic powers. Furthermore, costume supervisor Daphne Dare has dressed Carole Ann Ford in a costume that emphasises the character’s youth: looking at the costuming alone, Susan appears to be less a teenager and more of a 12 year old. Yet, despite the contradictions in the character (60s mod, unearthly child, and young granddaughter) all existing within the script, Newman provides something of a definitive take on the character. 

He sews together the oscillations within the character into a seemingly intended patchwork of contradictions: The Sensorites begins with an acknowledgement that the main cast have “all changed,” with Barbara confirming that Susan has as well. As such, the younger look that Dare puts together for Ford for this serial functions as an explicit visual signifier of Susan’s maturity—she’s growing out of childish things. The serial even renders this tension explicit in its third episode, “Hidden Danger”:

DOCTOR: If you go with them, then they will have all the advantage.
SUSAN: But they only want to talk to me.
DOCTOR: I’m sorry, Susan, but I don’t believe you have the ability to represent us. That’s all.
SUSAN: Stop treating me like a child.

Doctor Who, “Hidden Danger,” (Peter R Newman)

Following the first contact between the cast and the Sensorites, the aliens have developed a connection with Susan because of her latent telepathy. These abilities render Susan a far more dynamic character: as this scene shows, because Susan is able to perform within the narrative in ways the other characters can’t, she is able to push against the more passive and subordinate role that the grandfather-granddaughter dynamic has often reduced her to. When the Doctor attempts to undermine Susan’s abilities, she explicitly frames this as the Doctor infantilising her: “Stop treating me like a child.” Sandifer’s “problem of Susan” is explicitly a theme within The Sensorites. Susan is changing, and that change is associated with her maturing and growing out of the grandfather-granddaughter relationship that she shares with the Doctor. 

Newman has done two things here: firstly, he’s found a way for Susan to function as a dramatic character. Secondly, however, it’s this story which explicitly establishes a theme of change and growing up which allows Newman to engage with Whitaker’s original sin. If Whitaker’s narrative mode is dialecticism, of creating a dialogue between the performance and the viewer, then obviously the only way to address moral flaws establishing themselves under his watch was to engage in a dialectic.

So we have the Sensorites, literally invading the TV screen so as to undermine the idea of monsters, and a maturing Susan, finding herself telepathically linked with the Other as she grows up.

For the most part we’ve discussed how The Sensorites functions as narrative substitution: of establishing a monster narrative and then undermining it with the aforementioned dialectic between Susan and the Sensorites. That The Sensorites introduces a new relationship with the alien Other is a significant fact I’ve tried to unpack. There’s one fascinating detail, however, buried within this narrative of aliens who aren’t monsters and Susan reaching out to the Other as she matures and grows out of her reductive role.

It’s a nameless planet, ironically rendered in brilliant colour despite Doctor Who being filmed in black and white. Susan, smiling fondly, earnestly describes it as “quite like Earth, but at night the sky is a burned orange, and the leaves on the trees are bright silver.” However, it’s not a moment that Susan shares with the Doctor, the two reminiscing about their shared past. It’s not shared with Ian or Barbara either, a sign of growing familiarity amongst the TARDIS crew.

This is a moment that Susan shares specifically with a Sensorite elder. If this is a serial exploring two ideas—eroding the division between the human and the Other, and depicting Susan growing and becoming a more dynamic character within the show’s narrative—then here we have a moment where Susan grows, opening up about a home that the viewer knows only through its absence, as a result of a positive cross-cultural exchange. The thematic difference with The Aztecs is astounding: there, Barbara’s inability to “reexperience an epoch” emerged from her conflation of history and the past, whereas here in The Sensorites the parallels between the Sensorites and Susan enable her own growth.

It’s growth that can only go so far, however. Susan notes in the final episode, “A Desperate Venture,” that the facilitator of her growth (her latent telepathy) was a unique property of the Sensorite planet which “has an extraordinary number of ultra high frequencies, so [Susan] won’t be able to go on using thought transference” following the end of this serial. If the problem of Susan is the character maturing and  growing out of her reductive role within the grandfather-granddaughter dynamic she shares with the Doctor, it remains frustrated here at the serial’s conclusion. Susan’s abilities, which allowed her to function as part of a dialectic triggering narrative substitution, were specific to this story. 

In The Aztecs, I noted that Lucarotti revealed that the show’s core ensemble had become unbalanced. What Peter R Newman performs then, over the course of The Sensorites, is a test to see how far Susan’s character can be pushed. 

The answer that Newman seems to arrive at, then, is that she can only be pushed so far: and yet as a test case Newman actually strikes upon something fascinating. Susan functions as a character who helps erode the divide between that which is human and that which is monstrous, and in doing so facilitates her own growth as a character. The Sensorites as a species are transgressive, a fact emphasised by director Mervyn Pinfield’s use of the camera, but through close proximity they allow Susan to work as a transgressive character in her own right. If John Lucarotti has revealed the TARDIS ensemble to be unbalanced, within the limited size of this serial Newman has found a way for its weakest member to function dramatically.

It’s to push against the racialised binaries of Whitaker’s original sin. It’s to be that transgressive character who is allowed to grow and develop through proximity with the Other. 

And yet, at this serial’s conclusion, it’s revealed to be a temporary experiment. Susan’s transgressive potential—explicitly a result of her telepathic potential—was only specific to this story. Susan’s development isn’t going to echo into the future.