Doctor Who C1.7: The Sensorites review

Review

The Sensorites

The Doctor: It all started out as a mild curiosity in the junkyard, and now it’s turned out to be quite a great spirit of adventure.

Story Code: C1.7.
Production Code: G.
Story Number: 7.
Countdown week: 33…

From story number four to this story, the programme has now a seemingly repeating pattern – a fantastic historical, a dull Sci-Fi one, a fantastic historical – and now a dull Sci-Fi one for story number seven.

This story starts well, with a spooky cliffhanger at the end of episode 1 – but the dull resolution at the start of the next episode doesn’t bode well. The early parts of the story have an eerie atmosphere, though it isn’t sustained across all six episodes. (The aliens the Sensorites are interesting though, interesting enough to inspire Nu-Who’s similar Ood, and the 2008 Season explains that the Planet of the Ood is in the same solar system as this story’s Sense-Sphere.)

Like Inside the Spaceship does psychedelia before the Beatles do, this Doctor Who story does Star Trek before Star Trek – with a talky second half. The cliffhanger (for the next serial) is exciting though, with the Doctor, in a bizarre moment, rebuking a hapless Chesterton.

Rating: 2/5