Episode 7: The Sensorites

/ Kari / Leave a comment

Today, we look at “The Sensorites,” a return to space and some new aliens for Doctor Who.  Are they as captivating as the Daleks?  Are they as ridiculous as the Voord?  Will Kari survive this episode without laughing to death?  FIND OUT!

Daleks Aren’t Robots!? is a podcast in which two Whovian friends take two non-Whovians on a deep dive through the show from the very beginning.

Theme: Garage – Monplaisir

What we showed Kari: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cddgvs3yGgg

Check out our YT version for pictures: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ck7tGXIc3CA

Podcast Contents Include

Editor’s Note: The following are my original notes for the podcast, slightly edited for readability. They’re very far from the full contents of the pod, though.  – Kari

SUMMARY

The crew finds some dead human astronauts from earth in the future, but they turn out to not be dead. Instead they’re being mentally affected and/or mind-controlled by the Sensorites. Some weird stuff happens and then the dumbest looking aliens ever to exist show up. They look like an alien from Mac and Me banged a dufflepud from the Narnia books, and I died laughing.

We had to take a break. I wiped the tears away from my eyes and got a snack and we started the show again and then I saw they were wearing footie pajamas and we had to stop again so I could laugh.

The Sensorites aren’t bad people, they’re afraid of humans and it turns out one of the astronauts had discovered their planet was made from a valuable mineral, molybdenum. Eventually everyone but Barbara ends up hanging out with the Sensorites, who have a problem where a lot of them are dying for no obvious reason, a problem which started when a group of humans arrived 10 years ago.

Barbara comes down and sorts everything out. It turns out some humans who were crazy due to Sensorite mind influence were poisoning the Sensorites, and a Sensorite city administrator trying to murder our team and definitely murdering other Sensorites is caught offscreen in the largest anticlimax since the final book in the Twilight series.

THE GUEST STARS

  1. The Sensorites are absolutely hilarious-looking. They have the features of the Mac and Me aliens, but with an upside-down wig glued to their chins and caterpillars glued around their eyes. They have two plate-like feet and wear soft baby blue footie pajamas.
  2. The Sensorites are utterly nonthreatening. They cannot stand loud noise or even loud THOUGHTS. They cannot see in any kind of dim light. They do not move particularly quickly and are frightened of humans. These are the least scary aliens to have ever existed.
  3. They can do some telepathy stuff, but only with the aid of a silly stethoscope thing they hold up to their heads, which makes them look even funnier.
  4. The astronauts, Carol, John and Maitland, are fine. Maitland exists to be thoroughly English; he probably has an alarm clock that plays the Big Ben chimes, sweats black tea and says pip pip cheerio I say old chap. Carol is the official The Girl and John is her love interest, who when we meet him is crazy due to the Sensorites’ mind control. John is a large ham and he’s fun to watch until his mental issues are solved, whereupon he’s only about half as English as Maitland and only about twice as interesting. AKA he’s real boring.
  5. There are a few Sensorites with personalities as well. The First Elder, the leader, is a compassionate, gentle and cautious person. The Second Elder, his second-in-command, is more willing to believe humans are bad, but also willing to try making peace with them. The City Administrator is less powerful than either, and is an evil vizier type. He ends up murdering the Second Elder. Other Sensorites include a Scientist, who works with the Doctor to figure out what’s killing the Sensorites, and the City Administrator’s flunky.

THE TEAM

  1. This serial is FINALLY good to Susan, who is revealed to have some capability for telepathy and is able to communicate with the Sensorites to some extent. She’s able to get them to trust her because of this.
  2. Susan also has some good conflict and character building with the Doctor, as she argues with him apparently for the first time ever.
  3. If Barbara had been around the whole time this serial would have been a two-parter. She turns up and essentially solves everything except the poisoning. Why isn’t this show called “Barbara Solves Everything”?
  4. Ian looks like Steve Jobs the whole time. Despite this he is not insufferable in this serial, even though he is still overprotective of Barbara who can, as we all recall from Marinus, beat him up.
  5. The Doctor does some science in this episode and figures out that the Sensorites didn’t catch an illness from the humans, but are being poisoned by atropine, or belladonna. For some reason no mention is made of the way this probably affected the affected Sensorites’ eyes–atropine dilates your pupils and makes you sensitive to light. Which is weird because the sensorites are terrified of the DARK, so you would think suddenly WANTING to be in the dark would be a symptom definitely worth mentioning.

THE SETTING

  1. There were a few sets here, and some succeeded more than others. The control room of the human astronauts was cool. It was clear they had very limited sets made for their spaceship and they had to use them in creative ways to make it look like there was a lot there. Their design was distinctive, with stripy walls that gave it a lot of texture and made it look a bit industrial.
  2. The Sensorites have big spacious rooms and curved portals, not a lot of texture. The kind of place someone wearing footie pajamas would build.
  3. There is some attention given to Sensorite society, which has a caste system. Due to their bad eyesight they rely on certain marks of office such as sashes and collars to tell each other apart, which the City Administrator uses to sneak around in the guise of others.
  4. There are some hints about the earth of the future from the human astronauts. There is no longer a London, it’s all Central City.
  5. The Sensorites have some cool-looking guns that kind of look like one of those old-style coiled egg beaters, leaving me wondering if someone in the props department had a fear of kitchen implements.

THE SHOW

  1. I feel like they meant to make this serial more of a commentary on ambition and the way caste systems destroy social mobility and lead to destructive behavior on the part of people who can’t get ahead. However, this commentary wasn’t actually really present much.
  2. At one point the Doctor gets his coat wrecked and it’s replaced by a long cloak instead. I liked the coat better but the cloak looks nice too.
  3. We get some hints about the Doctor and Susan’s homeworld–it’s got orange skies at night and silver leaves on the trees.

Sources Include

Episode 6: The Aztecs

/ Kari / Leave a comment

Today, we look at The Aztecs, a famous serial and Josh’s favorite of the Hartnell era.  Are its awkward brownface and excessively clothed Aztecs dealbreakers, or is all that outweighed by the Doctor’s first love interest, Barbara’s steely determination and Ian’s hilarious chicken outfit?

Daleks Aren’t Robots!? is a podcast in which two Whovian friends take two non-Whovians on a deep dive through the show from the very beginning.

Theme: Garage – Monplaisir

What we showed Kari: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ysa7jRW-B7w

Podcast Contents Include

Editor’s Note: The following are my original notes for the podcast, slightly edited for readability. They’re very far from the full contents of the pod, though.  – Kari

SUMMARY

The Tardis lands in an Aztec tomb, and the group can’t get back into the tomb once they leave it because the door shuts. Barbara is mistaken for the reincarnation of Yetaxa, an Aztec god-priest. Luckily, the Aztecs are one of her academic specialties and she can play along and stall for time. Things get political, but fire-free, when Barbara tries to stop human sacrifice, Ian wears a Battle Chicken outfit, and the Doctor gets engaged, but in the end they find a way back into the temple AND the TARDIS, and escape.

GUEST STARS

  1. The Aztecs. There are a lot of them, and many receive some characterization, good or bad or some of each. I have read a little bit about the Aztecs but not a ton, so I don’t know how accurate it all is, but while there is a little bit of smugness about how “civilized” they aren’t compared to the Doctor and his time traveling team, it’s honestly not as bad as I thought it was going to be.
  2. The Doctor gets a LOVE INTEREST! It’s Cameca, an Aztec wise woman who gives good advice to others and knows a lot about botany. She’s very intelligent, pretty, age-appropriate, really keen on him, and while initially it appears he’s just buttering her up to get help back to the TARDIS, he keeps the token she gave him when he leaves. She even manages to get engaged to him, though it’s an accident on his part.
  3. There are two baddies, an evil high priest named Tlotoxl, who I mostly called Evil Priest, and Ixta, a warrior that Evil Priest sets up as Ian’s enemy. Evil Priest is SUPER over the top and just chews every speck of scenery ever. He doesn’t believe Barbara is a reincarnation of Yetaxa, and sees the strangers as political threats to his power. Ixta wants to command the armies instead of Ian.
  4. There’s also a good priest, Autloc, who does believe Barbara is Yetaxa, and even when he’s not sure, he’s generally presented as a decent person. In the end he loses his faith and goes to wander in the woods, which is sad, and it is presented as such.

THE SETTING

  1. The setting is earth! And an actual place in actual history.
  2. There are multiple sets for multiple locations in this episode, and both the sets and the costumes look pretty good for the most part, apart from the hilarious Battle Chicken Ian and the Puma Man outfit Ixta wears.
  3. However, all the outfits include pants, which is hilarious. These are the most clothed Aztecs who have ever existed.
  4. They are also, apparently, all white. Yikes on trikes. >.<
  5. Susan really gets the short end of the stick in this episode. She’s in a tent going to Aztec school for much of the episode, and then imperils the party by not agreeing to an arranged marriage with the next sacrificial victim due to die in a couple days. He honestly didn’t seem that bad, I’m not saying she should have agreed but she didn’t even try to stall for time by asking to think about it or anything. Susan’s not this dumb, show! This is getting frustrating!

THE TEAM

  1. Barbara is the queen of this episode, successfully pretending to be an Aztec priest-goddess.
  2. Not only that but she heads straight for the corpse of Yetaxa to investigate it, identifies where and when they are and lets no one push her around. At one point Evil Priest tries to gatekeep her by asking her about Aztec cosmology but she knows all the answers.
  3. Her motive throughout is preventing the Aztecs from sacrificing people, which for some reason she thinks will stop Cortez from destroying their entire civilization (which is absolutely not correct). She’s really upset when it doesn’t work, because she genuinely loves the culture. Again, a lot less smugness than expected, and they end up not interfering in the indigenous culture (though not from lack of trying).
  4. Ian gets a surprisingly large amount of fighting in this episode, most of which is cheesy and should have the Star Trek fight music playing while it happens. He also gets to wear an INCREDIBLE bird warrior outfit that has feathers everywhere and he looks like an overgrown Pokemon. BATTLE CHICKEN ATTACK! Also Ian can do the Vulcan nerve pinch!
  5. The Doctor gets to woo Cameca, who is presented as pretty wise and daring herself, and he was very flirty. I could ship it, it’s a shame she’s probably not going to come back.
  6. The Doctor also gets at least one comeuppance, when he is deceived into helping Ixta in his fight against Ian, providing some knockout juice to slow Ian down. And at one point he actually DOES apologize to Barbara, a real apology.
  7. But he also turns out to be right in his conflict with Barbara and Ian at the beginning. They CAN’T stop the sacrifices; the societal inertia and religious practices are too much.
  8. Speaking of which, the Doctor is TOTALLY willing to let people be sacrificed in this episode. Zero issues with that, yet again.

THE SHOW

  1. The show is really really reaching already for reasons they can’t get back to the TARDIS. And at the end the TARDIS breaks again. It’s got the same downtime as the transporters on Star Trek, it seems.
  2. They still haven’t fed it. Couldn’t they have gotten a leg or an arm from the Perfect Victim? Surely the Aztecs could spare ONE limb for a hungry time machine!
  3. The Doctor had his first romance on the show, and almost ended up getting married. His eyes almost fell out of his head when he found out he was engaged, but he couldn’t leave Cameca’s ornament behind.

Sources Include

Episode 5: The Keys of Marinus

/ Kari / Leave a comment

Today, down a member, the Daleks Aren’t Robots!? team looks at “The Keys of Marinus,” a much-maligned Doctor Who serial.  Is it truly as bad as some say? What do all the weird references to fascism mean? And what’s with the brain slugs?

Daleks Aren’t Robots!? is a podcast in which two Whovian friends take two non-Whovians on a deep dive through the show from the very beginning.

Theme: Garage – Monplaisir

Podcast Contents Include

Editor’s Note: The following are my original notes for the podcast, slightly edited for readability. They’re very far from the full contents of the pod, though.  – Kari

SUMMARY

The TARDIS and crew visit a planet with acid oceans, and they find a monk named Arbitan being attacked by a bunch of goons called Voords who are all wearing wetsuits with handles on the head. Arbitan tells the team he has a machine that can brainwash everyone on the planet into making moral decisions but he hid the keys so the Voords couldn’t use it for evil. He asks them to get the keys back, so they go get them: one from a location where brain slugs have taken over, one from a jungle, one from a frozen cave, one from a city where Ian is framed for murder. They get the keys back but Arbitan was killed by Voords while they were gone, so they blow it up and leave.

THE SETTING

  1. The settings are really the stars in this one and there are MULTIPLE ones.
  2. I love how foreign the world is this time–the glass sand, the deadly acid sea. Never try to go swimming in unfamiliar water, folks!
  3. For a while people kept getting sucked into the building, and I started wondering if it was an oversized gazebo or some other carnivorous masonry monster.
  4. The TARDIS has an invisible force field barrier around it, which turns the cast into mimes and it’s hilarious.
  5. The team is fitted with teleportation watches to zip them around the planet to where each key is, and the plot utilizes them to pretty good effect I think. Although they split the party again.
  6. Each of the settings for the keys is nicely themed. The first is Morpit, which seems to be a luxurious Greco-Roman world but only because giant slugs make everyone think it’s that way by putting stickers on their foreheads. It’s actually a run-down, shabby, nasty place, but Barbara escapes, smashes up the evil brain slugs (which are ADORABLE) and rescues both Altos, Arbitan’s associate, and Sabeetha, Arbitan’s daughter, from the brain slugs. The group splits up because OF COURSE.
  7. The next key location is a jungle filled with human-strangling plants, and it’s through a hidden temple full of boobytraps. They get a fake key here, puzzle out the location of the real one, and escape.
  8. The third place is a snowfield, a scary trapper’s hut, and then an ice cave. They escape from the trapper, who tries to murder them by giving them raw meat so the wolves will attack them, and then tries again by pulling down a bridge across a cave chasm. The group solves the puzzle, retrieves the key and steals their stuff back from the murderous trapper.
  9. The last place is a city, and we see what looks like a jewelry store. Ian immediately gets hit on the head, yay, and framed for murder, boo, forcing the Doctor to defend him in court, and the group to find the key, which was stolen from the jewelry store by the real murderer.

ARBITAN, THE VOORDS & OTHER GUESTS

  1. We need to talk about Arbitan. He ran a machine that made moral decisions for everyone on Marinus and mind-controlled them. NO ONE IN THE GROUP POINTS OUT THAT THIS IS HORRIFYING until the very end, and then it’s still mostly an afterthought! The doctor tells Sabeetha, Arbitan’s daughter: “I don’t believe that man was made to be controlled by machines. Machines can make laws, but they cannot preserve justice. Only human beings can do that. Now I only hope that you’ll carry on his good work, please.”
  2. The Voords wear wetsuits with big rubber handles sticking out of the head, which was hilarious. But. One of the Voords’ wetsuits had a tear in it, and they were completely dissolved by acid, leaving only the wetsuit behind in his tiny coffin-submarine. That is kinda hardcore for a children’s show!
  3. There are several minor characters who get their own subplots. Arbitan’s daughter, Sabeetha, and Altos, Arbitan’s former associate, help find the keys and end up as a couple and it’s cute.
  4. There’s a violent, scary mountain man named Vasor who tries to sexually assault Barbara. He says a lot of scary, unsettling things.
  5. And there’s a whole courtroom of people in the trial episode–they don’t get much time but they all have at least a little personality. I thought they did a nice job considering the number of NPCs in this episode.

THE TEAM

  1. I would say there’s not really a ton of character-building for the Doctor and his team in these episodes, because by this point we know who these people are.
  2. Susan freaks out about the homicidal vines, and Barbara doesn’t believe her, even though Susan is always right.
  3. The Doctor gets to play lawyer, which is fun. He’s surprisingly good at it.
  4. Ian stays cool under pressure, even as he’s about to be executed.

THE SHOW

  1. The TARDIS miniature is freaking adorable! Did they save any of the miniatures from the early show, or are they all lost like the Marco Polo ep?
  2. This time the TARDIS is working but the color TV is broken.
  3. Costuming for the Voords was hilarious. A wetsuit with a big rubber handle coming straight off the head-cover? What prompted that?
  4. A lot of elements from this episode were reused from previous episodes, which you said was to save money. I recognized a hallway and some other stuff, but was there anything prominent I missed?
  5. There’s an attempted sexual assault in this, from Vasor, who is a bad guy, and also you hear another bad guy hit his wife, who later also turns out to be a bad guy. Did anyone complain?

Sources Include

Episode 4: Marco Polo

/ Kari / Leave a comment

Today, the Daleks Aren’t Robots!? team looks at their first missing episode of Doctor Who.  Can “Marco Polo” overcome the slideshow and fan-animated presentation? Why did they lose the episode with the most beautiful sets and sumptuous costumes? And can we all overcome the distressing racism? (Nope!)

Daleks Aren’t Robots!? is a podcast in which two Whovian friends take two non-Whovians on a deep dive through the show from the very beginning.

Theme: Garage – Monplaisir

Podcast Contents Include

Editor’s Note: The following are my original notes for the podcast, slightly edited for readability. They’re very far from the full contents of the pod, though.  – Kari

SUMMARY

Marco Polo wants to claim the broken-down Tardis to give it to Kublai Khan in an effort to get Kublai Khan to let him go home. Our team wants to fix the Tardis and leave. There’s an agent of an enemy warlord, Tegana, who does evil stuff because he’s evil and finally he gets killed trying to assassinate Kublai Khan.

THE SHOW

  1. Technically these episodes don’t exist; we just have the audio track. We watched several different types of “reconstituted” episodes, one with black and white pictures, one with color photos and one that was created in a 3D virtual environment, which made it a little like watching the show in the form of a Playstation 2 game.
  2. The pacing is awful on this one, and it should have been 2-3 episodes long, because half of it is just Marco Polo going “Tegana says x, the others say y, I believe Tegana!” and this is very tiresome. In my notes, after the first episode was over, I wrote, word for word: I just realized, the whole plot is in this first episode and the entire rest of the series is just faffing about.
  3. The yellowface, oh gosh the yellowface. Why are some people Asian and some people white people made up to look “Asian,” with the biggest finger quotes ever?
  4. They still haven’t addressed why everyone is speaking English.
  5. There’s some swordfighting. No idea if it’s any good, because these episodes don’t exist.

THE GUEST STARS

  1. There are a few important characters this time, with the most prominent being Marco Polo, who is probably not meant to read as a jerk, but definitely does seem like a real jerk. In this story he’s working for Kublai Khan.
  2. Ping Cho is a sweet noblewoman of 16 who is set to be married to a 75 year old dignitary at the court of Kublai Khan. She has amazing chemistry with Susan and I really enjoyed reading them as a couple.
    2A. Ping Cho’s relationship with Marco Polo is really weird, I’m not sure if I’m supposed to be reading it as fatherly or brotherly or what. This element is underdeveloped; if he’d been protective of her and related to her more as a dad it would have been a stronger episode, because he would have been more sympathetic.
    2B. Ping Cho’s storyline is resolved when her ancient husband-to-be poisons himself taking a lethal concoction intended to make him “younger” for her. She decides to stay with Kublai Khan’s court.
  3. Tegana is the transparent baddie. He’s a warlord and an emissary of Nogai, an enemy of Kublai Khan, and even though he couldn’t be more obviously evil if he was wearing 47 skulls, Marco Polo trusts him over anyone else. Even though he’s the enemy of Kublai Khan. For no reason. Because that’s the plot. Also, he wastes fruit, so you know he’s evil.
  4. Kublai Khan in this story is a nice old man with lots of aches and pains, who is the best administrator in the world. He bonds with the Doctor about being old. He also plays backgammon with the Doctor with horrifying stakes, including, at one point, the Tardis.
  5. Eyepatch pirate guy.

THE TEAM

  1. FOR THE LOVE OF LITTLE GREEN MEN STOP SPLITTING THE PARTY. We need to make a drinking game for this and the first rule is going to be “take a shot when they split the party.” And everyone will die of alcohol poisoning in the first hour.
  2. No one believes Barbara even after she saved the day in the last episode. She screams again in this one.
  3. No one believes Susan, either, that the eyes on one of the paintings in the cave moved, even after she’s repeatedly been shown to be reliable. When she’s proven right, no one apologizes for doubting her. Again.
  4. Ian is actually slightly, a tiny bit, useful and explains thin air and later, condensation in the episode, both times in an appropriate way. He also comes up with a way to distract baddies by making an explosion later. At one point Ian pretends to be drunk, and this was funny. Maybe it would be better for Ian to just be drunk all the time.
  5. The Doctor is an arrogant jerk again for a lot of this episode, but it doesn’t seem to matter much either way.

THE SETTING

  1. The Tardis breaks AGAIN, and this time it has no water or temperature control. And it will take A WHOLE WEEK of work to fix.
  2. The Palace sets looked pretty, particularly in the color photos.
  3. At one point, there’s a sandstorm and I remembered the episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 featuring a sandstorm; this was just as much DEEP HURTING.
  4. AND STILL NO ONE HAS FED THE TARDIS.

Honestly, this episode just shows the road trip from hell: Everyone is angry with everyone else and anyone who isn’t is just whining constantly.

Sources Include