Series 1 Episode 36: A Desperate Venture

Serial: The Sensorites
Episode: 6 (A Desperate Venture)
Doctor: William Hartnell
Companions: Barbara, Ian, and Susan

Writer: Peter R. Newman
Director: Frank Cox
Producer: Verity Lambert
Original Air Date: 01/08/1964

Susan ForeDONE (and other stories)

In which Babs returns, Susan gets to stretch her telepathic legs a bit, and the Space Bros enjoy a brief stint as the Chuckle Brothers.

Finally, we arrive at the end of this desperate venture, fitting called ‘A  Desperate Venture’. Carol has been abducted by the New Second Elder and his Engineer henchman and she doesn’t know why. She is a bit magnificent, actually; they tell her to write a letter to ‘the man John’ and she replies stoutly ‘I certainly will not!’. The NSE tells Carol her party is divided, which apparently convinces her that she has to do what he says? Anyway, he tells her to write a letter saying she’s gone up to the spaceship. Otherwise the NSE will kill her. Apparently this will guarantee the success of all the NSE’s plans...because of reasons. Carol hands the NSE the note…which is spectacularly brief.

We cut to the letter being held by a different pair of hands altogether, and OH GLORY OF GLORIES IT’S BARBARA! BARBARA’S BACK! I AM INCOHERENT WITH JOY AT THIS SUDDEN INJECTION OF NO-NONSENSENESS INTO THE STORY. NEVER LEAVE AGAIN.

And she’s straight back on the case, inferring that whoever made Carol write the note had no idea she was coming down from the spaceship or they would’ve known Team Defiance (for this is what I shall call Barbara, Susan, and John, in honour of their time spent together in spaceship corridors) wouldn’t fall for the story. Anyway, Susan suspects the City Administrator, while John can’t work out why anyone would kidnap Carol. Then this happens:

BARBARA: I should think the why is fairly obvious, wouldn't you?
JOHN: No I don't think it is Barbara. We're on good terms with the first Elder, the Doctor's discovered an antidote for the poison and now he and Ian are tracking down the cause of the trouble.
BARBARA: Look, I've been away in the ship, so maybe I can see things more clearly, and I think we're being used by one of the Sensorites who wants to gain power.
SUSAN: You mean we're not just being attacked because we're from other planets?
BARBARA: No.

I have to admit I’m still in the dark as to the City Administrator’s (the New Second Elder’s) motives in kidnapping Carol and had to do a bit of Googling until I found the novelisation where Barbara elaborates and suggests that there might be a ransom note on the way or Carol might be used as a means of discrediting the humans and proving they’re the ones poisoning the water. However, she remains gloriously on the ball and I enjoy that she’s using the fact that she can see the bigger picture to try to make her companions see that this is about power and not just about xenophobia.

Enter the First Elder, who immediately seems to realise he’s talking to the boss, and tells Babs he had her brought down to the Sense Sphere because her friends expressed so much concern for her. Damn right. Anyway, Babs doesn’t hang about and asks the First Elder for help, seeing as how the Doctor and Ian are missing. The First Elder is reluctant to spill the beans, and stalls by marvelling at that quality of human beings that is concern for one another’s wellbeing, before letting on that he was asked not to let Susan know where the two men went. Susan has the following response:

Susan Foreman is done with your shit.

Babs shows him the letter, and John gets frustrated when the First Elder doesn’t believe a Sensorite could’ve kidnapped Carol; he gets shouty and is immediately chided for raising his voice by Babs. I have missed this. Susan points out that she smudged the ink with her thumb when she was given the letter, meaning it was still wet and therefore very recently-written when it was delivered, so Carol has to be nearby. The best bet seems to be the disintegrator room. Then the First Elder tells Team Defiance that the Space Bros have gone to the aqueduct; Susan is horrified and exasperated in equal measure, and I’m enjoying her general vibe of ‘my grandfather is such a fucking idiot’ in this scene. The First Elder tells them the Space Bros went with light and weapons and so can be in no danger. Famous last words.

And oh look, the Doctor and Ian have indeed discovered that their weapons are useless and that someone has been ‘jiggering around’ (an ad lib, apparently) with the map, plus they have no food and the water’s got deadly nightshade in it. A charming outlook indeed.

Meanwhile, Carol is hungry and thirsty and captured and pissed off about it. The Engineer stands around being racist for a bit while John opens the door behind his back and jumps him…but misses! The engineer grabs some sort of…I have no idea what it is, but it’s attached to a wire and if it touches Carol she dies, so obv John has to stop in his tracks. Then Carol—magnificent Carol—takes advantage of the Engineer’s racist gloating and PULLS THE PLUG OUT! Things start smoking, and John yells and the Engineer has to drop his whateveritis, and a warrior comes in to re-arrest the flown jailbird that is the Engineer. Carol and John hug.

Back in the palace thing, the First Elder and the City Administrator/Second Elder are talking about how terrible the Engineer is for being a horrible kidnapping criminal; subtly, the CA/SE asks whether he’s named his accomplice yet; he hasn’t. Luckily for him. Enter Susan and Barbara, just as the First Elder exclaims that if there’s one thing he can’t stand it’s accusation without clear proof, which the CA/SE reiterates pointedly; looks like Team Defiance will have to find some.

Anyway, Babs and Susan have apparently been interrogating the Engineer (!) and have ascertained that the Doctor and Ian have been sent off with duff maps and duff weapons; the First Elder assures them that the Sensorite responsible will die for this outrage and again responds to a practical crisis by getting all Emo about it…which goes down like a lead balloon with Babs in particular:

The CA/SE is scandalised by what he deems to be Barbara’s insolence, but Barbara gives zero fucks, telling the First Elder to figure out who his friends are and save them. I may just be reading into the faces of others my own happiness that Babs is back and kicking ass, but I love the fact that, at the point where the First Elder goes off on his Emo tangent, Susan automatically looks to Babs to get shit sorted. I adore these two.

This is basically the Golden Rule of Who.

Anyway, as you may have noticed, the First Elder doesn’t have a plan, so Babs comes up with one: get a proper map and find the Space Bros themselves with as much help as the First Elder can give; the CA/SE bangs on about his suspicions, the two women pull the most glorious faces, and then the First Elder, reasoning that the Doctor (to whom he refers as a human being) has put his life in danger for the Sensorite nation, so he’ll help as much as he can. Sorted.

Back in the aqueduct, Ian is tempting fate by observing that whatever’s out there hasn’t attacked them yet…at which point the beastly moaning starts up again. The Doctor tells Ian ‘courage, my boy—both hands’, which is perplexing, but hey Ian seems to dig it. Ian spots something moving slightly up ahead of them, at which point one of my favourite things in the episode occurs: the Doctor rolls up the map like a baton and hands it to Ian in what I can only assume is an attempt to arm his Space Bro, and he looks stupidly pleased with himself and I’m just dying. What the flying flange do you expect Ian to do with a rolled-up paper, Doctor? Swat some bluebottles? Use it as a telescope to see ahead? Use it to poke things? I have no idea. But bless him, he goes for it.

And oh it seems to work sort of because a raggedy guy emerges from the darkness, grabbing at Ian (or rather the outstretched map); they grapple and the man gets away. But ooh look! Ian’s grabbed a badge off his attacker—a badge which reads ‘INEER’ but which Billy reads as ‘INNER’, and which presumably refers to the rank of ‘ENGINEER’ ; they’re some of the surviving humans from the exploding spaceship! And they’ve been poisoning the water! Why? Ian may ask but the Doctor doesn’t know, so they’re away to ask the trampy engineer.

Meanwhile, back in the city, Babs is looking at a model city and has come up with a plan:

BARBARA: Tell me, can I use one of your mind-transmitters?
FIRST-ELDER: You have my permission to try. But how will it help you?

Oh my god the look Susan gives her is fantastic.

Me too, Susan.

Because of course Babs knows Susan’s a budding telepath and Susan is clearly itching to stretch herself a bit and she can see where this is going.

So Barbara’s plan is that she and John will go to look for Ian and the Doctor while Susan gives them telepathic instructions from the map room and guides them out! Brilliant! Susan doesn’t need a transmitter because she’s super gifted and all that, but Babs does, so they give it a test run and they’re both ever-so pleased with themselves when it works. There being no time like the present, Babs hops to it, pausing only to tell the First Elder to make sure there’s a trustworthy warrior left with her girl. And Carol’s going to help Susan, too! GO TEAM DEFIANCE!

And it seems I’m not the only one gushing over Babs this week, as the First Elder seems rather taken with her, too:

FIRST-ELDER: A very capable human being.
SUSAN: Yes, she is.
FIRST-ELDER: Gentle, yet with strong determination and courage.

Susan’s fierce pride in her friend is everything.

She and the First Elder talk about the wisdom of trusting implicitly for a bit, which is a bit sad as Susan at her age shouldn’t be the one saying impossibly tragic things like responding to the First Elder’s statement that the Sensorite’s whole way of life is based on trust by worrying that it might be their ‘downfall’. And when the First Sensorite muses that he and his people clearly have much to learn from the people of Earth, something unutterably gorgeous happens: Susan talks about her home.

Gifs by cleowho

EXCEPT YOU WON'T, SUSAN. *SOB*

It has only just occurred to me, what with this description being echoed in Gridlock, how much like his granddaughter Ten is. And that gives me all the feels. Also I just listened to ‘This Is Gallifrey: Our Childhood, Our Home’ for the first time in years and for the love of all that’s holy how long will it take for the Doctor to talk about Susan in any great detail in Capaldi-era Who?

Anyway, back to business: the Doctor is vandalising the set so that he and Ian won’t end up going round in circles, and the Doctor seems highly amused at the thought that the humans might be preparing an ambush:

Gifs by cleowho

Indeed he’s happy as a pig in shite, and is so merry burbling away about collecting evidence, calculating it, and pursuing to its inevitable end that he totally ignores the very important thing Ian is trying to tell him, which is that a beard guy with a sharpened stake is advancing on them from Ian’s end of the tunnel…that is until the Doctor spots a guy with a sharpened stake facing him at his end of the tunnel. A delightful bit of business follows, where the Doctor and Ian are clearly unaware that they are each facing an opponent and try to back up the passage so they can jump out at them…but of course they just back into one another and realise they’re surrounded. I laughed out loud. Their best bet is now to embrace this ambush situation and not do anything to alarm them. So they try to stay chill.

The stake-wielding tramps back them into some pipes and rasp that they’ve come at last; the Doctor improvs wildly and tells them that he and Ian came to find them; Ian plays along. The humans want to know whether the Sensorites are dead and whether the Space Bros have a spaceship; the Space Bros assure them that the latter at least is the case, assure them that they are alone, and wonder whether the trampy guys might want to pop out for a bit of sunshine; the trampy guys take the Space Bros to their leader.

Chesterchucklevision

Elsewhere in the tunnels, Babs is using the transmitter to speak to Susan but is a little indistinct; Carol suggests—in a neat budget-saving trick—that both women speak the words as they think them to make them clearer, which of course means no voiceovers and the like. Babs relays the directions to John and he leads them through the tunnels.

Meanwhile, the Space Bros are being marched to meet the leader of the Trampy Humans at stakepoint, and again have to swear they’re alone.

Except they’re not, because now Babara and The Man John (as the Sensorites call him) have spotted Ian’s scrunched-up fly-swatter and conjecture that the Space Bros chucked it once they realised it was all jiggered up; they decide to keep it because, as Babs points out, they need the tampered-with map as evidence against the CA/SE.

As the Space Bros are driven deeper into the caves, Susan keeps Carol and the First Elder abreast of the situation as Babs gets in touch to tell her she and John have found the Doctor’s trail of wanton set vandalism. So instead of Susan directing them, now Babs and Susan will be telling Susan where they’re going so Susan can keep track of them on the map. And it seems the Doctor is continuing to make the marks ‘in case we have to make a run for it, my dear boy’:

Gif by cleowho

Why is everyone so endearing this week?

Everyone in the map room is trying to work out what’s happened to Ian and the Doctor (with more finger-crossing from Susan), but we don’t have to wonder because we can see: they’re now meeting the Commander of the Beardy Colonials and he is both Colonial in accent and beardy of face (and looks a bit like Jeremy Irons). He’s also crazy and convinced he’s at war with the Sensorites. And it looks like we’ve found the poisoners.

Anyway, the Doctor and Ian are improvising like hell; the Doctor tells him the ‘war’ with the Sensorites is over; when the Commander asks whether the planet is now theirs completely, Ian assures them that it is so. So much smile-and-nod. The Commander goes on to tell the Space Bros about how he used to have a spaceship but two of his men deserted and pretended they had to go back to Earth for reinforcements so he blew up the spaceship, but he can get another one now because the planet is rich so he’ll be rich and yeah he’s completely bonkers.

But uh-oh, Ian’s let on he knows about the Molybdenum which makes the Commander jumpy and fighty, and to make things worse Babs and John (well, unspecified intruders) have been detected, which sends the Commander into a spiral of paranoia. He accuses them of being spies and is about to court martial them or something, but Ian cares less about this than the sudden appearance of none other than the Bestie herself! So sorry about that, Commander, but there’s very little in time or space can get in the way of their periodic reunions.

And oh glory, the Doctor is improvising again, telling the Beardy Colonials that the two extra humans are part of the welcoming committee; Barbara tries to elbow Ian and asks what’s going on, at which he rather hilariously mutters ‘play it cool’. Babs takes it in her stride, obv, and Ian tells them Barbara is their navigator who’s going to lead them back. Good save. Everyone moves out.

At the entrance to the aqueduct, the Sensorite warriors are lying in wait, and the humans are indeed apprehended. The Commander, however, does not come quietly but yells about treachery and is subsequently stunned by one of the Sensorites, who claims the moral high ground by not killing him. Right on. The Doctor reckons this shows great promise for the Sensorites’ future. Patronising sod.

Back at the palace, Barbara and Ian are tying up a few loose ends with the First Elder: Captain Maitland (where the hell has he been for the past three episodes?) is taking the stray humans home in his spaceship, the Second Elder is being banished to the outer wastes on the strength of the evidence of the jiggered map, and the humans probably mucked about with the transmitters or opened their minds until they went crazy and were left only with ‘the game they played—the game of war’. Very profound. But people died. Things that were not resolved include how the humans faked that beastie in the tunnels and mangled the Doctor’s frockcoat, but who cares, because the lock is back in the Tardis and they’re ready for off.

Back in the Tardis, Susan is sulking because she won’t be able to use telepathy away from the super-high frequencies or whatever it is on the Sense Sphere. Poor Susan. It was fun while it lasted. The Doctor, however, after an initial quip about nobody liking an eavesdropper, seems to have left his earlier douchebaggery behind and is actually being supportive for a change:

DOCTOR: I think you obviously have a gift in that direction and when we get home to our own place I think we should try and perfect it, mm?
SUSAN: When will we get back Grandfather?
DOCTOR: I don't know my dear, this old ship of mine seems to be an aimless thing. However, we don't worry about it do we? Do you?
SUSAN: Sometimes I feel I'd like to belong somewhere; not just be a wanderer...Still, I'm not unhappy.
DOCTOR: Good, good.

ONE DAY. ONE DAY WE SHALL KNOW WHAT HAPPENED TO THESE TWO.

Enter Babs and Ian, and the four of them watch Maitland et al take off in their ship. Ian wrecks the moment by making a quip about how the Doctor doesn’t know where the hell he’s going, which provokes a startling reaction from the Doctor: he flips out and tells Ian that if he’s so dissatisfied he can get the hell off his ship at the very next place they land. WOW, who shat in your porridge, Doctor? You literally just called your own ship aimless.

IS THE DOCTOR SERIOUS? WILL OUR HUMANS BE DUMPED IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE/NOWHEN BECAUSE THE DOCTOR LOST HIS TEMPER? WHY DID HE LOSE HIS TEMPER SO ABRUPTLY? IS THIS BECAUSE HE’S DECIDED HE WANTS TO GO BACK TO GALLIFREY WITH SUSAN SO HE NEEDS TO GET RID OF THE HUMANS SHARPISH? WHY IS MY SPACE FAMILY FALLING APART? WHERE WILL THEY LAND NEXT?

Summary (as applicable to this episode)

Does it pass the Bechdel test? With flying colours.

Is the gaze problematic? A bit lingering on Carol's kidnap face.

Is/are the woman companion(s) dressed 'for the Dads'? No.

Does a woman fall over/twist her ankle (whilst running from peril)? No.

Does a woman wander off alone for the sole dramatic purpose of getting into trouble so she can be rescued later? Carol. Though as has been pointed out, the Doctor and Ian seem to have wandered off mostly so they can be rescued by the women and John. Though the main dramatic purpose of their desperate venture is meeting the poison colonials.

Is/are the woman companion(s) captured? Carol.

Does the Doctor/a man companion/any other man have to rescue the woman companion(s) from peril? John gets pretty macho about rescuing Carol despite the fact that it's the women who work out she has to be nearby and Carol herself who pulls the plug on the laser with which she's about to be murdered, effectively saving herself from electric death only to stand around waiting for John to come and give her a cuddle.

Is a woman placed under threat of actual bodily harm? Yup.

Is/are the woman companion's/s' first/only reaction(s) to peril gratuitous screaming? No.

Does a woman companion go into hysterics over something reasonably minor? No.

Is a woman 'spared' the ordeal of having to do/witness something unpleasant by a man who makes a decision on her behalf/keeps her deliberately ignorant? YES. And Susan is suitably exasperated.

Does a man automatically disbelieve or belittle something a woman (companion) says happened to her? No.

Does a man talk over a woman or talk about a woman as though she isn't there? Not that I can recall.

Does the woman companion have to be calmed/comforted by the Doctor/a man companion/a man? Carol needs a hug. Understandably.

Is a woman the first/only person to be (most gratuitously) menaced by the episode's antagonist(s)? Carol. The Doctor and Ian get poked with sticks a bit, though.

Is a man shamed into doing/not doing something because the alternative is a woman doing/not doing something? No.

Does the woman companion come up with a plan? YES. Barbara's plan with the though transference navigation is a cracker.

Does the woman companion do something stupid/banal/weird which inspires a man to be a Man with a Plan? No.

Does a woman come up with a theory and is it ridiculed by the Doctor/a man? No.

Does a woman call the Doctor out on his bullshit? Not to his face, but Susan is pretty done with it this week.

Does a woman get to be a badass? Yes. Many women in many ways.

Is the young, strong, straight, white male lead the person most often in control of the situation? I'd say Barbara is pretty on it this week.

Is there past/future/alien sexism? Not especially.

Does a 'present'-day character call anybody out on past/future/alien sexism? No.

Does an past/future/alien person have the hots for a woman companion and is it reciprocated? The First Elder seems pretty taken with Babs, but in an emo way rather than a pervy way.

Did a woman write/direct/produce this episode? No/No/Yes.

Verdict

Barbara is back and all is right with the world. She gets to come up with an excellent plan, play with thought transference, and rescue the errant Space Bros from being lost in the dark with crazy colonial types. Even better, her return doesn't mean Susan gets sidelined but rather ensures that she gets lots of interesting stuff to do. However, it's enormously rubbish that Susan won't get to continue being a telepath after this week. No wonder Carole Ann Ford left. I also love that she gets to talk about Gallifrey and that her description here is carried forwards into New Who. As I mentioned earlier, I've had something of an epiphany this week as to how like his granddaughter Ten is, which makes me feel things. The Doctor and Ian get to have a bit of fun wandering about with rolled-up maps for weapons, and the Doctor finally gets to be supportive of Susan, though it does smack a little of placating her with promises of letting her fulfil her telepathic potential when they get home seeing as they will probably definitely never get home. Let's hope Susan gets lots of interesting stuff to do in the next historical to compensate for her loss of thought transference and doesn't end up being sidelined with a migraine for several episodes...