Terror of the Autons

Chapter The 156th, where a supposedly Machiavellian genius turns out not to be much cop, really.

Plot:

The Master, a Time Lord renegade and exile who knew the Doctor back on Gallifrey, arrives on Earth, steals the one Nestene globe left over from the previous invasion in Spearhead from Space, and brings back the Autons, because... well, it's unclear. He wants to team up with the Nestene meanies to destroy humanity, because... well that's unclear too. It's likely he's doing all this just to annoy the Doctor. Anyway, there follows a lot of convoluted attempts to blow up or hypnotise or kidnap the Doctor, or his new assistant Jo, or the plucky fellows of UNIT. In parallel, the Master teams up with the manager of a plastics factory and builds lots of prototypes of plastic objects that can be brought to life and kill people. He settles on plastic daffodils, and hires a coach to do a promotional tour of the country, giving the fake flowers away, town by town, like super villains do. The plan is to send a radio signal to activate the daffs, which then shoot a quick setting plastic over the face of anyone nearby, suffocating them; in the confusion of a wave of deaths, the Nestene invading force will land and take over. The Doctor and UNIT attack before the signal can be sent, but the Master still has time to use a radio telescope to signal the Nestene Consciousness into corporeal existence on Earth. Before it can fully materialise, though, the Doctor foils the Master's plan by... telling him not to do it. The Master is persuaded to turn on his co-collaborators, just like supervillains sometimes are apparently. The Autons defeated, the Master escapes. But the Doctor has swiped a vital component from the Master's TARDIS, meaning they are both stuck on Earth and all set for a rematch or four.

Context:

I watched this one with the whole fam, old school style: one episode a week over the course of a month. No particular reason for this, but it has been more difficult to find big swathes of time during lockdown for watching Doctor Who. Both the Better Half and I are lucky enough to be working full-time from home, and have been since the start of our isolation 10 weeks ago. On top of that, we're home schooling the three kids (boys of 13 and 10, girl of 8). The notion I had at the start of the lockdown about having extra time to tackle new projects was naive. We've done a bit of work in the garden, and streamed a few films, but that's about it. There's still time, though; the government of the UK is relaxing lockdown rules as of now, but neither myself or the Better Half need to go back into our offices to continue working, so we're going to be staying home as much as possible. This is a personal decision, but I still feel very guilty that I went with government advice before the lockdown (including travelling to London and congregating with a large number of people at a BFI Doctor Who event - not quite Cheltenham but still makes me feel bad looking back). The government were too slow to introduce strict lockdown measures, and I believe they are too quick now in lifting them; I don't want to make the same mistake again of paying their advice too much heed. Maybe I'll get to write that novel or learn a foreign language yet. Or, most likely I'll just watch a bit more Doctor Who. It's all good.

Anyway, the kids generally found the story diverting enough. The Better Half was very vocal about how rude and insufferable the Doctor acts during the story. The infamous description by the Doctor of Jo in their first scene together when she ruins his experiment, that she's a "ham fisted bun vendor" was misheard as "ham fisted bum vendor", which caused many minutes of hilarity. I had to pause the DVD to let the laughter die down.

First time round:

I'd seen a couple of intriguing clips of Terror of the Autons in black and white on Resistance is Useless; this was a documentary shown on BBC2 in early 1992 just before a season of repeats. It was just over a year later when it came out on VHS, and by this time it was in colour. Clever people, Who fans and BBC engineers, had worked out how to produce a broadcast standard colour version by merging various surviving versions of differing qualities. I bought a copy in WHSmiths when I was making a necessary trip to Durham (as I happened to be in my second year of university there). It was very exciting at the time to be getting full colour versions of some of the Jon Pertwee stories released on VHS that had previously only been available in black and white. To celebrate this unique selling point, the spines of the video boxes were adorned with a paintbrush logo, annoying the purist collectors by making them inconsistent with the rest of the collection, and meaning nothing to anyone else. Great days.

Reaction:

I'll start by saying that Spearhead from Space - the Auton story that, like Terror, kicked off a new series of Doctor Who the previous year - is one of my all-time favourite Doctor Who stories. Even if you don't like it as much as me, I think you'd have to concede that it made a big splash: first ever colour story, introducing a new approach and new regular cast for the show, and it's all made very glossily on film. Plus, it has a great new monster race, who work well both visually and conceptually: they like all things plastic, they copy people, they create a soldier class that look like shop window dummies; it's all very good stuff. Down to the smallest detail, Spearhead gets it right. The sound effects for example, are very distinctive and memorable - the buzzing drone sound that accompanies an Auton whenever it's close, the satisfying whirr when the guns emerge from their plastic hands, the "ka-choo" whoosh when they fire. All this and more made it almost certain that there would be a sequel. A year later, and here it is, a technicolour blast to re-introduce the Doctor and UNIT to the nation's Saturday afternoons.

The second invasion plan of the Nestene Consciousness is not, though, quite as solid as the first. In Spearhead, they arrive in small numbers, take over a plastic factory secretly where they can mass produce troops, then gradually replace people in positions of power with plastic facsimiles while smuggling those troops into multiple cities as shop window dummies, waiting to be activated. This is all pretty sensible (it should be, as the Nestenes clearly have been monitoring Earth broadcasts for a while, and cribbed their plot from old episodes of Quatermass). In the sequel, they don't bother with starting small, nor copying people in positions of power, and the main thrust of their invasion plan is to hire a coach and very slowly do a magical mystery tour of the shires of England, handing out plastic flowers in giant Frank Sidebottom heads; stealth is definitely not in it. By some miracle, despite their drawing massive amounts of attention to themselves, the Doctor and UNIT don't find out about this activity until the Autons have given out enough of these flowers to endanger a significant number of lives. Or so they say. Presumably, they have allowed for the percentage of households that have thrown their plastic flower away, or left it in a drawer, or even put it on display in a room that won't have any people coming in to it at the crucial moment when the signal is sent. If the idea is that the deaths have to happen all at the same time to create diversionary chaos, it seems a bit of a wonky plan, to say the least.

What, or rather who, has happened to make the plan so silly compared to last time? The Master. He loves an over-complicated plan to the point of ridiculousness. This isn't just fan snarkiness after the fact either, it's a key and intended part of the character. In later stories in other eras, he is said to be someone who would "delay an execution to pull the wings off a fly" or "get dizzy if he tried to walk in a straight line", but it's right there from day one too. There's a conversation when the Doctor and the Master finally meet in Terror where the Doctor comments that the Master's contribution to the Nestene plan is "vicious, complicated and inefficient", and that this is typical of his way of thinking. Now, one already has a monster in this story that can't invade a planet unless there's a convenient plastics factory to hand; it may seem to be stretching things too far to also add a villain that deliberately delights in making things unnecessarily convoluted.

The problem is that the Master was conceived without any obvious motivations for his actions (more on that later), and also to be a vehicle for a specific actor; this later aspect of the character's genesis makes up for any other deficiencies: Roger Delgado is perfectly cast, works well as a foil for Pertwee, and can suavely deliver any line or action, no matter how crazy. The action has been cleverly structured to keep the Doctor apart from his adversary until the end, with only a brief phone call before that (this approach must have made an impression on the young Russell T Davies as he reused it later in The Sound of Drums). Obviously, if the Master can sneak into UNIT HQ in disguise when the Doctor's out to put in a Nestene-controlled plastic telephone flex as a trap, then he could probably just sneak into UNIT HQ in disguise when the Doctor's in to, you know, shoot him. Shoot him, if you want him dead - just shoot him. To me, Delgado plays this as just a game, that the Master doesn't really want to kill the Doctor, but needs to keep up the pretence. The only time the script gives him something to which he can't grant verisimilitude is at the climax, where the Master has to volte face and turn against the Nestenes. Delgado tries his best, but it's pretty unbelievable, and would be a hard ask of anyone to find some truth in that moment.

The other key difference between Spearhead and Terror of the Autons is the producer Barry Letts, who is also on directing duties. The story a year before had been produced by Derrick Sherwin, and Sherwin had commissioned and handed over the structure and scripts for the rest of the year too. Terror of the Autons is the first opportunity for Letts to fully put his stamp on the show. The accent is much more on family-friendly fun; the scientific and military aspects of UNIT are toned down and the adult self-possessed assistant Liz Shaw is replaced by Katy Manning, who plays Jo as a child, getting things wrong and falling into trouble. The succession of different captains assisting the Brig is replaced with a permanent character in the shape of Mike Yates. The introduction of the wicked uncle character of the twinkly, sly Delgado as the Master completes the UNIT family, as they have since become known. This format, with increasing breaks for off world adventures with The Doctor doing jobs for the Time Lords - another change Letts would make, but which obviously there's no sign of yet in Terror besides the hint of a Time Lord turning up to offer guidance - would remain in place for the next three years.

As well as cast, there's tonal changes instigated in this story. The Doctor Who stories broadcast in 1970 starting with Spearhead were in colour, but they didn't have the colour of Terror of the Autons, and the stories that followed it. It's positively gaudy in places. Again, the changes go towards the more fun and family-friendly - the Autons aren't silent killers accompanied by that sinister buzzing noise anymore, they speak, which makes them less frightening somehow. It wasn't enough of a change, though, to avoid this episode being considered controversially frightening by many at the time - with dolls coming to life, policeman turning into blank-faced killers, and so on. There was quite an outcry. This would be something that they would continue to tweak as things went along, until the balance was right. This spirit of innovation extended to the technical side too. Letts as director pushed the technology, with lots of use of cutting edge green-screen work, to such an extent that a lot of it looks rubbish now. I can't fault the ambition. If it weren't for the existence of Spearhead from Space as a yardstick, it would be fine, but because of it's sequel - practically remake - status, the comparisons can't be avoided. For all its triumphs, Terror looks a bit tacky compared to the original.

Connectivity: 

Plastic. Both the alien consciousness in Terror of the Autons and the alien pathogen in Praxeus love plastic.

Deeper Thoughts:

The Conan Doyle Master Plan. The story told often afterwards about the creation of the character of the Master, is that Barry Letts and script editor Terrance Dicks, having seen the relationship between the Doctor and the Brigadier as something like that between Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson, realised that the Doctor needed his equivalent of Professor Moriarty. They were referring, as most people do when they allude to Holmes and Moriarty, to the perception that's grown up about what that protagonist / antagonist relationship was like, not what's written in the books. Moriarty appears in only one Sherlock Holmes story, and is mentioned in a few more. I've read a number of Sherlock Holmes stories and have never come across any reference to Moriarty. You couldn't miss the Master when he was first introduced - he was in every single story for a year. Given the nature of Doyle's character (a shadowy figure that guides and protects the criminals of London in exchange for a cut of profits), he could have been behind any of the plots of any of the books, I suppose, but he most definitely wasn't a front man, as the Master is. He only shows his hand in The Final Problem, as I understand it, in retaliation at Sherlock's impact to the schemes in which he has a vested interest. There is a clear and understandable motivation for Moriarty: he's a criminal kingpin.

The Master doesn't have such a motivation. If he were a mercenary, or at least were a bit mercenary, it would make sense of his teaming up with the Autons for profit, but there's no sign of that, and no evidence in stories before or since that either Time Lords or Nestenes use cash. As noted above, if his aim is to destroy the Doctor, he could go about it much more efficiently, and he passes up at least one obvious opportunity to do this in every story. He clearly wants to get the Doctor's attention, often going out of his way to ensure his supposed nemesis finds out about whatever plans he's got on the go. But why? With a blank space in place of a rationale for the character's behaviour, successive writers and the audience at home have filled it in with all sorts of ideas and theories, some more sensible than others. A prevailing fan theory for a long time in the 1980s explained the rivalry by imagining that the Master was the Doctor's brother; other stories have suggested - not necessarily very effectively - that he's just an amoral agent of chaos, and stories after Delgado's sad untimely death established that he had used up all his Time Lord lives, and made his raison d'etre just d'etre - his own survival. Again, though, this usually failed to convince as the plots he was involved in - with a couple of exceptions - weren't anything to do with extending his life.


Dodgy motivation is a flaw that often occurs with the big sci-fi adventure genre's supervillain role, but it seems more so with the Master. Perhaps this is because he was created just to be someone else's dark reflection, so it's unlikely he's going to have much life of his own. It's odd that he was so created, as the Doctor had managed to get by without a Moriarty figure for seven years. The main reason for this was that the Doctor has the Daleks. Yes, they lacked a single figure that could appear in a confrontation scene with our hero (this would eventually be rectified with the creation of Davros later), but still - if most people had been asked before Terror of the Autons who was the Doctor's equivalent of Moriarty - the answer would have come back naming Skaro's finest. The Daleks had not appeared in the show for a while when Terror of the Autons was broadcast, of course, and the resulting creation of the Master gave the new series a third 'big bad' to shuffle in to the series finales alongside the Daleks and the Cybermen, or combinations thereof. This also means - as Steven Moffat has pointed out regarding the Daleks - these top 3 baddies, because they return for the most rematches and the Doctor always has to ultimately win, are also paradoxically the top 3 most defeated too.

In Summary:

A good introduction for the Master and Jo, but the rest is a little bit plasticky.