Terror of the Autons

The Doctor’s exile on Earth enters its second year with the Doctor still co-operating with the UNIT forces in exchange for shelter and facilities to attempt to repair the TARDIS. Liz Shaw has left and the Doctor is assigned a new assistant in the form of field agent Josephine (Jo) Grant although she is not the scientific help the Doctor was hoping for. An act of what appears to be sabotage draws UNIT and the Doctor to a radio telescope where the Doctor learns that a rival Time Lord known as the Master has arrived on Earth with the aim of destroying the planet and the Doctor along with it. And to achieve this, the Master has reactivated a dormant Nestene energy unit and brought the menace of the Autons back to Earth…

Here starts the longest running feud in the series, with the Doctor and the Master pitted against each other like a time travelling Holmes and Moriarty. The Master’s obsession with killing the Doctor will lead to millions of deaths throughout the series, and he will pull every dirty trick he knows to get the job done. The fun part about the Master is that he is so unerringly polite to people while he plans their doom, but he is coldly efficient and makes few mistakes. One might be trusting the Nestenes, though. The narrative of the episode indicates that the Doctor knows the Master of old and things between them have never been good, but this is the first any of us watching the series have heard about it over seven years. But wait a sec – the Master has had a retcon debut story, The Dark Path, where he met the second Doctor and hypnotized Victoria. Jo gets a taste of that power herself in this story, which is pretty nerve wracking for her first day on the job.

Jo Grant will by the time she leaves be established as the favourite companion of the Pertwee years, serving three of the five at the Doctor’s side sometimes saving the day, other times making dreadful mistakes and gaffes, but always being someone the Doctor can depend on. Despite making a mess of the Doctor’s lab on her first day Jo does earn his trust quickly. Unlike Liz, Jo isn’t a scientist but a fully trained field agent who has been put on the Brigadier by forces over his head (Jo’s uncle is a man in a high ranking government position) and the Brigadier in turn puts her onto the Doctor and dusts his hands. Jo doesn’t actually have any rank within UNIT but the Brigadier is her commanding officer, she just doesn’t have to report to any of the other officers in the chain of command.

And here’s our third series debut: Captain Mike Yates. He just arrives on screen as if he has always been there, and even professes to remember the first Auton invasion although he was not there on screen. At the time the character was introduced it was all accepted as canon and Yates continued on as part of the UNIT family for the duration of the Pertwee years, but since then he has been retconned as well through the previously mentioned novels Eye of the Giant, The Scales of Injustice and Devil Goblins From Neptune so his backstory is a bit more solid. It’s not like ne needed that much of an intro really but he will in future episodes be changed by his experiences with UNIT so there’s a lot of development ahead for this character.

The Autons themselves are bit different here; they made their debut in Spearhead from Space as shop window dummies but now with a bit of creative flair from the Master are able to channel their essence into almost anything made of plastic including plastic flowers, dolls, plastic cables, even plastic furniture. I imagine that their return at the time would have been likened to the return of the femmebots in Bionic Woman as both are a deadly menace more or less hiding in plain sight and seem to be unstoppable. They can speak this time as well, although they sound a bit like the Cybermen. The mission has not changed though: conquer Earth. Kill everyone. Everyone. As with Spearhead from Space we do not get a really good look at a Nestene properly and its true form is still left to our imaginations, although the artists creating covers for the novelizations back in the day had a pretty good crack at it and produced a truly terrifying vision of one which would be impossible to create on a BBC budget in the 1970s.

The Master’s presence will dominate the entire run of the season with him appearing in every story, something which no other enemy of the Doctor has managed yet. It’s debatable that if Roger Delgado had not made such a compelling go of the role there may not have been a Master anywhere else but in the Pertwee years, but the character would endure and continue to return in regenerated forms right to the final episode of the classic series in 1989. The Master would make a return to the new series as well in 2007 but then be the victim of some of the worst revisionist crap the series attempted when in 2014 the character would regenerate again and return as a female version with all the dignity and menace of the original wiped out.

But that rant is yet to come, politically incorrect as it might be.

NEXT EPISODE: THE MIND OF EVIL