Terror Of The Autons
(Season 8, Dr 3 with Jo and UNIT, 2-23/1/1971, producer: Barry Letts, script editor: Terrance Dicks, writer: Robert Holmes, director: Barry Letts)
Rank: 53
'I'm an auton girl in an auton world,
Made from plastic - I'm fantastic!
I'll hand you a flower - you'll be dead within the hour
Unless you meet my Master. Then it'll be faster!
Call me on the phone when you're home alone
When you'll suffocate - baby I can't wait!
I'll send you a doll who looks just like a troll
He's dreamy - till he gets steamy!
And then you'll wake up dead with something wrapped around your head
And only then you'll have caught on - you're dating an Auton!'
Another story with a simple plot about plastic mannequins taking over the world a year after ‘Spearhead From Space’? Did they think we wouldn’t notice they were recycling plastic? What do they take us for? Dummies?!? Only ‘Terror Of The Autons’ is much more than just a facsimile of what happened just four stories earlier and the characters we meet this time around are much more than just mannequins. This is effectively another re-boot for the series now that the Barry Letts/Terrance Dicks era feel more comfortable and the producer is firmly in charge rather than playing catch-up, taking the elements of the ‘Earthbound’ format they feel are working (most of the same writers and actors, with a few important new additions) and dropping a few things that aren’t (the longer stories and the more adult cerebral feel). Mostly, though, it’s a victory lap: Dr Who was due to be cancelled following ‘Inferno’ if the viewing figures were still as low as they had been by season six but they’ve doubled and in some cases tripled and there’s a growing sense of confidence that this relatively new to TV production team know what they’re doing. Oddly enough the show becomes more contradictory: more child-friendly yet also more immediately scary, with an Earthbound format that features a new timelord in a central position and even though there are some of the most adult themes ever in the series coming up, that can match the intelligent horror of anything happening over on the BBC’s big new rival ‘Doomwatch’, the show has never been closer to its cartoon appearances in ‘TV Comic’ and it’s new home ‘Countdown’ (aka ‘TV Action’). Indeed even The Radio Times picked up on this, advertising the new season of Who with a ‘cartoon’ version of the story on the front cover (with The Master’s picture largest, much to Pertwee’s chagrin as his co-star hadn’t even been on telly yet and a lot of fans only half paying attention saw the Dr Who logo and wondered if his part had been re-cast). As happened last time the Autons are a nice easy concept we can understand straight away so we can be introduced to all the new toys that have been added to the box. The 3rd Dr’s still there of course, but he’s re-written as a cuddlier, friendlier figure, a benevolent uncle rather than a stern grandfather. The Brigadier is still nominally in charge but he’s more of a partner in crime from now on than an obstacle who puts saving his planet by any means before listening to timelords. Benton is the one fixed point in a changing world, but is getting more space to be Benton than he ever had before. And there are no less than three new characters to meet.
There’s a new captain to
replace the sundry interchangeable ‘Jimmys’ that the show has kept giving us. Mike
Yates is a slightly more complex Benton, a dashing hero who’s more capable of
thinking for himself and doing the dashing around the Brig used to do. He
doesn’t really work as a character until he becomes (spoilers) an unlikely
betrayer a couple of years later, something they couldn’t really have done with
the Brig or Benton, but he adds to the feeling of ‘family’ in the UNIT era, the
gawky teenager finding independence. Yates seems an odd sort of character to
introduce in retrospect, given that he doesn’t actually get to do much with so
many characters sharing the limelight and the intended romance with Jo is a
non-starter. I never understood why they didn’t simply try that dynamic with
Benton, who has more chemistry with the new companion that Richard Franklin
ever will. Officially Yates was introduced after Letts saw some old stories and
thought the Ian/Barbara Ben/Polly and Jamie/Victoria/Zoe dynamic worked well,
though it might well be to have a ‘senior officer’ in play to cover Nicholas
Courtney’s occasional bouts of depression and take the pressure off him if he
needed it (it’s at its worst in this story, with scenes re-written when
Courtney was at his worst – losing his best friend at filming, Caroline John,
and having new members of the cast probably didn’t help his often shaky
confidence as an actor. To his credit Pertwee realised this and started
spending more time with him, the pair becoming firm friends from this era on –
despite all the story’s about Jon’s vanity and ego, he was a sensitive soul
with a big heart who was loyal to the people he admired. Other stars would have
tried to get him sacked for showing weakness; Tom Baker for one).
Then there’s Jo Grant, someone who’s the
opposite of Liz Shaw’s feminist from the last series in so many ways,
inexperienced and enthusiastic, loyal to a fault and automatically taking the Doctor’s
side from the second she meets him. To some she’s a backwards step after Zoe’s
massive intelligence and Liz’s university credentials, but Jo Grant is our
‘eyes’ and ears’ inside UNIT, asking all the questions everyone else knows the
answers to already. She plays up to the ‘paternal’ side of the 3rd
Doctor’s character and allows the writers to give him some softer moments,
starting with the moment he tries to sack her and finds he can’t. More out of her depth more than anyone we’ve
seen on the show outside Jamie (who she’s like in more ways than people
realise) Jo could so easily have been irritating, a backwards step in a series
trying to reach a new level of sophistication and keep up with the children
who’d grown into adults during the 1960s, but instead she’s endearing: Katy
Manning is too warm and likeable for anyone to be annoyed with. She’s no drip
either: usually companions in Who get less interesting as time goes on and
writer’s make each one more generic, but Jo stays true to her goofy hippie
principles from first to last and keeps surprising us, with sudden moments of
being tough or independent or sudden abilities we haven’t seen before (she’s
even better at escapology in this story than The Doctor!) She’s as clumsy as
Ryan will be later (before he came along I had her and Harry down as the first
dyspraxics on the show) but she’s a lot more independent and fiercely
courageous, usually when someone she cares for is in trouble. To an extent Jo
is entirely Katy’s creation: the draft scripts for this year were written with
a tougher ‘Emma Peel’ type of companion in mind, a cool blonde bombshell (which
is why Jo suddenly has these moments of power and toughness) but after a full
day of auditioning actresses who all looked and sounded the same Letts was
tickled by Katy’s audition where she was the archetypal dizzy blonde who turned
up late, walked into the table and improvised her script as she’d left her
glasses at home and couldn’t see. She was always accident prone: she deserved
some luck after losing a promising five year contract with MGM films by having
a nasty car crash before filming was due to start, when she got dropped (you
can still see her leg scars in some shots, though not in this story). By chance
Jon Pertwee had seen her in the BBC foyer working on another job and had
suggested his producer ‘get someone like her’ for the role, little knowing
she’d already applied for the audition. Even so Katy had a rude awakening,
falling over during a running sequence on her first day of shooting and tearing
a ligament (talk about method acting!), which is why Jo is randomly sits down
across a lot of this story, with a line added about Jo hurting herself during
her fall from the coach (although she’s limping way before this, poor thing).
Pertwee took to her immediately, rounding on the production assistant who joked
they’d have to replace her (which, had he known it or not, happened to be Nicholas
John, her predecessor Caroline’s brother) – that sense of protection never left
for the rest of their time on the show together.Although she’s also capable of
being protective to The Doctor, seeing past his extra centuries and
authoritarian ways to realise he’s as lost as she is sometimes (this sets her
out as different to Liz, who acted more his ‘equal’ but yet seemed more in awe
of him; Jo sees him as a superior in most things but happy to take charge where
he isn’t, such as knowing how to handle people). She’s instantly perfect – not
for UNIT of course, having the first day from hell (it’s not everyone who
nearly blows up their bosses on their first day of work hypnotised or not,
while her first scene sees her upsetting the Doctor’s experiment with my second
favourite insult in DW that I use more than I should: ‘You ham-fisted bun
vendor!’, a line beaten only by ‘Brain Of
Morbius’ ‘Chicken-brained biological disaster’) and not for the Doctor (who
spends their first episode trying to break it to her that she’s hopeless as his
new assistant), but perfect for us at home, a warm-hearted character we can
love and root for in amongst the straight-laced soldiers. Even The Master (the
black sheep of the UNIT family) develops a soft spot for Jo and will later ask
after her, without the taunts of other companions the way he does, say, Tegan,
Peri or Bill.
Then again this first Master, making his debut here too, is not like the other incarnations, he’s a gentleman who’s just pretending to be gentle, not a ranting psychopath or borderline insane like the others. We know the Doctor is predictably good, but The Master is never predictably evil (not yet anyway); instead he’s the Doctor’s mirror opposite because he is unpredictable and you never know whether he’s going to charm, snarl or hypnotize his way out of trouble. The threat of The Master comes from the fact that he always feels in control and can schmooze anybody, while The Doctor struggles to keep his emotions in check, ruffling feathers of people in power that The Master knows just how to charm. Roger Delgado is instantly perfect too, the Doctor’s mirror rather than his equal and full of all the qualities he doesn’t have, there to destroy the establishment while pretending to uphold it as The Doctor (trying to save everyone) is seen as outside it. The Doctor’s response to hearing The Master has followed him to Earth is that ‘that jackanapes causes nothing but trouble’, but The Master is someone who can join in with the status quo and disrupt it from the inside in a way the 3rd Dr never could. That makes him the perfect foe for this particular Earthbound Dr, whose fought off interchangeable bureaucrats till now without any of them really sticking in the memory – The Master, though, is impossible to forget (its all too easy to empathise with the people he hypnotises left right and centre, especially in this story – I can’t take my eyes off Roger Delgado either). The Master knows when to keep quiet and be subservient when he has to be, to blend in, to hide in the background which the most flamboyant of all Doctors could never do. His character was invented after Barry and Terrance met to discuss the next year and realised that, rather than trying to introduce a similar but different baddy each week, they could have one versatile character who could team up with anyone. Barry knew just who to play him too, an old friend he’d once crossed swords with during his acting days (literally in the series ‘Francis Drake’; one of the reasons Barry’s stint was such a happy one was that he saw actors as fellow creatives rather than people who got in the way of deadlines and budgets like other producers) and who he’d reluctantly turned down for one role already for not being quite right (we don’t know which one but I’d like to think it was Channing from ‘Spearhead In Space’ – The Master is the same character exaggerated and more ‘Human’, if that’s not an odd thing to say about a timelord). Delgado was only too happy, having worked with Pertwee before too and keen to get away from his typecasting as ‘shifty foreigners’ to play a ‘shifty alien’ (actually Delgado is an East End Londoner, the only Londoner in this era of the show, but his Spanish dad and Belgian mum have him exotic looking genetics. He isn’t Turkish, as some guidebooks assume though he played many Turkish roles). Letts encouraged Terrance Dicks and Robert Holmes to write the character around him rather than find an actor to fit. Roger was a truly sublime bit of casting, with moments of pure evil and great anger and frustration with the universe that peek out behind the curtain of civility just enough to keep us and the Doctor guessing. Strange, too, that The Master should signify a first move away from the most ‘Quatermassy’ period of the show, even though Roger Delgado was the only Who actor who was actually in it! (he’s the journalist in ‘II’, the one set in Carlisle).
Interestingly we first
meet The Master in a circus, which seems odd compared to his usual roles as
Vicars, Scientists and Examiners where he’s generally high up the social pecking
order. It still kind of fits though: this first incarnation is a showman, a
ringmaster, one who’s firmly in control of his acts and pulls all their strings
with a combination of titbits, whips and brainwashing. The fakeness of this
carnival world reflects the way The Master can blend in with the real world by
hiding his real self, which is why the plastic Autons are such a good fit for
him – they’re different sides to the same coin, as he’s an intelligent Auton
who can think for himself but is never ‘real’ and authentic in this world the
way the Doctor always is at his core. He’s a plastic Doctor if you will, a
mannequin dressed up in similar clothes but who’s warmth is all for show. Circuses
in literature tend to be the ‘opposite’ of modern industrial life; they’re the
romantic image that people run away to, where you work just as hard but t
something colourful and bright rather than grey and drab. It’s the sort of
place people look down on but secretly want to be in, ‘separate’ from society with
its own set hierarchy and roles, often used by satirists as a metaphor for the ‘real’
establishment with its fake roles and the seriousness with which it takes daft
jobs like lion-taming or throwing custard pies (woe betide anyone who doesn’t pull
their weight in the circus, except the boss who is stereotypically lazy but too
high up the ‘food chain’ to criticise). It’s very much the opposite of the
establishment that The Master pretends to come from, with some nice sub-plots
from a typically anarchic Holmes that it’s all a con anyway, that all people in
the ‘establishment’ are clowns and circus freaks who ran away in a different
direction. The civil servants in this story are even more out of their depth
than usual and try to stop The Doctor at every turn, before he reveals he’s one
of them (with lots of blackmailing digs at ‘Tubby’ Rowlands, the very nickname
suggesting a life of comfort and excess, cut off from the ‘real’ world). Jo is
a nepo baby foisted on The Brigadier because of her Uncle at the United Nations
even though she’s patently hopeless and the last person who should be there (a
typically clever Holmes line has Jo protest about taking general science A
level in episode one then admitting she flunked it a few episodes later.
Holmes, who always had a bee in his bonnet about how poor Britain’s education
system was and how it was who you know that got you decent jobs rather than
what you know, even plays this theme out between his two timelords, when The
Master gets a better grade in ‘cosmic science’, even though The Doctor clearly
understands how the ‘cosmos’ works better than The Master ever will). Even for
Homes this script is stuffed with brilliant one-loners designed to cut the pomposity
of authority down to size, from The Doctor moaning to Jo that ‘sometimes I
think ‘military intelligence’ is a contradiction in terms’ to his cutting
description of the upper classes obsessed by money, although the best scene might
be when The Doctor, despite four stories and counting of butting heads against
The Brigadier, praises him to his bosses and wishes they’d work as hard.
The Master’s plan is to
take over a radio telescope and a plastic factory where he’s been in league with
the Nestene consciousness. Characteristically it’s as convoluted as all future
Master plans to come (like I say, a showman). While plastic is everywhere and
by rights the Nestene could take over everyone in one go they’re really a distraction,
with humanity in such a panic at the sudden death of 50,000 people that they
don’t notice the mass invasion. The nestene just need to warm up the plastic
(which Dicks changed from the original plan that they would be kick-started by
rain, adding a note to Holmes that any alien race intelligent and observant
enough to be a threat would know not to rely on British weather!) Oddly (for
character reasons if not plot purposes) this Doctor who has happily wiped out
Daleks, Cybermen and Ice Warriors never quite got round to destroying the
nestene consciousness last time, feeling it would be ‘tantamount to murder’
(has he learned nothing from leaving the similar Great Intelligence spheres
intact at the end of ‘The Abominable
Snowmen’ and causing ‘The Web Of Fear’?!)
Once more the Autons are a more plausible substitute for The Yeti, deadly
killer mannequins who make sense in ‘our’ world. While there’s no single scene
as iconic as the one of the Autons breaking through the shop windows in ‘Spearhead’,
this story ups the ante with several new deadly inventions: plastic dolls that
come to life, plastic daffodils (like the ones religious movements liked
handing out to travellers at airports and train stations), a even killer phone
cords (a real shame the Dr didn’t bring one of our era mobiles back to his
laboratory or he’d have been spared a cliffhanger). Once again Homes writes a
story that juggles a general feeling of despair at how much plastic tat is
ending up in society and making life seem artificial and false with the
jumpscares that this story could happen to you – every home would have
something plastic nearby to the person watching this on TV. In fact we even
have a plastic sofa that suffocates its victims (you see kids – even your hiding
place behind your sofa isn’t safe! Holmes, who has by now properly caught up
with the history of a series he barely knew existed when his debut script ‘The Krotons’
was passed on to production team by ‘Out Of The Unknown’, throws in another
injoke, of having part of this story take place in an actual quarry being an actual
quarry for a change).
While, presumably, the
bodyless Nestene consciousness is asexual, this one seems to identify more as a
1970s kind of girly girl given that its swapped playing around with 1970s
boyish past-times like, umm, playing with balls for trolls. The starting point
came when Holmes was given a Christmas present that really left him scratching
his head: one of the Danish ‘good luck’ trolls that had been all the rage
across the 1960s. They’d been created by John Dam in 1959 when he couldn’t
afford to buy his little girl a present so made one instead, but all her
friends wanted one too so he created a business that spread across Denmark to
the rest of the world (where they tended to be better known as ‘Those Dam
Trolls’). To their fans they were a sort of anti-doll, an ugly baby that fitted
the 1960s (and very Dr Who) idea that everything was worthy of love and they
became quite popular with boys as a ‘toy’ to care for that didn’t necessarily
mean they’d be teased for being feminine (‘Look at this ugly mug, my toy’s
going to eat your doll up! No don’t cry Mr Uglymug, here’s a hug when nobody’s
looking….) Holmes, though didn’t understand the appeal of something so ugly and
claimed it wasn’t the sort of thing you gave someone you liked so much as
someone you wanted to kill. Having got this first idea, in quick succession he
found his detergent had come with a free plastic flower he hadn’t asked for, he
spotted a hideous plastic chair in a local furniture store and saw a warning on
a TV advert about the dangers of plastic bags and children. So, after a story
about plastic mannequins, this is a new twist on the old idea of Dr Who making
the ordinary extraordinary, only this story goes a stage further than pretty
much any other and makes ordinary household objects deadly. Some of the deaths
in this story are gruesome indeed (Poor Farrel! Michael Wisher is superb in his
second DW appearance, in a humane part the complete opposite of Davros) and one
of two times Dr Who maybe goes a bit too far (alongside ‘Deadly Assassin’s drowning). These
deaths aren’t poignant cerebral horrors that happen at a distance: the camera
lingers on each and every one, as we see the suffering up close and having them
be household objects come to life rather than something obviously ‘fantastical’
made them a new level of scary to viewers of a certain age. The Dailys Mail and
Telegraph both ran campaigns about how scary the show had become, instigating a
deluge of letters (there had only been two before the articles were published),
Scotland Yard wrote in protesting that children would now be afraid of
approaching policeman after one turns out to be an Auton and for the first of a
handful of times Dr Who was even mentioned in the House of (time?) Lords, in a
debate about mass media, Baroness Bacon (no, seriously) raising the point that
Dr Who was on too early for young children. Letts admitted they’d gone too far after
getting a letter from an anxious parent concerned their children had stopped
going to bed with their dolls in case they tried to strangle them in the night
and never tried anything quite like this again.
There’s a place for
visceral horror in Dr Who though and scaring children is good for them, as long
as it’s done in the right way and surrounded by a comforting family (as Letts
always emphasised Dr Who should be seen). All drama series need dramatic
tension and having something come to life that a child understands is far more
immediate than something happening on an alien world. It’s a way of practising
how to be safe, of recognising peril and what to do about it and being aware
that the world can be a scary place, but with an element of ‘fun’.
After all, the violence in this story is never gratuitous; it’s always a natural part of the story and the evil that The Doctor definitively defeats. Despite the ‘real’ location too, this story is also more obviously a fantasy cartoon, full of larger than life characters in a setting that never feels quite ‘real’. Putting all this against a circus is a masterstroke, as children are already inclined towards the idea that the normal rules of life don’t apply there (or did in 1970s when circuses were still relatively common), where everything is topsy turvy and you can see animals up close that are kept behind protective cages in zoos. There isn’t one in Tarminster by the way, if you were thinking of running away and joining up - actually it’s Barry Roberts’ Travelling Circus, which let the production team film during a special ‘extra day’ or two after a performance at Ley Bridge Road, Leyton. Pertwee had worked with Barry before and took him out for ‘extra lunches’, wangling just a basic fee and a credit for the circus that was sure to get fans flocking in return for cameo appearances by most of the circus - only the ‘Strongman’ is an actor, Roy Stewart who’d been ‘Toberman’ in ‘Tomb Of The Cyberman’ (though Katy, for one, was horrified at the state of the animals and complained to Letts, who secretly agreed – they talked about ‘accidentally’ setting the animals free at the end of filming but never did). The Master’s very cartoony threat, of the tissue compression eliminator’ (not that it’s called that by name until ‘Time-Flight’) is the perfect horrible ‘death’ for this character to bring too: he can take even leading authority figures and tear them down to size, his ego bigger than anyone and the scenes of Humans shrunk to dolls and abandoned in lunchboxes is a memorably gruesome image.
Also few stories deliver
such horror with quite so much brightness and glee as this story does: one of
the things Letts wanted to change was the relative drabness of season seven,
figuring that Dr Who would be a great series to exploit for the new colour TV
craze. This isn’t some lurking shadow in some dimly lit basement but an
invasion in full daylight and technicolour, it’s a horror that’s brought out
into the open and seen in all its glory. And what glory! There are reds and
oranges and yellows and greens galore and it’s arguably the first time Who has
been this in yer-face about being colourful. Ironically, even though the ‘real
world’ is in colour, somehow this makes it far more cartoony than half-seeing
something in shadows in black-and-white. Sometimes it feels there’s a bit too
much colour in fact, as if the series has been given ‘artificial flavourings’
that have exaggerated it, like it’s a pencil drawing that’s been coloured in by
a madman (to an extent it has: technically what we have today isn’t quite what
went out on air as this story was the second of three Pertwee stories to be
re-colourised in 1992-93 using black-and-white copies and ‘dots’ left in the
original that point to the initial colours and feels like witchcraft to me.
While ‘The Daemons’ looks good in some
scenes and less so in others and ‘The Mind Of
Evil’ looks better in black-and-white anyway, ‘Terror Of The Autons’ is
screaming out to be in colour and looks nothing in monochrome). ‘Terror’ is a
colourful story full of images designed to stamp themselves into your memory
banks long after the story finishes. It might not be the deepest or most
thoughtful story, but boy is it imaginative and exciting. Even as a big fan of
the more intellectual season seven, coming to this story after three fairly
lengthy and slow talky stories in a row it’s a revelation, a reminder of just
how vibrant Who can be.
Talking of memories
there’s a lot this story recycles, not just from ‘Spearhead’ but from ‘The Invasion’, where the baddy bites
off more than he can chew and had to get the Dr’s help to put things right
again (whose the dummy now then, eh?!) This story also shares those two story’s
use of radio technology and a memorable showdown around a telescope, a tiny
battle on an insignificant planet against the backdrop of mankind’s vision of
just how big and wide this universe is, rightly becomes such an iconic image in
the series they try it again with ‘Logopolis’
(the sadder, older, wiser, pastel version of this story where The Master comes
back from the dead). That’s in the future though: for now, in the present,
this is a cracking story where the stakes are high, the baddy is the greatest
evil genius around, the goodie is pushed to his limits trying to stop him and
there are some terrific lines from Robert Holmes at his funniest, delivering
the wry sense of humour for which he’ll become famous after a few false(ish)
starts with easily the best of his first four scripts. There’s a real joy and
verve to this script in fact which seems at odds with all the horror, but the
script walks a thin line between the two: the comedy enhances rather than
detracts from the death we see, while without it the horror would be too much
(I reckon that’s why Mary Whitehouse picked on this show as much as she did:
she didn’t have a sense of humour, so couldn’t see the fine balance Who was
playing the way 99% of viewers could). This is Dr Who at its most glam rock –
it’s too colourful and surface to be the punk show this series will become and
not rebellious enough for the rock it’s just been, while steadily moving on
from the psychedelia it used to be. While glam wouldn’t normally be an era
that’s to my taste, full of silly surface nonsense after years of proper
thinking, you can also see where it came from and why; after so many years of
so many earnest stories its breezy brightness is like a breath of fresh air. Dr
Who seems fun again for the first time in years, give or take the dead bodies,
something you can’t wait to tune back in to see.
In time this formula will
get as restricting as anything it was replacing, but here everything is new and
shiny and everyone has a bounce in their step. ‘Spearhead’ was already a great
story but this sequel has less time to spend on the ‘old’ timelord and lots on
the promising new one, with lots of extra clever ideas that help sell the dangers
of plastic even more. There are many, many scenes that stay with you – more than
all but a few other Who stories – from the doll woken up by the cold to The
Doctor being strangled by his own phoneline, to The Master’s unruffled air, to
the shock of the policeman driving a police car who turns out to be an Auton to
one of the best stunts ever in the series (stuntman and Pertwee double Terry
Walsh being hit by a car and crashing down into a quarry an impossible distance
only to get up again and start walking, something that sells The Auton’s indestructableness
so much better than before). Very little goes wrong: usually even the best Who
stories lose out on some effect or monster costume or ‘Dr Who acting’ but here
the most that goes wrong is that The Auton’s new ‘standardised’ look isn’t as
strong as the ‘old’ one when all the shop dummies looked different (complete with
silly boater hat, though even that fits a story partly about seeing through
authority figures). the title is a tad silly, smacking of a 1960s B-movie
(though still an improvement on working title ‘The Spray Of Death’, dropped
when the sub-plot got shifted back from being the original focus to episode
three). It’s maybe a bit of a sudden finale too, The Doctor working on his
solution, dimethysuphoxide (something he should have worked out quicker,
really, given that it’s been in constant use for dissolving carbons including
plastic since the 1860s and usually used in medical procedures as it can be
absorbed through the skin). Perhaps another is that this story passes by in
such a rush, as if you’re watching it on fast forward – but even that’s a
delight in context following the lengthy talky stories of season seven, a
cartoon to their film noir that instantly grabs your attention and never lets
go. For the most part its remarkable how watchable this is, another one of
those stories often used by fans to show non-fans because of how many things it
gets ‘right’ and how little it gets ‘wrong’. It’s a story brimming with confidence
in script and on screen in a way that few other ‘classic’ stories share. Yes
there are better, deeper, braver Dr Who stories than this one but few are as purely
entertaining, with ‘Terror’ a real highpoint of the 3rd Dr’s era. Recycling
plastic, it turns out, isn’t just good for the environment but good for Dr Who
too. The only real shame is that it will take another 34 years until our 3rd
Auton encounter (and by contrast a whole week until The Master shows up again, but
that’s another story...)
POSITIVES + One thing
that’s always intrigued me about the story is how consistently great the CSO
(Colour Separation Overlay – the era’s analogue version of CGI) is, while on
many of the other stories across the 1970s it will be Dr Who’s Achilles heel.
Some fans say it’s terrible in this story too, but to these eyes it’s pretty
good and called on to do all sorts of things, from laboratories to circuses to
moving toys (the colourisation helps maybe, removing the fuzzy blue lines there
on the original which I was too young to see). There are shots of the
troll-doll growing inside a very 1970s family home until it’s full size that
seem impressive now, never mind in 1971, despite the problems shooting it
(reportedly the costume designer for the Troll actor turned up late, drunk and
with the material still smelling so strongly of glue that, under the hot studio
lights, it made the actors pass out). The shot of a shrunken scientist, left to
rot inside his own lunchbox, is the sort of shot they’d have a hard time
pulling off today. This is such an effects heavy story that it could easily
have been torpedoed by shoddy FX taking you out of the reality and showing that
you’re just watching a TV programme, but instead they’re so good they heighten
the drama and makes you feel The Master and Nestene really can do anything.
Weirdly enough the closest to a ‘bad’ effect in the whole story are the scenes
of the countryside outside the various car windows, which seem rather obviously
painted in (yet ought to be the simplest to do, simply because they’d done
before – everything else is being ‘invented’ on the spot now all this is so new
in colour).
‘The Dark Path’ (1997) is one of the second Doctor
‘Missing Adventures’ by David A McIntee and is a prequel of sorts, featuring as
it does the ‘first’ appearance of the Roger Delgado Master. It’s an odd little
book, which despite featuring the 2nd Dr-Jamie-Victoria trio is more
in keeping with a late Pertwee era ‘space opera’ story, with Draconians and
interstellar wars set on a ‘bubble’ inside a neutron star named ‘Darkheart’
used by a race known as Chronovores to heal their sick. Our heroes and their
usual silly banter and rescuing each other from getting into scrapes seem
totally out of place in this story with such big and dangerous stakes,
especially the Doctor who’s usual ploy of keeping to the sidelines and watching
things fall apart is the opposite of what the 3rd Dr would do and
what the plot ‘needs’. The Master,
incidentally, hasn’t adopted that name yet and refers to himself as ‘Koschei’ –
at first he seems a ‘goodie’ from the way he saves Victoria from certain death,
only going all Masterish near the end. Indeed, this feels so utterly unlike
‘our’ Master that it would be tempting to see him as an earlier regeneration,
despite the Delgado likeness on the front cover, while that would also hint at
the sheer length of time it takes The Master to escape from ‘Darkheart’ and why
he has such a burning need for revenge because of it (even though, in true
Master fashion, he really brings all his problems on himself). Despite the
importance of the plot, it’s a bit of a slog to get through to be honest.
‘Synthespians’ (2004) is a ‘Past Doctors’ novel
starring the 6th Doctor and Peri, written by Craig Hinton. Notable
as one of the last Dr Who anythings published before the series came back to
telly it’s quite the nostalgia fest, one that puts the very different character
of the 6th Doctor in very much the same sort of situation
encountered by the 3rd in a story that’s a cross between ‘Terror Of The Autons’
and ‘Vengeance On Varos’.
The Tardis has landed on another planet obsessed with telly, with series from the
20th century enjoying a timely revival in the 101st, as
the Earth’s initial television signals spread into space and create an entire
culture by accident. The fake plasticness of celebrity culture and 1980s soap
operas obsessed with appearance is a good match for the Autons and there are
lots of pithy comments on the emptiness of fame, while the very real
no-holds-barred honesty of the 6th Doctor let loose in a place this
artificial is a joy to behold. You long for a sequel where The Autons get lost
in a world based on telly from the early 21st, all plastic implants and
scripted reality TV! It’s the plot that lets this one down slightly, as it has
nowhere to go after that great central idea and even the villain behind The
Autons, Walter J Mathieson, is as plastic and one-dimensional as they are. I
have to say though, I came to this novel having heard of its less-than-stellar
reputation and was surprised how much better it was than I feared.
There’s another variation on how Mike Yates joined
UNIT in ‘Vengeance Of The Stones’ (2013), part of Big Finish’s epic 50th
anniversary set ‘Destiny Of the Doctor’ which we’ve included under ‘The Stones Of Blood’,
given the similarities between the two plots. Yates is a junior army officer
posted in Scotland whose calm head under pressure and acceptance of weird
orders so impresses the Brigadier the older man remembers him when setting up
UNIT.
Previous ‘Inferno’ next ‘The
Mind Of Evil’
No comments:
Post a Comment