Terror Of The Autons: Ranking - 53

 

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 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 show has been renewed after coming as closer to cancellation as it ever had (so far) and 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. As much as I love season 7 it is quite talky and budget-stretched and in many ways its a testing ground for all the ideas that are about to be poured into this new season, which shakes things up almost as much as last time. The 3^rd 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. Mike Yates is a slightly more complex Benton, a dashing hero whose more capable of thinking for himself and doing the dashing around the Brig used to do (he seems an odd sort of character to introduce now, but it might be that the production team figured that they needed some sort of continuity after a series of captains who only stayed for a story at a time, or maybe it was to cover Nicholas Courtney’s occasional bouts of depression and take the pressure off him if he needed it). 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. Then there’s Jo Grant, UNIT’s cute girl, someone whose 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 Dr’s side from the minute 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’ and 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 Katy Manning is too warm and likeable for that and her character has just the right blend of courage and feistiness in there too (which tends to show itself when someone she loves is threatened, making her a good match for the Dr as that’s one of his traits too). 

Legend has it that her character wasn’t meant to be like this at all, she was meant to be more of a cool blonde bombshell, till Katy walked into the interview room without her contacts in, tripped over everything in sight and endeared herself to everyone, with the script hastily re-written for her as more of a dizzy blonde. She’s instantly perfect – not for UNIT of course, having the first day from hell (its 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 Dr’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 Dr (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 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 1^st Master’s not like the others, he’s a gentleman whose just pretending to be gentle, not a ranting psychopath. And talking of which The Master is instantly perfect too in his debut, the Dr’s mirror rather than his equal, so that on the surface he’s much more charming and finds it easier to mix with Earth’s elite than the Dr has patience for, but underneath it he’s far more Bolshoi and rebellious than the Dr even when he’s screaming at officials. The Dr’s response to hearing The Master has followed him to Earth is that ‘he causes nothing but trouble’, but this isn’t Batman’s Joker, The Master is someone who can join in with the status quo and disrupt it from the inside in a way the 3^rd 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). DW producer Barry Letts had been an actor before he turned to the backroom (one of the reasons why his era of the show was such a happy one – many producers are scared of actors and see them as getting in the way of their love of deadlines and need for budgets, but Barry is one of the few people in the ‘Whoniverse’ I’ve never heard anyone have even a slight bad word against) and Barry had worked with Roger Delgado before, encouraging 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 Dr guessing. We know the Dr is predictably good, but Tghe Master is never predictably evil (not yet anyway); instead he’s the Dr’s opposite because he is unpredictable and you never know whether he’s going to charm, snarl or hypnotize his way out of trouble. Interestingly we first meet The Master in a circus which seems odd compared to his usual roles as Vicars, Scientists and Examiners. It still kind of fits though: this first incarnation is a showman, a ringmaster, one whose firmly in control of his acts and pulls all their strings with a combination of titbits, whips and brainwashing. It fits with the fakeness of this carnival world, which 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 Dr is at his core. He’s a plastic Doctor if you will, a mannequin dressed up in similar clothes but whose warmth is all for show. 

 The Master’s also taken over a radio telescope and a plastic factory where he’s been in league with the Nestene consciousness, who survived their first encounter with the Dr and still have the power to build autons, deadly killer mannequins. 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 plastic sofa that suffocates its victims (you see kids – even your hiding place behind your saofa isn’t safe!), 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). 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. This is a new twist on the old idea of DW 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 DW maybe goes a bit too far (alongside ‘Deadly Assassin’s drowning; Letts admitted as much after getting letters from anxious parents 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 DW though and few stories deliver it with quite so much brightness and glee as this story does: this isn’t some lurking shadow in some dimly lit basement but an invasion in full daylight and technicolour (its the first story to properly make use of being in colour, after the beiges and greys of season 7) and images from this story really stamp themselves into your memory banks long after the story finishes. Talking of memories there’s a neat conclusion, repeating the idea of ‘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?!) and the showdown in the 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. 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 DW was playing the way 99% of viewers could). This is DW at its most glam rock – its too colourful and surface to be punk and not rebellious enough for rock and while it wouldn’t normally be an era that’s to my taste, after so many years of so many earnest stories its breezy brightness is like a breath of fresh air: DW seems fun again for the first time in years, give or take the dead bodies. 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. If there’s a problem its that this story passes by in such a rush – but even that’s a delight in context following the lengthy talky stories of season 7, a cartoon to their film noir that instantly grabs your attention and never lets go. Yes there are better, deeper, braver DW stories than this one but few are as entertaining, with ‘Autons’ a real highpoint of the 3^rd Dr’s era. Recycling plastic, it turns out, isn’t just good for the environment but good for DW too – the only real shame is that it will take another 34 years until our 3^rd Auton encounter (and by contrast a whole week until The master shows up again,but that’s another story...)

+ 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 DW’s Achilles heel. 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, while 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.

- Did this episode over-run slightly? It’s not just that this story feels like highlights from season 7 sped up and with the duller more talky bits taken out, more like someone has hacked into it with a pair of scissors. Some dialogue overlaps scenes it doesn’t belong in, characters leave one room and suddenly appear in another with no sense of how they got there and people in one place are reacting to events in another without us always seeing how they found out about them. To some extent that’s great – this is such a modern method of storytelling that ‘Terror’ seems more like new-Who than any 20^th century made till Ace turns up – but like many a modern story you can’t help but wish they’d slow down just a little bit and let us keep up with the plot before they throw more stuff at us. Sometimes boring can be good (amazingly ‘Colony In Space’ comes only three stories after this – and that goes too far the other way; they really should have switched the four and six parters around this season).