Terror of the Autons

I am usually known as the Master

A thought occurred to me while watching this story. It is fairly normal for the primary villain of the story to be mentioned or somewhat alluded to in the story title. However, despite being a central antagonist of the Doctor, the Master is never actually mentioned in any story title. The closest I can think of is probably The Witch's Familiar but it's really only by process of elimination that one is able to surmise that Missy is probably the titular witch. I just thought it an interesting bit of trivia.

Plot Summary

The story opens with the Master appearing at a local circus. He hypnotizes the owner and together they steal a Nestene Conscious sphere on loan to a museum from UNIT. Next, the Master breaks into a radio telescope. He kills the operator and hypnotizes the scientist in charge. He hooks up the Nestene sphere and allows it to become fully charged with the Auton consciousness.

The Doctor is given a new assistant, Jo Grant, after Liz Shaw returned to Cambridge. The Doctor doesn't want her but when the Brigadier informs him that he will have to tell her, the Doctor buckles and accepts her. UNIT is informed of the theft of the Nestene sphere as well as the break in at the radio telescope and they go to investigate. While there, the Doctor is met by another Time Lord who informs him that the Master has appeared on Earth and is behind these events.

The Master next hypnotizes the son of a plastics factory owner, Rex, and commissions a large order for a series of plastic dummies. The Doctor urges the Brigadier to check all the plastic factories in looking for the Master. Jo goes along in the hunt and discovers the Master talking with Rex. She accidentally knocks over some crates and is discovered. The Master hypnotizes her and is informed that the Doctor is investigating. He implants a post-hypnotic suggestion in Jo and then sends her back with no memory of these events.

The factory manager confronts Rex on the scale of the order and how there is no paperwork filed for it. Rex goes to see the Master and is shocked to see several dummies come to life. Meanwhile, UNIT soldiers discover the case they shipped the Nestene sphere in and bring it back to headquarters. Jo begins to open it with the Doctor realizing that it is a bomb rigged by the Master. The Doctor grabs the box and throws it out the window where it explodes in the river. The conflict between the Master's instructions and her natural instincts to fight have caused Jo to lapse into a catatonic state but the Doctor slowly brings her around, although she can't remember anything of her experience beyond the fact that it was in an office.

The Master confronts the factory manager and kills him with a living plastic chair. When the factory owner arrives to find out what happened, the Master attempts to hypnotize him as well but he resists. He insists that Rex get rid of the Master and go back to their standard production. The Master plants a mini heat activated auton in the owner's car but the owner turns the heat off before the auton fully activates.

UNIT discovers that near the site of the robbery, there had been a circus. The Doctor travels to this circus at it's next location to see if anyone working there had seen the missing scientist. Despite being told not to go, Jo hides in Bessie's backseat and observes the Doctor asking around with a picture of the scientist.

Back at home, the factory owner tells his wife about what happened and sets the Auton doll to the side. She leaves to make tea. The doll, now near the radiator, comes to live again and kills the owner. The wife hears the commotion and sees her husband dead with the doll lying near by.

At the circus, the Doctor is grabbed by the hypnotized ringmaster and the strong man. Alerted to the Doctor's presence, the Master orders the hypnotized scientist to kill the Doctor. Jo sneaks behind the strong man, knocks him out and frees the Doctor. The scientist comes in with a grenade but the Doctor talks to him and he fights the control. He runs out and tried to get rid of the grenade but it detonates, killing him. The Doctor retrieves the Master's TARDIS key and steals his dematerialization circuit. He and Jo are attacked by the circus workers but are pulled away from the mob a two police officers and put them in their car. The Brigadier and Captain Yates drive up shortly afterwards to see the police car drive off.

The police car pulls into an old quarry and when asking about it, the Doctor discovers the police men are Autons. He distracts the Autons and he and Jo flee the car and hide in the grass nearby. The Brigadier pulls up and attracts the Auton's attention. One UNIT soldier is killed but the soldiers distract the Autons enough to get the Doctor and Jo into the car and drive away.

The Master moves into the next phase of his plan, crafting and giving away plastic daffodils. UNIT continues to search for the factory but has been unable to do so. They do receive a number of death reports, most unrelated. However, the first two are the plastic factory owner and manager killed in the previous episode. The Doctor and Jo ask the widow some questions and take the Auton doll after hearing her story. Leaving the doll and Jo at the lab, the Doctor and the Brigadier head to the plastics factory. While gone, a technician installs a new telephone with a longer cord for the Doctor.

The Doctor and the Brigadier find the plastics factory recently abandoned but their suspicions are confirmed when a safe is opened to reveal and Auton waiting for the Doctor as a booby trap. The Doctor seals it back in and heads back to the lab. While he was out, the Auton doll activated due to being near an active bunson burner. It attacks Jo but Captain Yates shoots it, destroying it. Learning this, the Doctor plans a test and asks everyone to leave the room. Before he can start, the telephone rings. It is the Master, who had posed as the technician. He sends a signal over the phone line and the phone cord comes activates and attacks the Doctor. The Doctor calls for help and the Brigadier bursts into the room and pulls the cord out of the wall, severing the connection.

The van being used by the Master and the Autons to hand out the flowers is spotted in the same quarry the Doctor and Jo had been taken to earlier. UNIT troops head out and the Brigadier calls the RAF requesting an air strike, which will occur in an hour and a half. The Doctor tries to activate the flower with heat but is unable to. He tells Jo to call the Brigadier on the radio to request the air strike be delayed but she is unable to get a signal. Instead, the radio signal activates the flower which then sprays Jo with a plastic film, covering her nose and mouth. The Doctor is able to get it off and the plastic then dissolves when he breathes on it.
The Doctor tells Jo to tell the minister who alerted UNIT of the deaths of this. After she leaves, the Master enters and prepares to kill the Doctor. The Doctor holds him off when he reveals that he is holding the dematerialization circuit from the Master's TARDIS (although it's actually the faulty circuit from the Doctor's TARDIS). The Master threatens to kill Jo unless the Doctor hands it over when she walks back in. The Doctor prepares to concede but the Master changes his mind when Jo slips about the air strike. Instead, the Master forces them to drive to the quarry and enter the van. The Brigadier calls off the air strike just in time.

The Doctor and Jo are tied up but as the Master and Autons are conferring about their next move, the Doctor is able to tap the brake pedal and send the Brigadier a message using the brake lights in code. The Master then drives the bus towards the radio telescope to activate the flowers and bring in the Nestene Consciousness in force. The Doctor and Jo, having managed to free themselves from their bonds, leap from the bus when Rex awakens from being knocked out by the Autons and grabs the wheel to avoid crashing into the gate. They knock him out again and the Autons begin to fire at the UNIT soldiers while the Master runs up to activate the telescope. The Doctor and the Brigadier run after him.

The Master activates the telescope and the Nestene begin to be absorbed into the machinery. The Doctor confronts the Master and makes him realize that the Nestene will turn on him once they are on Earth in force. The two work together to reverse the process. It works and the Nestene Consciousness is sent back into space. It also pulls back the Nestene in bodies and the Autons engaged with the UNIT troops fall over lifeless.

The Master flees back to the van but the troops have him surrounded. He comes out appearing to surrender and then pulls a gun. Captain Yates shoots him down but when the Doctor examines him, he finds that it is Rex in a Master mask, having been rehypnotized. The van then drives away and the Master escapes. Afterwards, the Doctor reveals that he still has the Master's dematerialization circuit so he is trapped on Earth and they should be seeing him again in the future.

Analysis

I'm a little conflicted about this story. On one hand, I was getting a bit bored with the set up and wanted them to get to the primary focus of the Master's plan faster. On the other hand, there were cuts in scenes that were so fast, it felt like there was more there but it was edited out for time. So I can't figure out if this story would have been better or worse if it had been expanded out to five episodes. But as is, it wasn't bad.

Weighing the two, I think I would prefer the five episodes because then a better resolution might have been achieved. I greatly enjoyed the Master and his plan was a fairly sound one. Each plan to kill the Doctor was reasonable and could have worked if it were not for the Doctor's ingenuity or a bit of good luck here and there. However, the Doctor managing to convince the Master in the heat of the moment that the Nestene were going to betray him and him turning on them just didn't work for me. The Master should have anticipated that possibility or even if he hadn't, it should have taken more than a single word from the Doctor to make him change his allegiance. I don't know that having an extra episode would have changed the writing of that outcome, but perhaps it would have given more space to force the Master to see his mistake.

Outside of the ending, the story was pretty good. The set up was a bit slow and I was glad that things finally started to get going in Episode Three regarding the Master's primary plan. I greatly enjoyed all the performances although I think Captain Yates was a bit stiff in his deliveries. Jo was nice and I appreciate her earnestness even if tempered with a little less scientific knowledge and a bit more klutziness.

One other thing that slaps you around in this story is Barry Letts' love of CSO (color separation overlay), an early form of green screening. In some cases it is necessary, such as when the Auton doll comes to life and attacks people. That allowed a little person to play the doll but still make it look doll's size as it moved. However, there are other areas where it just used in the background to make it look like a site is on location when it is in a studio. When you have actual location shots mixed in with the story, these just make the scenes look cheap and not planned well. The two worst ones were when the Master steals the Nestene sphere and when the doll attacks the factory owner.

In the theft scene, CSO is used for the museum backdrop. But because they didn't have the best visual, the guard it shot in close up both in his objection and his being knocked out by the circus ringmaster. It looks very clunky and cheap. In the doll scene, the doll attacks the owner while the wife is in the kitchen. They had a set for the living room and it was mixed with the required CSO around the doll. That was fine, but they cut to a scene of the wife hearing the commotion in the kitchen and that was done in CSO. Cutting between the two, made the kitchen look very odd and badly sized. The wife then bursts into the room and her reaction must have been done in pick up work because CSO was used around her screaming rather than it being on set. It was again the contrast which made it look so odd. It also forced a tight close up shot of her screaming reaction the whole time rather than a zoom to a close up reaction.

Little things like this just chip away at the story and take you out of it, especially when you contrast it with filmed location shoots or conventional studio shooting. The CSO providing the sky background of the telescope control room was a lot more palatable and easy to ignore with the modern eye.

Overall, it was a middling effort. There were portions of the story that were well done but others that fell flat. Some production efforts looked great, others looked cheap. I'm going to have to ding it a little bit extra for the ending though. A better effort could have been there in my opinion. That's actually a bit of a shame because the Master scenes are definitely worth watching again even if the rest falls a touch short.

Overall personal score: 3 out of 5.