It is just a little bit odd having the Autons back already. It's even odder thinking that they won't actually appear on the program again until 2005. For all that they're one of the more famous Doctor Who monsters, they've actually only ever shown up prominently on the program four times in its whole history. Surely this must be rectified sometime? Because they're absolutely brilliant. What was, a season ago, a fairly scary and uncanny human-like monstrosity in the form of the mannequins, can now be just about anything. The range of plastics that the Nestene can control is expanded upon, meaning that almost anything can now become an object of menace. You watch every phone wire, daffodil, and doll in the story warily, knowing it could jump to life at any moment. The paranoia mixes with the knowledge that every facet of our modern world is permeated by plastics, and that in the face of an enemy like this, our industrialization could be our own undoing.
Needless to say, it's all very clever, both in terms of giving us one of the scariest monsters we've had so far, and for highlighting one of the deficiencies of modern civilization in a quite startling way, namely its reliance on environmentally unfriendly (and apparently murderous!) plastics. And just in case that wasn't enough for the bargain, we get one of the series' most iconic characters introduced in the form of the Master. Delgado is immediately convincing in the role, his high-class charm and evil eyebrows healthily tempered by the inherent silliness of the character. The story smartly holds off his meeting with the Doctor until the last half of the serial, and I was surprised once Delgado actually came face-to-face with Pertwee just how much I'd been anticipating it. It's profoundly odd how the Doctor says at the end that he's so looking forward to sparring with the Master again, when he's just killed dozens of people, but you know what? So am I.
Here we also bid a cheerful hello to Katy Manning as the lovable Jo Grant. It must be said that the framing of her introduction leaves a lot to be desired, as the Brigadier smirkingly tells the Doctor that he doesn't need a highly qualified scientist like Liz, but rather someone to "pass you your test tubes and tell you how brilliant you are". What a load of crap. The attitude the program is taking (by which I mean Barry Letts, and possibly Terrance Dicks, although I'm not sure how much he is to be implicated in this) is really rather retrogressive, but if Katy Manning is what we get out of the bargain then I suppose I can't complain. Because I confess, she did charm me basically from moment zero, and I sense that Jo's best days are ahead of her.
Holmes's dark streak of humor continues when McDermott dies in Episode Two, smothered to death in a rather horrifying fashion by a plastic chair. Then the hypnotized Rex Farrel hits the intercom and asks, "Sylvia, will you check Mister McDermott's entitlement on termination of employment, please?" That had me in stitches for minutes on end. The script is terribly clever, and only heightened by strong performances, such as those by Michael Wisher as Farrel, Delgado as the Master, and of course Pertwee as the Doctor. The "Action Doctor" trend continues, but for my money, the more memorable Doctor moment from this serial comes when he's defusing the explosive in the radio telescope, and the delightfully understated way Pertwee reads "a bomb". I absolutely have to give due praise to Terry Walsh, whose dramatic fall as one of the Autons in Episode Three was apparently an accident! That car wasn't supposed to tap him off the edge of the hill, but credit to him, he just got back up and kept Auton-ing. It's an incredible sequence.
There's very little to fault with this story, so even though the tonal issues surrounding the changes in the cast affected my enjoyment in a way, I still found this a very strong story. I'll be looking forward to seeing The Mind of Evil next.
(Modified from the original posted at Gallifrey Base on 25 March 2021.)
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