Terror of the Autons

12 May 2006, 12:41 am
Dorney
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Re: Day by Day

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Terror of the Autons 1

One of the great things about Doctor Who being back on is the reappearance of a phenomenon I’d sort of forgotten.

At the end of New Earth, in some of the more negative posts, people were saying ‘but Tooth and Claw looks fantastic’. And think back – whenever polls were being done, marking series one out of five, there was lots of talk of ‘I’ll have to save my 5/5 mark for episode N’.

It was one of the joys of being a fan in the old days – deciding what you were going to think of a story before you’d seen it. It’s in the same ballpark as deciding how good stories were on the basis of other fans opinions (a regular bugbear of mine), but we sort of did it to ourselves.

It’s surprising how many of these opinions stick around. For example, there are still people who think that The Happiness Patrol is worse than Silver Nemesis and is on the level of season 24 style stories, simply because of what it sounded like in advance.

The reason I bring this up is because I’ve done it myself. And once was about Terror of the Autons. You see, as a young fan, I knew I was going to love this one. I knew it was going to be the best story ever. Because it was going to be violent. Because that was all I knew. Not scary, violent. That’s why it was regarded as being quite cool.

I’m less keen now, if I’m honest. There’s a school of thought that suggests that Robert Holmes finds his feet with Spearhead from Space, and everything before is rubbish. I’m not convinced. The more I watch these stories, I think it takes a little bit longer before he figures out what he wants to write. Up til now, he’s writing what he thinks he ought to in stead. Terror of the Autons isn’t a man having fun. It’s a man writing by numbers.

Occasionally, you get glimpses of the Holmes we grow to love (mainly in gloriously witty flashes of dialogue). But whilst Spearhead is efficient, there’s no real personality to the writing (if you didn’t know, would you be able to tell who’d written it?), and Terror of the Autons… well…

Part One:
For a season opener, a very bitty episode. Scene comes after scene like lightning, the production team throwing everything at you in the hope something will grab you. We’re in a circus, we’re in a museum, we’re in a radio telescope, we’re in a plastics factory.

All this would be well and good if there was a sense of progression. But the clues are right there at the start. The Master lands at a circus (clearly deliberately as he knows the owner’s real name). And then it’s just ignored. It’s just there to look colourful and exciting and different. The episode lacks a structure. Lots of action, sure, but without any sense of coherency. Where’s it going?

This is even clearer in the radio telescope sequence with its bomb. There’s a lot of criticism of the trap itself (and fair play, it’s a dumb trap and makes no sense), but more to the point – it’s dealt with so quickly, you wonder why it’s there at all. There’s no time for tension, there’s no time for suspense. The Doctor just jumps to catch it – a desperately dull and un-Doctorish solution (why would hitting the floor set it off when hitting his hand doesn’t anyway?). It’s just another in a lot of set pieces filling in time, and hoping that one of them will lead to a plot.
In fact, if anything, it’s things to keep the Doctor occupied. This episode is really about the Master, and if anyone’s driving the story it’s him. He’s the first character we meet, and he’s moving the plot along whilst the Doctor does very little active investigation.

The Doctor is purely reactive in this episode, and I’m not sure I like it. There’s something deeply annoying about the plot turning up within ten minutes (the Doctor all but says ‘Ah, the Autons are invading again). Not only does it mean there’s not very far the Doctor can go (he knows who it is, and what they want, he’s just got to stop them), it’s weak for a sequel too, because it’s offering an extension rather than an elaboration. For all the characters, they know what they’re dealing with, making it all feel a little easy (they’re off searching through plastic factories already!). It also offers little for the viewers to get hooked on – we’re told, not shown. . The need for the exposition and investigation phase of a story is emphasised here. This story just starts too quickly. We haven’t had anything to grab us and draw us into the story, nothing to hook us.

Furthermore, none of this is helped by the short and scrappy scenes and the odd editing style: the vast majority of scenes, particularly towards the end of the episode, seem to cut in halfway through, and there appear to be whole chunks of story missing. What with the increased use of CSO and cramped sets this means that the whole episode has a very cheap look about it.

The biggest annoyance is the end of the episode, when having trod water for most of the first twenty minutes, there’s an undignified scramble for the finishing line (Jo finds the villains base/gets hypnotised/tries to bomb her new friends within five minutes – if those five minutes focused on her, then that’d be hard to buy, but they intercut it with scenes of Harry Towb getting annoyed!).

That’s not to say there’s nothing to like. Some of the incidental detail is fab (the technician’s conversation about eggs is lovely) and the unnamed Time Lord is great (his and the Doctor’s hints about their linked pasts are demystifying the Time Lords even here). There’s probably the most breathtakingly awkward camera shot in the show’s history (trying to get Jo in shot through the Doctor’s apparatus is harder than it sounds, apparently). Furthermore, Jo Grant is surprisingly loveable straight off, offering a direct contrast to the seriousness of the previous year, and more importantly, the Doctor’s pomposity. Her warmth warms us to him.

The other new regulars fare a little less well. Yates does nothing worth noticing in this episode. Just as surprisingly as with my liking for Jo, I find the Master a bit uninspiring so far. He just feels a little too generic. It probably doesn’t help that the costume and look are so determined to tell you how villainous he is – once again, told not shown. There’s an obviousness to it all, a dumbing down about him. We know he’s the bad guy because of how he looks rather than because of what he does.

Still – the episode’s enjoyable enough. If you’re twelve.

Part Two:
If confirmation were needed that this story is just about set pieces, you just have to look at the start of this episode. The Master is hounded by one of the staff of the plastics factory, and disposes of him. Within five minutes he’s got another one on his back, and he sets a trap for him as well. If you watch closely, it’s like Holmes has written the two characters as one (there are no other Master scenes between the two). I’d guess he might have had one character – and then couldn’t pick between two entertaining ways to kill them. Similarly, he describes his bomb as a gesture on the eve of battle (wonder what the volatiser was then?). The story doesn’t have a plot, a progression. It just recycles itself.

Furthermore, a lot of details just seem to be there to fill in time. Phillips is kidnapped and controlled for no obvious reason (and the moment he does something, the Doctor overcomes him annoyingly quickly). And the circus, once again. For all it being portrayed as part of the Master’s plan, it’s all terribly convoluted. It’s just there to look cool, and it barely manages that (where are all the best looking things about a circus – clowns, stilt-walkers, etc?). The whole redundant storylines would be easy to take down, but they’re so obvious it would feel like a waste of time.

The problem is that the story has no plot. No one seems to be doing anything. The Doctor sits in his workshop fart-arseing around like he’s got all the time in the world (notice how, when the circus news comes in, he’s working on the dimensional circuit from his TARDIS, not actively doing anything to help figure out the invasion, he’s leaving that to the proles). The Master just seems to sit in an office plotting overly complex ways of killing people (or hypnotising them – oddly he can’t seem to make his mind up. Sometimes he leaps straight to killing them: Goodge, McDermott; and hypnotises others: Phillips, Farrell Snr–attempted. Why he can’t be callous all the time it’s hard to tell. Maybe for the same reasons he’s phobic about killing people the same way. He’s always keen on variation…). The Master isn’t doing anything to further his plan; he’s just playing with himself.

Sure, stories are usually based around a series of obstacles for the protagonists, but these have to be on the route to a goal. They have to progress. The Doctor and the Master keep meeting the same obstacles. Over and over again. The story, having blown all its mystery straight off now has to actively straitjacket its protagonists with minor problems. It’s got nowhere to go, so it goes nowhere. There needs to be investigation or progression. There needs to be change. Events in a row don’t make a plot.

And for a story called ‘Terror of the Autons’, they ain’t in it much. The story, what it is, is a series of stand offs between the Doctor and the Master – and it’s only at the end of this episode that the Master uses Autons for the trap. Generally though, they’re just his bitches, and off-screen bitches at that (we’ve seen the proper mannequin versions for approximately twenty seconds in the two episodes to date!) It simply isn’t about an invasion on any level. The regulars are more focused on the diversions than anything else). Why on earth has he bothered with making Autons so far, as he’s getting all his dirty work done by other people (which seems mad – ‘yep, I’ve got myself some bullet proof warriors with inbuilt weaponry. I’ve got an enemy I want dead – shall I use my invincible killing force, or shall I use a hypnotised dizzy wench, a hypnotised Michael Caine impersonating scientist with all the will of a crayfish, a fat ringmaster and a strongman. Yep, that last lot’ll do!’).

Once more, it’s not all bad. The traps are admittedly fun, and there are plenty of cracking jokes (Holmes’ wit clearly marks him out from the regular writing team – they’re always portentous, he’s a gags man, and his flip, casual Doctor under pressure seems to define a lot of how we view the character, certainly roots a lot of the current series). I should also mention the first proper role for Michael Wisher, easily a match for Delgado’s easy charm). And the cliffhanger looks great (though precisely why the Auton’s aren’t moulded with a face in the first place is unclear).

Generally fun, but generally shallow.

Part Three:
I think I’ve figured out the little bit of ongoing plot this story has. There’s a hint in part two that the Master is filling in his time trying out the death traps for his invasion. After the death of McDermott he observes that the use of plastic is uneconomic. A bit later, he kills Farrell Snr with a smaller device. Slowly but surely he’s experimenting, trying to figure out the best way to take over the world.

Wouldn’t it have been better to figure this out before sweeping the invasion plan into action? Arriving on Earth, getting all the attention, and then spending all your time figuring out what to do next hardly seems a sensible idea. You’ve given your enemies more time to come and get you, whilst you’re wasting yours trying to decide what colour to make your army’s suits (‘green? Or canary yellow?’)

Anyway, it at least makes a nice change that he seems be getting somewhere at last. As the script explicitly states (in the Brigs briefing) everything so far has been distractions, and with the Master finally plumping for daffodils he’s got something to do. Just a shame it’s taken so long (and it’s further evidence of the shoddy construction of this story – be that in terms of directing/acting/writing. One second Farrell hasn’t seen the flowers, the next he’s already booked a coach, and there’s been a swathe of deaths). And the Doctor’s at least found something out, and seems to be making progress. The story is picking up, three episodes in. It’s now concerned with what the Master is actually trying to do, not the distractions (though, to be fair, it manages a fair few of them as well!). One problem is that it’s really only about a plan to wipe out humanity. Not really about an invasion. The Auton’s are sidelined in favour of (yes) fun traps, and are clearly not the focus of the story. The Auton’s aren’t really doing anything (all of the traps have to be set off in some way – they’re not really alive in the Nestene sense).

How crap are the Autons in this episode anyway? Impervious to bullets, but not to a quick smack from Pertwee. Then there’s their frustrated inability to open a car door (less a problem because of what it is, more the fact that the seem really annoyed about it, the way they rattle it, then look up – they’re impassive killers, you shouldn’t be able to imagine them shouting ‘d’oh!’) Then, four stories after they were able to track down Ransome from miles away with his body data – here they can’t track down the Doctor and Jo when they’ve laid down behind a bush. And finally, not one of them can shoot straight – they can’t even hit the Brigadier with direct line of site across six foot of room! Honestly, it’s like Delgado’s gone to the pound shop branch of the Nestene homeworld and got all the really cheap ones. (Though, I’ll admit to thinking that the design of the basic model is an improvement, that the happy face versions are cool, and that the way the police Auton starts to climb up the slope instantly when it’s been smashed off by a car is chilling in the extreme).

The trouble with this story is that it has nowhere to go, in every sense. There’s no centre to it. It isn’t really set anywhere. You have the villains lair and the goodies lair, but nothing else. There also aren’t really any guest cast worth mentioning, meaning that it’s curiously detached from our world. The story is reduced to a battle of wills between two people in different rooms. The story doesn’t go anywhere because there’s no where else to go. They can only hang round the lab with the same people (up until the Doctor wants them out of the way so he can put his life in danger at the cliffhanger, anyway). The story lacks a context, and for an alien invasion story, lacking in scope. If you wanted to do a budget stage version of Who, this would be the script to pick. You never get the sense that any of this is connecting with the world outside. As a result, it lacks tension. I never feel that this could affect anyone I know or care about.

Part Four:
I really really hate the yellow and pink swirl around the episode caption in the titles. It’s too garish, and it makes the titles hard to read. It’s kind of appropriate for the story though. Multi-coloured and noticeable, but not exactly a good piece of work.

Actually, that’s a touch unfair. This episode belatedly offers us something half decent. Here we have something like an entire four parter in one go, as the Doctor figures out the scheme and defeats it in twenty minutes flat. This condensing of plot means that, for once, everything in this episode is related to a central developing plotline, and as such it feels like a story rather than a sequence of events. It’s not distracting from the plot any more, it is the plot.

This compression does mean that the story doesn’t quite work as well as it could. Holmes uses a surprisingly common trick when a writer can’t think of answer to a questionable bit of plot – he vocalises the question (Having the Doctor ask how the Master got into the base) and then doesn’t give the answer. I’ve seen this tried a few times, and it always annoys me. But it’s not as annoying as the major flaw of the episode – the resolution, with the Doctor persuading the Master to drop his entire villainous scheme in ten seconds flat. It’s ludicrous to think that the Master, clearly intelligent as he is, hasn’t already considered that the Nestenes might betray him. (Though he doesn’t seem to have thought a lot of the plan through – it’s never entirely clear what he gets out of the deal). And the defeat of the monsters is piss poor, defeat by meaningless technobabble as in Spearhead.

But equally there are some corking moments. The face off between the Doctor and the Master is superb, with the changing stakes keeping the tension high, and the plotting surprisingly ingenious (the Doctor using the brake pedal to signal is a lovely idea). Perhaps most noticeably, after the shallow entertainment value of killer dolls, chairs and telephone flexes, we get something a lot nastier and scarier. The simplicity of the daffodils, combined with a panicked performance from Katy Manning makes them horribly real. Notice, in contrast to the previous traps, the focus is on the suffering victim rather than the device itself – marking the difference between a cool image and something scary. Added to the nasty way the Master disposes of Farrell, you’ve got a surprisingly nasty episode, in contrast to the basically comic violence of the previous three.

I remember reading an old Virgin Who novel, The Shadow of Weng-Chiang. In the intro to it, David A McIntee talked about how it was said that the best sequel took a different path to the original. Now, I don’t think this is true – otherwise, Halloween 3 would be the best sequel ever, and it isn’t.

However, it can’t be exactly the same. That’s basically what Terror of the Autons is. The reason there is no plot, is because Holmes used it all up four stories ago. It’s hard not to understand why the great man hated using recurring monsters – where the hell can you go? How long can you legitimately make the Doctor miss the bleedin’ obvious?

So what’s he left with? He’s got to fill in the time with every witty death he can think of, and hope no one notices. Ultimately, that’s the script’s problem – it’s been given a set up with no story. You can’t just tell the same story.

The way to make a sequel work is to make it the same and make it different. All of the best ones do. They take the basic set ups of the original and put them somewhere new, or twist them a new way. And TotA’s biggest fault remains not really trying to do anything else with the same old parts (or more generously, not being given the opportunity to do anything different – it’s not like you’ve got much else you can do when you’re stuck on Earth – remember the exile only features the Daleks once). It just basically act as an extension, episodes five and six of Spearhead from Space.

I remember when I finally watched Terror of the Autons for the first time as a kid, after hearing so much, and knowing it was going to be a classic. I thought it was. I loved it. I would vote it higher than Spearhead in polls. Purely because that’s what I’d decided it was going to be.

The reality is wafer thin. Amazing what we can convince ourselves of.


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#430 12 May 2006, 10:22 am
ianzpotter
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Sheffield
Joined April 19, 2004
Last On: 6 Jul 2009 9:10 am
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Re: Day by Day

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I think you'll find what we think of as proper Holmesian Holmes springs forth fully formed in Carnival. On a side point, my day-by-daying has just got me through Logopolis and K9 & Co, but let's not dwell on the latter. The shocker for me in Logopolis is where the Doctor calls the Master "Master" to his face in episode 4. It feels totally out of place, am I right in thinking he studiously avoids doing this in all the Pertwee episodes? It feels like the Doctor accepting the Master's opinion of himself and playing lower status. Could you look out for any other examples of this for me as you yomp through Seasons 8 to 10?

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#431 12 May 2006, 12:14 pm
Dorney
Time Lord

Bromley, Kent
Joined April 22, 2004
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Re: Day by Day

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Quote:
Originally Posted by ianzpotter
I think you'll find what we think of as proper Holmesian Holmes springs forth fully formed in Carnival. On a side point, my day-by-daying has just got me through Logopolis and K9 & Co, but let's not dwell on the latter. The shocker for me in Logopolis is where the Doctor calls the Master "Master" to his face in episode 4. It feels totally out of place, am I right in thinking he studiously avoids doing this in all the Pertwee episodes? It feels like the Doctor accepting the Master's opinion of himself and playing lower status. Could you look out for any other examples of this for me as you yomp through Seasons 8 to 10?

Yeah, I was trying to avoid mentioning Carnival too far ahead... now, that's one I'm looking forward to.

I don't think that Pertwee used the word 'master' to his face in Autons, it's mainly 'what do you want' or 'how did you get in'. I'll keep an ear out.


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#432 13 May 2006, 1:51 am
codywillis1
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South Australia
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Re: Day by Day

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I turned off Terror last time I tried to watch it a few years back. Though it's partly to do with the fact I'd just watched Inferno the week before and the contrast between the sheer grittiness of that and the camp comic-strip of Terror did not do the latter any favours...

Love Jo, though. Adorable.

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#433 13 May 2006, 11:01 pm
The Secretive Bus
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Edinburgh
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Re: Day by Day

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So, remind me why you're doing "bulk" reviews again? Because you've written as much in that one review as you would have written in 4 separate installments.

Now to read it.

*scurries*

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#434 13 May 2006, 11:32 pm
The Secretive Bus
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Edinburgh
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Re: Day by Day

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Quote:
The Master ... he’s just playing with himself.

Ooo-er.

Aside from that - or perhaps because of that - a greatly entertaining review and one that I'm in full agreement with.

There's a case for saying that Russell T Davies is a lot like Robert Holmes when it comes to Who. Both can write great characters and funny lines, but neither could think up many decent plot resolutions. Think about it: Spearhead, Terror of the Autons, Carnival, Pyramids, Talons - Rose, World War Three, the Bad Wolf Arc.

It makes sense!

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Ben grins out of the cockpit window:
“I am only borrowing this. I’m Ben Chatham” before expertly taking off into the clouds.

- "Face of Death" by Sparacus


"They laughed at Gallileo once."
- Sparacus


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#435 1 Jul 2006, 11:55 am
Dorney
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Re: Day by Day

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Quote:
Originally Posted by The Secretive Bus
So, remind me why you're doing "bulk" reviews again? Because you've written as much in that one review as you would have written in 4 separate installments.

Well, it should become clearer with the Mind of Evil (one episode in, at last). The idea is that a lot of the time, especially with the longer stories, I tend to be reviewing how I know the episode fits into the whole, rather than on it's own (it's mad to pretend I don't know the stories relatively well). As a result, it's probably best to review each episode in the context of the whole.

So Mind of Evil by the end of next week. If I have any say in it.