Terror of the Autons

With Liz Shaw having gone back to Cambridge, the Doctor is short of help. The Brigadier has a replacement in mind: agent Josephine Grant; mind you, she's not a scientist, she's barely trained in any other aspect of UNIT operations aside from using the phone and fluttering her eyelids at Captain Mike Yates, but she'll do. And her first introduction to life with UNIT is going to be a doozy: the Master, another renegade Time Lord who has so far escaped the same justice that saw the Doctor put on trial, has come to earth, and he's brought the Nestenes back with him. Once again the plastic killer Autons are stalking the cities, although with the Master's help they have branched out from store mannequins and are now manifesting themselves as killer toys, plastic household goods, and masked replicas of human beings. With the aid of a brilliant Time Lord they are intent to conquer the Earth this time - unless the Doctor can stop them again.

This is the good meat of the UNIT years; alien menace comes to Earth and spreads unseen, aided by the Master in his quest to simply destroy and to humiliate the Doctor. The Master is on a higher more dangerous tier than the Meddling Monk; collaborating with aliens so long as he gets power. Only his obsession with destroying the Doctor is what causes him to fail. I'm sure there is somewhere out there a paper on the Master, written by someone in fandom, labelling him as an absolute psychotic sociopath. It's far easier to accept someone who is evil when they are out and out evil and consumed with rage and fury, though; and the Master is calm and polite, meticulous and scheming. And he's going to be a thorn in the Doctor's, the Brigadier's, Jo's, UNIT's, the world's side for a while.

Terror of the Autons is another of the colourized adventures, the results being pretty iffy, and made worse by the fact that it's on VHS tape. Of course technology has changed and there is probably a better way to make this kind of thing work, so when a DVD release comes along it'll be better. I hope.

And now we have a new companion. Jo Grant. She's a bit of a ditz, perhaps a product of her era if her wardrobe is anything to go by. But where she is the antithesis to the brainy Liz (who was just a less abrasive Zoe) she is still a very new kind of companion; someone from a modern age who might have a few more brains going for her than Polly, whose days were spent toiling for Professor Brett and then idling the nights away flirting with sailors at the Inferno Club with Kitty. Jo's got the ambition to be a UNIT operative but she's not experienced enough of the realities of the job yet, although when job description is "assistant to scientific advisor" things are bound to get a bit dodgy for her...

NEXT EPISODE : THE MIND OF EVIL