Prof. Julius J. Smudge is a writer at Kasterborous Doctor Who News and Reviews - All the latest Doctor Who news and reviews with our weekly podKast, features and interviews, and a long-running forum.
Doctor Who is fundamentally a show about change and unpredictability. Rare is the season of the classic series that doesn’t include a fundamental shift in character or concept. Companions arrive, leave or die. The Doctor becomes a completely new person. Important, transformative background information is revealed.
And then there’s Season 8. The Season of the Master.
The show had already turned itself inside out in Season 7, just the previous year. Suddenly, in the first week of the new decade of the 1970s, we not only had a new Doctor, but he was now stuck on Earth working for the military (well, okay, UNIT). His assistant Elizabeth Shaw (not a “companion”) never even saw the inside of the TARDIS and didn’t really believe all that guff about time travel. Plus, the show was suddenly in colour and featured major fight choreography and film and Bessie and everything.
But then, in 1971, that horse trailer materialized, Roger Delgado hopped out, and nothing would be the same. Yet again.
The confidence and swagger with which Terror of the Autons gives the audience a swift kick right up their preconceptions is nothing short of astonishing. In the first ten minutes or so, the dark and mysterious Master has appeared and stolen the show (not to mention the will of Luigi Rossini, aka Lew Russell); the Doctor has both met and viciously insulted his new assistant-to-be, Jo “Ham-Fisted Bun Vendor” Grant (cutely fumbled by Katy Manning, who would later go on to pose naked with a Dalek for Girl Illustrated magazine); and we receive a visit and a warning from a floating Time Lord dressed like John Steed. Add on the fact that this story features the return of the Autons and the Nestene Consciousness (the first monsters the Third Doctor ever encountered), and we’re pretty solidly in “soft reboot” territory.
Just to clear the air, I remain a huge fan of Liz Shaw (played by Caroline John), the Doctor’s more-than-able assistant from the previous year. She is one of the rare super-smart ultra-competent companions, following on from Zoe Herriot. The like would not be seen again in the series until Romana shows up in 1978.
The decision to replace Liz with the adorably ham-fisted Jo was (according to the lore) a fairly dire and sexist collaboration between Pertwee, producer Barry Letts and script editor (and later, Target Novelisationist extraordinaire) Terrance Dicks. At least the decision is amusingly lampshaded by a comment from the Brigadier: “What you need, Doctor, as Miss Shaw herself so often remarked, is someone to pass you your test tubes and to tell you how brilliant you are.” Perhaps that’s what Pertwee needed as well.
All this ex-post-facto social justice-ing on my part is rather beside the point, because Jo becomes a bloody brilliant companion in fairly short order. Her obvious characteristics of “cute” and “spunky” combine with the much more useful traits of adaptability, intelligence, strong will, and loyalty … not to mention being a deft hand at escapology. You may find that hard to believe as you watch episode one of Terror of the Autons and see the Master turn her into a ruthless suicide bomber in seconds flat. (That will be the last time the Master manages that little trick, not for lack of trying.)
The only person not overawed by the presence of the man in black is, of course, the Doctor, who at various times refers to his enemy as “conceited”, a “jackanapes” and an “unimaginative plodder.”
Roger Delgado’s Master absolutely dominates the show from his first second of screen time onwards. He’s not a flamboyant psychotic, like Simm or Gomez in the new series. Delgado is cool and in control. He is one charismatic mofo, delivering his lines with charm and grace. When he announces his plan to kill the Doctor, he might as well be inviting you up to see his etchings. Smooth, baby. This is the first of five Master stories in a row (yes, five!), and by the time the viewer gets to The Dæmons at the end of the season, the appearance of “Reverend Magister” is merely the fulfillment of a running gag. But not here. This was the first time out for the pseudonyms, rubber masks and the Tissue Compression Eliminator (TCE, or, as I will call it from now on, the Sonic Shrinker).
The only person not overawed by the presence of the man in black is, of course, the Doctor, who at various times refers to his enemy as “conceited”, a “jackanapes” and an “unimaginative plodder.” So no love lost there. Nevertheless, the Master’s visit to Earth has certainly gotten under his skin. The Doctor is more or less constantly fed up and on edge. He insults everyone within a 10-foot radius (except doe-eyed Jo), rips up status reports with disdain, and brings annoying bureaucrats to heel with tales of chummy encounters in “the club” with their social betters (okay, it only happens once, but it’s really good). Pertwee always shines at seething and brutal sarcasm. You just want him to kick somebody, and he’d be happy to oblige, but he might rip his cape.
It’s easy to just think of the Master as a very evil counterpart to the Doctor, Moriarty to his Holmes. But one of my favorite things about this version of the terrible Time Lord is that he keeps teaming up with very powerful cosmic evil in bids to control Earth or the galaxy or humiliate the Doctor or whatever … but he tends to bite off more than he can chew. The forces he musters almost always rise up against him and he ends up fleeing for his own life. This happens again and again, and it’s always satisfying to watch. In this case, it happens with Autons wearing comically large cartoon heads, so bonus!
So now that the new character introductions are out of the way, we can move on to some good old-fashioned Auton Terror. The Master gains control of a plastic factory, infuses it with a big dose of Nestene, and all hell proceeds to break loose, of course. When you compare this story with the first appearance of the Consciousness in Spearhead from Space (or even their triumphant return in 2005’s Rose), it’s pretty clear that the Master’s perverse imagination adds a whole new layer to the ways living plastic can be used to kill and dominate. Walking store mannequins with guns built into their hands are one thing, but here we get chairs that devour, phone cords that strangle, artificial daffodils that smother, and creepy dolls that … wow, that’s a creepy damn doll. Even the fact that you can clearly see the CSO outline just makes him creepier. You will never forget that ugly, ugly … yeesh. My point is, plastic is bad.
The look of the story is bright and synthetic. Like plastic. More importantly, like the 70s! We get subjected to a nightmarish circus (with thankfully few clowns); the big, bald, horrible cousin of the classic troll doll; and the Master renting a Magic Bus so his cartoon-headed associates can give away killer posies in the streets. Careful where you point that flower power!
The music, such as it is, plays a downright peculiar role in the production. The ongoing narrative is punctuated with seemingly random electronic buzzery which occasionally collects itself into something you might try to hum. Then you get fight scenes with nothing but the sounds of gunshots, scuffle, and grunts. I’d be tempted to call it experimental, but maybe the better adjective is “radiophonic”.
There’s a surprising and subtle character moment in episode three after the Doctor steals the dematerialization circuit from the Master’s TARDIS. He becomes visibly fixated on it, and for a few minutes there, it looks like Gollum’s got a brand new ring. We find ourselves back in the company of a renegade Time Lord who has been stuck working that Earthbound 9 to 5 for too long, and the strong implication is that (if he can manage it) he might well take off and let Earth try to cope without his aid. When he says “Bye-bye, Jo,” I don’t think he’s planning the return trip yet. But the antsy, petulant Doctor is foiled by compatibility issues — the newer model circuit won’t work in the his TARDIS. So, as long as he’s still stuck unable to travel, he might as well defeat his arch-nemesis. Two birds with one stone, what?
The Master manages to summon the invasion force of the Nestene Consciousness down a radio telescope (what is it with the Master and radio telescopes?), but when the Doctor points out that the bad guys are probably not even going to let him live, much less give him a share of the conquest, the two of them work together and implement Doctor Who’s first polarity-based final solution (mark it down, trivia buffs!), sending the ball of malevolent energy shooting back into the cosmic void. And the Master scarpers. But since the Doctor stole the circuit from his TARDIS, he’s stuck on Earth! I wonder if we’ll see him again some time … like next week and throughout this entire season, maybe?
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