Doctor Who: Terror of the Autons

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Terror of the Autons is the opening serial of Doctor Who Season 8, broadcast in four weekly parts on BBC1 from 2 to 23 January 1971. It was written by Robert Holmes and directed by Barry Letts. It stars Jon Pertwee as the Third Doctor, Katy Manning as Jo Grant, Nicholas Courtney as Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, and Roger Delgado as the Master.

The Doctor faces a new foe when the Master arrives on Earth and helps the Nestene Consciousness use deadly plastic (shop dummies, toy dolls, and even daffodils) to prepare an invasion. With UNIT under pressure, Jo begins her first adventure beside the Doctor, learning fast as danger grows in ordinary places.

The story brings fast action, sharp wit, and a strong new set of characters, setting the pattern for the season and the Doctor’s ongoing duel with the Master.

Episode 1

A bored Third Doctor rattles around his UNIT lab until a jaunty Time Lord materialises to warn him: the Master is on Earth. At the same time, the Brigadier introduces a new assistant (Jo Grant) eager, kind, and wholly untrained in high physics. The Master arrives in style, stepping from a horse-box at a travelling circus run by Rossini.

He immediately starts recruiting: with hypnosis and quiet menace. From a museum store, he steals a dormant Nestene energy unit, the seed of another Auton invasion, and heads for a nearby radio telescope to wake it. In the plastics world, he finds a perfect front: Farrell’s factory, where impressionable Rex Farrell is easily bent to his will. Back at UNIT, Jo opens a toolbox she can’t remember picking up; the Doctor’s eyes widen at the ticking inside.

He snaps her out of the trance, flings the bomb into a yard, and shields her as it erupts. Shaken but furious, he follows a trail of hypnotised couriers and plastic prototypes (an ugly doll, a glossy chair, a spray of daffodils) each hinting at weaponised plastic. That night, the Master tunes his transmitter and sends a clear, cold summons into the dark. The Nestene Consciousness stirs. The Autons are coming back.

Episode 2

Jo’s mortified apology becomes resolve; she asks to help and means it. The Doctor agrees (with rules) and follows leads to Rossini’s circus, where strongmen and clowns double as the Master’s guards. He and Jo are seized; the Brigadier’s men are a step behind. At Farrell’s Plastics, the Master consolidates control by hypnotising Rex and humiliating his anxious father with a demonstration: a modern inflatable armchair that swallows a man whole. Mr Farrell Senior vanishes without a trace.

In UNIT’s lab, Jo studies residue from the bomb and learns the Master’s weapon of choice: compressed plastic filaments that cling and suffocate. Across the country, a “free gift” campaign begins: plastic daffodils given out from cheerful vans. The Doctor wriggles free at the circus, unmasks the Master’s TARDIS as a shabby trailer, and narrowly avoids a miniature corpse: the calling card of the Tissue Compression Eliminator.

Later, in a quiet cottage, a nursery doll wakes on a mantel and strangles its owner with jerking glee. UNIT raids the circus, but the Master has already moved his operations into the heart of the plastics works and the radio telescope. He watches the daffodils roll off the line by the thousand, each bloom primed like a smile with teeth.

Episode 3

The Master accelerates his plans, deploying Autons in various forms, The Master tests his toys. A telephone cord comes alive and throttles a civil servant who asked one question too many. An Auton in police uniform pulls over the Doctor, pistol blooming from its palm. Only quick thinking and gravel-spitting reverse gear save him and Jo from a quiet roadside execution.

The Brigadier steps up security around the telescope, but the Master glides past guards with a word and a glance. He seeds control boxes through the factory, turning it into a hive ready to receive a signal. Rex Farrell, frayed and guilty, tries to warn his fiancée; the Master snaps his fingers and erases doubt with a smile.

In the lab, Liz would have built a neutraliser; Jo volunteers, hands steady, as the Doctor improvises a counter-signal that might freeze Auton circuitry. The first field test half-works: a mannequin twitches, pauses, and then punches through a wall. UNIT captures a daffodil and triggers it. Thin plastic film explodes from the flower head and seals over a face, airtight. Jo pulls it clear, shaken. The Doctor calculates one comfortless truth: when the Master activates the full broadcast, the daffodils will bloom in every town at once. He looks at the radio dish. That is where this will end.

Episode 4

Dawn. Daffodils sit on dashboards, in lapels, in vases by kitchen windows. The Master throws his switch at the radio telescope and the Nestene signal floods the air. Across Britain, plastic flowers spit film and people claw at their faces. Autons march from shopfronts and police cars, hand-guns humming.

UNIT hits back, but the line buckles. The Doctor drags a power lead up the gantry and fights his way into the control room. The Master is waiting, smug and priestly, already speaking for his new god. The Doctor argues like a scientist and a friend: the Nestene won’t share, it will consume, and the Master will be first on the menu. For a flicker, doubt shows. Together (snapping, cooperating, deceiving) they retune the transmitter. The Nestene link judders, reverses, collapses. Daffodils fall limp; Autons sag and crack; the wind tastes clean again.

Soldiers haul away wreckage. Rex Farrell stumbles out from hypnosis into grief. The Brigadier moves to arrest the Master; smoke, confusion, and a stolen uniform give him his exit. Later, in the lab, Jo brings tea and a brave smile. The Doctor calls the Master dangerous, brilliant, and still out there. He pats the TARDIS console, already plotting. Somewhere, a carnival trailer rolls into the night.

Themes

As a season opener, Terror of the Autons trades the stark realism of Season 7 for a pulpier, gleefully sinister energy: and it works. It may not carry the moral heft of Doctor Who and the Silurians or the relentless dread of Inferno, but it’s tighter, cheekier, and instantly iconic. The Autons’ plastic nightmares escalate the threat of Spearhead from Space.

The Master’s first appearance arrives fully formed, a debut as definitive as Spearhead from Space, Robot, or Rose. Measured against its peers, it’s top-tier entertainment and a cornerstone of the Third Doctor’s era.

The serial stitches past and future into a new, confident pattern. It pulls the Nestene thread from Spearhead from Space, introduces Jo Grant and Captain Yates to refresh UNIT, and launches the Master’s Season 8 through-line into The Mind of Evil, The Claws of Axos, Colony in Space, and The Dæmons.

Jo’s partnership with the Doctor grows from this spark toward her farewell in The Green Death, while the Master’s rivalry echoes through The Sea Devils, The Time Monster, and far beyond to The Deadly Assassin and Utopia/The Sound of Drums/Last of the Time Lords. Even the Autons’ set-pieces ripple forward to Rose and The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang, proving that Terror of the Autons doesn’t just follow the UNIT years: it defines them.

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This is a chapter from Craig Hill’s book “Doctor Who – The Third Doctor”, chronicling every episode featuring the Third Doctor. It is available on Amazon.

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To view the list of other Doctor Who serials, please click this link

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