Old Who: Terror of the Autons and The Mind of Evil
Or: My Evil Ex-Boyfriend Is Back and My Evil Ex-Boyfriend Is Back: The Sequel.
Okay, without kidding, those two serials were just a joy to watch (and rewatch), especially after two not so stellar Pertwee era stories I also watched recenty, The Daemons (I know they had to deal with all the fashionable stuff in the 70s, but satanism is just gauche, and also, it dragged; otoh, nice Doctor and Brig moments, and great Doctor and Master goodbye exchange), and Planet of the Spiders (not bad, but could have been better since it was the final story for the Third Doctor, though again, love the Doctor and Brig scenes, and is there fanfic about the two of them visiting questionable cabarets since this is canon?). Terror of the Autons, on the other hand, the story that introduced the Master to the Whoverse, and The Mind of Evil, which is competing with The Sea Devils for best Three/Delgado!Master story ever, are Classic Who at its best.
Robert Holmes wrote Terror of the Autons, which not only introduced the Master but also Jo Grant and Mike Yates, so there are some great lines of dialogue guaranteed. Holmes can also be relied upon to show the Doctor as three dimensional, with his petty sides and flaws (without those overshadowing why he's the hero of the show). The Brigadier's reply to the Doctor's complaint about getting regular girl Jo as a replacement for Liz the scientist is one early example: "As Miss Shaw herself so often said, you don't need a scientist, you need someone to hold your test tubes and tell you how brilliant you are."
(The Doctor takes some potshots at the Brig in this story as well, what with the "military intelligence is a contradiction in terms" remarks of which there are several, but the moment someone else attacks the Brigadier, he launches into a defensive speech. As with his retort to Jo inThe Daemons, one has the impression he thinks he's the only one allowed to critisize or be sarcastic about the Brig.)
This particular quip at the Doctor's vanity and innate need for admiration from his human companions is funny because it's true, but it also works on a meta level, since this is presumably the main reason why Liz Shaw was replaced by Jo Grant from a Doylist pov; Liz didn't need the Doctor to explain the plot to her. Now while this can be taken as a depressing statement regarding the validity of Doctor-Companion equality in the early 70s, it is a bit more complicated than that. The structure of most Sherlock Holmes stories is based on the premise that Watson, the stand-in for the reader, serves as an audience and feedback to Holmes while Holmes is busy deducing; Watson asking questions is necessary. Not because Watson is lesser or more stupid than Holmes but because Watson has other talents; Holmes couldn't do without him, either. (For a modern update on this, see House.) Jo, whose first outing Terror of the Autons is, may not be a scientist, and she does need to ask what is going on or what could be going on every now and then, but she's not an idiot, and the script cleverly addresses prejudices by letting her first blunder - messing up the Doctor's experiment with the best of intentions, getting captured by the Master - and then, when audience and Doctor alike dismiss her, showcase her strengths - her resourcefulness and bravery, which allow her to rescue the Doctor. Morever, in both these serials, as in the later Sea Devil, the script remembers Jo has UNIT training and allows her to use some self defense moves. More about that later. And the tables are completely turned as far as Jo's (lack of) maturity is concerned when the Doctor, after finding out the dematerialisation circuit he stole from the Master's TARDIS still won't make his own TARDIS fly again, throws a fit and she tells him not to be childish. Which results in the immortal: "What's wrong with being childish? I like being childish!"
(Some things never change...)
Yates, though introduced, doesn't get to do anything particularly memorable. Or maybe he's just overshadowed by the other new guy. You can see the Moriarty origin for the Master very clearly here; very much a cool and collected master criminal, and we're far, far away from the manic side of the Ainley years. Mind you, the theatricality is there already, and you have to love that he arrives in the Whoverse through a circus. And isn't just content with employing regular Autons, no, he branches out to killer daffodils. Quoth the Doctor, when the Master invites him to guess his plans: "Probably overcomplicated, vicious and in the end ineffective, like your plans usually are."
There is no bickering like Time Lord bickering. Which can be also observed at the start when the emissary from the other Time Lords arrives to give the Doctor the heads-up regarding the Master's impending arrival. In addition to the Doctor not so quietly seething because of the general exile situation he's in thanks to these people, you get the priceless exchange when the messenger from Gallifrey mentions ever so casually that between the Doctor and the Master, the Master got better grades at school, and the Doctor shoots back: "I was a late developer!"
For all the good classic Who crack provided by scary plastic, Terror of the Autons makes no bones about the fact that the Master really is a pure sociopath. We see him kill several people on screen (and a lot more offscreen) with a casual indifference that is chilling. And the pleasant remark to the Doctor in their very first on screen conversation - well, the first with the two of them in the same room - captures this element, too: "I have so few worthy opponents. I always miss them when they're gone."
While from a Doylist pov I'm sure at this point the production team had only a very vague idea of the backstory for the Master and the Doctor at this point, but we don't hear anything that would contradict later statements, and some things we do get at this point work would be turned into quintessential relationship elements. Such as the habit these two have to either a) bicker, b) try to defeat each other, or c) fanboy each other, being members of an exclusive club of 2 Who Get It. Such as the Master telling his minion du jour who is surprised that the Master isn't more angry about the Doctor having just foiled the Master's first attack that this just makes it more fun and: "I admire him in many ways."
And then you have the Doctor's reaction when the Master makes his getaway at the end. He smiles. Just in case the audience has missed that because of the quick cut to the next and final scene, there he smiles again as he points out that given he still has the Master's dematerialisation circuit which means the Master is stuck on Earth, just as he is. When Jo and the Brigadier observe he's remarkably unconcerned with the prospect of the Master running loose on Earth he admits that not only is he not worried but he's looking forward to seeing the Master again. Which on the one hand is one of the Doctor's literaly more in-human moments - the Master at large inevitably means more dead people sooner or later, and he knows it - but on the other, from a Watsonian pov, is an early indication of the mutual dependence which every now and then surfaces about them.
Speaking of things resurfacing, one plot point that keeps getting repeated during the Three/Delagado!Master era is the Doctor and the Master for a brief period being forced to work together against a third party. They come up with better justifications in later adventures, because the one here is pretty lousy - the Master only just thought of the fact the Autons could turn against him once they're on Earth in full force? Bad form in an otherwise fine script, Holmes. Anyway, it's clear why they included that scene, because here as with every other similar scene - down to, decades later, Ten and Professor Yana working together which in many ways echoes this plot element - the moving in synch and ease with each other during the scientific cooperation showcases the past and the might have been. It's also clear they these scenes never extend very long. Either of them would have to abandon their sense of self otherwise, and then their purpose in the story would be lost.
One last thing about long term continuity: in this story, the Doctor destroys one of the Master's captured superweapons before UNIT can analyze it, telling the Brigadier humans have enough weapons of destruction of their own and he doesn't intend to let them have ones that are even worse. Methinks that even without his own experience with them, that's why Torchwood's "if it's alien, it's ours" attitude would never have sat well with him. It also says something about the balance achieved between UNIT (especially the Brigadier) and the Doctor in those years - it's not that he trusts them blindly, for all that they are good people, and they don't trust him blindly, either (see the Brig completely accurately predicting that the Doctor has lied to Liz about the key and intends to leave them if he can in Spearhead from Space, which, btw, he tries again to do here - if that attempt to escape with the Master's dematerialisation circuit hadn't been genuine, he wouldn't have bothered with the quick goodbye to Jo before getting into the TARDIS), but they don't ask him for things he's not willing to give (i.e.: superior tech, weapons), and for all his occasional attitude, he does help them everytime they do ask for something.
The Mind of Evil doesn't have plastic as its MacGuffin, it has something from good old Stevenson and his Doctor Jekyll; in this case, not a drug but a machine that is supposed to separate everything evil from the rest of the human mind. Of course, no one but the Doctor seems to have read Stevenson and knows is is a bad idea from the start, but then again, who cares? We need the thing to keep the plot going, and the plot is such fun and has all the highlights of the Third Doctor era, with everyone at their best. The Brigadier gets to mastermind the recapturing of a fortress-prison, play a working class supply guy (which so reminds me of Jack Bristow doing the same thing in Alias' Breaking Point) and save the Doctor and Jo, complete with banter.
"Thank you, Brigadier. Do you think you could manage to arrive just once before the knick of time?"
"It's good to see you, too, Doctor."
Jo gets to show off not just the usual thing for female Who companions, her compassionate nature, but her UNIT training, goes from being held hostage at gunpoint to taking the gun away from the man holding her and capturing him instead, and in a later breakout shows the same kind of physical team work with the Doctor in overpowering two guards as we see in Sea Devils.
And the Doctor gets a veritable avalanche of scenes with his best enemy. By now I've watched most of the Pertwee era, and I don't think they have that much direct interaction with each other in any of the other serials, except perhaps for Sea Devils. Said interaction also reads like current day fanfiction. Witty verbal confrontations followed by bondage scene, err, by the Master tying the Doctor up, followed by torture scene, followed by the Master, fearing he has gone to far and the Doctor is done for, rushing to his aid, being concerned and worried as long as the Doctor is not conscious to see it, and reviving him in a Master version of hurt/comfort. I've read that story, you know. In several variations. Seriously, there is no sense of personal space with all the leaning in while they're together in the same room, and then they indulge in their very own phonecall tradition later on. Mind you, this time the Doctor doesn't say he's looking forward to seeing the Master again, and is properly concerned that the guy gets captured (which he doesn't) because "we can't inflict him on other planets". Also, the Master gets revenge for that quip about his plans ("overcomplicated, vicious and ineffective", remember) by taunting the Doctor about his exile at the end, which the Doctor doesn't have a good retort for. But the sense of magnetic attraction is rarely that strong.
Again, definitely not planned from a Doylist pov but really neat continuity/foreshadowing from a Watsonian one: those "worst fears" the MacGuffin of the week confronts them with. The Doctor's consists of images of burning flames mixed with Daleks yelling "exterminate". As involuntary visions of the Time War go, this isn't a bad one. The Master's is a gigantic Doctor triumphing and laughing over him, and before breaking out of the vision, he cowers, arms up, in exactly the same way Simm!Master does in Last of the Time Lords when the Doctor floats towards him. Interestingly enough, for neither of them the fear is their own death.
Trivia: if we couldn't tell this was shot at the start of the 70s by everything else, the fact we get a favorable Mao Tse-tung reference would settle it. The long and noble tradition of this firmly leftist show can backfire at times.
Three says something about being several thousand years old again. If the later Doctors show signs of middle age syndrom by insisting on being 900 years old, from Seven onwards, the earlier ones clearly do the teen and young adolescent thing of claiming to be way older than they are.
Lastly: Jo being stricken by the death of the hapless Barnum and grieving for him in the final scene was a good way of making the redshirts of the episode real. Plus again, it makes the Master's evil real in a way his more outrageous plans (which are foiled to boot) do not.
Bonus: if you, dear reader of these ramblings, are not famliar with the Old Who shows I just talked about and/or are not patient enough to hunt them down and watch them, BUT would like proof that those decades old tales really have every element of modern slash story other than the actual sex - to wit, as mentioned, witty repartee followed by bondage and groping followed by torture followed by hurt/comfort, I shall link you to the relevant excerpts from Mind of Evil for proof.
Banter, bondage, torture
followed by
Twisted hurt and comfort, OMG!
Okay, without kidding, those two serials were just a joy to watch (and rewatch), especially after two not so stellar Pertwee era stories I also watched recenty, The Daemons (I know they had to deal with all the fashionable stuff in the 70s, but satanism is just gauche, and also, it dragged; otoh, nice Doctor and Brig moments, and great Doctor and Master goodbye exchange), and Planet of the Spiders (not bad, but could have been better since it was the final story for the Third Doctor, though again, love the Doctor and Brig scenes, and is there fanfic about the two of them visiting questionable cabarets since this is canon?). Terror of the Autons, on the other hand, the story that introduced the Master to the Whoverse, and The Mind of Evil, which is competing with The Sea Devils for best Three/Delgado!Master story ever, are Classic Who at its best.
Robert Holmes wrote Terror of the Autons, which not only introduced the Master but also Jo Grant and Mike Yates, so there are some great lines of dialogue guaranteed. Holmes can also be relied upon to show the Doctor as three dimensional, with his petty sides and flaws (without those overshadowing why he's the hero of the show). The Brigadier's reply to the Doctor's complaint about getting regular girl Jo as a replacement for Liz the scientist is one early example: "As Miss Shaw herself so often said, you don't need a scientist, you need someone to hold your test tubes and tell you how brilliant you are."
(The Doctor takes some potshots at the Brig in this story as well, what with the "military intelligence is a contradiction in terms" remarks of which there are several, but the moment someone else attacks the Brigadier, he launches into a defensive speech. As with his retort to Jo inThe Daemons, one has the impression he thinks he's the only one allowed to critisize or be sarcastic about the Brig.)
This particular quip at the Doctor's vanity and innate need for admiration from his human companions is funny because it's true, but it also works on a meta level, since this is presumably the main reason why Liz Shaw was replaced by Jo Grant from a Doylist pov; Liz didn't need the Doctor to explain the plot to her. Now while this can be taken as a depressing statement regarding the validity of Doctor-Companion equality in the early 70s, it is a bit more complicated than that. The structure of most Sherlock Holmes stories is based on the premise that Watson, the stand-in for the reader, serves as an audience and feedback to Holmes while Holmes is busy deducing; Watson asking questions is necessary. Not because Watson is lesser or more stupid than Holmes but because Watson has other talents; Holmes couldn't do without him, either. (For a modern update on this, see House.) Jo, whose first outing Terror of the Autons is, may not be a scientist, and she does need to ask what is going on or what could be going on every now and then, but she's not an idiot, and the script cleverly addresses prejudices by letting her first blunder - messing up the Doctor's experiment with the best of intentions, getting captured by the Master - and then, when audience and Doctor alike dismiss her, showcase her strengths - her resourcefulness and bravery, which allow her to rescue the Doctor. Morever, in both these serials, as in the later Sea Devil, the script remembers Jo has UNIT training and allows her to use some self defense moves. More about that later. And the tables are completely turned as far as Jo's (lack of) maturity is concerned when the Doctor, after finding out the dematerialisation circuit he stole from the Master's TARDIS still won't make his own TARDIS fly again, throws a fit and she tells him not to be childish. Which results in the immortal: "What's wrong with being childish? I like being childish!"
(Some things never change...)
Yates, though introduced, doesn't get to do anything particularly memorable. Or maybe he's just overshadowed by the other new guy. You can see the Moriarty origin for the Master very clearly here; very much a cool and collected master criminal, and we're far, far away from the manic side of the Ainley years. Mind you, the theatricality is there already, and you have to love that he arrives in the Whoverse through a circus. And isn't just content with employing regular Autons, no, he branches out to killer daffodils. Quoth the Doctor, when the Master invites him to guess his plans: "Probably overcomplicated, vicious and in the end ineffective, like your plans usually are."
There is no bickering like Time Lord bickering. Which can be also observed at the start when the emissary from the other Time Lords arrives to give the Doctor the heads-up regarding the Master's impending arrival. In addition to the Doctor not so quietly seething because of the general exile situation he's in thanks to these people, you get the priceless exchange when the messenger from Gallifrey mentions ever so casually that between the Doctor and the Master, the Master got better grades at school, and the Doctor shoots back: "I was a late developer!"
For all the good classic Who crack provided by scary plastic, Terror of the Autons makes no bones about the fact that the Master really is a pure sociopath. We see him kill several people on screen (and a lot more offscreen) with a casual indifference that is chilling. And the pleasant remark to the Doctor in their very first on screen conversation - well, the first with the two of them in the same room - captures this element, too: "I have so few worthy opponents. I always miss them when they're gone."
While from a Doylist pov I'm sure at this point the production team had only a very vague idea of the backstory for the Master and the Doctor at this point, but we don't hear anything that would contradict later statements, and some things we do get at this point work would be turned into quintessential relationship elements. Such as the habit these two have to either a) bicker, b) try to defeat each other, or c) fanboy each other, being members of an exclusive club of 2 Who Get It. Such as the Master telling his minion du jour who is surprised that the Master isn't more angry about the Doctor having just foiled the Master's first attack that this just makes it more fun and: "I admire him in many ways."
And then you have the Doctor's reaction when the Master makes his getaway at the end. He smiles. Just in case the audience has missed that because of the quick cut to the next and final scene, there he smiles again as he points out that given he still has the Master's dematerialisation circuit which means the Master is stuck on Earth, just as he is. When Jo and the Brigadier observe he's remarkably unconcerned with the prospect of the Master running loose on Earth he admits that not only is he not worried but he's looking forward to seeing the Master again. Which on the one hand is one of the Doctor's literaly more in-human moments - the Master at large inevitably means more dead people sooner or later, and he knows it - but on the other, from a Watsonian pov, is an early indication of the mutual dependence which every now and then surfaces about them.
Speaking of things resurfacing, one plot point that keeps getting repeated during the Three/Delagado!Master era is the Doctor and the Master for a brief period being forced to work together against a third party. They come up with better justifications in later adventures, because the one here is pretty lousy - the Master only just thought of the fact the Autons could turn against him once they're on Earth in full force? Bad form in an otherwise fine script, Holmes. Anyway, it's clear why they included that scene, because here as with every other similar scene - down to, decades later, Ten and Professor Yana working together which in many ways echoes this plot element - the moving in synch and ease with each other during the scientific cooperation showcases the past and the might have been. It's also clear they these scenes never extend very long. Either of them would have to abandon their sense of self otherwise, and then their purpose in the story would be lost.
One last thing about long term continuity: in this story, the Doctor destroys one of the Master's captured superweapons before UNIT can analyze it, telling the Brigadier humans have enough weapons of destruction of their own and he doesn't intend to let them have ones that are even worse. Methinks that even without his own experience with them, that's why Torchwood's "if it's alien, it's ours" attitude would never have sat well with him. It also says something about the balance achieved between UNIT (especially the Brigadier) and the Doctor in those years - it's not that he trusts them blindly, for all that they are good people, and they don't trust him blindly, either (see the Brig completely accurately predicting that the Doctor has lied to Liz about the key and intends to leave them if he can in Spearhead from Space, which, btw, he tries again to do here - if that attempt to escape with the Master's dematerialisation circuit hadn't been genuine, he wouldn't have bothered with the quick goodbye to Jo before getting into the TARDIS), but they don't ask him for things he's not willing to give (i.e.: superior tech, weapons), and for all his occasional attitude, he does help them everytime they do ask for something.
The Mind of Evil doesn't have plastic as its MacGuffin, it has something from good old Stevenson and his Doctor Jekyll; in this case, not a drug but a machine that is supposed to separate everything evil from the rest of the human mind. Of course, no one but the Doctor seems to have read Stevenson and knows is is a bad idea from the start, but then again, who cares? We need the thing to keep the plot going, and the plot is such fun and has all the highlights of the Third Doctor era, with everyone at their best. The Brigadier gets to mastermind the recapturing of a fortress-prison, play a working class supply guy (which so reminds me of Jack Bristow doing the same thing in Alias' Breaking Point) and save the Doctor and Jo, complete with banter.
"Thank you, Brigadier. Do you think you could manage to arrive just once before the knick of time?"
"It's good to see you, too, Doctor."
Jo gets to show off not just the usual thing for female Who companions, her compassionate nature, but her UNIT training, goes from being held hostage at gunpoint to taking the gun away from the man holding her and capturing him instead, and in a later breakout shows the same kind of physical team work with the Doctor in overpowering two guards as we see in Sea Devils.
And the Doctor gets a veritable avalanche of scenes with his best enemy. By now I've watched most of the Pertwee era, and I don't think they have that much direct interaction with each other in any of the other serials, except perhaps for Sea Devils. Said interaction also reads like current day fanfiction. Witty verbal confrontations followed by bondage scene, err, by the Master tying the Doctor up, followed by torture scene, followed by the Master, fearing he has gone to far and the Doctor is done for, rushing to his aid, being concerned and worried as long as the Doctor is not conscious to see it, and reviving him in a Master version of hurt/comfort. I've read that story, you know. In several variations. Seriously, there is no sense of personal space with all the leaning in while they're together in the same room, and then they indulge in their very own phonecall tradition later on. Mind you, this time the Doctor doesn't say he's looking forward to seeing the Master again, and is properly concerned that the guy gets captured (which he doesn't) because "we can't inflict him on other planets". Also, the Master gets revenge for that quip about his plans ("overcomplicated, vicious and ineffective", remember) by taunting the Doctor about his exile at the end, which the Doctor doesn't have a good retort for. But the sense of magnetic attraction is rarely that strong.
Again, definitely not planned from a Doylist pov but really neat continuity/foreshadowing from a Watsonian one: those "worst fears" the MacGuffin of the week confronts them with. The Doctor's consists of images of burning flames mixed with Daleks yelling "exterminate". As involuntary visions of the Time War go, this isn't a bad one. The Master's is a gigantic Doctor triumphing and laughing over him, and before breaking out of the vision, he cowers, arms up, in exactly the same way Simm!Master does in Last of the Time Lords when the Doctor floats towards him. Interestingly enough, for neither of them the fear is their own death.
Trivia: if we couldn't tell this was shot at the start of the 70s by everything else, the fact we get a favorable Mao Tse-tung reference would settle it. The long and noble tradition of this firmly leftist show can backfire at times.
Three says something about being several thousand years old again. If the later Doctors show signs of middle age syndrom by insisting on being 900 years old, from Seven onwards, the earlier ones clearly do the teen and young adolescent thing of claiming to be way older than they are.
Lastly: Jo being stricken by the death of the hapless Barnum and grieving for him in the final scene was a good way of making the redshirts of the episode real. Plus again, it makes the Master's evil real in a way his more outrageous plans (which are foiled to boot) do not.
Bonus: if you, dear reader of these ramblings, are not famliar with the Old Who shows I just talked about and/or are not patient enough to hunt them down and watch them, BUT would like proof that those decades old tales really have every element of modern slash story other than the actual sex - to wit, as mentioned, witty repartee followed by bondage and groping followed by torture followed by hurt/comfort, I shall link you to the relevant excerpts from Mind of Evil for proof.
Banter, bondage, torture
followed by
Twisted hurt and comfort, OMG!