First Broadcast: 2nd January 1971 – 23rd January 1971
First Published: 15th May 1975
For all of its faults – UNIT dating; the Doctor’s age; when did Mel first come aboard?; how many Atlantis’s were there? etc – television continuity in Doctor Who is sometimes a lot easier to deal with than what we have to put up with in the Target books.
For instance, in this novelisation, Jo Grant (as played by Katy Manning) comes to work for UNIT as the Doctor’s (Jon Pertwee) assistant and meets the Master (Roger Delgado) for the first time as he utilises an alien menace to fulfil his own plans.
So far, so Doomsday Weapon, right? Well, no. However, if you were a casual fan coming to the series, you might be confused why, in a series just fourteen slim books long, one of the companions has two first meetings with the Doctor.
The reason is simple: economics.
The Doomsday Weapon featured the Master in a plot on an alien planet. However, most of the Third Doctor’s other adventures thus far had featured him exiled on Earth by the Time Lords. The Doomsday Weapon, third in the Third Doctor’s adventures to be published, showed new fans that there was some variety to the show that it was just a slightly more eccentric version of The Avengers. So some short cuts were taken to explain how the Doctor was now working with Jo Grant and who the Master was. This explains why there was a prologue in that book with two Time Lords having an “As you know, Bob,” conversation about the background to the new series. As well as a brief and entertaining explanation of how nepo-baby Jo Grant took advantage of a kindly uncle to wangle a job in a top-secret quasi-military agency.
But now that the book series was well-advanced and well-received, we needed to skip forward to a new phase in the shows history whereby the television series is settling in to a new era of popularity that would last for several more years and which it wouldn’t experience again for about three decades.
And the novels are selling well, with a new one coming out every one or two months, so the books sort of have to stick a little closer to what was established already on the parent show… sort of.
Which leads us back to Terror Of The Autons. This was a sequel to the Third Doctor’s debut serial, Spearhead From Space. In that story, the newly regenerated and exiled Third Doctor begins working with UNIT and successfully repels an alien invasion by the Nestene Consciousness and their plastic army (the name of my next punk band, by the way).
Both scripts were written by Robert Holmes, who was proving himself to be a valuable writer for the show. In this sequel, though, there was an added villain: early in Episode 1, we meet a mysterious figure who calls himself the Master (or is it The Master? One never knows where to put one’s capital letters, sometimes). He launches a raid on a space telescope and when the Doctor (or should that be The Doctor?) comes to investigate the aftermath of it, he is informed by a Time Lord projecting himself from Gallifrey that the Master is on Earth, looking for trouble. After some brief exposition, the Doctor manages to defuse a trap set by his foe, discovers – and explains to the audience about – the Master’s Tissue Compression Eliminator, which kills its victims by shrinking them, and brings us up to speed with what we can expect from him in the next few episodes – and adventures, since the Master was a guest villain throughout this entire season (the eighth, for those playing at home).
While we don’t the delicious nuance of Roger Delgado’s performance in this book, we do get a sampling of the rivalry that would develop between the Doctor and the Master. The Master tries to help the Nestene Consciousness – its aims are similar to his, after all – but they keep chastising him for being distracted by his feud with the Doctor, and while the Doctor isn’t quite keeping score, we do get the occasional reference to the Master’s repeated and failed efforts to eliminate him.
This is a lot of fun to read and Terrance Dicks seems to have had a lot of fun writing it as well. He cleverly adds in some references to future stories – at one point a character is carrying what the Doctor recognises as a “Sontaran fragmentation grenade” a reference to the aliens introduced in the Season Eleven opener, The Time Warrior, which had aired the year prior to this books publication. And while it isn’t quite the same thing, there’s a line in the final chapter where the Doctor seems to be almost pleased that the Master has escaped:
“Well, I do sometimes think the cosmos would be a duller place without him.”
Dicks inverts this line slightly in his script for the Twentieth anniversary special, The Five Doctors when the Master is tasked with rescuing the Doctor:
“A cosmos without the Doctor scarcely bears thinking about.”
It’s a phrase that shows him as an author confident in using these little writerly touches that reward long-term readers.
But the rest of the book is an absolute cracker: every major, minor and supporting character is given some vitality and depth in this novelisation, making it exist almost on its own without the televisual original to support it; when we meet Professors Goodge and Phillips, the ill-fated staff at the space telescope, we are shown them as two individuals, one cranky and fussy, the other more mild-mannered and easy-going; the staff of the plastics factory that the Master takes over are painted as having their own stories to tell before this one ended their lives and careers so suddenly. Dicks takes us into the lives of these background characters and makes us feel something for them using shorthand techniques that later writers would exploit so frequently that it would become a cliché when you met a character who was talking about something unrelated to the story and realise that they weren’t long for this world.
Nonetheless, this is another excellent addition to the series and possibly Dicks’s best contribution thus far.
Coming Up next: Doctor Who And The Green Death
