They returned for the following season's Terror of the Autons (1971), which also introduced the character of the Master, but they did not appear again in the original series. Holmes intended to feature the Autons for season 23 of Doctor Who in 1986 in a story entitled Yellow Fever and How to Cure It, which featured the Master and the Rani, but it was abandoned due to the programme being put on an 18-month hiatus.[1]
Autons are essentially life-sized plastic dummies, automatons animated by the Nestene Consciousness, an extraterrestrial, disembodied gestalt intelligence which first arrived on Earth in hollow plastic meteorites. Their name comes from Auto Plastics, the company that was infiltrated by the Nestenes and subsequently manufactured their Auton shells in Spearhead From Space.
Autons conceal deadly weapons within their hands, which can kill or vaporise their targets. The typical Auton does not look particularly realistic, resembling a mannequin, being robotic in its movements and mute. However, more sophisticated Autons can be created, which look and act human except for a slight plastic sheen to the skin and a flat-sounding voice.[2] In Series 5 of the relaunched Doctor Who series, they are shown as being able to create fully lifelike human replicas, able to fool other humans.[3]
History
An Auton weapon, as shown at the Doctor Who Experience
The Nestenes are among the oldest beings in the Doctor Who universe, described as creatures which existed in the "Dark Times", along with the Racnoss, Great Vampires and Carrionites.[4] Eventually, they sought to invade the Earth (in Spearhead from Space), using more human-looking Autons to replace key government figures, although these plans were thwarted by UNIT with the help of the Doctor, who also destroyed their invasion form, a multi-tentacled cephalopod.
The Nestenes subsequently returned in the first serial of Pertwee's second year as the Doctor, Terror of the Autons, which also featured the introduction of the Master. In this attempt, the Nestenes also made use of more mundane, everyday plastic objects, animating plastic toys, inflatable chairs and artificial flowers in addition to their Auton servants. The Doctor convinced the Master that the Nestenes were too dangerous to be reliable allies, and they reversed the radio beam the invasion force was coming in on, sending it back into space. This would be The Nestenes and the Autons final appearance in Doctor Who's original run. They would not return again until the episode Rose in 2005.
Early drafts of "The Five Doctors" (1983) featured a scene where Sarah Jane Smith encountered some Autons and is rescued by the Third Doctor, but it was dropped before filming for reasons of time and expense.[5] A third appearance was planned for the aborted 1986 season during Colin Baker's tenure as the Doctor, but never materialized. Titled Yellow Fever and How to Cure It, it was supposed to be set in Singapore, with appearances by the Rani and the Master. The story, which was to be scripted by the veteran writer Robert Holmes, only exists in outline form.
The Ninth Doctor encounters the Nestene Consciousness
When the series was revived in 2005, producer and writer Russell T Davies chose the Autons as the first monster to be featured,[6] though the name Auton is never used onscreen. The Nestenes infiltrated Earth once more, using warp shunt technology, in the opening episode of the 2005 series. In "Rose", it was revealed that the Nestenes lost their food supply during the Time War when their protein planets rotted. Their intent was to overthrow and destroy the human race, as Earth was ideal for their consumption needs, being filled with smoke, oil and various pollutants. They were eventually destroyed when Rose spilled a vial of the Doctor's "anti-plastic" solution into the vat of molten plastic which housed the main bulk of the Consciousness, causing it to explode. The episode established that the Nestenes animate the Autons by means of telepathic projection, and also featured an Auton facsimile that could change the shape of its features and limbs. The Autons later appeared in a flashback sequence taking place during the finale of "Rose" in the Series 2 episode Love & Monsters, and again cameoed as a sketch in John Smith's "A Journal of Impossible Things" in the episode "Human Nature."
The Autons returned in the 2010 episode "The Pandorica Opens", alongside many other monsters from throughout the show's history, to trap the Eleventh Doctor. The Autons in this episode were programmed to believe they were the soldiers of a Roman legion, among them Rory Williams, using the memories of Amy Pond. They were very realistic and far more sophisticated than the average Auton, and their hands contained futuristic laser guns rather than projectile weapons. As in the 2005 appearance, the name "Auton" was not used in dialogue; the phrase "Nestene duplicate" was introduced here to describe the copy of Rory. Due to the influences of the cracks in time, the Rory copy possessed the personality of the real Rory and was able to resist the Nestene's control, later working together with The Doctor to save the universe.
The Autons were later mentioned in the series 12 episode Praxeus. According to an interview with writer Pete McTighe, the Autons were initially planned to appear before being scrapped at an early stage in development.[7]
Other appearances
The Nestenes have also appeared in the Doctor Whospin-off novels (which linked the Consciousness with the Great Old Ones of the Cthulhu Mythos, in particular as an offspring of Shub-Niggurath). In the Sixth DoctornovelBusiness Unusual by Gary Russell, the Nestenes utilized computer games and plastic toys in another bid for world conquest. They later reappeared in the novel Synthespians™ by Craig Hinton. In 2008, the Eighth Doctor and Lucie Miller again encountered Autons in the audio Brave New Town. These Autons were part of an old Soviet program to infiltrate Britain during the Cold War before the collapse of the Soviet Union left the Autons stuck in a loop in the fake British town created for the spies, eventually developing independence. A Tenth Doctor novel, Autonomy, was released in September 2009 featuring the Autons.
In the Doctor Who Annual 2006, an article written by Russell T Davies mentions the loss of the Nestene Consciousness's planets during the Time War, and states that it "found itself mutating under temporal stress". This may be a reference to the difference between the portrayal of the Consciousness in Spearhead from Space and "Rose".
The Autons, shown here at the Doctor Who Experience
In the late 1990s, BBV released a trilogy of made-for-video films, titled Auton, Auton 2: Sentinel and Auton 3. These stories featured UNIT battling the Consciousness. In the first film, a Nestene energy unit and several Autons captured by UNIT in Spearhead from Space are accidentally reactivated. In the sequels, the escaped Autons attempt to awaken several dormant Nestenes put in place since before the development of human civilization. Though BBV was licensed to use the Nestenes, Autons and UNIT by the writers who created them, the canonicity of these films is unclear.
In the first series of the televised Dead Ringers, in a sketch with Jon Culshaw visiting the London Eye (calling it an Interstitial Time Delay Helix) in the persona of the Fourth Doctor, he humorously accused two tourists: "You are Autons from the planet Tosos!"
In 2006, a sketch on The Charlotte Church Show showed the Doctor examining the inner thigh of a scantily clad female mannequin; when confronted by Church (playing his companion), he claimed that he thought it was an Auton.
The Autons also appear in Lego Dimensions. They appear in the Doctor Who Level “The Dalek Extermination of Earth” when the player time travels to Central London in 2015 using the TARDIS. Whenever the player destroys a purple rock, the Autons come to life from the shop windows and attack the player. They also appear in the Doctor Who adventure world as encounterable enemies.[8]
The Autons appear in one of the Doctor Who and Mr. Men mash-up books, published under the Doctor Men series of books.[9]
During 2020, as part of a fan "Watch-along" of the episode "Rose," writer Russell T Davies wrote a sequel to the episode "Rose" entitled "Revenge of the Nestene." It depicts a surviving Auton after the events of the episode.[10]
Reception
Autons, as shown in the revived series at the Doctor Who Experience
Writing for Looper.com, Richard Chachowski included the Autons on a list of the show's greatest antagonists. While he states they are hard to take seriously, "their blank, unemotional faces and stiff movements make them some of the creepiest looking antagonists the Doctor encounters in his adventures across time and space."[11] Writing in a review of "Spearhead from Space" for The AV Club, Christopher Bahn states that "The Autons are of secondary importance to the story," but also highlights that they "...provide some effectively chilling moments," highlighting Hugh Burden as the Auton duplicate of the character Channing, as well as the scene in which the Autons break out of the shop windows.[12] Writing for Doctor Who TV, Raphael Kiyani praised the Autons role in "Rose" as something "children could be scared about every time they walk down the streets," and further highlights that "Every time I see a shop-window I can’t help but think of the Autons, so it’s a powerful image."[13]Den of Geek writer Andrew Blair listed the scene in which stuntman Terry Walsh, playing an Auton, falls down a sixty foot cliff and gets back up again, as the greatest stunt in the series, highlighting the accidental nature of the stunt and how it made "the Autons seem uncanny... creatures who felt no pain."[14]
The image of store mannequins coming to life in Spearhead from Space, in full colour and shooting people down in the street, is one of the series' iconic moments and is often cited as an example of the series' ability to make everyday things terrifying. The use of even more ordinary objects in Terror of the Autons— including the unmasking of a police officer as an Auton — caused public controversy about whether the programme was too frightening for children. The story also featured in a discussion in the House of Lords, where Baroness Bacon expressed worries about it being too frightening even for older children.[15]
The Time Lords are a fictional ancient race of extraterrestrial people in the British science fiction television series Doctor Who, of which the series' main protagonist, the Doctor, is a member. Time Lords are so named for their command of time travel technology and their non-linear perception of time. Originally, they were described as a powerful and wise race from the planet Gallifrey, from which the Doctor was a renegade; details beyond this were very limited for the first decade of the series. They later became integral to many episodes and stories as their role in the universe developed. For the first eight years after the series resumed in 2005, the Time Lords were said to have been destroyed during the Last Great Time War at some point in the show's continuity between the television movie in 1996 and the show's revival. In 2013, the 50th anniversary special "The Day of the Doctor" concerned this supposed destruction and their eventual survival.
BBV Productions is a UK-based video and audio production company founded in 1991, specialising in science fiction drama. The company has expanded to include publishing of novels and scripts associated with its productions.
The Zygons are an extraterrestrial race in the long-running British science fiction television programme Doctor Who. The Zygons have shape-shifting abilities, allowing them to replicate the appearance of another being. Limited by the small size of their force, they rely on shape-shifting and their organic space craft to conceal their numbers and seize power on Earth. The Zygons were conceived by writer Robert Banks Stewart, and designed by James Acheson as part of a collaboration with John Friedlander. Then director Douglas Camfield also influenced the final appearance. They were designed to resemble "oversized embryos."
The Seeds of Death is the fifth serial of the sixth season of the British science fiction television series Doctor Who. Written by Brian Hayles and an uncredited Terrance Dicks and directed by Michael Ferguson, it originally aired in six weekly parts on BBC1 from 25 January to 1 March 1969. It sees the return of the Ice Warriors, previously introduced by Hayles in the 1967 serial The Ice Warriors.
UNIT is a fictional military organisation from the British science fiction television series Doctor Who and its spin-off series Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures. Operating under the auspices of the United Nations and initially led by Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, its purpose is to investigate and combat paranormal and extraterrestrial threats to Earth. Several UNIT personnel played a major role in the original Doctor Who series, and it was a regular feature from The Invasion (1968) until The Seeds of Doom (1976).
Spearhead from Space is the first serial of the seventh season in the British science fiction television series Doctor Who, which was first broadcast in four weekly parts on BBC1 from 3 to 24 January 1970. It was the first Doctor Who serial to be produced in colour and the only one to be made entirely on 16 mm film.
Terror of the Autons is the first serial of the eighth season of the British science fiction television series Doctor Who. It was broadcast in four weekly parts on BBC1 from 2 to 23 January 1971.
Doctor Who spin-offs refers to material created outside of, but related to, the long-running British science fiction television series Doctor Who.
"Rose" is the first episode of the first series of the revived British science fiction television programme Doctor Who. The episode was directed by Keith Boak and written by Russell T Davies, who was also one of three executive producers. It was first broadcast in the UK on BBC One on 26 March 2005. "Rose" was the first Doctor Who episode to air since the Doctor Who television film in 1996.
The Third Doctor is an incarnation of the Doctor, the protagonist of the British science fiction television series Doctor Who. He was portrayed by actor Jon Pertwee. Within the series' narrative, the Doctor is a centuries-old alien Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey who travels in time and space in the TARDIS, frequently with companions. At the end of life, the Doctor regenerates. Consequently, both the physical appearance and personality of the Doctor changes. Preceded in regeneration by the Second Doctor, he is followed by the Fourth Doctor.
Captain Mike Yates is a fictional character in the British science fiction television series Doctor Who, played by Richard Franklin. He was adjutant of the British contingent of UNIT, an international organization that defends Earth from alien threats.
Elizabeth "Liz" Shaw is a fictional character played by Caroline John in the long-running British science fiction television series Doctor Who and its spin-offs. A civilian member of UNIT, an international organisation that defends Earth from alien threats, she was the companion of the Third Doctor for the 1970 season. Liz appeared in 4 stories.
Mickey Smith is a fictional character in the BBC One science fiction television series Doctor Who. He is portrayed by British actor Noel Clarke and was the show's first televised black companion. The character is introduced as the ordinary, working class boyfriend of Rose Tyler, a London shopgirl who becomes a travelling companion to the Ninth and Tenth incarnations of an alien Time Lord known as the Doctor. Mickey first appears in the first episode of the 2005 revival, "Rose". Initially someone who struggles in the face of danger, Mickey nevertheless acts as an Earth-based ally to the Doctor and Rose. In the second series he joins the pair as a second companion of the Doctor's, though he leaves during the 2006 series to pursue his own adventures. He returns to aid the Doctor and Rose in the series finale later that year, and then again for the 2008 finale "Journey's End," as well as fleetingly in 2010 in the Tenth Doctor send-off "The End of Time".
Nicholas Briggs is an English actor, writer, director, sound designer and composer. He is associated with the BBC science fiction television series Doctor Who and its spin-offs, particularly as the voice of the Daleks and the Cybermen in the 21st century series.
The Auton trilogy is a series of direct-to-video spin-off productions based on the long running BBC science fiction series Doctor Who. The three films in the series are Auton (1997), Auton 2: Sentinel and Auton 3. They were produced by the independent BBV company and are sequels to the Third Doctor stories Spearhead from Space and Terror of the Autons. All three films have been reissued on DVD.
Dudley George Simpson was an Australian composer and conductor. He was the Principal Conductor of the Royal Opera House orchestra for three years and worked as a composer on British television. He worked on the BBC science-fiction series Doctor Who, for which he composed incidental music during the 1960s and 1970s. When Simpson died aged 95 in 2017, The Guardian wrote that he was "at his most prolific as the creator of incidental music for Doctor Who in the 1960s and 1970s, contributing to 62 stories over almost 300 episodes – more than any other composer."
In the long-running BBC television science fiction programme Doctor Who and related works, the term "companion" refers to a character who travels with, or shares adventures with, the Doctor. In most Doctor Who stories, the primary companion acts as an audience surrogate by providing the lens through which the viewer is introduced to the story, and often, the series itself.
Amelia "Amy" Pond is a fictional character portrayed by Karen Gillan in the long-running British science fiction television series Doctor Who. Amy is a companion of the series protagonist the Doctor, in his eleventh incarnation, played by Matt Smith. She appears in the programme from the fifth series (2010) to midway through the seventh series (2012). Gillan returned for a brief cameo in Smith's final episode "The Time of the Doctor".
"The Pandorica Opens" is the twelfth episode of the fifth series of British science fiction television programme Doctor Who, first broadcast on 19 June 2010 on BBC One. It is the first in a two-part finale; the second part, "The Big Bang", aired on 26 June. The episode was written by head writer and executive producer Steven Moffat and directed by Toby Haynes.
↑ Baroness Bacon (3 February 1971). "Mass Media Communication". Parliamentary Debates (Hansard). Vol. 314. House of Lords. col. 1244–1245. and I wonder what has happened to "Dr. Who" recently, because many children must have gone to bed and had nightmares after seeing the recent episodes
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