TV Club: Doctor Who, Terror of the Autons

“Terror Of The Autons” (season 8, episodes 1-4. Originally aired Jan. 2-23, 1971)

It’s a law of storytelling physics, at least for the kind of serial adventure story that is Doctor Who: For every hero, there is an equal and opposite villain. Not just the run-of-the-mill bad guys who take a number and line up for a single-episode smackdown, but a true nemesis, someone who presents a genuine challenge to the hero’s abilities and also to the fundamental question of who he is. All good hero/villain pairings do this to some extent, but the emergence of a nemesis relationship is something special, even epic, and when it’s done well it resonates throughout the entire series. You know what I mean: Holmes and Moriarty. Batman and the Joker. The great rivalries.

In Doctor Who’s case, you could make a pretty good argument that prior to our Mystery Guest Villain’s debut in 1971′s “Terror Of The Autons,” the Doctor already had a perfectly serviceable epic nemesis in the Daleks. He’d clashed with them repeatedly since the beginning of the series, and the things they stood for—fear, oppression, stagnation, conformity—helped define what the Doctor stands against. Obviously, that relationship is still important, even crucial for the series today. But there was always something missing, because the Daleks are perhaps too diametrically opposed to the Doctor. The differences are starkly apparent, but the commonalities aren’t. That’s what Moriarty has over the Daleks: He’s equal and opposite, a man with the skills and temperament of Sherlock Holmes who represents the ways Holmes could have gone wrong. The other problem with the Daleks is that by the time of “Terror,” they’d grown overexposed by repeated return engagements, and had in fact been effectively killed off four seasons earlier in “Evil Of The Daleks.” So the field was open for a new nemesis.

Originally published Oct. 16, 2011 on avclub.com. Read the complete article.

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