Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...
Day 303: Colony in Space, Episode Four
Dear diary,
You know how sometimes you meet someone and they’re just cool. Effortlessly calm, and collected, and fun, and just… cool. Usually when you meet someone like this you’re either jealous of them or you simply hate them. They always have the right line to say at just the right moment. The person you fancy would much rather be with them. They’ve literally rolled out of bed and left the house that morning, but they look fantastic without even trying. That was The Master when he first appeared in Terror of the Autons.
While the Doctor was blowing up the TARDIS again at a garishly decorated UNIT HQ (that awful green door made a comeback at the start of this story – please tell me that this is the last time we’ll see it?), being hassled by the Brigadier, and getting his experiments ruined by Jo, the Master has just swanned onto Earth in a fully-functional TARDIS, and hypnotised the first person he meets into doing his bidding. He even gets that first line spot on – ‘I am usually referred to as the Master’.
The thing with those naturally ‘cool’ people is that at some point it all falls apart. There comes a time when you realise that – actually – they’re just like you. They haven’t just rolled out of bed, but spent two hours getting the right look. They don’t know the right thing to say all the time, they just happened to be on form that day. Eventually, you have ‘the moment’ where you see through the cool exterior and see the real person.
It feels a bit like that’s happened today with the Master. We’ve grown accustomed to seeing him in the back of luxury cars lighting up a cigar and using other people to do his dirty work because he’s got such a strong power of persuasion. But then today we see him at what appears to simply be his job. He confirms to the Doctor that he’s not really the adjudicator (of course), but we get several scenes of him just getting on with the job of impersonation and he comes across as some sort of boring middle-management type.
Even the direction has stopped trying to make him look cool. His arrival is briefly treated as a secret, being shot from behind as he enters the colony, and with an extra large collar so that we don’t accidentally spot the back of his head (although the second he arrived on the scene I’d figured out it must be him – we were running out of time for him to turn up!), I thought we were in for a great reveal where the Doctor walks in, the adjudicator turns around and… dun dun dunnnn!
But no. Having built up the suspense a little during his approach to the building and his first meeting with Ashe, we then simply cut to a shot of him inside. There’s not even a ‘turning around’ shot: he’s already done it! It’s a pity, because this feels like the point that the master officially stops being cool. He was already in danger of losing some mojo when every story boiled down asking the Doctor for help because he’d overlooked an element of the plan, but this just finalises it.
Things might start to pick up once the story gets back underway. Much of today’s episode seems to boil down to the Doctor and Jo being captured and escaping, and then once they’re done with that, we go for a debate between the scientists and IMC, before ending with a battle, because it just wouldn’t be a Pertwee episode without some kind of action sequence. Now that all the elements have been introduced, things might start looking up again…
5/10 
