Auton

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For the Supreme Court of Canada case, see Auton (Guardian ad litem of) v. British Columbia (Attorney General).

Doctor Who race
name=Autons
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Type	Living plastic automata
Affiliated with	Nestene Consciousness
Homeworld	Unknown (possibly Polymos)
First appearance	Spearhead from Space

The Autons are an artificial life form from the British science fiction television series Doctor Who, and adversaries of the Doctor. First appearing in Jon Pertwee's first serial as the Doctor, Spearhead from Space in 1970, they were the first monsters on the show to be presented in colour.

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.

Autons conceal deadly weapons within their hands, which can kill or vaporize 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 sheen to the skin and a flat sounding voice.

1 History
2 Other appearances
3 Other uses
4 Appearances

[edit] History

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

The Nestenes' first attempt to invade the Earth, using these more human-looking Autons to replace key government figures, was 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 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.

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. A third appearance was planned for the aborted 1985 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 veteran writer Robert Holmes, only exists in outline form.

Although the Autons only made two appearances during the original television series run, they remain one of the more memorable monsters associated with Doctor Who. The image of store mannequins coming to life in Spearhead, 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. It also raised questions in the House of Lords about its effect on the public perception of the police.

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. 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 in a 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. The Doctor eventually defeated them when a vial of his "anti-plastic" solution spilled into the vat of molten plastic which housed the main bulk of the Consciousness, causing it to explode.

Rose also featured an Auton facsimile that could change the shape of its features and limbs, and established that the Nestenes animate the Autons by means of telepathic projection. When duplicated, the originals are kept alive to maintain the copy. It is not yet clear if the war mentioned was also the motivation behind their earlier invasions or a recent development, but it is likely to be the same war as the Time War that is mentioned in subsequent episodes of the 2005 series.

The Autons appeared in a segment of the 2006 series episode Love & Monsters. The sequence, specifically filmed for the episode, was a flashback to the climactic events of Rose.

[edit] Other appearances

The Nestenes have also appeared in the Doctor Who spin-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 Doctor novel Business Unusual by Gary Russell (which gave Melanie Bush a belated introduction story), the Nestenes used computer games and plastic toys in another bid for world conquest. In Synthespians™ by Craig Hinton, a far-future television station's artificial actors were not what they seemed. This novel also featured the Time Lords launching an assault on the Nestene homeworld Polymos, which may or may not be connected to the war mentioned in Rose.

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.

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, as with all spin-off productions the canonicity of these films is unclear.

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.

[edit] Other uses

In the film Alien: Resurrection (1997) the girl Call, when being revealed for being a robot, is noted by another character to be "an Auton, a robot designed by other robots".