Original air dates January 1971. A short episode this time. New season, new companion! Goodbye Liz, wherever you’ve got to.
Backstage at a circus. A truck appears with a TARDIS noise and The Master arrives. He takes over the circus leader, and they then steal something.
Jo Grant introduces herself to the Doctor, dramatically. More fire extinguishers.
Oh look, a teletype!
Some men doing Sciency things are observed by The Master. He enters and zaps one man. He plugs in the stolen energy module and begins to do something with radiotelescopes. The Doctor heads there immediately on hearing it.
A Time Lord arrives to tell the Doctor that the Master was around. The Time Lord delivers this message and vanishes again. The Master has left a bomb which the Doctor gets to deal with.
The Master puts a whammy on the operator of a plastics factory. Jo is busy sneaking in. Badly. The Master puts the whammy on Jo. The whammy isn’t working on the factory man as well, and his staff resists the new leadership.
Jo opens a bomb and credits roll. Yay whammied-Jo.
The Master kills a director of the plastics factory with an inflatable chair.
Dad shows up to keep the factory on the straight and narrow. Dad resists the Master’s whammy, probably leading to his doom. Yes, plastic dummy derived doom, narrowly averted, only to be triggered later.
The Doctor checks out the circus, just as the Master intended. Doom is planned for him there, too. Lot of that going around. The Doctor gets captured by the circus manager, and Jo, who’d snuck along, calls the Brigadier.
The circus people attack the Doctor after the missing radiotelescope operator tries to bomb him, and are driven off by the police, who take the Doctor and Jo away. Brigadier follows, to discover it’s not a police car at all. The Doctor finds it’s driven by an Auton as the credits roll.
Dumped in a quarry, the Doctor and Jo are hunted by the Autons. They hide. The Brigadier and two men arrive. They rescue Jo and the Doctor.
They find a lead that Mr. Farrell may have been killed. Worried by factory business and the death of Mr. MacDermott. A new customer Colnel Masters. Suspicious.
The Master phones the Doctor to attack him with his new long phone cord. Credits roll.
Brigadier saves him.
They clue into the tourbus full of autons giving out daffodils. Daffodills which kill when triggered with a shortwave radio signal by squirting a plastic film over the nose and mouth.
They chase the Autons back to the radiotelescope which would signal all the daffodils, and capture them. The Master makes good his escape.
The Doctor looks forward to next time.
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