The Doctor karate chops (Venusian karate chops) the driver so that the car crashes and he and Jo run away. The Autons pewpewpew at them, but miss, and then give chase.
The Brigadier and Yates arrive in their car, having obviously stopped off somewhere* to pick up another UNIT manny with a big gun. Guess which one of them gets pewpewpewed by the Autons?
The Doctor says
"They're Autons, bullets can't stop them!"so Yates gets back in the car and runs one of them over. The others then get in the car with him and escape.
Farrel tells the Master that the Autons have failed to kill the Doctor and Jo. The Master is not surprised, and says
"He's an interesting adversary. I admire him in many ways."
"But you still intend to destroy him?"
"Of course. And the more he struggles to postpone the moment, the greater the ultimate satisfaction."
The Master knows how to play the game of Cat and Mouse. Purr.
The Doctor tries to use the Master's dematerialisation circuit (which he "borrowed" last episode) in his own TARDIS, but it doesn't work because the Time Lords, like Apple Inc, don't believe in backwards compatibility.
"My TARDIS might not work, but neither will his now. Wherever he is, he's trapped on Earth."
The Master now has Autons wearing giant fake faces - presumably to make it harder for the Doctor to remove them - handing out plastic daffodils to unsuspecting mannys. When they have no more flowers left to distribute, they get back on their bus.
At the Doctor's lab the Brigadier comes in with Mr Brownrose "from the Ministry." 'Brownrose' sounds a bit like 'brownnose,' is this Robert Holmes perhaps being a bit satirical with his character names? If so, this one is a bit too on the, er... nose, lol.
The Doctor pretends to be a friend of the minister in order to troll Brownrose, but he has actually come with a vital clue - he has a list of mannys who have died, and two of them were McDermott and Mr Farrel, "Production Manager and retired owner of the same plastics factory."
This leads the Doctor and Jo to speak to Mrs Farrel, who tells them about "Colonel Masters." When she says the name the Master's theme music starts playing, and the Doctor says
"I knew it."because he is clever enough to see through the Master's almost-impenetrably cunning alias, although I suspect he needed a final hint from the music to get him there.
Mrs Farrel gives them the troll and tells them
"I found it under the curtains. It was as if it was trying to get out."
At the lab, a new telephone is being installed. For the first time we see that the Master is a master (lol) of disguise when he takes off his mask, Mission: Impossible style, to reveal that it was really him who installed the telephone.
If the Master is now in league with The Worst Company in the World, the Doctor really does have the odds stacked against him. The Master on his own is bad enough, but there's no limit to their evil.
The Doctor leaves the troll in his lab while he goes off to investigate Farrel's factory with the Brigadier. Jo is left alone in the lab when the troll wakes up. She sees it and screams for help from Mike Yates, who
In the plastics factory, the Doctor finds one of the daffodils. The Brigadier asks him
"What do you want it for? They give these things away with soap."
"It's plastic, Brigadier, and any plastic artifact, anything at all, can, in the Nestene sense of the word, be alive."
There is a giant safe in Farrel's office which the Doctor opens. It is big enough to have an Auton inside, which tries to pewpewpew them, narrowly missing the Brigadier before the Doctor defeats it by means of closing the door again.
They go back to the lab and see what is left of the troll. The Doctor wants to examine the daffodil, but before he can start he gets a telephone call from the Master.
"Hello, Doctor, is that you?"This reminds us that even though we are almost three-quarters of the way through the story, the Doctor and the Master have not actually met each other yet.
"Who is this? What do you want?"Given that the Doctor doesn't actually say 'yes' in response to the Master's question, it would have been embarrassing for him if he had called the wrong number.
"Simply to say goodbye."The Master then makes a high-pitched sound effect that annoyed my puppy and his doggy friends, but which also causes the unnecessarily long telephone cable to attack the Doctor.
The Doctor makes a face, which means it's cliffhanger time!
* I expect they also rescued the lions and tigers off-screen at around this point in the story, seeing as the circus does not appear again.
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