page_title: Auton
section_title: Other appearances
hierarchical_section_title: Auton / Other appearances
caption_attribution_description: DSC_0984 Doctor Who Experience
context_page_description: The Autons are an artificial life form from the British science fiction television series Doctor Who and adversaries of the Doctor. They were originally created by scriptwriter Robert Holmes. 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.
  Robert Holmes would feature the Autons later for Season 23 of Doctor Who entitled Yellow Fever, and How to Cure It, it features the Master and the Rani in this story, but was abandoned due to the program put on an 18th-month hiatus.
  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 From Space.
  Autons conceal deadly weapons within their hands, which can kill or vaporise their targets. The typical Auton does not look particularly realistic, resembling a mannequin, being robotic in its movements and mute.
context_section_description: 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 2008, the Eighth Doctor and Lucie Miller encounter Autons in the audio Brave New Town, these Autons being part of an old Soviet program to infiltrate Britain during the Cold War before the collapse of the Soviet Union left the Autons stuck in a loop in the fake British town created for the spies, eventually developing independence.
  A Tenth Doctor novel, Autonomy, was released in September 2009 featuring the Autons.
  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 the first series of the televised Dead Ringers, in a sketch with Jon Culshaw visiting the London Eye (calling it an Interstitial Time Delay Helix) in the persona of the Fourth Doctor, he humorously accused two tourists: "You are Autons from the planet Tosos!"
  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.
  The Autons appear as sketches in John Smith's A Journal of Impossible Things in the episode "Human Nature".
  They appeared in issue 15 of Doctor Who - Battles in Time in which they were the main theme of the issue.
  "Autonomous" Autons, which had a piece of Nestene Consciousness inside them and developed personalities when separated from the control unit, were featured in the 2008 Eighth Doctor audio story "Brave New Town".
  The Autons also appeared in the Doctor Who Level Pack in Lego Dimensions serving as minor enemies.
  The Autons are also mentioned in the series 12 episode Praxeus.
caption: The Autons, shown here at the Doctor Who Experience
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