Synopsis: Two years have passed since the Nestene creature vanished from UNIT's top secret Warehouse... Suddenly and without warning the Nestene strikes, once again using Autons as its deadly foot soldiers. As mysterous UNIT operative Lockwood struggles to unearth the Nestene plan he finds himself drawn to the remote Sentinel Island. There, the population have been caught up in a bizarre frenzy of religious activity. Lockwood is joined by Natasha Alexander, a new scientific advisor with her own, sinister agenda. To defeat the Nestene menace they must both face the terrifying power of a creature from before the dawn of Mankind...

• A Review by Stuart Gutteridge
• A Review by Richard Radcliffe
• A Review by Finn Clark

A Review by Stuart Gutteridge 30/11/98

Where Auton opened the trilogy, Auton 2:Sentinel, builds and improves upon established continuity, drawing heavily from both The Sea Devils and The Daemons. The story benefits greatly from the location work and an impressive script, bringing new aspects to the main players.

The Autons have been tracked to Sentinel island, where the local vicar is holding more than just morning service in the church,a nd Lockwood finds somebody knows more about him than he thought. In deciding not to centre solely on the characters, Michael Wade`s Lockwood loses some of his acidness, becoming instead more vulnerable; this is due largely to Jo Castleton`s Natasha Alexander, a UNIT operative with telepathic abilities. Here she serves as a replacement for Bryonie Pritchard`s Dr Sally Arnold, who is written out of the action early on.

Best performance should go to George Telfer who, as the local vicar, steals the show, being charming one minute and menacing the next. Surprisingly the Autons themselves don`t play as large a role as in Auton, being servants here rather than killers. The script, however, does give John Wadmore and Andrew Fettes, men in charge of the UNIT soldiers, more to do.

The atmosphere here also belies the fact that despite being set in the English countryside, everything will be all right; from the outset, it is established it won`t be. Add to this some CGI effects at the end, and you have an impressive production. Auton 3 will need to be something special.

A Review by Richard Radcliffe 9/10/04

As if conscious of the limited stage that the first Auton was acted out on, there seems to be a concerted effort here to go places. The first Auton was set in and around a warehouse. The second Auton is set on the Isle of Wight, and is on location all of the time. It thus distinguishes itself from its predecessor, and tops it.

The story is better too. Having escaped the warehouse, Winslet the Auton has set up his own community in a little village. He poses as the Vicar of the Parish, and controls the populace by force - a strict "Obey me or Die" arrangement. His soldiers used for this control are, of course, the Autons. There is something definitely more creepy about the Autons walking through the woods, rather than from behind boxes in a warehouse. This creepiness is used to full effect in some wonderfully directed scenes when UNIT, Natasha Alexander and Lockwood arrive on the island.

Lockwood is again excellent. His crustiness is still there in abundance, and this time he has a better foil in Alexander (played by BBV favourite Jo Castleton). Their interplay is very good, even though Alexander seems a little lacking in personality early on. Thankfully Lockwood carries the 2 of them in the first half, and Alexander really gets into the swing of the things in the second half.

What is most effective is the village that the Autons control. There's plenty of religious analogy, as the local church is the focus for the story. The church provides an atmospheric and realistic scene for much of the action, with the conclusion particularly sticking in the memory. This religious analogy isn't too intense, nothing really uncomfortable in there - but it does work well in this kind of story.

The story is presented very well overall. The production crew choose to set the action in the light throughout. Whilst this makes everything that transpires clear, it would have fitted the story more to have a few night scenes, or even some scenes in the crypt of the church. The story seemed to be heading in that direction, but stayed firmly in the light of day.

There is no doubt at all though who the star of both the Auton stories thus far is - Lockwood. His job reflects mystery and intrigue. His past a strange unknown, he is human, but something different too. His personality is unusual and alarming. Having created such a complex and interesting character BBV would be wise to feature him just about as much as they possibly can. Better than the first, and recommended. 7/10

A Review by Finn Clark 12/7/13

It's the middle film in Nicholas Briggs's Auton trilogy for BBV. I might slightly prefer the original for its claustrophobia, but I had to think about that and in important ways, this film trumps its predecessor. For starters, it has a startling central idea.

Two years have passed. The Auton Winslet is still on the loose somewhere and Lockwood (Michael Wade) is still dribbling bile and anti-charm into the bowels of UNIT. The movie begins with Nicholas Briggs transporting some Autons and getting killed for his pains. A happy beginning! Soon Lockwood is getting shanghaied to work under a Colonel Wilson (John Wadmore) and his psychic investigator (Jo Castleton). UNIT hasn't got any cuddlier since last time, by the way. They're still paranoid, sinister and bullying... and that's to their own operatives.

This is an invaluable plot device. It lets Wade mellow a little towards the people he's worked with before (Andrew Fettes, Bryonie Pritchard) while still being openly abusive and disdainful towards people who are supposedly his colleagues and commanding officers. He's not in charge any more. He doesn't like it. It's a clever answer to the How To Reset Things For The Sequel problem, in other words. Better still though is that even the audience can't trust him. He may or may not be linked with the Nestenes and so it's possible that he's working for the enemy and acting to bring about the destruction of mankind. Nice one! That's our Lockwood. Anyway, he's still the star of the show, although this time he seems to be showing his age more and is perhaps a little more reflective in his bitterness. This is of course deliberate and I love the fact that Michael Wade's developing his character instead of just rehashing what he did (brilliantly) last time.

If it weren't for Wade, this series wouldn't be ten percent of what it is. He elevates the whole thing.

That's our hero, if the word could be said to apply. However we also have our villains, with whom I'd say Briggs is doing the most interesting thing I've seen done yet with Autons. They're not just plastic thugs in this one, you see. They have a village. They conduct church services, preaching about Satan and evil while one of their energy units glows and bleeps on the altar under a crucifix. The village's human inhabitants are still alive, astonishingly, although a series of early gangster-like killings from the Autons shows that you wouldn't want to be a dissenter among them. They've experienced a rapture. The most far gone of them appear to worship their plastic masters, to the extent that you'd assume you'd met the village idiot.

This is wacky, but intriguing. We know the Nestenes' powers of mental domination, after all. This is just taking it further than I'd previously imagined, that's all. If either of their Pertwee-era Earth invasions had succeeded, might the result have been produced an outcome like this? It seems unlikely to me, given the Autons' known lack of interest in human individuality (and even their occasional outright blindness to it, e.g. Rory in Matt Smith's first season), but it's not an impossible conjecture, and I found the idea both freaky and fascinating. Its realisation also reminded me faintly of The Wicker Man.

Then there's the finale. We see a Nestene! Admittedly it's traditional to glimpse an octopus-squid thing at the end of their TV stories, but elsewhere it's always been as a faintly silly throwaway. Here, it's as big as a church and stomping around. It's like one of H.G. Wells's Martian tripods, but organic. I now desperately want to see this done in proper Doctor Who, which has never even begun to take advantage of the fact that our mental image of one of its first-division bad guys is in fact just the rather dull and personality-free plastic puppet of Godzilla-sized Cthulhoid entities. I want a Nestene story with Nestenes in it! Let them stomp! Autons tend to fade into the background, I think, to the extent that one tends to forget they're in a bunch of Colin Baker PDAs, even while you're reading them. This could change all that. It's the Auton story the world has been waiting for!

Apart from that, there's some nice stuff in the village. The scenes of Autons being applauded is creepy, for instance, while there's some poignant stuff with the village idiot and his girlfriend. "Did you call the mainland? Did the police take the vicar away?"

What's bad? There must be something, right? Okay, there is, but Wade and the Auton village between them still lift this film up a long way. What's not so good are the psychic powers. The plot's most important players all have a psychic link to someone or something, which can be a lazy plot device at the best of times and here makes the story annoyingly muddy. What happened? Why? When? The answer to all those questions is "psychic powers, I'll explain later". Oh, and the plot has some "was that all?" moments in regrettably important places. The Nestene's defeat is almost bathetic, while you'll laugh at their criterion for becoming invincible. Apparently all they need is Lockwood's knowledge of UNIT's plans for combating alien invasion! Wow. UNIT have plans? I thought they just made it up as they went along?

Those are serious problems, but they don't derail the movie. By semi-pro Doctor Who fanvid standards, this series is practically a masterpiece. In other words, it's pretty good. It's building on its predecessor in both scale and ambition, doing that thing you see in Hollywood superhero movies by which the first film is effectively laying the groundwork and then the second film is the one that spreads its wings. Wade ("UNIT's creature") is still terrific. I love Briggs's use of the Autons. It's a good series. Recommended, if you can forgive plot problems.