Generally I think this is absolutely fantastic. This era isn't entirely my cup of tea, but I can't deny its quality.

Only a couple of complaints from me. Regarding this story in particular, I've never really fully understood the Autons. Are they robots? Are they made fully of plastic (the gun would suggest no) in which case are they living creatures? Never really got it. (But I will say that the terrifying hollow eyes make them vastly superior to the ones we see 35 years later in Rose.) The only other issue that I recall right now is the dreadful special effects. The Autons' "total destruction" of Farrell is as risible as it is impossible. And surely the shoppers' deaths from the mannequins could have been given a little more realism than just falling over. It's a masterclass in bad extra acting.

The only other thing is about this series as a whole, and by extension the next one too. The two things the new crew were left with by the old production team were both detrimental to the show. 1) The Doctor being grounded on Earth. There's certainly more than a degree of invention with stories like Inferno and The Silurians, but it strips the series of its USP. Pertwee only has one historical in his entire run, and it's in his final season! Instead we have alien invasion after alien invasion, and while I like U.N.I.T. as much as the next person, it means the series begins to rely far too much on unfathomable coincidence (in that virtually everything that needs to happen happens right there and right then). And unfortunately, I simply don't believe it. And that means I don't feel it. The stories are still mostly very good, but it doesn't feel enough like Doctor Who to me. It's just fairly standard science-fiction. Some would say that's no bad thing, but when you have literally anything open to you like with this show, I think it really is a bad thing.

2) The story length. Three of this season's four serials are 7 episodes long. It's way, way too many. Even Inferno (the best of the three by a long shot) can't quite sustain that length of time. It's a real shame, because this is when Robert Holmes and Terrance Dicks really started to come into their own, and both are extremely talented. But this is the first season of the show where I could sympathise with people saying "it's not the same show anymore". And unfortunately, it was Pertwee's first.

It's a good intro to Doctor Who but this particular serial is a few episodes too long. There's so much going back and forth, it just feels like padding. A lot of Classics have this same problem, which is why I quite like the Tales of the TARDIS series - cuts out all the crap.

@CaptainKaibyo This one's only four to be fair. The next two are far more guilty of to-ing and fro-ing IMO.

Spearhead was only four? It felt like more. Then... I suppose the issue is the pacing!