Re-running through corridors: The Robots of Death

4 Episodes
Aired between 29th January 1977 and 19th February 1977

Written by Chris Boucher
Produced by Phillip Hinchcliffe
Directed by Michael Briant

Synopsis

The Doctor has wrestled control of the TARDIS back from Leela. The ship takes them to a sand miner, a huge machine that captures precious ore from the storms on a desolate planet. After nearly getting buried by all the sand,

they discover that some of the crew are dead, with the rest being picked off one by one by a mysterious murderer.

The crew think that the Doctor and Leela did it, but the Doctor thinks it's the robots, mechanical servants of the humans. That however is impossible, seeing as how all robots from Dums (manual labour bots that can't talk) Vocs (ones that can talk) and the super voc (that coordinates robot task work) are all hardwired with a programme that inhibits them from harming any human.

As the death toll rises, so do the stakes. Whilst Leela discovers a secret agent "Dum" robot that can actually talk,

the Doctor finds out that Taren Capel, a mad scientist who grew up with robots is onboard and is bent on starting a robot revolution onboard, masquerading as a late replacement crew member.

Thanks to the Doctor's quick thinking, he comes up with a plan to secretly pour helium into Taren Capel's lair, so that his voice changes and he won't be able to command the robots anymore. The robots, looking for humans to kill, ultimately find Capel and strangle him to death.

D84 (the secret agent Dum) sacrifices himself to send a virus code to every robot and destroy them.

With the crisis finally averted, and the Doctor's hatred of filling in all the messy paperwork afterwards, he and Leela head back to the TARDIS and set off on another adventure.

Trivia

After a story scheduled for this slot fell through, Bob Holmes suggested using Chris Boucher as he did such a good job on the previous story. Phillip Hinchcliffe agreed and asked that the story incorporate something about robots as he'd wanted a story like that for a bit.

The problem was, Bob Holmes hated those kind of stories, as he felt there wasn't much you could do with them, just like historical stories. Regardless, he gave the job to Chris

Funny enough, Tom Baker didn't like the script for this story and took every opportunity to complain about it. Rather mischievously, Michael Briant invited Tom to go on one of his rants, just as the new producer came to visit the set!

As noted in The Deadly Assassin, Phillip Hinchcliffe's card had been marked and so, he was to be sent off at the end of the series to work on a show called Target, a programme that had been created and developed by a Producer called Graham Williams. It just so happened that Williams was coming to replace Hinchcliffe on Doctor Who. Williams did come and visit the set on this story to get a handle on things and meet with Hinchcliffe.

Chris incorporated a lot of things into the story from elsewhere. For example, the robot stuff was very similar to Isaac Asimov's stories, the murder mystery was similar to Agatha Christie's "And then there were none", but it reached further than that. Uvanov is meant to be a similar name to Asimov, Poul's name was based on sci-fi author Poul Anderson, and Taren Capel was a call to Karel Capek, the guy who came up with the word Robot.

This is the last story that uses the wooden panelled control room. The reason for this was that the wood warped whilst it was in storage.

Grimwade's syndrome was a reference to Peter Grimwade, Production Assistant who often moaned about robots in the scripts.

There's an audio series called Kaldor City that develops the world shown in this story (http://kaldorcity.blogspot.co.uk/) as well as a further book written by Chris Boucher called "Corpse Marker".

The Review

You might have noticed something different on this post. Simple terms, I'm finding less and less time to produce these blogs, and the pilgrimage of watching every Dcotor who episode sequentially is becoming more and more laborious because of the recap I'm doing. So, I thought I'd switch it up a bit, and in the process enable myself to do a bit more of a free form review and, well...just see what happens. Let me know what you think of it.

Ok, on with the review.

A Second Gem?
Given that such a good story preceded this, and given that it was the same author that did it, can we really expect lightning to strike in the same place twice?

It turns out that yes, we blummin well can!

Chris Boucher is great at world building. I mean, no other story in this show has really reached this pinnacle. The Robots of Death, although borrowed heavily from other literature, does the impossible. In the first twenty five minutes, it gives us a pretty excellent explanation of transdimensional engineering, it shows a multi-cultural society and even helps to point out sub-cultures of the servants of that society and how something is very wrong.

The World and Setting
The world feels new, it feels odd, and that's partially because Boucher went to the effort of thinking about it, even if the results of his thoughts were to simply mash up Dune, Agathatha Christie and I Robot. But it's not only Boucher that can take the credit. Michael Briant compounded the strangeness of the story by having it created in an art deco style, with lots of curves and sparkly material. It should be horrible, it should be about as realistic as anything seen in Patrick Troughton's era, and don't get me wrong some of it is, I mean, you just have to look at Toos' head dress to see that..

but the most important parts, the bits that really matter do work. I'm talking about the odd custom of face paint on each of the crew, like it's futuristic cosmetics, and of course, I mean the robots themselves.

The robots look fantastic. They are aesthetically pleasing as far as machinery goes, but their lifeless eyes and droning voice give out all the creepiness you'd ever want in a villain. I'd even go as far as to say that they work better than the Cybermen, because they just have that slight edge of humanity to them, that's cruelly ignored when it's time for them to kill someone.

Acting
The crew themselves aren't amazing acting wise, with the exception of Russell Hunter as Uvanov, but he more than makes up for it, as does Tom Baker.

There's nothing particularly wrong with the characters you understand, but take Zilda for example, when she's arguing with Uvanov, the dialogue feels so scripted it's painful. And robot or not, the guy who delivered D84's lines made his scenes hard to stand.

Louise Jameson doesn't shine here, but that's alright because the script sadly doesn't allow her to. There's the bits about her noticing body language but for the most part, she's totally reactive, and never really recovers beyond a "what's that doctor?" situation. All I can guess is that they were still sorting out in their heads how she would be developed as a character.

The Murder Mystery
I liked the fact that the Robots of Death made a murder mystery in an unusual location. It adds tension, and because it's on a remote location, it ramps up the drama, just like the base under siege stories of the Second Doctor's era.

The thing is though, in this particular murder mystery, there's not much of character justification in it. What I mean by that is there's not much reason for the characters to do what they do. I understand that the story needs the characters to start questioning each others motives, so that we as viewers are drawn in and start to engage in the investigation itself, but...as soon as the Doctor is taken to the crew, the coincidence of him being on board as bodies start appearing seems too good to just brush off on the Doctor's insistence. Plus, they escape and low and behold, are captured again right at the scene of another murder, yet, Poul suspects Uvanov?!

And that's not all. Zilda clearly hates Uvanov too, yes, but when the murders start to happen, she never once mentions the fact that her brother was killed on her captain's first tour of duty. Don't you think that information might just be relevant rather than making pouty faces and coming across like you're the one with the problem?

Then there's Uvanov himself, who doesn't seem to be happy with Zilda suspecting him for no reason, so he starts to give her a reason by explaining that he's incredibly likely to be the killer (before the Doctor comes on the scene) because with every crew death, he gets a bigger cut of the profits. This bit would have worked far better if someone else, even Zilda, had pointed it out to him rather than him bringing it up himself.

The Real Killer
Then there's the real killer. The alibi's for Dask seem pretty good at the start as he's always the voice of reason and kept out of the limelight. Conventional TV detective wisdom now tells us that he should be an obvious suspect because of this, but as this is 1977, I'll give the benefit of the doubt.

If it continued like that, or maybe even faked his death, then that would have been great, but for everything that Michael Briant got right in this story, he failed on two major accounts in regards to keeping the villains identity. First, he shows the killer meeting with a robot via only his feet. Nothing wrong with that, except that we see his striped trousers in full view, and this is directly following on from the scene before, when he was pottering about on the command deck in a striped outfit.

In the very next episode, we see him commanding SV7 via a video link. Even though it's a top of the pops style effect that masks him, you don't have to look too hard. It wouldn't be as bad if the remaining crew looked something alike, or even better, just have him relay the instructions by audio instead.

Then there's the killers motives. If you're going to start a robot revolution, why there? It's like saying you're going to overthrow the government and then starting by attacking the workers at the local coal mine, and that's without even looking at the age old argument of destroying his fellow humans and then what? How will he eat etc?

The End Result
So, for me, the Robots of Death is a lot like The Sea Devils. On the surface of the story, it is great. The mystery, the creepiness the witty one liners. It has it all. When you start to look a little harder at it, there's tons of plot holes and inconsistencies that niggle at you, but ultimately, do they really matter?

Fans for decades have scored this story high. It's consistently in top tens when the stories are ranked. I agree with the masses. This story has downsides, yes, but none of them matter because at the end of the day, there's not many TV shows that are like this. Take ANY era of TV. There's not many shows that go into so much detail to build a world and a story as the Robots of Death. This story is immersive. Not even the Daleks had multiple layers of society at their inaugural outing. It's different, it's interesting and the killer's identity takes a back seat to this wonderful world Chris Boucher created. We're more concerned with Poul and the implications of Robophobia.

The Robots of Death is a top class Doctor Who story, worthy of being set amidst some of Tom Baker's best work.

Rating

10 out of 10

Characterisations: poor, story: ok, setting: beautiful

Rewatchability Factor

8 out of 10

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