Doctor Who: The Robot Revolution

Thinking about this episode, and the season it’s following up on, I’ve landed on a bit of an observation. And it is this: the current DOCTOR WHO had entered its version of the 1980s, a period when, concerned about pushback that the show was too dark and violent for young viewers, it instead steered more firmly into camp and color and silliness. That’s very much what DOCTOR WHO had been doing since it arrived on Disney+, and while it would be easy to put blame upon that platform, I don’t think that’s truly the case at all. I suspect that much of this is just down to the choices showrunner Russell T. Davies is making. His WHO was always very comfortable with going camp, and he always remembered that it was designed to be a series aimed primarily at children. It’s just that now, much of the additional levels and the complex emotional maturity that his earlier run was famous for seems to have fallen by the wayside, subsumed by a larger budget and a seeming need to show the money off. But this is Peter Davison DOCTOR WHO, Colin Baker DOCTOR WHO, Sylvester McCoy DOCTOR WHO. Daft, dodgily plotted, a confection.

As an episode, The Robot Revolution has a bunch of stuff to offer, even if it doesn’t entirely come together properly or well. To begin with, new companion Belinda Chandra is far better fleshed-out than her predecessor Ruby Sunday ever was. She still feels a bit less convincing and fully-realized than Davies’ earlier creations Rose Tyler, Martha Jones and Donna Noble, but it’s an overall improvement. Some of that is simply down to Varada Sethu’s performance, where she’s convincing even in moments where the script is at its battiest and least sensical. So she’s a definite improvement all around. I do wish that we got a bit more of her in her natural habitat, being a Nurse and living with her flatmates and so forth–her real life before the science fiction nonsense comes crashing through her wall. DOCTOR WHO is always at its best when set against a convincing real world background, so while Belinda is sketched out here, it feels very much like checking a box, doing the bare minimum before moving on to the next thing. Even so, Varada makes the most of what she’s given.

Ncuti Gatwa pretty much is the Doctor at this point. I admit that I was still having difficulty with him in the role even by the end of the first season. He was somehow too light, too playful, missing that streak of intensity that all the best Doctors have. The Christmas Special, though, did a lot to cement him in as genuinely being the Doctor, and that carries over to his performance and appearance here. For all that he doesn’t really accomplish much directly, Gatwa at least gives off the appearance that he has a plan and that he’s the prime mover of the story. That said, I never quite bought the fact that the Doctor had been on-site for six months waiting for Belinda to show up. That’s what was said, but it isn’t how things played on screen.

The story itself is a big jinky, built around the fun conceit that years ago, a boyfriend had a star named after Belinda, and now the inhabitants of that world need her to help them end years of warfare between the human population and their robots. The robots are fun, if just a hair too big and unwieldy an unconvincing. They never quite succeed in coming across as a threat. If anything, they seem like a cross between King Hydroflax and those Emoji robots that Peter Capaldi once crossed paths with. They don’t quite work, but they’re very obvious in their toyetic appeal.

There’s also very clearly a moral to this story, but one that’s a double-edged sword given how bluntly the show chooses to frame it. It isn’t enough to reveal that the true cause of all the mayhem is Belinda’s old boyfriend, tossed a decade back in time, where his controlling, parochial attitudes became the basis for the robot uprising. All of that would have been fine if the episode left it to viewers to detect the message at its core. But as the show has been doing of late, it instead feels the need to drop a hammer on its point. So we get references to incels and toxic masculinity and abusive control and it all gets a bit much, particularly when the story doesn’t really have anything much deeper to say on these points apart from the such behavior is bad.

And I do like the central conflict of this season: that Belinda doesn’t actually want to be on this adventure and instead wants to simply do home, having witnessed her potential predecessor get horribly killed while trying to assist the Doctor. Sasha 55 was a bit too quickly-drawn for her demise to carry much impact, but it was a good touch that the Doctor remembered to morn for her after their Trans-Mat escape. It’ll be for future episodes to show how well the follow-through to Belinda’s reluctance plays out–past a certain point, the character is going to have no choice but to hang on for dear life as adventures get thrown at her. But I like the novelty of the approach and can see how it might give this Doctor/companion pairing a bit of a unique feel.

So not a great episode, but also not a terrible one. I’m still left wanting a bit, longing for greater emotional purity and punch, more dramatic and suspenseful moments, and stronger overall plotting. But I think my problem is that what I’m still looking for is 1970s DOCTOR WHO, and the show maybe just isn’t going to be that any longer. And that’s fine, the series always changes and adapts to the era that it’s being produced in, and it should hardly be targeting Fifty-Year-Olds as its primary audience in the first place. Buy, boy, I miss it.