Doctor Who: The Robot Revolution

"You lot. Forgive. Rebuild. Maybe change the name of the solar system."

The new season of Doctor Who has arrived, bringing with it a new companion, new adventures, and a newly acquired lack of focus as to what exactly it wants to be.

I've probably phrased that a little harsher that it deserves, just for the sake of having a flashy and provocative opening sentence above the break that's designed to lure you in to clicking the 'more' button. That is, after all, what openers are meant to do, right? Pique your interest and get you to come back to see where things are going?

By now you'll have caught on to my fairly obvious analogy for the episode, so let's just dive in. I apologize up front. In order to discuss what works and what doesn't about this episode I'm going to have to waffle on about the show's past for a bit. Bear with me, I swear I'll get around to talking about 'The Robot Revolution' very soon and it will all be relevant.

To begin with, let's take a look at the season openers of the modern series. Now, Davies has always had a preference for leaning into 'silly' for his season openers. By keeping things light it allows him to streamline the story enough to have room to set up whatever setup needs to be set up. If you follow me. Space Babies, Beep the Meep, Adipose. They're silly and cute. They make the viewer go 'aww' and be less inclined to nitpick about the logistics of the story, which is useful when you have a lot of other things that you need the script to get around to doing.

Moffat, on the other hand, accomplished the same trick by structuring season openers around a conceptual sci-fi 'hook.' A clever concept for us to ponder which we know will drive the season. A crack that shouldn't exist, following us around. An older Doctor dying and then meeting back up with the younger one. The previously announced incoming companion getting pre-emptively killed twice. That sort of thing. By keeping the actual story of the opener itself simple it allows whatever that season's 'neat concept' was to take focus.

'The Robot Revolution' tries to do both, and they really get in one another's way. It's fair to argue that this season opener isn't as much about humans fighting robots as it is one half of the script fighting the other half about what it wants to be.

The initial premise, clearly, was the idea that buying one of those 'You own this specific star now' certificates, taking to a ridiculous theoretical conclusion – i.e. that the people who live on planets circling that specific star that you now own would become aware of your ownership, accept it, and come pick you up to rule the planet as their queen. Since, you know, you own them all.

That right there is a pleasantly silly hook to base a season opener around, and I love what they did with it. The repeated gag of everything being named Missbelindachandrakind, Missbelindachandrabots, etc. was a fun gag and thankfully didn't get overused too badly. It was also a wonderful choice to have everything about the visuals echo the Flash Gordon-esque premise and lean way heavily into 50s and 60s pulp sci-fi imagery, from the buildings to the ships to the robots' guns.

But then with the introduction of the human rebel crew things start to get a little muddier. For starters, the visual style of the rebels and their hideout doesn't really gel with the pulp sci-fi style of the rest of the world. That isn't a major flaw, but it did grate a little. A bigger issue is that there needed to be either much more character depth to the rebels, or – preferably – much less. Because even though the script really wants to invest them with enough to be proper characters, the amount of time we spend with them here isn't enough for them to do more than what their plot function needs them to, which is to guilt Belinda into announcing their location to the robots so that they can all get to the big third act confrontation.

It's clearest if you look at Manny. Specifically, his shoulders, which are majestic as they flex mightily and I'm sorry, what was I talking about? Oh, right. Manny. Sorry.

Manny is the main voice of 'This is all your fault' to Belinda. It's his anger toward her, combined with the destruction and loss of life she's witnessing around her, that cause her to summon the robots so that she can surrender and stop the fighting. And that's all fine as far as character motivation goes, but they could have accomplished the exact same thing with the visuals of the destruction and a couple of audio callbacks indicating that she's feeling responsible for the deaths.

So why did we spend so much time building up Manny's resentment specifically, when it doesn't really go anywhere as far as Manny is concerned? Why the long shots of him holding up that pillar and scowling? And speaking of that, what was up with that? Does Manny have super strength of something? We'll never know, because Manny, much like the rest of the specific rebel characters, just doesn't matter to the story being told. Certainly not enough to justify the amount of screentime they receive.

And that's time which could have been used to organically uncover important details which now just get told to us. The Doctor tells us that the robots only turned on the humans ten years ago and so we have to get to the central information center to find out why. That's interesting and important information, but if they were just going to have the Doctor tell us that instead of showing him going to the information center and discovering it for himself, why not just have someone say it earlier and spare us the whole sequence?

And this is all indicative of the problem I talked about in the beginning. The first half of this episode is a Davies style opener, but somewhere along the line it jarringly becomes a Moffat style opener, and so the concepts that will drive the season are suddenly more important than the silly premise and whole swathes of characters that were a big part of the plot have their nascent character development sidelined. We'll circle back to the concepts in just a moment, but I want to talk about the biggest casualty of this shift in focus. I refer, of course, to Alan.

The reveal that the AI generator is really an abbreviation for Alan, Belinda's dickhead ex-boyfriend, is a really great reveal. And the way that that reveal facilitates the further reveal that things have been coming through the time fracture at random points relative to one another, and that Alan got picked up on Belinda's suggestion and got here ten years earlier than her, and that he's the reason that the robots all became dickheads like him because he can't distinguish between real life and a first person shooter videogame is all great. And it would have been even better if they'd dropped the 'the robots changed ten years ago' information much earlier in the script so that we'd had a good long time to wonder about it, but it's still great.

The problem is that Alan isn't a character at this point, he's a plot function. And the clearest way to illustrate that is the callback to the every-ninth-word gimmick from earlier in the episode. Now, the fact that the robots can't hear every ninth word, and that The Doctor uses that to communicate to Belinda what's happening, is very clever and I liked it a lot. It's also exactly the sort of gimmick that you put at that exact point in the episode so that you can call back to it at the end as part of the dramatic resolution.

And yet they don't. They sort of half-heartedly try, by giving us an eleventh-hour message from Alan that he's in pain, but it doesn't feel like the episode itself even buys it at that point, and it doesn't go anywhere. Not even a mid-temporal-explosion, 'Thanks for freeing me, and sorry about being such a shitty boyfriend' from Alan, which is the least they could have done to tie up that thread if they were interested in it. But they don't, because we don't care about Alan as a character anymore. He's just a vehicle to explain how the relative timelines got all mixed up. Which is admittedly interesting, to be fair.

And yet the fracture causing all the timelines to be mixed up, which is exactly the sort of concept you could spin a season arc around, is itself indicative of another problem. Is it the big concept of the season, or is it all cleaned up? Towards the final moments of the episode the Doctor basically says, 'Oh, I fixed that', which left me honestly wondering if I missed something. And therein lies the lack of focus that I gratuitously opened with.

We're left at the end of this episode with at least four unanswered questions and given no indication which of them we're supposed to be curious enough about to tune in next week and which of them the show considers safely resolved. Is the time fracture closed? Apparently. Are we supposed to care about what caused it in the first place? I have no idea, because the show never even mentions it. Who's the 'he' that dropped Belinda's name to the Doctor in a way that indicated that she'd be important? I assume we're going to circle back to that one, but a mention in the final scene would have been nice confirmation. How does the star certificate get back thousands of years to start Missbelindachandra One's history and culture? Surely, we'll get back to that, and yet it seems like such a ridiculously minor point to make a big mystery out of. Does it matter that Belinda is exactly like Mundy Flynn, or are they just lampshading the re-use of the actor? It must be significant, based on the amount of screentime they gave the question, and yet they've handwaved the exact same question away so many times before that dwelling on it this time feels strange.

OK, I don't feel nearly so negative about this episode as it would appear from the above paragraphs, so let me end this section on a positive. The premise of bouncing off of May 24, 2025 – conveniently the day the season finale airs – is a fun way of keeping Belinda with the Doctor and strikes the exact right tone with the viewer of 'You don't know the reason for this yet, but we do and we're going to get around to explaining it' that so many of the other mysteries don't. I love that they're going back to the very first story arc ever of 'trying to get the companions back home.'

Oh, and that final image of all the national monuments floating, broken in space, was haunting, lovely, and intriguing.

I'm not as important as the episode wants me to be,
but I am wearing a sleeveless T-shirt

Bits and Pieces:

-- Addressing the elephant in the room first, I have no interest in debating if the show is being cancelled, if Ncuti Gatwa is leaving after this season, or if Alan Ritchson is going to be playing the next companion wearing only a thong. Speculation about the show's imminent cancellation is literally as old as the second episode of the show in 1963. It's best not to worry about it and just see what happens.

-- OK, well obviously I would be interested in discussing that third one. I suspect his commitment to Reacher would probably preclude it, though.

-- For the second episode in a row, we're given a companion for the Doctor whom he knows for a very long time, and we only spend minutes with. Sasha 55, you seemed nice. You were clearly doomed to die the moment you said that you were going to leave with the Doctor, though. I'm sure all of the usual corners of the internet are complaining about Ncuti crying again.

-- This probably only bothered me, but cutting off all the power abruptly in a hospital would kill lots of people. Far worse than just a 'whoopsie, my bad.'

-- It was a mistake for them to kill the cat. Belinda's shitty roommates were right there to be cannon fodder, and nobody would have cared at all if the show had shot one of them instead.

-- It seems a little strange to me that Belinda still had the star certificate from some yutz she rightfully kicked to the curb 16 years earlier. I guess she actually did like the gift and wasn't just being polite.

-- The robotized makeup on Alan as the AI Generator was phenomenal. I saw Superman III in the movie theater as a kid and was particularly traumatized by the one woman getting pulled into the big computer and having metal bolted to her face exactly how the pictures showed that they were going to do to Belinda.

-- Belinda has apparently seen 'Mawdryn Undead.'

-- I loved that Belinda, a trained nurse, saw all the casualties and just immediately started helping out tending to them. Also, bonus points to her for double checking the local anatomy before resetting the guy's shoulder.

-- I honestly never thought that I'd see an episode of Doctor Who resolved by cleaning up sperm.

-- I really enjoyed them calling out the overuse of 'timey-wimey' and immediately replacing it with 'schwupped.'

-- Mrs. Flood either lives in between Belinda and Ruby's apartment buildings or she's moved.

Quotes:

Belinda: "Who bit you? Was it a dog? Was it a man? ... Was it your wife?"

Robot: "The cat is irrelevant."
Belinda: "It wasn’t my cat."
Robot: "The cat is still irrelevant."

Belinda: "Do you know Lucy at Number Seven?"
Mrs. Flood: "Yes."
Belinda: "Tell her her cat’s gone to live on a farm. Apparently, I’m the queen of outer space if you could tell the police."

Mrs. Flood: "You ain’t seen me."

Belinda: "Who am I marrying? A spark plug?"

Belinda: "Why is everything on this planet so stupid??"

Belinda: "I’m sorry about your friend."
The Doctor: "Sasha."
Belinda: "Sasha 55. She was nice to me."
The Doctor: "She was lovely. She’s dead."

Belinda: "Is that better or worse than humans?"
The Doctor: "If you start deciding which body is best, you’re going down a very dangerous path."

There was a lot of fun to be had with this season opener, and I've been far too hard on it. Varada Sethu is clearly going to be wonderful, and she and Ncuti Gatwa have great chemistry. Let's hope the season pays off on all the mysteries.

Let's say seven out of fifteen Doctors.

Mikey Heinrich is, among other things, a freelance writer, retired firefighter, and roughly 78% water. You can find more of his work at the 42nd Vizsla. If you'd like to see his raw notes for this and other reviews, you can find them at What Was Mikey Thinking.

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