Robot: Ranking - 129

           Robot

(Season 12, Dr 4 with Sarah Jane and Harry, 28/12/1974-18/1/1975, producer: Barry Letts, script editor: Robert Holmes, writer: Terrance Dicks, director: Christopher Barry)

Rank: 129

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 So, after five years of spills and thrills in frilly shirts, Jon Pertwee’s Doctor has shuffled off this mortal coil after a fight with his own inner demons and some giant spiders, lying on the floor of his laboratory in UNIT surrounded by friends in one of the saddest of the show’s regenerations. Behind the scenes, too, producer Barry Letts and script editor Terrance Dicks are making way for a whole new production team with this their last official story in charge. It’s been DW’s most successful period so far, give or take the first post-Dalek boom, and a lot of people are worried about what’s going to come next, not least because Barry’s last role in the job is to cast by far the most obscure actor to take the lead role, someone so unknown he was working part-time on a building site when he got the call from the BBC. While Jon Pertwee seemed almost human, Tom Baker is pure alien and looks as if he’s been put together all wrong: tall, lanky, with a mop of Harpo Marx curly hair and big bulging eyes, such a huge contrast to Pertwee’s no-nonsense action hero that his debut story left most fans in shock the first time round. His character too is in many ways a slap in the face to everything that came before: no sooner has he got off that floor of friends than he tries to leave UNIT, his home for the past five years and its obvious that he considers all the characters we’ve come to know and love there as just distant memories. Is he...Going to leave us too/ Whispered the fans at home. Everyone has good reason to hate this sea-change, as DW fans do with every new Doctor or showrunner even now and of all the change-overs this is the biggest wrench in one go since Hartnell unexpectedly turned into Troughton. DW could so easily have ended here – after all, eleven years is still a more than great innings for any show. Something magic happens within the opening scenes of ‘Robot’ though that keeps you hooked. Tom Baker puts a magic spell on the camera that won’t fade during the next seven years – arguably even after he left the series it never has. He’s instantly the Doctor in a whole new way to any of his three predecessors that’s still a logical progression from who he used to be: more shadowy and complex than Pertwee, even more eccentric than Troughton, capable of sudden explosions that make Hartnell look tame, unpredictable to the point where you don’t know whether he’s going to shoot you, abandon you, rescue you or offer you a jelly baby. He’s...entrancing. Tom Baker had one heck of a weight resting on his shoulders and is certainly the most manic we ever see him (this is a rare DW debut story that really was filmed first before he calmed down) but he’s so good that by the end of it you absolutely know beyond question that he’s the Doctor and that even though we’ve lost the family feel at the heat of the last few years DW has regained a lot of its mystery and is once again a series that can go anywhere or do anything. A lot of credit deserves to go to Terrance Dicks, too, who creates this Doctor from scratch and manages to make him so very different to the two Doctors he’s already written for, with a voice all of his own based on nothing more than a few sketched ideas and a handful of meetings with the star. With all that going on the rest of this story is, like so many regeneration plots, an after-thought, deliberately simple so that the action is placed firmly on the Doctor and companions re-acting rather than the complexities of what they’re re-acting to. The 4^th Doctor era starts as it means to go on with a homage to hammer horror source materials and a fixation with anthropomorphising robots, this time a homage to King Kong only this being DW the giant gorilla is a giant robot and the damsel in distress is poor Sarah Jane. He’s defeated by nothing so much as a shrinking ray, which is as basic as DW plots ever get. Even so, there’s room for a couple of excellent supporting roles: Professor Kettlewell not only sports the best mad professor hairdo but is arguably the most believable of DW’s many mad professors too, driven by curiosity and horrified at people adopting his inventions for evil when he wanted to do so much good with them. Miss Winters, too, is Sarah Jane times a thousand, the first female DW baddy in charge since the Drahvins in 1965. With the Doctor not himself for so much of the story a lot of the plot falls to Sarah Jane, in a rare story that’s centred round her day job as a journalist and the two feminists make for some good banter as we see their character similarities contrasted with their moral differences. Best of all though is poor K1, a robot created to kill who only wants to love and you really feel his demise at the end far more than any human. He’s the epitome of a gentle giant, with a heart that must be several storeys high even when he’s human size. What this story doesn’t have is the depth of the 4^th Dr stories to come, the big moral debates, the clash of strong characters, the urgency that everything we know and love could be lost if the goodies fail. Instead its just a tale of a giant robot that causes a bit of minor local damage that’s easily solved even by a Doctor who isn’t fully up to speed yet. In that sense its not a story to match the ambitious brilliance of fellow debutants ‘Spearhead From Space’ and its close cousin ‘Rose’ or the big showdown of ‘Power Of The Daleks’ or the inventiveness and originality of ‘Castrovalva’ ‘The Christmas Invasion’ and ‘The Eleventh Hour’ to come. There’s no big emotional sense of the trauma the Doctor has just been through, forced to change into a whole new person and no episodes of delirium that gives you space to miss the old Doctor before the new one arrives – instead Tom Baker just takes the baton and runs from the first. It’s an exercise in safety, of doing a plot that will work in the background while the new Doctor settles in. It is, you will, the closest DW comes in the pre-1980s of being written by committee, or artificial intelligence, to fill in what a standard DW story looks like (in other words it is, funnily enough, the ‘classic’ story I can most imagine a giant robot coming up with). On that score, then, it fails. But on every other - as an introduction to a new Doctor, as a re-set button that unlocks the mysteries of time and space anew and as a good fun story in its own right – ‘Robot’ works very well indeed and with so much to do in such a short space of time that is a marvel in itself.

+ The defining scene of who Tom Baker is comes when he’s put with this series’ ‘other’ Doctor, the much loved but pretty useless Harry Sullivan, judged to perfection as always by the much-missed Ian Marter. Though designed to be the younger action hero if an older Doctor was cast (think ‘Department S’), instead he becomes the Ernie Wise to Tom Baker’s Eric Morecambe and never more than in the scene where the timelord runs rings around the human, proving his fitness by karate-chopping wood blocks and running on the spot while bewildering the poor man with his two hearts beating fast. Even though Harry is a senior UNIT medical officer officially in charge and thus highly respected, you always know which one of them’s going to end the scene tied up in a cupboard with a skipping rope. More than any scene this is the one where Tom Baker wins over all the confused Pertwee fans with his brilliant clowning around and even after seven years of cracking gags its still one of his funniest scenes.

- Some of the model shots in this story are atrocious. The robot ‘grows’ and ‘shrinks’ in a way that seemed ridiculous even in 1974 and the production team struggle to convey the big ‘King Kong’ like action sequences without a Hollywood budget – odd, really, that a writer as experienced as Terrance Dicks should have written so many sequences like that in, knowing how they were likely to turn out. In the end they have to settle for cheap plastic models in long shot, the artificial-in-all-the-wrong-ways robot clutching a doll that looks more like The Rani than Sarah Jane, with the shot of an action man toy tank drundling its way onto screen to shoot it quoted by many a fan as their least favourite model shot in the entire series. All I can say is...at least its not as bad as the model dinosaurs, although there’s even less excuse for using cheap models a year after they turned out so badly last time.