The Robots Of Death
(Season 14, Dr 4 with Leela, 29/1/1977-19/2/1977, producer: Phillip Hinchcliffe, script editor: Robert Holmes, writer: Chris Boucher, director: Michael E Briant)
Rank: 111
'The robot butler did it. Well, sort of. Well, not exactly. Well, ish'.
Another Doctor Whodunnit next and arguably the best of the handful of murder mysteries the series has done. All this despite arguably the most obvious ‘Cluedo’ set up going – we know from the first that it’s the robot what done it (the clue is in the title, after all) and we know where they did it, because everyone is on board a Sandminer, a spaceship used to harvest the weather (it’s a very Dr Whoy mix of a hydro-electric dam crossed with a tractor). The joy of this story, though, comes from working out who is controlling the robots and why, with a backstory more plausible than ‘Terror Of The Vervoids’ covered more in depth than in the finale of ‘The Keys Of Marinus’ and less silly than ‘The Unicorn and The Wasp’. For it’s not the robots themselves who are evil but the murderer who takes them over, while the title also refers to the way the people of the future are so reliant yet creeped out by their robotic chums, referred to as like being amongst the waking dead’ with their expressionless faces and monotone voices. The robots themselves make the perfect background for a murder mystery: you don’t know when they’re telling the truth or lying, don’t have guilty expressions or body language that give the game away and they can be modified, turn evil and start throttling at any moment. It’s one of the best examples of the show going back briefly to the way it used to work in the 1960s: take a different genre like a crime series, set it in the future and throw something Dr Whoy at it. Midsomer Sandminer Murders indeed, if detective Barnaby was a timelord, his assistant was a savage and the sleepy English village was in space and filled with robots.
‘Robots Of Death’ is all
the more impressive given that it was a substitute when another story fell
through – yet another attempt at telling a story about ‘The Foreign Legion’
(this one in colour and by director-turned-writer Douglas Camfield who had a
passion for the subject matter but was just too busy to fully sit down and
commit to it). In an emergency meeting producer Phillip Hinchcliffe and script
editor Robert Holmes threw out a few ideas of what they could cobble up at
short notice: Hinchcliffe, long interested in robotics, still wanted a proper
android story after the one that turned into ‘The Brain Of Morbius’ had come
out being more about genetic engineering and body-building. Robert Holmes
favoured a murder mystery as they hadn’t done one of those in ages and he
missed the days of ‘bases under siege’ when he’d first begun writing for Who.
However he didn’t want a boring manor house setting as that would be too
obvious and he wanted a setting that would be claustrophobic and where the
characters couldn’t escape but somehow wasn’t static, with the producer adding
the touch of a mine. Now all they needed was a writer to work on it – and one
just happened to be free. Chris Boucher was a young wannabe writer at the time,
back in the days before he became the de facto showrunner for ‘Blake’s 7’ one Terry Nation got bored. Being young and
hungry he’s done something almost no one had ever done in the history of Dr
Who: got his scripts for ‘Face Of Evil’ in on time and had actually got through
his re-writes early! Hard work like that doesn’t go unpunished so the producer and
script editor offered him this slot too. Boucher eagerly agreed after a
lifelong fascination with robots and added the rest himself, seeing the
Sandminer as like a whaling ship where the crew had all signed on as strangers
and ended up jealous and paranoid of each other as well as going stir crazy
eight months into a two year mission that they were beginning to regret. The
robot assistants, who did most of the manual labour, weren’t helping matters
with their un-nerving repetitiveness that made everyone long for home.
Like many a Hinchcliffe
era story this one wears its source material on its sleeve, but unlike the Dr
Who twists on ‘Frankenstein’ (‘The Brain Of
Morbius’) or ‘Dracula’ (‘The State Of
Decay’) this one combines all sorts of different genres to make up
something that feels a bit more original than usual than some of the others.
Fans point to Frank Herbert’s ‘Dune’, with the background of a sand miner but
it’s treated in a very different way. Instead of your functional streamlined
‘sand miner’ this one chases storms with a plush art deco look, with every
other room slightly different and tailored by the employees to their needs.
Many fans point to Agatha Christie too and ‘Ten Little Indians’ was a starting
point in the way the supporting cast are being bumped off one by one in
different ways. Though it’s not often mentioned Boucher clearly knows the play
that first coined the word ‘robot’ as this story is a dead riner for Karel Capek’s
1920 play ‘Rossum’s Universal Robots’, a political play in which they’re a metaphor
for serfs overthrowing landowning gentry (which sort-of happens here; ‘Taran
Kapel’ is also close to ‘Karel Capek’ and we see elsewhere in this story how
many characters were named after scifi writers). Then there’s Isaac Asimov's
groundbreaking robot stories that all but created a whole genre in the 1940s,
starting with the short stories ‘Liar!’ and ‘Rebound’ before the longer works
‘The Naked Sun’ ‘Caves Of Steel’ and ‘I, Robot’ (‘Sun’ had, indeed, been made
by Who’s ‘sister’ 60s show ‘Out Of the Unknown’, the scifi anthology series on
BBC2 and starred David ‘Poul’ Collings. Sadly it’s long since been wiped).
These are where the ‘laws of robotics’ originated, as the prolific Asimov sat
down and thought about what a future filled with robots would really look like
– there had to be some sort of inhibitor in place to stop the robots simply
taking over humanity with their superior abilities so the writer coined the
‘three laws of robotics’ – that a robot cannot cause harm to a human or through
inaction allow harm to come to a human, must obey laws given to it by a human
and must protect its own existence as best it can unless doing so would break one
of the first two laws. These laws exist in this world too – so the crew of this
ship are all the more surprised that someone has come along and tinkered with
the robot to deliberately break them. It’s just not feasible in their world: it
would be like your AI Alexa app suddenly arguing with you or the self-service
checkout at the supermarket suddenly telling you to put back those cream cakes
because you’re getting fat, it’s just not something anyone has given any
thought to. However I think there’s an even
bigger source that’s never mentioned: Asimov didn’t just write ‘pure’ science
fiction, he wrote a large number of ‘scifi crime’ books too, all set in the
future and which occasionally had robots in them. ‘The Black Widowers’ lay
forgotten now, a sort of scifi update of the club Sherlock Holmes goes to in
order to visit his brother Mycroft and a lot of ‘Robots Of Death’ feels like it
belongs in there, not least the comments on how humans never change.
For the big theme of
‘Robots Of Death’ and what makes it ‘feel’ most like an Agatha Christie book is
the idea of class. The humans aboard this Sandminer are snooty, each of them
looking down their noses at the others slightly. Like many modern-day Americans
they like to boast that their ancestors are the ‘originals’, that they’re
descendents of the first human colonisers as if that makes them more entitled
to the (un-named) world they come from. But really they couldn’t be more
different to the way their ancestors would have lived, struggling for survival on
a newly terraformed planet and having to bring their own supplies; by contrast
the Sandminer is lush in the extreme and robots do all the hard labour. The one
exception is Uvanov, the boss, who comes from ‘new money’ and so nobody respects
a word he says. Though they like to kid themselves that they’re doing something
grand and important, really they’re there to press a few buttons and oversee
the robots. They’re not particularly well-read or intelligent and for all their
finery and funny hats (these are some of the best, certainly the most, ah,
individual headgear seen in the entire series) they’re all here because they
have one thing in common: they need the money. They’re certainly not a team:
each one has their own outrageous dress sense and their rooms all reflect their
own tastes not those of the ship and they hardly ever commune, they just laze
around in their rooms between shifts. The perfect breeding ground, then, for
mistrust: they might not be about to inherit a fortune from some relative they
barely knew, like most Christie books, but in every other way they’re direct
descendents of the stuffy middle classes in their books. Everything in this
story comes down to a hierarchy, of people trying to control other people and
keep them in their place. And oh look the butler did it. Lots of butlers in
fact. So like many a Dr Who story it’s a class revolution (see ‘The Sunmakers’ and ‘The Space Museum’ in particular), only a
very very different one with robots getting some belated equality at last. Despite
the futuristic setting everyone knows people like these people, who have never
ever had to deal with a hardship like the one they’re faced with in this story
and don’t quite know how to handle it. The characterisation of them all and the
ways that they’re the same but different under pressure (Toos goes to pieces
and waits for someone to save her, Uvanov goes to pieces and tries to take
command, Poul goes to pieces which is a shame for him because – spoilers – he’s
the undercover investigator) is the real strength of ‘Robots’ and keeps you
watching.
On another level this is
an allegorical story that asks that age-old Dr Who question of what throwing
robots into a human world would do to them – and to us. The humans are largely
predictable and all follow the same pattern of hysterics, bargaining and
pleading for their lives and blaming everyone else. The robots though are all
very different and continue that theme about ‘hierarchies’, coming in three
different designs who all have different levels of intelligence: the olive
green ‘Dum’ robots who aren’t supposed to think, the lighter green VOC robots
who are capable of thought and one silvery Super Voc who is almost human in his
levels of understanding and ends up becoming the Doctor’s de facto assistant
for much of this story (so much so there was serious talk of having him stay on
as a companion – or at any rate that’s what Tom Baker and actor Gregory de
Polnay wanted but the long makeup job needed everyday rather put a kybosh to
that). The robots might not have the sweet character of K1 in ‘Robot’ but then they’re not meant to: they’re
gloriously blank, perfectly down the middle between ‘eerily human’ and ‘eerily
un-human enough to cause a believable nervous breakdown if you were trapped on
board with them for eight months’. In fact the designs are gorgeous. Forget
your bog-standard supermarket brand own faceless drones seen in other stories,
the art deco masks and the gold hues make these seem like the deluxe models.
Combined with Gregory De Polney’s acting skills you’ll care for D84 more than any other in scifiland. After K9 and
Marvin the Paranoid Android anyway.
They were all a rare
happy collaboration between departments on Who (remembered fondly by all sides)
designer Ken Sharp, costumer Elizabeth Waller and sculptor Rose Garrard who all
have great fun bringing Boucher’s vague descriptions to life.
They made eight costumes in all and they both look like the way you think robots are meant to look and fit this strange art deco spaceship (also Sharp’s work but from an idea by director Michael Briant: he wanted something that would look plush and luxurious as he couldn’t see these people living in a basic dirty spaceship and it again fits the Agatha Christie vibe; he also wanted to get away from the silver giants he’d directed last time out in ‘Revenge Of The Cybermen’, which was also why he deliberately cast small actors for the robot roles). The robots really do look amazingly good, considering that their feet are actually sprayed slippers and their arms are sprayed washing-up gloves! Often the future in Dr Who can look ridiculous and some of these costumes do look a little on the silly side (mind you, if thick eyebrows and orange tans can come back into fashion again who’s to say crescent moon hats won’t be all the rage in a few millennia?) but by throwing a few ‘old’ designs in there too (notably the art deco designs coming back into fashion again) this one seems more plausibly futuristic-real than maybe any other in Who, realising how every age borrows from the past rather than ramming headfirst into the future; it’s certainly more memorable than yet another stainless steel spaceship that looks like a hospital. Briant and Sharp went to great ends to get the mining aspect accurate too, going so far as visiting an actual Cornish mine and seeing how the people there behaved and what sort of conditions they worked in. Would that all production teams had been this thorough: it really helps sell the idea that this is a real life working ship, not just a set.
At times the Humans are
much more like the robots than the Vox and the Dumbs, robots with different
degrees of intelligence, scheming and distant towards their companions. On the
other hand the robots themselves have their own society that feels as real to
us as anything the Humans have. It’s the splintered humans who can’t find a way
of working together and even though they’re the ones giving the ‘orders’ they
never seem fully in control of themselves, never mind the robots. While some of
the other Hinchcliffe stories are all about the horror and having fun with the
source material and twisting it to fit a Dr Who concept, this one feels ‘real’
– of all the 1970s writers Boucher had one of the best eyes for human
observation and these people feel plausibly like us despite the differences of
the age and times. You really do care when these characters die, or are hurt,
or how they feel when the Doctor points out the lies they’ve been living their
whole lives. Boucher’s trump card as a writer is not just making other worlds
come to life, which a lot of Who writers do well, but in making
three-dimensional characters you understand even when you don’t agree with them
– he does it by making the baddies sympathetic here and its surely a big reason
why Dalek creator Terry Nation ‘poached’ him for ‘Blake’s 7’ the following year,
when we end up totally on the side of bandits murderers and thieves for four
series. The reveal of who it is when it comes in episode four (mega spoilers
for the rest of the paragraph, although I don’t really know why I bother given
that they goof and give away who it is clumsily in episode three – using a
machine that gives swirly colour lights on loan from Top Of The Pops isn’t the
camouflage everyone seemed to think it was! You can also see the colour of the
trousers of the kiler in episode two – a colour no one else alive by the end of
that episode wears) is perfect too: after three episodes of assuming it’s the
shifty Poul (who is really undercover and out of his depth) it’s the overlooked
Dask who turns out to be notorious robot genius and psychopath Taran Capel ,
who murders humans because he sympathises with robots after growing up with
them and hating the absent family who are never there for him. He’s become a
robot, if you will, after spending too long around them and now thinks without
emotions or remorse, wanting robots to get some power back from the humans. It
comes out of nowhere enough for you not to guess it and yet it fits this world
of reliable robots and unreliable humans perfectly. Well, that’s Grimwade’s
syndrome for you, that feeling of rubbing shoulders for too long with something
that isn’t quite human but nearly is (it’s in the script as the made-up name
‘Grimold’ but Tom Baker couldn’t resist getting in an in-joke – the director of
the model sequences was the first directing work by Peter Grimwade who had a
longstanding career with Who and who had been a production assistant all the
way through the Pertwee years and had been heard to moan that his commissions
lately all centred around ‘^%$$&%& robots!’
The assumption for millennia
has been that robots can’t harm (err, despite the old wives tale Holmes added
in at the start): the fact that they can overthrows such a basic fundamental
understanding of life that it causes a breakdown in most of the humans there,
though in a mark of a clever writer they break down in very different ways. Toos
was always on the verge of hysteria anyway, while Uvanov becomes more controlling
and Poul collapses. Its’ an extension really of what Kit Pedler was saying with
the Cybermen, about how our reliance on technology is in danger of taking our
humanity away from us but ‘Robots’ does so in a very clever and original way.
In our days of smart phones controlling everything at a press of a button (and
yet leaves us unable to get into our houses when there’s a massive power cut
and our phones are low on charge) and the worry about where artificial
intelligence might lead ‘Ribits’ is more prescient than ever. For you can’t
possibly think of everything and include every failsafe – one day tech is going
to outsmart us and find a way around it, an intrinsic horror behind modern
society this story cleverly mines as well as lucanol (which still sounds like a
health drink with bubbles). Most interesting of all is what this story does
with the robots themselves – D84 is a likeable soul even though technically he
doesn’t have one (certainly he has more humanity than the humans do). He’s like
data from ‘Star Trek: The next generation’ fifteen years early, an android that
wants more than anything to be a real ‘boy’ because then he might understand
how these puzzling illogical humans think. His existentialist crisis is a real
highlight of the story and its surely no coincidence Douglas Adams is writing
his first draft of ‘Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To the Galaxy’ when this story goes out
(and will be Who script editor himself not long after); D84 is the serious
version of ‘Marvin The Paranoid Android’ and an idea for what happens to robots
when they understand how futile their role in life is and how few rights they
have. What with AI opening up many of the same questions, ‘Robots’ feels if
anything more timely now than when it went out. The other robots, too, all have
personalities of their own.
The script is (mostly)
full of great little touches. The Doctor name-checks Marie Antoinette, the
perfect historical reference point for this world of humans who are so out of
touch with their robot slaves and don’t understand people lower down the food
chain. Leela comments, rightly, that detective Poul ‘moves like a hunter’,
unlike the more laidback walk of everyone else on board, as if he’s looking for
something. The Doctor’s comments that being surrounded by robots is ‘like being
surrounded by walking, talking dead men’ with nothing behind the eyes. A couple
of the best parts were added by Holmes as late as rehearsals when it was
discovered how badly the story was under-running: that’s his clever scene
setter at the beginning as the humans joke about an old wives tale about a robot
masseuse accidentally taking an arm off: it sets up the role of robots on this
world, sets the humans up as living in luxury and the joke that something like
that can never ever possibly happen (though it mirrors what comes later it’s
meant in the same jokey way we say ‘one of those days that printer will be the
death of me’ before it lands on your foot and you end up in hospital). The
sub-plot of the sand miner sinking in the storms, too, was added by Holmes as
pure padding but really ups the tension in the middle two episodes. Alas it all goes wrong at the end. ‘Robots Of
Death’ is, for the most part a serious story – the tension builds up across
three and a half episodes precisely because it feels as if this story and the
outcome is important. And then we get that ending where the villain is defeated
by The Doctor flooding the room with helium gas so Taren Capel can’t give
orders to robots and now talks in a squeaky voice. Then in the joke at the end
Leela starts talking in a squeaky voice too and everyone laughs, like we’re in
one of those bad sitcoms from the 1980s (or, indeed, early ‘Star Trek’) with
tag excruciatingly smug tag scenes rather than a high class scifi drama. Aside
from being cringe-inducing and making the big threat that’s been so carefully
built up all this time look stupid, it makes no sense: at no other point in the
story do robots tell humans apart purely by their voices: they’re supposed to
be taking in readings in all sorts of ways. I don’t fully buy the fact that the
Doctor’s respiratory bypass system means he’s unaffected either (His lungs work
like ‘ours’ given his voice so it should affect them the same way;’ did Tom
pull another strop about being given a funny voice?) Murder mysteries need to
nail the end or you feel a bit cheated which, despite the greatness of the
story, you do feel a bit here as well. It seems odd, too, that nobody vetted
these people for working together: admittedly they didn’t on whaler ships either,
but they did on polar expeditions and trips into space so you’d have thought in
the future they still would do this, as its in a big company’s best interests
rather that the crew don’t kill themselves before coming back with the goods.
You can at least forgive Boucher for the line modern audiences laugh at: scientists
have proven that it is indeed theoretically possible for bumblebees to fly
(something to do with wing span and speed versus drag effect) but hadn’t worked
this out in 1977 (such a common though at the time that the 3rd
Doctor says it in ‘The Daemons’ too).
The other downsides to
this story (and yes, please don’t throw hands at me, I know this is a top ten
story for a lot of people and I still love it, it’s just not perfect) alas are
several. Boucher hasn’t quite got the 4th Doctor right. While Drs 1
and 6 loved the chance to be a detective and go round pompously accusing people
it’s not in this particular Doctor’s wheelhouse. He’s happy to breeze through
space and only starts caring about this world when it starts killing him (via a
first episode cliffhanger that’s very in keeping with this story, being one of
the greatest in the series as The Doctor chokes to death by sand in an airlock,
something he can’t possibly get out of…then in the second episode continuation
turns out to be breathing through a straw. Genius or nonsense? Maybe both?!) t.
Unusually for him, he’s lowkey and all but wiped off the screen by the other
actors (maybe it’s because his is actually the most ‘normal’ costume on screen
for once?!) Usually he’s a good enough actor not to let his personal emotions
show, but the Doctor is rather snarly in this story too, without his usual
lightness of touch or childish glee. Tom was by all accounts in an especially
grumpy mood by all accounts, rubbishing the scripts (he might have a point
about un-heroic his Doctor is at times, oddly so given how much Boucher got him
spot on in ‘The Face Of Evil’) and snarling
at most everyone on set. Matters came to a head during that very episode
cliffhanger, which Tom refused to do – he wanted to swing out of harm’s way
from his scarf by cleverly looping it round the closing door at the last second
(putting rather more trust in the sets than I would have done!) The director
lost control and phoned Phillip Hinchcliffe to intervene – he happened to have
a ‘guest’ with him that he brought along too – and that was Tom Baker’s
introduction to the ‘next’ producer Graham Williams and rather summed up how
the next few years were going to go. He still did the cliffhanger as written
though. You can tell, though, that there’s a coldness between the two stars
that for once has spilled over from the set onto the screen and some of their interactions
are a tad uncomfortable. Especially as this is Leela’s second story and her
first away from home (just look at how nice the modern Doctors are to their
homesick companions going through shock, Rose in ‘The
End Of The World’ especially. Even if Leela needs less molly-cuddling that
most companions he barely speaks a word to her once they leave the Tardis).
Leela fares a little
better. Boucher invented her and ‘gets’ her better than all later writers.
Indeed she might be where the thinking for this story started, as Boucher lets
her loose in a world of opposites: she’s a creature of instinct and is all
about being authentic, proud of her animalistic roots with no care for money or
social status. She’s exactly the wild card this place needs (as even The Doctor
can be a bit posh at times) - a mixture of action and intuition alien to the humans
and robots of this world both - and she punctures many a pompous attitude. Her
revealing leotard, too, has never made more sense than it does in amongst all
these poncy costumes and ridiculous hats. Naturally everyone on board naturally
suspects her straight away. The fact she lives off instinct and body language,
too, is perfect for a story where the robots don’t have any and give nothing
away, yet the humans give away too much too easily. In a world of everyone
keeping secrets you need a character so open they don’t understand the concept
and it makes for a worthy contrast against the robots and the soppy humans
who’ve become used to robots doing everything for them. Her dialogue is
littered with maxims from her homeworld too, something sadly dropped after this
(as no one could write them like Boucher): ‘In my world they say if someone is
bleeding look for someone with scars’ is a favourite. Her reaction to the scene
where the Doctor tries to describe the dimensions of the Tardis and how it works
– ‘that’s silly’ – is priceless and always turning up in clips compilations. At
the same time, though, Boucher doesn’t write for Leela as well as he did in
‘The Face Of Evil’, treating her as a bit thicker and with less respect all
round. By rights she ought to have seen through the real killer quicker than
anyone, while the teacher-pupil relationship that was such a strong part of her
debut story has turned a little into the Doctor mocking her for things she
could never possibly know – and her getting her own back on him in ‘little
victories’. The ending, too, is rather mean: Leela does more to save anyone in
this world than anyone and yet the story ends with her trapped and squeaky, her
voice treated with helium, while instead of rushing to her aid the Doctor
laughs. A sign of things behind the scenes perhaps (Tom really didn’t want an
assistant at all, unless it was a parrot, a talking cabbage or Miriam
Margoyles, all three ideas that were turned down) but a difficult watch.
Especially as Louise Jamieson acts everyone else off the screen and deserved
better.
In fact it’s the acting
all round doesn’t quite match the script. Although the robots are all
first-class (err, whatever their class) the humans are a hammy lot this week, often on the
verge of hysterics, tears or fits. David Collings (that’s Silver in ‘Sapphire
and Steel’ to you – and indeed me) is excellent in his other Who outings ‘Revenge Of The Cybermen’ and ‘Mawdryn
Undead’ but never quite gets to grips with the jumpy Poul (named for
American scifi writer Poul Anderson), who seems like the last person who should
ever have ended up a detective. Russell Hunter copes well against type as the
commander Uvanov (named for Uvarov, a character in Bob Show’s short story ‘The
Cosmic Cocktail Party’), the short actor more used to playing underlings
overshadowed by bigger characters, but he strays a little OTT at times. We know
Pamela Salem is excellent from her no-nonsense UNIT scientific advisor role in ‘Remembrance Of The Daleks’ but she
struggles a bit with Toos, a character always on the verge of a breakdown. David
Bailie either excels at underplaying Dask so much you don’t notice him or doesn’t
make much of an impact before the last episode, depending how you look at
things. Brian ‘Travis’ Croucher doesn’t exactly shine as Borg (a combination of
cyborg and the tennis player) either. They’re a rather emotional bunch, which
is fun for an episode but gets wearing after four. Although even that somehow
works: this is the first (of many as it turns out) DW stories set in the future
where, far from being traditional action heroes or clinical scientists getting
on with their work calmly, they’re just like ‘us’ at home but in space, the
constant sea of robotic faces making humans ever more emotional and less
robotic. Its the sign of a writer whose done a lot of thinking about his world
before he ever put pen to paper – I just wish they’d done a bit less of emoting,
that’s all.
Another problem is the
whodunnit angle. With such a small cast and so many of them getting bumped off
early on there’s only a small number of people the killer can be – and two less
than the characters realise given that we know it can’t be the Doctor or Leela.
After (spoilers) Poul is revealed to be the future equivalent of an undercover
cop the suspect is even more obvious. You kind of know who did it, not because
the clues are laid out so brilliantly but because there’s hardly anyone else
left. A better and more in keeping ending, too, might have been to have had the
robots controlling themselves as you’re led to believe at one point, outraged
at having people so unworthy control them. It would be like the peasant revolt,
only with robots, with the Doctor negotiating over working conditions and giving
them their own cushy cabins before putting things right back on their
home-world as well (whatever it’s called). Instead the ending just kind of
falls away, such a shame after three and a half really good episodes. A few
tweaks and the whodunnit aspect could have worked nicely - certainly the
motivations of the people involved ring true, even the ones you can rule out -
but you can’t help but feel that Boucher just isn’t interested in that aspect
anyway; he wants to explore this world and the dynamics of a world where
everyone thinks robots can’t hurt humans, but mistakes, complacency and
paranoia can do funny things to their programmers.
So we end up with a bit
of a curio: an intelligent story by an intelligent writer with moments of pure
daftness; robots that look the part but doesn’t sound it which is capable of
amazing things but can still be fooled by a hat placed over its eyes; some
glorious filming with a hand-held camera shot mixed through TOTP’s ‘colour
synthesiser’ that makes us see things from the point of view of the robots that
then later gives away the disguise of the murderer (although you’d be surprised how many people
it fooled on transmission; a mastermind criminal who has the perfect plan but dies
a squeaky unglorious death; a future meticulously crafted and believable in
every way that still lets people walk around in those hairdoes; a ship so
luxurious and decadent and yet the ‘marks’ used on the robots were such a last
minute idea that the budget had well and truly run out so what we see are…glow-in-the-dark
bicycle spokes. No seriously, they don’t just look like bicycle spokes – they are
bicycle spokes; the production that looks absolutely perfect even though it was
both written and made as a rush job (with some sets still being painted while
others were being used, with set dressers trying not to make noise during takes
– and failing, by some accounts); a story that’s 95% of the way to being
perfect but doesn’t just drop the ball a little on the other 5% but drops it a
whole lot.
For the most part though
‘Robots’ has it all – arguably the best robots in Who in design and character
complexity (as fond as I am of K1), one of the better modern day sets, a plot
that’s simple but is a useful launchpad to asking difficult questions and some
cracking dialogue. So much so that even some of the people in my life that normally
hate Dr Who quite like this story – even the ones who normally ‘throw hands’ at
me for watching it don’t blow the fuses they normally do. Which might explain
why it’s the one non-anniversary/Dalek story that was picked for early release
for both the video and DVD markets, a useful entry point to the series for
newcomers, even if no other story quite goes where this one does. The result is
a clever story that’s always shifting gears and one that’s as deep as you want
it to be and all things to all people: you can read it as a damnation of a class
system and see the robots as the working classes propping up the upper classes
if you want; it’s a philosophical debate about where mankind is heading with
its reliance on technology if you wish; it can be just another Dr Who action
adventure in space if that’s what you fancy, with lots of crazy space sets and
costumes (oh the costumes!) to look at if that’s what you tune in for; it’s a
pretty decent crime story for other fans who get more caught up in whose going
round bumping off Sandminer workers than they do, say people getting killed off
by potted plant Vervoids or giant wasps; if you’re big into the Doctor and
Leela then this is a story all about them trying to prove their innocence when
they naturally fall under suspicion, arriving just as people are dying (great
timing there Tardis!) Never robotic, always thoughtful and imaginative, ‘Robots’
might not be up to ‘Face Of Evil’ but it is amazingly good and intricate for something
cobbled together at short notice and writer Chris Boucher and the designers, especially,
excel themselves on this one like never before.
POSITIVES + ‘Robots’
looks amazing throughout. Allegedly one of the reasons it all looks so good is
that producer Phillip Hinchcliffe was told during the making of this story that
owing to the pressure from Mary Whitehouse he was going to be taken off the
series and replaced by Graham Williams, so decided not to worry about money
anymore and make his last stories look amazing, letting his departments splash
out knowing that they couldn’t fire him twice. Though unconfirmed, certainly
this story and ‘Talons Of Weng Chiang’ look a lot more impressive than most
other 4th Dr stories, especially season enders – and its notable just how cheap
the following season looks by comparison.
Nick Briggs took over for Big Finish’s ‘Robophobia’
(2011) as issue #149 in their main range. It’s the 7th Doctor’s turn
to visit Kaldor, landing on a transport ship named The Lorelei a few centuries
after ‘Robots Of Death’ which is home to several thousand robots. There’s neat
bit where The Doctor listens back to audio played in the ship about what
happened when he was the 4th Doctor, with no one realising who he
is. Soon he becomes embroiled in another outbreak of murders apparently
committed by robots, taking charge as only this regeneration can and setting
traps galore to work out whose behind it all. There’s a real distrust of robots
in this era, understandably so given the rumours about what went on in the
Sandminer, with a very jumpy crew none of who want to be transporting their
precious cargo. Sadly none of the cast from the original return but despite
that this story captures the flavour of the original well, with Nicola Walker
(Lady ‘Battlefield’
Peinforte herself) making her first (of many and rather better than on TV it
has to be said) Big Finish performances sparring off Sylvester McCoy well in
the part of Liv Chenka. Familiar names to the Whoniverse like Toby Hadoke,
Nicholas Pegg and Dan Starkey are in there too.
A mention too for Magic Bullet Productions, an
unofficial company who make their own really good Dr Who and Blake’s 7 audio
adventures and are well worth checking out. ‘The Robots Of Death’ is their
biggie though, and a universe they keep returning to with eight stories now in
their ‘Kaldor City’ range featuring lots of the original characters. ‘Occam’s Razor’
was the first from the year 2000 and is particularly enjoyable for fans of
Blake’s 7 as it features three regulars in its cast (Paul Darrow, Peter
Tuddenham and Brian Croucher- who played Borg in the original ‘Robots’). Uvanov
is now chairman of Kaldor, a planet where ‘The Company’ are in charge of
everything. His worst nightmare comes true as the docile robots start killing
again while no one else realises the gravity of the situation as well as he
does. Original story writer Chris Boucher himself writes ‘Death’s Head’, a
longer and more intricate piece again starring Paul Darrow with such Who names
as Peter Miles and Nicholas Briggs alongside him. This time we’re on a desert
ore processing station with the unexpected return of Taren Capel who everyone
thought was dead. Have the robots really brought him back to life? ‘Hidden
Persuaders’ adds Nicholas ‘Brigadier’ Courtney and David ‘Poul’ Collings to the
cast list with what might be the best of the eight, as the followers of Taran
Capel turn into a cult and start fighting back against society’s position on
robots. Moral crusaders or nasty terrorists? This is easily the most nuanced
story in the range which tries to see things from both sides. The fourth story
is simply titled ‘Taran Capel’ and is a simpler tale of the title character’s
survival against all odds and the lengths he’s gone to in order to keep his
secrets, to the point of recruiting robots to keep them for him. It’s still
good but less involved than the others. ‘Checkmate’ adds Peter Halliday to the
cast and follows the story logically on, with a colossal fight between Uvanov
and Capel, although it’s really the story of Iago the official who seems to be
the last one left standing. ‘Storm Mine’
is a more compact production than the others with most of the main cast
dead, although it still finds room for John Leeson and Phillip Madoc. It’s kind
of a full circle story as we follow a character named Blayes trapped on a
Sandminer spaceship with some malfunctioning robots, waking up in quarantine
after the events of the last story. It’s also the weirdest of the eight, with a
dreamlike surreal quality as Blayes, so used to relying on robots for
everything, now has to trust her own senses rather than what she’s told and
doesn’t quite trust either. ‘The Prisoner’ is back to the short running time of
the first story and initially included on the ‘Paul Darrow Speaks’ CD alongside
interviews and short stories. It’s a brief tale of Iago and what happens after
he wakes up on the lawn of a stranger’s ancestral home, trying to survive
interrogation. The big finale is ‘Metafiction’ which started life as a
stageplay at the Scifi London Film Festival before becoming a radio production.
It’s a sort of prequel where Uvanov’s personal assistant seeks to learn as much
about Iago’s past as he can but, like so much of the range, he struggles to
work out what’s real and what’s been altered by years of robot officials
working in secret (‘You come from the Earth? What, like a plant?!’) A worthy sort-of
ending to a great little series, well worth digging out, with Paul Darrow on
top form throughout. Magic Bullet’s other Dr Who stories are in Lawrence Miles’
‘Faction Paradox’ range started for the ‘New Adventures’ novels and well worth
hearing too, although it’s their Blake’s & stories that are the jewel in
their crown.
‘Robots Of Death’ was also the second of three Dr
Who stories to be adapted into a stage play (the others being the similarly
for-copyright-reasons Doctor-less ‘Mission
To The Unknown’ and ‘Midnight’),
running at the Greater Manchester Fringe Festival for just three nights between
July 22 and 24th 2012. Basically the same as the TV story with some
additional scenes from the ‘Kaldor City’ story ‘Sand Mine’, it features two
pretty major tweaks to better fit it into the Kaldor City universe and less
like Dr Who (for copyright purposes): The Doctor and Leela have been replaced
with Kaldor City stars Iago and Blaves, who have gone back in time to try and
investigate where their prosperous city began to go wrong (clue: it might have
had something to do with the moment when the robots started killing people).
Given that the stage play wasn’t filmed for posterity and I wasn’t there I
can’t tell you much more than that, but it went down well apparently – well
enough for it to be a surprise that no one has tried anything like it since.
Previous ‘The Face
Of Evil’ next ‘The
Talons Of Weng-Chiang’
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Of Evil’ next ‘The
Talons Of Weng-Chiang’
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