Who Review: The Robots of Death

Please do not throw hands at me.
-D84, delivering the greatest line ever spoken by a robot

So I lied when I said that Terror of the Vervoids was going to be the next Who Review. I meant it when I said it, and then I started watching Terror of the Vervoids, and two things struck me. 1) I desperately needed to watch something that didn't keep cutting away to a trial, and 2) this story is essentially a cheaper, crappier, and more unintentionally hilarious remake of The Robots of Death. Murder mystery set in a closed environment? Check. Many, many characters who all look alike? Check. Absurd costumes? Check. So here's a good story for comparison.

The plot concerns a mining tank somewhere in the far future, long after everyone remembers Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics, but apparently also long after everyone's forgotten the movie adaptation of I, Robot. Everyone's also apparently also forgotten Titanic, so that's a plus. Nevertheless, the first episode features a conversation about a massage robot who accidentally ripped someone's arm off. Naturally, such a thing could never happen today, so when bodies start piling up, it's obviously not the robots' fault. The important crewmembers are: Commander Uvanov, whose confidential file holds a dark secret; Zilda, whose brother died on Uvanov's watch (that's his dark secret); Dask, who's in charge of fixing the robots and therefore couldn't possibly be the villain; Poul, who's actually an undercover agent placed on the miner by the company that makes the robots (so Alien* in no way copied any element of this story's plot); D84, Poul's robot partner, who shouldn't be able to speak but is; and Toos, whose primary contribution to the story is to get captured and scream. You know, all the things the Doctor's companion normally does, but can't because she's a savage warrior-girl who can stick up for herself, thank you very much.

*I can go on about the relationship between Doctor Who and Alien all day. In addition to this story, there's The Ark in Space, not to mention the fact that Ridley Scott was supposed to be the production designer for The Daleks. No, really. Oh, and then there's Terror of the Vervoids, but you'll have to wait until Friday for more on that.

The Doctor shows up and gets accused for the murders. He says it can't be him, maybe it's the robots. Nobody believes him, including Poul... the guy who is on the mission to make sure the robots don't go insane and kill people. Zilda finds out Uvanov's secret and has just enought time to call him out on something in a broadcast to the entire ship before she too is killed. But none of this matters because halfway through episode two we see somebody with black-and-white pants giving the killer robots orders... and sure enough, Dask is the only one with black-and-white pants.

Poul goes crazy with robophobia (good employee screening, that Weyland-Yutani), so it's up to the Doctor, Leela, and D84 to save the day, because God knows that in a crisis, you want a robot whose most memorable line is "please do not throw hands at me" at your side than a couple of useless humans. I'm not being sarcastic here - that line is awesome, so go watch it for yourself to find out how it comes up.

It turns out that Dask is actually Taren Capel, a robot liberator... who jacks into their innocent, nearly child-like minds and transforms them into killers. Good job. Near the end of the story, he inexplicably dresses himself up as a robot, complete with facepaint. His downfall eventually comes when the Doctor floods a room with helium, making Dask's voice go all squeaky so the robots don't recognize him.

On a more positive note, this is Leela's second story, and she's given a fair amount to do here. Leela, for those of you who don't know, is a warrior-girl from a far-future human colony gone horribly wrong. As a result, she's the most proactive and violent companion ever. As cute as the Four/Sarah relationship was, it's Leela who actually reawakens the Doctor's interest in humanity. Note his tendency to get more detached throughout Season 13, especially in Pyramids of Mars. As the Doctor takes Leela on a tour of human history, trying to teach her about her people's past, he also reconnects with our species. This serial is Leela's first time out of her element, and just to make things more unnerving for her, she can't read the robots' body language. Given that the next story - The Talons of Weng-Chiang - is basically Sherlock Holmes meets the Phantom of the Opera, and this one's essentially an Agatha Christie story with robots, it's surprising that Leela actually gets stuff to do as a character. She's arguably never more important to the plot than she is in her first three appearances. And since I've gotten through an entire paragraph without mentioning her outfit, I deserve a cookie.

The design here is passable as well, even though the mining tank is obviously a model and some of the costumes border on the clownish. The robots are all obviously men in suits, but that's okay because the one time they tried something else, we got Kameleon, who never really worked. There's a clever effects shot of one part of the ship that was created by putting a painted glass slide in front of the camera to make the set look bigger than it is; you're going to see that technique in everything from the TV adaptation of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy to Star Wars. (It's probably not the first use of it, but it's worth pointing out.) As far as the script goes, we have the silliest ending in quite some time - it's not a deus ex machina, but the logic of robots not being able to visually identify Dask doesn't quite hold up. The red herring about Uvanov more-or-less works, but the more one thinks about Poul's role and subplot, the less it makes sense. The story also thankfully doesn't waste our time with any of the cannon fodder, only giving us a few scenes with the whole crew before people start dying and instead focusing on the characters who are going to be with us for the duration.

The Robots of Death gets a 9/10. As Tom Baker's time on the show goes on, the instances where he can be bothered to throw in a great performance get fewer and further between, but he's on decent form here. Louise Jameson and Gregory de Polnay (D84) are the real stars here.

...and as a side note, the name "Taren Capel" is a play on the name "Karel Capek," the playwright who coined the word "robot." He did so in a play called "Rossum's Universal Robots." This means that Doctor Who is not the only show I'm going to be reviewing that referenced this person...