The Robot Revolution

Chapter the 334th, which features a Schwup! And You Know Who.

Plot:

[A recent story of the streaming era, so beware of spoilers ahead.] In 2008, Belinda Chandra had a star named after her by a boyfriend, Alan, who she dumped soon after; she kept the certificate, though. Seventeen years later, after her nursing shift at a London hospital, Bel's back at home when a rocket descends into her back garden and some heavily-armed robots emerge. They are from the planet Missbelindachandra One, which orbits her distant star, and have come to take her there. She will be queen and marry the great AI Generator. They pull the star certificate from the wall, and present it to her: a binding contract. The Doctor, who has heard about Belinda Chandra (from Conrad Clark in Lucky Day, continuity fans!), pursues the rocket in the TARDIS, but as both ships approach the planet, they fly into a time fracture. Schwup! This only sends Bel back a few seconds, when she's mid-rant about how the robots should press-gang Alan to be their leader instead of her, as he was the one who named their star. The Doctor meanwhile goes six months into the past. Separated from the TARDIS, he works with rebel humans who have been trying to overthrow the robots since the machines revolted ten years before. When Bel arrives six months later, the rebels attack, but they can't defeat the more powerful robots. The Doctor, with the surviving rebels and Bel, retreats to a makeshift hospital for the wounded, where Bel helps out.

Knowing that the attacks will keep coming, Bel gives herself up to the robots and is taken to the AI Generator. This is revealed to be Alan, melded with the machinery. The robots took Bel's instruction and went to get Alan, but because of the time fracture arrived with him on Missbelindachandra One ten years earlier. He started the robot revolution (his controlling personality influencing the world once he was plugged into the machinery). Somehow, the planet had previously come across the star certificate, and with the version that Bel has with her from home, there are now two time-displaced versions of it in the same place and time. The Doctor gives Bel the idea to touch them both together - this causes a time explosion. The Doctor pulls Bel clear, but Alan is regressed back to a sperm and an egg. Freed from his influence, the people and robots of Missbelindachandra One can live in harmony. The Doctor tries to return Belinda home, but something is stopping the TARDIS from getting to the 24th May 2025. After an unsuccessful attempt, the Doctor dematerialises the TARDIS before seeing that the area of space he was just in contains lots of familiar Earth detritus, almost as if the planet has been destroyed... 

Context:

The Robot Revolution came up in a random selection just a day before the novelisation of the story popped through my letterbox alongside some other books retelling Ncuti Gatwa TV stories (see Deeper Thoughts section below for more details). As such, I did the story twice over in quick succession: I watched the TV version from the BBC iplayer in mid-July, and then experienced the story in prose form over a few days after that.

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now approaching the point where I catch up. This is the fourth of the seven Ncuti Gatwa stories of 2025 to be blogged. Beyond that, the tally stands at 11 Doctors' televisual eras completed (Doctors 1-4, 7-9 and 11-14), and 37 out of the 41 seasons completed to date (classic seasons 1-18, 20, 21, 23-26, and new series 1, 2, and 4-14). Of the 892 episodes of Doctor Who from An Unearthly Child up to The Reality War, 14 now remain.

First Time Round:

I was excitedly looking forward to Ncuti Gatwa's second season, but sometimes I felt like I was the only one. On Friday 11th April, the day before The Robot Revolution, opening story of the run, all I could see around me were online tabloid news stories forecasting doom for my favourite show. This then impacted fan conversations and speculation too, with everyone talking about the end before we'd even seen the beginning. I got caught up in it to a certain extent, musing on a WhatsApp group with some fan friends that they had perhaps got Ncuti in to record a voice-over for the very end of the season finale, as Sylvester McCoy had for Survival in 1989: "Somewhere out there are space babies, and the Interstellar Song Contest, and somewhere else the tea is getting cold; come on, Bel, we've got work to do...". I watched the story from the BBC iplayer quite late on the following Saturday, only a smidge earlier than it would have been broadcast on BBC1. Before then, I'd read two online reviews in advance; one said the show was in rude health and the plot developments were audacious, the other said that the show was corny and the plot developments were ridiculous. The WhatsApp group was similarly divided, and ultimately so was I. The first time I watched - when, for full disclosure I have to tell you, I'd had a couple of beers - I enjoyed it very much. I watched it back a couple of days later, and a couple of script issues irritated me. What would I make of it on this latest watch...?

Reaction:

The pre-credits sequence for this story is fairly lengthy (by the time it's completed and the credits have rolled, seven minutes have elapsed), and it's magnificent (for the most part). The central idea - someone has a star named after them and because of that ends up being dragged off to a planet around that star to become their monarch - is inventive and fun, a perfect fit for Doctor Who. The sequence is nicely paced, starting with a sedate two-hander scene when young Belinda gets the star certificate, then jumping forward to 2025 and a high velocity sequence of Bel working as a nurse in the hospital while the Doctor tries to track her down; this introduces us to the new character (and the existing lead too, for those joining the show for the first time). Then, we're in Bel's home and there's some funny flat share comedy before everything explodes and spaceships and robots crash into her life and change it forever. There's even time for a cameo from Mrs. Flood (the over-arching mystery of this season and the last) before Bel zooms off in a beautifully designed retro rocket, with the Doctor shouting her name after her as the rocket disappears into the sky.  It's six minutes and 55 seconds of brilliance. There's just that five second duff moment, though, when Alan Budd - Bel's boyfriend in 2008 - explains the distance to the star she's had named after her; he says "I know girls aren't good at maths, but that's a long way". That's a bit on the nose, isn't it? It's hard to rationalise why anyone would say something like that in any scenario, particularly one where they're giving someone a gift. It's cartoonishly on the nose, in fact. Watching first time we don't know anything about Alan nor the tone of the piece as a whole; cartoonish might well turn out to be in keeping. Plus, it's only the briefest moments; so, it's easy to let it go.

Unfortunately, and particularly on any subsequent viewings, more and more such moments stand out, and collectively they are more and more damaging. Mostly the duff moments are centred around Alan Budd, who's revealed to be the villain of the story. Because of a quirk of time, ten years before Bel's arrival he has become the part-man, part machine overlord of this world, and caused the robot revolution. The reveal of this includes two jokes that are just bad. First, it's not the AI generator, it's the AL generator, Because his name's Alan, which could be shortened to Al. But why would it be called that - it's not generating any new versions of Alan? And when and why would it have been labelled such? And who would have done this if not the robots, so why don't they remember? It's only been ten years, not long enough for every robot to have forgotten that one day they painted a name onto the generator (seemingly for no reason other than to set up a clumsy and lame reveal in a decade's time). Second, there is the joke that Bel thought Alan had moved to Margate, when it was actually "Stargate". But he didn't travel through any stargate, and even if he had Bel wouldn't know this and neither would anyone else on Earth. So, the joke isn't about some silly corruption of language through retelling, the joke is just that Margate sounds a bit like Stargate. Sheesh. Writer of the story, and showrunner of Doctor Who, Russell T Davies can usually do jokes and emotion well; he's having an off day here, as the emotion is just as illogical as those two gags. The script wants to say something about toxic masculinity, but it can't decide exactly what. Alan was a bit bossy with Belinda when they dated, and this is described as coercive control. It's not coercive control, and if it's supposed to be some cartoonish version of coercive control suitable for inclusion in a Doctor Who story, then that's just offensive.

Within a breath, though, Bel has described Alan's fiefdom as the "Planet of the incels". Incel behaviour and coercive control are very different types of toxic masculinity. Not completely incompatible, of course - an incel could probably be coercive and controlling of their Mum - but generally you have to have a partner to control, and incels can't get partners (or at least feel they can't). That's the whole point. So, is the idea that Alan had Belinda as a girlfriend, got too controlling and lost her, has never been able to get a date since, and that's caused him to become angry and radicalised? This is too detailed a psychological make-up to get across in the cartoonish style of the story. Anyway, I'm not buying it. When we see Alan in a flashback arriving at the planet, he doesn't seem angry or hate-filled: he's treating everything as a lark. There's the hint in the dialogue at this point that he feels the people of this planet are just so many non-playing characters in a computer game; this also doesn't fit with any of the previous attempts at nailing down the psychology of this character. Then, he calmly orders someone to be shot dead. Oh, so now he's a psychopath (but still a cartoonish one): where did that come from? As ugly as it might be, the logical extension of incel behaviour is for Alan to be a danger only to Bel, the person who turned him down, ruined his life, etc. Why would he have any beef with anyone else? And the logical extension of coercive control would not escalate to killing people so quickly. There's just nothing about the character that's psychologically consistent or true, so the next handbrake-turn of the script where we are supposed to feel some sympathy for Alan can't possibly work. The script forgets all about it instantly anyway; once the plot climaxes with a big timey-wimey explosion and Alan's regressed to a fertilised egg, he's literally wiped out of existence, and it's treated as a joke.

Usually, a protagonist is only as good as the antagonist. Luckily, this isn't the case in The Robot Revolution. Belinda Chandra is a much more rounded and well-written character, and Varada Sethu plays her well. This is achieved because the more interesting antagonism is between her and the Doctor; she calls him on some of his stuff, which works well. The story is a good showcase for character and actor, and that's almost all of what it was intended to be. The jokey references to the topical - Netflix's acclaimed Adolescence, a much more serious treatment of those topics, had landed with a splash only a month before The Robot Revolution - expanded Who's online publicity, so probably would be seen by the production team as 'job done' too. With some more discipline regarding Alan Budd's characterisation and a few other tweaks, this could have been something much more special. For example, the moment where Bel hands herself in to stop the violence meted out on the planet's populace is done by her betraying the rebels' position, and bringing the robots to a battlefield hospital. It's such a stupid risk for her character to take: the robots could have immediately killed all the wounded and the carers. It wouldn't have taken any effort at all to rework such that Bel can do the self-sacrifice where she's only sacrificing herself, therefore not making her look careless / callous. Other aspects are better, for example the device where secret messages can be snuck in to normal speech as the robots don't hear every ninth word. The mysteries are nicely set up at the end too, to be resolved later in the season. The question of how the certificate got to be on the planet might have been better resolved as part of this robot story, however, as the wider mystery of what's happened to the Earth is enough of a hook, and the eventual certificate pay-off is prosaic and disappointing.

Connectivity:

Both The Robot Revolution and Shada involve a lone male antagonist that uses technology to control others on a mass scale. Not quite a link to Shada, but to its author Douglas Adams: Belinda is unexpectedly taken off world in a spaceship while still wearing her PJs, just like Arthur Dent in Adams's most famous work.

Deeper Thoughts:

Right on Target: Book Reviews. A new Target tranche was published on the 10th July 2025. Like the two batches released in 2024, it comprises prose adaptations of up-to-the-minute stories, with no revisiting the first 59 years of the show. The furthest delve back into the archive is a story from 2024; apart from that, there are books for the first three stories of the 2025 run. Una McCormack, a very experienced writer of Doctor Who and other Sci-fi books, tackles The Robot Revolution. The main structural change she makes is to take the scenes that occurred on TV as flashbacks and put them into chronological order. The story starts with Bel as a newborn receiving her jathakam astrological chart from an aunt, which predicts that she will travel. This may have been a scene in the original that was cut, from either script or shot footage, as there is still a brief reference in the finished TV story about Bel's destiny. The prose works to ground Bel's character more than the whistle-stop scenes that TV required: as the chapters continue, Bel grows up, meets Alan, their relationship develops and then falters, but not before he's inadvertently set up her destiny with the star certificate. During this, there are glimpses of a mysterious stranger appearing randomly. This is the Doctor flitting through Bel's timeline as a result of the time explosion at the climax. It works very well, more intriguing for showing rather than telling (which was all the TV version had time to do). Also improved by the chronological ironing out are the main characters on Missbelindachandra One, Sasha and Manny; seeing their history play out linearly brings home the devastation that the robot revolution has wreaked. McCormack also puts a lot of effort into fixing the contradictions of Alan's characterisation mentioned in the Reaction section above. It's a good stab, but doesn't quite come off. This is wholly the blame of the original script, of course.

James Goss's novelisation of second story Lux has no such challenges, as the motivations and psychology of its characters are much more clear and consistent. Goss runs with this; there's a little bit of Douglas Adams-esque omniscient cosmic narrator (covering the competition between humans' capacity for creativity versus destruction over the centuries) but mostly his prose gets into the characters' heads. There are sequences from the perspective of projectionist Reginald Pye and Lizzie (hosting a Doctor Who viewing for her fan friends Hassan and Robyn). A memorable passage late on shows Lux the God of Light's POV too. Most of the action, though, is from the viewpoint of Belinda. This is her second story and a lot of the thoughts Goss writes for her involve her gradual acceptance of the madcap life she has suddenly found herself living. As in his adaptation of The Giggle (see Deeper Thoughts of this blog post for more details), there is much use of typography, white space and illustration between the text to help tell the story and capture the TV version's tone. There are also numerous lovely in-jokes and continuity references, none of which I'll spoil here. One significant addition is the prose retelling of a "deleted" scene during the section where the Doctor and Bel try to escape Lux's celluloid trap: a widescreen recreation of a famous moment from North by Northwest. Was this really a deleted scene from the script, or something Goss invented? I think I'd rather not know, and leave it deliciously ambiguous. The only tiny criticism of the book is another additional scene of the three Doctor Who fans inserted in the middle where they pause the story in order to have a tea break. Goss obviously wanted not to have too big a gap before returning to these characters (who appear at the start of the book), but I can't think that any sort of fan would pause a brand new episode for long enough to boil a kettle. I can believe a cartoon coming to life easier than I can believe that!

Unusually, this batch of novelisations includes none authored by the original screenwriter. Acclaimed Sci-fi and horror author Gareth L. Powell is the person who got the gig to turn Sharma Angel-Walfall and Russell T Davies's script for The Well into prose. It's a gig he was pleased to get; as outlined in his Acknowledgements section at the back of the book, he has been a Doctor Who fan since watching Tom Baker in the 1970s, with the reading of Target novels being a big part of that fandom. Even without that confirmation, I would likely have suspected he was a fan: he uses an apposite Jon Pertwee Doctor Who quote as the novelisation's epigraph, and takes evident pleasure in getting inside the Doctor's head in writing passages with the titular Time Lord as the viewpoint character. This always needs careful handling by any author, as it risks subtracting from the mystery of the character, but Powell manages it with verve. He effortlessly captures the energy of Ncuti Gatwa's fifteenth incarnation. Particularly good is a passage where the Doctor is just about to face off against the antagonist and gives himself an internal pep talk. At even more potential risk of depleting the mystery, Powell has a few sections from the antagonist's point of view too; he gets away with it. As well as sometimes being privy to their thoughts, the reader also gets backstory of the trooper guest characters in the form of their personnel files, interspersed within the middle chapters of the book. This all changes the story to be more ruminative than the high velocity actioner that was the TV version. The material just about stands up to this scrutiny, but any deficiencies are from the original script and not down to Powell (I haven't reviewed the story for the blog yet, but - despite its popularity - I'm personally not sure it's all that).

Scott Handcock novelises the two-part finale of 2024's season (the novel going by just the second episode's title). In his role of script editor for the telly version, he was familiar with cut material he could reinstate. There's a new opening section with the Doctor and Ruby tracking down a Susan Triad in the US in 1946; that's just one of many new versions of the mystery woman that appear, some of which might have been budget-busting on TV, and one of which is a reference back to a classic Who story that will be recognised with a smile by long-term fans. All these then reappear later to spread Sutekh's dust of death, which gives a more epic, universe-wide feel to that section. The prose is peppered with continuity references, but they're subtle enough that none that will trouble the uninitiated. It's overall a much less playful approach than James Goss in Lux, but nonetheless Handcock does mess a little with conventions: the prologue turns up after a couple of chapters as an illustration of the out-of-order nature of time travel; also, there's an interlude in the middle to get the reader up to speed with Sutekh's history that uses some of the surrounding material from the Tales of the TARDIS omnibus of 1970s story Pyramids of Mars. Despite the book not having the excellent vocal work of Gabriel Woolf' (to whom the book is dedicated, by the by), Sutekh is still alive on the page, A passage about his plans for those few soldiers who made it to the bunker in UNIT HQ is memorably chilling. Latter sequences are extended or alternate versions of those in the original - it's thorough, but at the expense of pace. If you're going to buy only one of these four, Lux edges it for me; but the other three books all have something to offer. Even just as artefacts, they are eminently collectible - an excellent design bringing together Dan Liles's retro artwork and a smart foil-embossed Doctor Who logo.

In Summary:

A great idea, great design, and a great new companion, but the antagonist is sketchily written, and this damages the story as a whole.

Shada (Webcast version)

Chapter the 333rd, Flash animation - ah-ah! And the Doctor saves the universe...

Plot:

The Eighth Doctor visits Romana and K9 on Gallifrey (she's now the president, it was a Big Finish thing, don't ask). He's wondering about a time when he was in his fourth body and she and he visited Cambridge. They were taken out of time (by the black triangle in The Five Doctors, continuity fans!) and so never got to answer the summons of the Doctor's old friend Professor Chronotis. They visit this retired Time Lord and old friend of the Doctor in his rooms in St. Cedd's College. He asks them to take a book he borrowed from Gallifrey back for him, as it has special powers and could be dangerous. But Chris Parsons, a young science postgrad, has already borrowed the book, and is examining it with his colleague Clare Keightley. Also, Skagra - a villainous clever-clogs, armed with a mind-stealing sphere and backed up by an army of Krarg creatures and an invisible ship with a sultry-voiced computer - wants to steal the book too. When he gets his hands on it, Skagra kidnaps Romana and steals the TARDIS, using the book as the key to take him to the Time Lord prison planet Shada. Skagra needs to steal the mind of an old Time Lord villain imprisoned there, Salyavin, to help him turn everyone in the universe into one connected mind, controlled by him.The Doctor stops him and saves the day, everyone has tea and biscuits, then gets arrested by a policeman.

Context:

This definitely has to be cheating, right? Well, let's see by answering my standard canon questionnaire for any spin-off or oddity I want to watch in between Ncuti episodes to try to keep up the random nature of the blog. Does it star the Doctor? Yes. Was it released as an official Doctor Who or spin-off story (i.e. its not an unofficial fan-made proposition)? Yes. Is there a dramatic context to the story (i.e. it's not just a skit)? Yes. Was it released with the intention of being the main attraction for audience engagement (i.e. it's not just an extra on a DVD or Blu-ray)?  Yes - it did end up as an extra on a DVD eventually, but when it first came out, it was the main attraction. Have I already covered it in passing with another connected story? Hmm... I have covered the story Shada before in a post from 2017, and I did briefly mention the 2003 webcast then, but I didn't go into any detail. The 2003 version has an almost completely different cast, including a different lead actor playing the Doctor, and little bits of new material. That's variance enough, at least in my mind, to warrant a separate blogging. Anyway, to watch it at all required a lot of effort, so I felt I should write it up to make that effort worthwhile: I had to dig out the 2013 Shada DVD from storage, and download an open-source Flash emulator (Flash hasn't been supported in web browsers since 2021) to get the thing to play at all. I watched on my laptop an episode a night over six nights in July 2025.

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now approaching the point where I catch up: aside from sideways trips into spin-offs like this, the tally stands at 11 Doctors' televisual eras completed (Doctors 1-4, 7-9 and 11-14), and 37 out of the 41 seasons completed to date (classic seasons 1-18, 20, 21, 23-26, and new series 1, 2, and 4-14). Of the 892 episodes of Doctor Who from An Unearthly Child up to The Reality War, 15 now remain to be blogged.

First Time Round:

This was the third of four webcasts made available on the BBC's Doctor Who website in the early 2000s; stretching the rules of the blog for this one has allowed me to post about the full set. The BBC staff who worked on the website in those days, many of them fans, saw an opportunity to create something new. This started with the salvaging of a rejected radio pilot. For the follow-up, they turned to Big Finish who had been creating audio Doctor Who stories for a few years by that point. The images that accompanied the audio were animated in a rudimentary style, but they grew in sophistication with each attempt. Big Finish also produced Shada, and the fourth of four that followed later in 2003 was a fully animated story by Cosgrove Hall Studios. The technology of the time could not keep up with the ambition, so the technicalities of viewing each webcast were challenging. Shada was the first one I watched in full online; a story by Douglas Adams was rewarding enough to persevere with the lagging and stop-start nature of such an activity in those pre-broadband days.

Reaction:

The majority of what shapes this version of the story, for good or ill, comes from the original script. A Douglas Adams Doctor Who script is a hell of a gift, containing as it will so many original ideas, surprising plot reversals and witty dialogue. It doesn't come without flaws, though. There's a lot of to and fro between space stations and spaceships in the second half of the story, for example. This 2003 version uses backgrounds that help orient the viewer to where exactly in space each scene is taking place. This works better than does the 2017 version, which was hidebound by the need to be faithful to the original designs. There, the animation had to sit alongside the original footage; with no such restriction here, and no worries about budget, artist Lee Sullivan is able to go wild and create some striking new designs for the Think Tank, Skagra's ship, Shada, and - best of all - the Krargs. Despite the limited nature of the animation, Sullivan's Krargs are more dynamic and scary than the ones from 1979. Where the 2003 version is perhaps too faithful is in the words rather than the pictures. The one clever addition to the original is the prelude scene explaining why Paul McGann's Doctor is appearing instead of Tom Baker. This is classic Gary Russell (the writer who adapted the scripts for audio); often in his original work he creates imaginative connections from one piece of Doctor Who continuity to another: in the 2003 Shada, he takes the reuse of Shada footage in 1983 anniversary romp The Five Doctors and weaves it into the canon tapestry, twenty years on. When the fourth Doctor and Romana were taken out of time in the Peter Davison era story, it aborted the Shada adventure, and now McGann's Doctor wants to return and finish it. The fictional world mirrors the real world, with Shada incomplete in both, and being revisited and finally finished after many years. It's low-key genius.

The prelude's idea is so good that one almost wants to explore it through the rest of the story, but that can't be done: if the remainder deviates too much from the original script, then the viewer isn't getting Shada as conceived, but instead someone else's take on it. That would defeat the point. Unfortunately, in places the original script can't be made quite to fit: the porter at St Cedd's having recognised the McGann Doctor from various visits over the years doesn't work - it needs to be Tom Baker, as that is who originally intended to visit, and who was already a friend of the professor at that stage in his lives; as president of the Time Lords, Romana has much more authority, responsibility and power to recover the book than the Doctor, so shouldn't be letting him take the lead; indeed, she could call in any number of Time Lords to sort out the situation rather than go with the Doctor's more home-spun approach. One just has to let these go, and accept that the original dialogue had to be sacrosanct. There are but a few cursory mentions of Romana's status and the Doctor being pleased at being reunited with K9 to remind us that we're watching a slightly new take on the old tale. Other changes are because the story needs to act as both webcast and audio only. People whose bandwidth couldn't cope with the flash animations, or those who bought the story as a CD from Big Finish afterwards, need to have some things vocalised. This means some action is simplified with explanatory dialogue of the 'Look out for that sphere just behind you!' variety. It's mostly unobtrusive, but it does lead to an in-joke being smothered to death for webcast viewers. When Skagra gets a lift, the drawing shows the car is a Ford Prefect (a reference to a character from Adams's The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy). The drawing was only picking up on a gag in the audio, though, so the driver character then bangs on about how much he loves his Ford Prefect car, which belabours the point a bit.

The artist gets a couple of other visual Hitch Hiker in-jokes in later though: a drinks machine is labelled Nutrimat, and - this one a real freeze-frame job - a Shada background shows two convicts trapped inside their prison pods; one has two heads (Zaphod Beeblebrox) and the other is wearing a dressing gown (Arthur Dent). There are a few other minor changes: Think Tank scientist Caldera is a purple alien rather than an old bloke, and there's a minor subplot added where Claire worries about the bike that she lent the Doctor. There are a couple of Tom Baker ad-libs removed - calling Chris 'Bristol' and "What's it powered by K9?"/"Insufficient data"/"Aren't we all?!" - probably because they were too characteristic of the fourth Doctor's style. Mostly, though, change comes from the different performances by the new actors. Andrew Sachs is a good baddie, a more clipped and sneering version of Skagra than the TV version's more suave and aloof take by Christopher Neame; James Fox does a slightly different calibration of absent-minded professor in the role of Chronotis - he's not quite as doddery as Denis Carey in the original, which maybe takes a little away from later revelations of the plot; Melyvn Hayes and Hannah Gordon do very well in small comic roles - it was a coup to get such a strong cast together to give voice to this story. Sean Biggerstaff and Susannah Harker as the two students tagging along are both perhaps giving under-powered performances compared to the actors in 1979, but both of them feel more like postgrad students than did Daniel Hill and Victoria Burgoyne. They look more like students too (the animations are modelled throughout on the new actors' looks). McGann, Ward and Leeson are great, as usual. It all adds up a nice tribute to Adams (whose tragic premature death happened only two years before this webcast) and to 40 years of Doctor Who.

Connectivity:

Both Shada and Lucky Day have sequences set in contemporary UK places that are not London, Sheffield nor anywhere in Wales, which is fairly uncommon. They both contain an appearance from at least one other Time Lord besides the Doctor, and both feature an organisation called Think Tank.

Deeper Thoughts:

"You've looked into alternative time." It's less rare than you'd think that a Doctor Who story exists in more than one alternate version. For a start, every one of the classic series stories, and a growing number of the new series ones too, exist in prose form as Target novelisations. Often these were very close to transcripts of the TV episodes with added descriptions, but a great many diverged, often in significant ways. The first ever novelisation in the 1960s was Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks, an adaptation of second ever Doctor Who story The Daleks from 1963/64. The book was published in 1964, whereas the very first story An Unearthly Child was not novelised for decades afterwards (as it only has cavemen and no Daleks). David Whittaker, the script editor of the first ever season that included both stories and the author of the Dalek book, created a brand new introduction for the main characters on the page. The aim was to make the book self-contained and get to the Dalek action as soon as possible, and Whittaker took quite a few liberties: Ian is a scientist rather than a science teacher, Barbara is Susan's private tutor rather than her school history teacher, Ian and Barbara don't know each other before the story's start, and they see the mysterious police box on Barnes Common rather than in Totter's Lane. For similar reasons, Jo Grant is given a completely new introduction in the 1974 book Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon (an adaptation of TV story Colony in Space, Jo's fourth story). It's pretty much impossible to reconcile these different televisual and prose versions; of course, someone might have said the same about the 1979 and 2003 versions of Shada. I'm sure Gary Russell could give it a good go; parallel universes might well be involved.

Many Target book authors, particularly in the very early and in the much later years, either side of a lean middle period, fleshed out their TV work with new characters, subplots, motivations, dialogue. It wasn't one way travel, either. By the early 1990s when stories to novelise were running out, original stories started to be made as novels (as well as in comics, short stories and audios). When the new series started in 2005, there were therefore quite a few ready-made candidates to turn into television stories. 2005's Dalek is based on Robert Shearman's audio adventure Jubilee, and the following year's Rise of the Cybermen / The Age of Steel is loosely based on Marc Platt's audio story Spare Parts. They were perhaps changed enough that the two different versions could co-exist without too much canonical musing; the same, though, cannot be said of Human Nature / The Family of Blood, which was a much more faithful - though still different - take on Paul Cornell's 1995 novel Human Nature: it's hard to reconcile why the Doctor would choose to hide out pretending to be a human in a boy's school just before the First World War twice, in both his seventh and tenth regenerations. Creating similar difficulty, he had to indulge in an odd couple flat share comedy twice (in the TV and comic strip version of The Lodger) and interacted with unlikely messages across time with someone called Sally Sparrow as both his ninth and tenth self (in Blink and the short story it was based upon, What I Did on My Christmas Holidays by Sally Sparrow).

Contemporaneous with the explosion of original stories that would one day act as the blueprints for TV episodes, VHS was becoming the showcase for new versions of classic stories, such as the extended editions of The Curse of Fenric or The Five Doctors. This was just the start, with many new versions of stories following on DVD and Blu-ray to this day, recut with new effects and extra scenes. The Five Doctors had another special edition made in the 21st century, meaning there are now three variants. Which of the available versions of any story is the definitive one? Is there any such thing? Shada is a narrative multiverse all on its own. It existed in at least three versions beyond any officially licensed product, with two fan edits of which I'm aware, as well as an unofficial novelisation written by Paul Scoones. Officially, there was the narrated version of the story with to-camera inserts of Tom Baker released on VHS in 1992, and the script book of the story that was sold in the same package. There was an official novelisation published in 2012 (don't imagine any of these versions were consistent, by the way), There was the 2003 animated webcast as described in this blog post; as mentioned, this was also available as an audio only version from Big Finish, and that was expanded with additional material, so was different again. There was a 2017 hybrid of live action and animation, formed as an omnibus version; then, when that was released on Blu-ray in 2021, it had minor changes, and episode starts and ends inserted. Added up, that's ten different versions, seven official, three unofficial. If one counts Dirk Gently's Detective Agency (an original novel by Adams that reused a lot of the Shada material), it's eleven. Shada, like Doctor Who, like life, is definitively infinite, and I can't help but feel that that's exactly as Douglas Adams would have wanted it.

In Summary:

Douglas Adams worked on so few Doctor Who stories that you can't blame anyone - including your humble blog author (who begs your indulgence) - from covering Shada over and over again. 

Lucky Day

Chapter the 332nd, which features UNIT and dating.

Plot:

[A recent story of the streaming era, so beware of spoilers ahead.] Conrad Clark met the Doctor and Belinda Chandra when he was eight years old, and saw their magic blue box disappear into thin air. He then spotted the box again, years later, spying the Doctor and Ruby Sunday as they dealt with the Shreek, an alien hunting animal. Conrad is accidentally marked as its prey. A year later he has tracked Ruby down and interviews her for his blog on aliens and unexplained phenomena. After the recording, he asks her out for coffee. She explains about the Shreek, which returned to Earth the previous day but was captured by UNIT. She gives him an antidote, so he is no longer at risk of being hunted. Ruby and Conrad go out on a few dates, much to the keen interest of Carla, Cherry and Louise. Ruby has been finding it hard to adjust to life after travelling with the Doctor, and dating Conrad is just what they think she needs. Conrad invites Ruby to visit some of his friends in a village in England. It appears that the Shreek has come there to kill Conrad, who admits to Ruby that he never took the antidote. Ruby calls UNIT in, but it turns out to be a hoax: Conrad and his friends have deliberately - and elaborately - staged an alien attack so they could film UNIT and make them look stupid (or something). This creates a negative reaction against UNIT on new and old media. Conrad's organisation Think Tank publishes the details of all UNIT's employees, and - with the help of an inside contact within the organisation - infiltrates the UNIT tower. Kate Lethbridge-Stewart releases the real Shreek, which hunts a terrified Conrad until Ruby tasers it. Conrad is imprisoned. He is briefly transported from his cell to the TARDIS where the Doctor gives him a ticking off, before returning him. Mrs. Flood turns out to be the governor of the prison, and releases Conrad for her own mysterious purposes...

Context:

The random number generator has picked another story from the most recent run at time of writing, Ncuti Gatwa's second season from 2025. It was nearly two months on from when I first watched Lucky Day, and a good month on from the end of the season; nonetheless, it felt like I'd only just been watching that set of stories (probably because, in the interim, online 'news' hasn't ceased covering it - see Deeper Thoughts from the previous blog post for more details). As such, I chose to watch on my own, from the BBC iplayer, on an evening towards the end of June 2025. The eldest child (young man of 19) popped in to the living room and watched for a few minutes, but didn't stick around.

 

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now approaching the point where I catch up: with this post, the tally stands at 11 Doctors' televisual eras completed (Doctors 1-4, 7-9 and 11-14), and 37 out of the 41 seasons completed to date (classic seasons 1-18, 20, 21, 23-26, and new series 1, 2, and 4-14). Of the 892 episodes of Doctor Who from An Unearthly Child up to The Reality War, 15 now remain to be blogged.

First Time Round:

I first watched this story on the day it landed on the BBC iplayer, 3rd May 2025. As the season had progressed, I was watching the episodes earlier and earlier on each Saturday, but I never watched one as early as 8am (the time that episodes first became available this season). Lucky Day was watched just after lunch, around 1pm. As with most of the season, I was accompanied by middle child (boy of 15). A week or two later, the eldest caught up when back home from university. Finally, on the 1st of June 2025, the youngest (girl of 13) binged this amongst other selected episodes she hadn't yet watched from Joy to the World through to The Reality War. This was because we'd advised her to catch up before she got spoilered about the various revelations in the season finale, which were all over the internet a day after its broadcast).

Reaction:

I've never thought about the phrase 'more than the sum of its parts' quite as deeply as I have after this rewatch of Lucky Day. There's many a Doctor Who where things take a turn at the half-way point or thereabouts, sometimes for the worse, sometimes the better, sometimes just the different. Lucky Day certainly does that. These two halves, though are completely incompatible in terms of plot believability and character motivation. It's like the sum of Lucky Day's parts is adding b squared to c to a fridge freezer. And yet... The resulting story works as the sad but ultimately fierce tale of Ruby, who thinks she's found a way to move on after her travels with the Doctor, but is betrayed by a person she thought she could trust. She then finds her inner strength at the side of UNIT, fighting against the negative forces that want to destroy it. Through that, she inches a little closer to a way of living beyond the Doctor. A lot of why it works is Millie Gibson; the episode is presented as her nightmare, and she makes you feel every moment of that. Nightmares don't need to completely add up, of course, which also might explain why the story gets away with it. Or maybe Lucky Day is just having a lucky day. The twist when it comes is satisfying on first watch, but the slightest thought highlights that a massive, rickety scaffold of contrivance is required to hold it up. In the first part of the story, Ruby starts going out with the clumsy, lovable doe-eyed version of Conrad (an invention, we later find out). This version - very like the characters in Redacted, and others like the members of LINDA in Love & Monsters - is desperately seeking the Doctor and his blue box. He has this yearning because he had an encounter with the Doctor when a child that left him pondering mysteries (again exactly like the characters in those earlier stories).

Writer Pete McTighe is cleverly using these previously adopted tropes of Doctor Who as misdirection, so we don't see coming the twist that Conrad is a much nastier and more calculating character than his doe-eyed persona would indicate. But he's not an unreliable narrator: he did meet the Doctor in his childhood and then spot him again in 2024; he did see the TARDIS appear and disappear, and he did see evidence of an extra-terrestrial predator as an adult. Does he believe all of that was faked by UNIT (the theory he consistently espouses once he's shrugged off the doe-eyed persona)? UNIT weren't present at any of these events. Indeed, nobody else was; so, if it was faked, does he think it was faked just for him? Does he genuinely believe that theory or is he pretending just to incriminate UNIT? It doesn't seem like the latter. The events we see happen to Conrad in the first part don't align with his attitudes in the second. Perhaps the intervening rejection from UNIT is what caused the change. Let's play that out so I can get my head round it: Conrad becomes obsessed with the Doctor after a chance encounter; he starts a podcast to try to find out more, and at some point finds out about UNIT. He applies to UNIT and is rejected and this starts him thinking negatively about the organisation. Despite the evidence of his own experience, he starts to believe UNIT are faking aliens just to waste taxpayer money. Okay, that's plausible so far just about. He forms a group of like-minded conspiracy theorists, Think Tank, to bring UNIT down. Again, a little bit OTT, but still plausible. During all this time, he continues his more idealistic podcast because, erm ... I'm struggling. Perhaps he does it deliberately as a way of snagging someone like Ruby who can help him get closer to UNIT? It seems like a lot of effort, though (particularly as it's revealed later than he already has another insider in his pocket).

If Conrad's public media persona is the doe-eyed one, how is he covertly interacting with followers of Think Tank? Just on Whatsapp? Think Tank seem to have ready-made channels with many viewers when they are filming their UNIT gotcha, but perhaps other members of Think Tank maintained those and Conrad kept himself secret until his Shreek stunt had played out. A much more truthful narrative, of course, would be Conrad continuing with just one online media presence (without the second secret one) but gradually getting more and more radicalised. That, though, wouldn't give him any opportunity to fool Ruby. And he needs to fool Ruby, doesn't he? Doesn't he? For the emotional arc, yes, but for the logical plot arc it's again an excessive amount of effort. Why create this weird tableau in a rural village when he already has the means to doxx everyone in UNIT's employ and infiltrate their building? Why the theatrics? Also, isn't there an inherent flaw in his plan to show that UNIT are a waste of money by getting them to respond to what looks like a credible threat? Isn't them showing up in the village to capture the Shreek them behaving exactly as their remit dictates? Therefore, hasn't Conrad proved that the only one faking events and wasting taxpayers' money is he himself? Maybe the script is trying to say something about the credulity of online audiences, their stubborn belief over facts meaning they see UNIT as bad even though that's the opposite of what's being presented. Maybe. Giving Gemma Redgrave as Kate Lethbridge-Stewart something a little different to do, all simmering anger and crossing the line, is at least a plus (and according to comments from McTighe will be something picked up again in this year's UNIT spin-off The War Between the Land and the Sea).

I know I'm probably expected to just see Conrad's weird, disconnected and contradictory social media exploits as a high-level metaphor, and therefore not worry about the detail; there ought to be some internal logic, though. I'm not convinced that an online youth movement would come together over the taxpayer cost (a preoccupation of an older demographic) of an organisation that fights aliens (a nerdy niche interest); but, if it did, I can't see how the public mood would be suddenly changed just by footage of Conrad being mauled. The likely reality would be that people would grimly stick to their belief that it was all faked. This doesn't, though, stop the climactic scenes of the UNIT Conrad confrontation, and the released Shreek stalking its prey, being exciting. Jonah Hauer-King is great as Conrad despite the contradictions on the page. There's also a nice couple of quieter scenes of Redgrave and Gibson together. The sequence where Conrad is brought into the TARDIS control room is a bit odd; the thought that instantly popped into my head was that being allowed inside the TARDIS should be the privilege of a special few, and shouldn't be bestowed on the unrepentant Conrad. The Doctor then says as much, almost word for word; so, why is he indulging him? The Doctor's subsequent speech is a little too preachy, but is saved a little by the continuity link: Conrad mentions Belinda Chandra's name, meaning this scene is the lead in to the Doctor's initial appearance at the beginning of the season, tracking Belinda in The Robot Revolution. The final curve ball moment is Mrs. Flood turning up and releasing Conrad so he can feature in the series again. That later appearance doesn't really answer any of the questions raised above, but again it doesn't seem to matter.

Connectivity:

Both Lucky Day and Redacted prominently feature characters who have their own podcast show. Both stories include moments where UNIT are a bit heavy handed. Towards the end, both include a bit of preachy editorialising about online misinformation.

Alex Jones in The One Show in Doctor Who

Deeper Thoughts:

As Themselves. Lucky Day features quite a few cameos from people playing themselves. As part of the satirical montage of various news sources entertaining Conrad Clark's wild theories, newsreader Reeta Chakrabarti, presenter Alex Jones, and comedian Joel Dommett appear for short set-ups in amongst fictional media / social media stars. This emulation of a media round covering a topic within the Doctor Who universe is long-established. Showrunner of Lucky Day Russell T Davies particularly likes it. The first example from the new series era is in the fourth 2005 episode Aliens of London. During that episode, the Doctor - stuck outside the area where the action is happening - is reduced to following events on the television like everyone else. He channel hops between various news programmes where anchors and reporters (played by actors) cover the story of a spaceship that's seemingly crash landed in London. At one point, Matt Baker - then a children's TV presenter - is shown in the Blue Peter studio making a cake shaped like the spaceship. Baker was the first person to appear as himself in the new series, but he most certainly wasn't the last: indeed, later in the same episode political journalist Andrew Marr is seen reporting on the UK government reaction to the crisis. It's easy to see why such a thing would be done: it adds real world verisimilitude to the action, it provides fun moments for people who like celebrity spotting, and it gives lots of no doubt lovely non-actors (and Ann Widdecombe) the opportunity to brag to their sons, daughters, nieces or nephews that they've been in Doctor Who.

Andrew Marr in Aliens of London

Like most innovations in Doctor Who, this was first trialled in the laboratory conditions of the William Hartnell era. In 1966 story The War Machines, newsreader Kenneth Kendall is shown on a TV in a bar commenting on the sci-fi action in the capital. The scene and the person provide verisimilitude in exactly the same way as the scenes in Aliens of London would many years later. The 1972 story Day of The Daleks had reporter Alex MacIntosh reporting about the peace conference in Auderly House; it's probable that those making the 1970s story didn't remember The War Machines playing the same trick years before, and were experimenting anew. The approach didn't take hold: contemporary alien invasion stories fell out of favour, so the opportunities for such cameos were limited. There were only a couple more real life cameos, not connected with news broadcasting, in the remainder of the classic series. Near the start of the 1980s, Concorde - a slightly faded but nonetheless still pretty big star at the time - played itself in Time Flight. Later in the decade, Courtney Pine and his band appeared as themselves in Silver Nemesis. That was it until the show returned in 2005, when the approach took hold big time. After Aliens of London, memorable appearances were made by news presenter Jason Mohammad, who made a record-breaking six appearances in the Whoniverse (four in the main show, two in The Sarah Jane Adventures), TV medium Derek Acorah bemoaning his redundant status now that ghosts have become real in Army of Ghosts, daytime TV mainstay Trisha Goddard interviewing someone in a relationship with a ghost in the same story, and the aforementioned Ann Widdecombe endorsing politician Harold Saxon in The Sound of Drums. She certainly knows how to pick 'em (did the programme makers maybe not tell her that Saxon was evil personified?).

(L to R) Widdecombe, Saxon

In the remainder of Russell T Davies's first period as showrunner there were further appearances by people such as Richard Dawkins, Paul O'Grady, and Nicholas Witchell. Usually included in any montage was fictional US news anchor Trinity Wells. She proved so popular it was almost as if she became a real person. Up to 2010, the character appeared in two episodes apiece of spin-offs Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures, and nine times in the main show. After Davies, the other two new series showrunners also used the real life cameo approach, but less frequently, with scientist Brian Cox, game show host Alan Sugar and journalist Emily Maitlis making appearances. When Davies returned as showrunner, Trinity Wells came back too, first making an appearance in The Giggle, then Lucky Day. Alas, she is now an alt-right conspiracy theorist, but that must be more interesting for Lachele Carl to play (Carl, by the way, played an investigative journalist in 1987 BBC sci-fi series Star Cops, set in the futuristic year 2027, and I like to think her character there is a relative of Ms. Wells). It's only with Lucky Day that the cameo montage returned in full. It sounds like these segments are an odd thing to shoot, disjointed from the narrative. Alex Jones - the one from Wales, not the far-right American broadcaster who would probably have been a much more plausible interviewer of Conrad -  talked in an interview about a scene where she had to "interview a guy", which is all the context she would likely get. Mind you, even Jonah Hauer-King playing Conrad, who would have had a whole script, found it difficult to explain exactly what was going on (as mentioned in this video). Will this be the last instance of real world cameos appearing in Doctor Who? Well, first off Doctor Who itself has to endure in the real world, and nobody knows when - or if - any media round will confirm that.

In Summary:

Lucky Day is very lucky (blessed as it is with Millie Gibson's performance bringing it all together) and - like Conrad -  gets away with it in the end.