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.

Kerblam!

Chapter The 170th, in which the Doctor encounters the second scariest bubble-wrap in the universe (cf. The Ark in Space).

Plot:

The Doctor receives a package in the TARDIS from online cosmic retailer Kerblam! delivered by a teleporting robot postman. The packing slip contains the message "HELP ME". The Doctor investigates with her friends Graham, Yaz, and Ryan, materialising on the planet Kandoka's moon, where the company is based. They find evidence that workers are going missing, perhaps nabbed or killed by the many robot 'teammates' who work alongside the humans. Who could be the villain behind this? Could it be happy-go lucky 'head of people' Judy Maddox who you'd least suspect? Could it be the obvious choice, grumpy Warehouse Executive Slade? Could it be Charlie, the mild-mannered janitor? Mmm - could be! Charlie is planning mass murder, delivering parcels to all Kerblam! customers using an army of postmen robots; the bubble-wrap inside the parcels is explosive. The company's computer system has been fighting back: it sent the HELP ME message to the Doctor and even arranged for Kira, a girl who worked in packing that Charlie was falling for, to blow herself up with the bubble-wrap, to show Charlie how it will feel for the loved ones of the victims. Charlie still instigates the plan, but the Doctor - interfacing with the system via Twirly, a prototype delivery drone - changes the destination address for all the postmen, so they arrive back in the warehouse and blow up only Charlie.

Context:

It was the night of 7th November 2020 going into the morning of the 8th. The rest of the family had gone to sleep, but I wanted to stay up to hear Joe Biden's speech live, which was expected at around 1am. So, I put on this story (from the season Blu-ray box-set) to bridge the gap until it was time. The story was just the next one that had come up as a random selection; I didn't choose it for any thematic reasons, though it does touch on globalisation, the power of Big Tech and worker's rights. It also features a misguided Antifa antagonist. It wasn't without some resonance to the American election, is all I'm saying; though, probably, Arachnids in the UK - with its Trump clone baddie - would have been better. At the time of writing the orange gas balloon is still bumping around the White House. If you're reading this in late January 2021 or after, I hope my faith in the US democratic and judicial processes has not been misplaced, and that he's floated away from our lives and our timelines for good.

First time round:

Watched live on its BBC1 debut broadcast in November 2018 with all the family bar one (youngest child, girl of 8 years old, then 6, found the first episode of Jodie Whittaker's first season too scary, and so would not watch the rest). I can't remember much more about it. Looking back on the nearest thing I have to a diary of that time - this blog - I notice that I was busy watching classic Who at that point having published a post earlier that Sunday on Mawdryn Undead, one of many I did that month. It was not a reflection of any boredom or frustration with Jodie's new series that I was taking refuge in older Who; on the contrary, I was finding its new approach refreshing, and Kerblam! was one of my favourites of the year.

Reaction:

In 2018, the writer of Kerblam!, Pete McTighe, was something of an unknown quantity; now, since his significant involvement in the Doctor Who Blu-ray collection (or Who Rays as they are being called online) as consultant, content provider and on-screen commentator, it's clear that he is very fond of classic Doctor Who. This shouldn't have been a surprise, as I now see that Kerblam! is a homage to 1970s Tom Baker classic The Robots of Death. Calmly-spoken, aesthetically pleasing but sinister robots with a stylised look serve an enclosed working community. Some of these robots are going rogue having been reprogrammed by a human planning a revolution. There are a number of suspects for who this might be, Agatha Christie style. I feel a bit dumb for having missed this before now; it's screamingly obvious but perhaps on first watch, and the couple of times I've seen it since, the political slant distracted me. McTighe's script for this year's run, Praxeus, overdid the moral message and ended up being preachy; the subtext of his first story on the other hand, if it can be called subtext as it's pretty overt, is much more successfully handled. The threat of automation on humans' lives and livelihoods is no more or less important than the impacts of microplastics on the environment, but the former integrates better with a science fiction narrative. Also, by making comparisons with Amazon, the story inherits an interesting locale, a planetoid-sized version of one of the real-world company's euphemistically-named fulfillment centres.

When reviewing Praxeus earlier in the year, I briefly touched on Kerblam! stating that the story "had loads of plot, carefully written, nicely paced and delivered, and had no superfluous characters or scenes". I'd stand by that after re-watching. I particularly like the misdirection of Charlie's rom-com subplot with Kira, to make him less of a suspect as he seems to be in the drama for different reasons; then, making him the victim with Kira killed moves him even further from suspicion. Deadly bubble-wrap is a great touch too, in keeping with Doctor Who's history of twisting the everyday into something more sinister. There's a great action sequence with the conveyer belt chase, a cameo from a Fez, and some cracking jokes ("Customers with your current medical symptoms browsed blood pressure medication"). All told, it's certainly a much better written piece than Praxeus, and is easily as well-structured as its probable inspiration. Like The Robots of Death, though, the script alone would not be enough; as with the 1970s story, Kerblam! has a consistency of look and feel across the whole production. The robots here have a cartoony look, rather than the art-deco stylings of The Robots of death, but it's just as impressive. There is a nice chunky, Tonka toy-like presence to the postmen and teammates, and even the comedy Twirly drone, that works well in the story and makes them a great photo opportunity too. Chibnall era Doctor Who is low on memorable new monsters, and these might be the most distinctive they've given us so far.

Casting is very strong, as it was throughout 2018's stories. Everyone is perfect for their role, and giving it their all. Lee Mack doesn't survive for long, but embodies the comic everyman, and conveys the human impact of the story's bigger message, putting up with dehumanising work cheerfully to provide for the young daughter from whom the work keeps him away. Best of all the guest cast, though, is Julie Hesmondhalgh, who's cast to type but nonetheless nails the chirpy administrator exterior with some steel beneath. As there needs to be a few suspects, and they have to be given enough screen time to be distinct from one another and display actions sufficient enough for suspicions to be aroused, there isn't much time for the regulars. And there are a lot of regulars. All four by this point in their first series are well established and don't need to necessarily have characterful moments, but as the producers are unlikely to have anyone faint and have to have a nap in the TARDIS, there's got to be something for them to do. Yaz gets to bond with Lee Mack's character for a bit, Ryan gets to moan about being back to working in a warehouse, Graham gets to call someone 'cockle'. That's about it. After two years, maybe it's the right time to reduce the number of companions / friends / fam.

There are a few flaws. It does seem unlikely that Charlie's plan could have got so far advanced without the system sending a robot to kill him long before; that would be a more direct way of dealing with him than sending cryptic notes to the Doctor. At the end of the story, it looks like the company will be rebuilt anew with better labour practices, but how will that change the wider economy that must have existed around that one company? Also, Kerblam! will continue as a going concern powered by a central computer system that has some form of autonomy and is capable of killing humans just to make a point. It'll all end in tears, I tells ye. The jokey ending with Graham almost unable to resist popping the bubble-wrap falls a bit flat too. None of that, though, takes away from a successful tale, cleverer and less obvious than its title might suggest.

Connectivity: 

Both stories feature a guest actor in a dramatic role who around the time of broadcast was known primarily for situation comedy work (Lee Mack in Kerblam! and Martin Clunes in Snakedance).

Deeper Thoughts:

The FAANGs of Time. I am cursed with a good memory for trivia but not important things. I also have a tendency to consume a lot of popular culture, often watching things again and again many times over the years. The combination of these two factors creates a mental media-space where all of recent history seems to be happening at once. Doctor Who returning as an ongoing series seems like it happened only yesterday, and yet it was more than 15 years ago, longer than the lifetime of my oldest child. Sometimes, little dated references catch me, with a moment of shuddering realisation my bubble of timelessness is popped: I'm re-watching The Christmas Invasion, say, or Aliens of London, or School Reunion, and I realise none of these people have smartphones. Why do none of these people have smartphones?! McFly cameoed as a young boy band in a Doctor Who story just the other day, didn't they? How can they suddenly be in their thirties and releasing a mature comeback album?  It's not just Doctor Who either. The American sitcom Friends recently arrived on Netflix in the UK, prompting a lot of commentary from the commentariat (actually, it wasn't that recently, and could have been anything up to five years ago, I'm not sure - I have no sense of time passing, did I mention that?). A lot of people sniffed at whether the show was particularly relevant any more with regard to its sexual politics or diversity of casting. Nobody thought that it might not be relevant because it is a show about social interaction whose entire run took place in the world before social media. It isn't old enough to be presented or enjoyed as a 'classic', a period piece of its time, but the world has moved on - pretty significantly - around it.

Social media has a lot to answer for. The shadow of the FAANGs tech behemoths (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google) has fallen rapidly over a lot of lives and stories; my life's been impacted without my noticing too much as it happened. When I started working in technology for the day job, only the two of those five beginning with A existed, Amazon only barely, and Apple had nothing to do with music or phones. It took only fifteen-ish years for them collectively to become all powerful in the western world. Another few more years after that, they started looking dangerous. The direction of travel could end with a nightmare scenario of mass unemployment as depicted in Kerblam! I've been part of it pushing it along too. I was a relatively early adopter of Amazon, for example. My first purchase was not long after the turn of the millennium. It was a Doctor Who audio CD that I couldn't find in my favourite bricks and mortar shops (which have all now gone) or my preferred smaller online retailers (which have also now gone). My enjoyment of a CD of Marco Polo or whatever has turned, in the blink of an eye, to a monolithic multi-national tax-dodging nightmare powered by insecure labour. I'm weaning myself off Amazon. Netflix's successful subscription model will likely one day put paid to the licence fee in the UK, which may well put paid to the BBC, who make my favourite programme. I can't stop using Netflix, though, as it is the place where I can watch the documentaries that tell me how bad Facebook is.

I've completely given up using Facebook now, but I'm nonetheless a little bit complicit in what it's become. Just like me and that first innocent Doctor Who audio CD, nobody looking for a way to remember people's birthdays or share holiday snaps intended to enable fascism. What happens in the next few years will be interesting, by which I mean terrifying. From my current vantage point, as mentioned above, the president of one of the most powerful countries of the world is refusing to accept the result of a democratic election, and it's playing out second by second on all the platforms. I hope that you dear reader of the future are living in a better world; I think you will be - he can't hang on for too much longer. Perhaps it will be just the start of things getting better. The direction of travel can shift, and maybe a bleak Kerblam! destiny might not come about, and we can retain things of quality like small retailers, public service broadcasters and democracy. A bit of good news would be good for all of our mental health in 2020 too; it's been a tough year, and I've found myself doomscrolling (word of the year for me, I think) through bad news on a daily basis. As well as being unhealthy, it's a bit ridiculous too; with everything jumbled up on a timeline, the serious gets equated with the silly. Pandemics and coups and disasters on my twitter (yes, I still use twitter) timeline are interspersed with people moaning because the Covid-impacted 2021 series of Doctor Who is only going to be 8 episodes long. It's a miracle we're getting any at all. It's time to look on the bright side as much as we can, I think. 

In Summary:

Not as Biff! Bang! Pow! as its comic book title would suggest, but still one of 2018's best.

Robot of Sherwood

Chapter The 159th, which is all about a mythical character (or two).

Plot:

Despite the Doctor's protestations that it is impossible for Clara to meet Robin Hood as he doesn't exist, the TARDIS takes them to late 12th-century Sherwood Forest, and there he is, large as life. The Doctor is suspicious that this can't be real, but Robin has the full contingent of Merry Men: Little John, Alan a' Dale, Will Scarlet, Friar Tuck. He's only missing Marian, whose whereabouts is unknown. This has made Robin a little sad, but he disguises it with lots of theatrical laughing and banter. The Doctor takes exception to this. Clara and the Doctor accompany the Merry Men to the legendary archery tournament - and obvious trap - set up by the Sheriff of Nottingham. The prize is a golden arrow. As is customary in tales such as these, Robin Hood fires an arrow into the bullseye that splits the Sheriff 's arrow to claim the prize, but then the Doctor splits Robin's arrow, and it escalates with everyone showing off. The Sheriff's knights turn out to be robots; the Merry Men make off with the golden arrow, but Robin, Clara and the Doctor are captured. The Sheriff locks up the three of them, and keeps them observed to see who is the ringleader; as Robin and the Doctor spend all their time bickering, he assumes it is Clara. Out of the cell to have dinner with him, she cleverly gets the Sheriff to explain his plan to her: the Robots crashed down from space, and promised him power and glory and all the usual. He's helping them rebuild their spaceship using plundered gold and captured peasant labour.

The Doctor and Robin have meanwhile escaped, and found the spaceship. The Doctor examines it, and discovers that it has insufficient gold plating to survive take off, and will blow up, destroying the surrounding area. He also conjures up an unlikely theory that Robin Hood is a robot too, designed by the Sheriff to give false hope to the masses. Robin resents the suggestion that he and the Sheriff are in cahoots. The Sheriff enters with Clara, and some swordplay ensues. Robin and Clara get away, but the Doctor is knocked out and wakes up in the dungeons to find he's with the other prisoners working on the spaceship. He befriends a woman, escapes his bonds, and with her help foments a rebellion, with the prisoners using polished surfaces to reflect the robot knights' blasters back at them. The Doctor catches up with the Sheriff as the countdown to take off has been instigated. Robin and Clara arrive, and more swordplay ensues. The Sheriff is killed, and Robin injured. They all rush out into Sherwood Forest, as the unstable spaceship starts to rise. The golden arrow will be the last crucial part of gold to seal up the ship and stop the explosion, but it needs to be fired at a precise point on the ship. Robin can't fire an arrow with his injury, and the Doctor reveals he was cheating during the tournament, using tech to improve his aim. So, Robin, the Doctor and Clara have to work together and between them manage to fire the arrow, hitting the target and saving the day. Saying goodbye to Robin, the Doctor has to concede he's been wrong all along, and Robin Hood is real: an ordinary man pretending to be a legend. The TARDIS leaves, and Robin is reunited with the woman from the dungeons, Her name? Marian.

Context:

All the family (The Better Half, and three kids, boy of 14, boy of 10, girl of 8) watched this with me one Sunday afternoon, all sat in the living room watching the TV as the story played from the Blu-ray (as part of the series 8 box set). Everyone was silent throughout, which is always a good sign, and afterwards all said they enjoyed it.

First time round:

Watched with the Better Half time-shifted on the Saturday evening of its first UK broadcast on BBC1 in the autumn of 2014, then again on the following Sunday morning with the children. I was enjoying the series very much at this point having been somewhat underwhelmed by most of the stories shown the previous year. I very much liked the first five or six Capaldi stories, coincidentally the same episodes whose early edited assemblies were leaked on the web a few weeks before the series started. I had resisted any temptation to view those versions, so this was my first appreciation of this story.

Reaction:

Some people don't get on well with the more light-hearted Doctor Who stories commonly known as romps. Robot of Sherwood might just be the rompiest of romps, and is authored by Mark Gatiss, who since writing for the new series from its return in 2005 had carved out the role of the Rompmaster General. We the audience are left under no illusions as to the tone and shape of the story from the off: the Doctor himself tells us it's all not to be taken seriously, undermining the very possibility of the story's concept within the first minute; and, Robin when he first appears gives a bloody great wink to camera. Subtle this ain't. It is genuinely funny, though, and earns its comic status. The swashbuckling is satisfying too, being shot and performed with efficiency and a light touch. Within the early sequences, we've had the Doctor best Robin in a swordfight armed only with a spoon, and seen both the Doctor and Robin end up bumped into the stream. This, plus a very rude joke bout Errol Flynn for good measure. It's sunny and charming, and it really works.

A lot of this is to do with casting. Tom Riley plays the ostensibly panto version of Hood with gusto, but the script allows him some quieter moments where he reveals to Clara that it's all a facade, and that actually it's the true character underneath the banter and bravado that is the one who is performing. It's deceptively nuanced. Ben Miller as the Sheriff has more latitude to perform without subtlety at all - that's the joy of playing the Sheriff of Nottingham. As with Riley, he grabs the opportunity (with both black leather gloved hands) and blazes through every moment he's on screen. The regular cast match them, and are not overpowered. Jenna Coleman as Clara is really giving her best here, being clever and perceptive, and getting to shake her head witheringly at the bickering boys around her, outwit the Sheriff, and be direct and no-nonsense and Blackpool at various points. Plus, she gets a stunning outfit too, one of the most striking of her time on the show. Peter Capaldi is adept at comedy, and works up a double-act with Riley instantaneously; it feels like they are old muckers, who've been bantering with each other for years. This may sound grating to some people - as the Doctor himself says, pretend grumpy about banter: "Do people ever punch you in the face when you do that?" - but I have a high tolerance for this kind of stuff if done well, and I enjoyed it enormously. 

The four star turns, all of them coming close to chewing the scenery in their own way, don't leave much of a look in for any of the other cast. It's a shame as it is a strong set of Merry Men; Trevor Cooper, for example, seems born to play Friar Tuck, and Rusty Goffe is a nice subversion of the usual Little John casting. One's left wanting more - I'd love to see these particular Merry Men have more adventures (perhaps Big Finish will get round to doing a series one day). Other positives: great music, good dialogue ("Shut it, Hoodie"), a cameo by Patrick Troughton (he's one of the images of Robin Hood the legend pulled from the spaceship's databanks - Troughton played Robin of Loxley in a 1950s BBC series). The only minor niggle is the reference to the series plot arc, that the Robot's spaceship is on its way to 'The Promised Land' (which was also the destination of the Half-Faced Man from Deep Breath two stories earlier). I don't think it was ever explained what this had to do with Missy's plot housing people's dead brains in a cyberspace reality, as revealed in the series finale - it's almost as if they were making it up as they were going along!

Enjoyable as it all is apart from that tiny flaw, it doesn't matter a great deal - the whole thing is essentially just misdirection. Gatiss uses the shape of a standard hackneyed device that Doctor Who had deployed before - explaining real world legends with sci-fi phenomena - then pulls the rug, revealing that the twist is that there's no twist. Hood is just the ordinary man from whose tale the legends grew. This allows the story to address the overall theme of that year's series, the heroism or otherwise of the Doctor as he struggles with his new identity, but in a clever and surprising way.  In a - probably inadvertent - foreshadowing of that year's Christmas special, Last Christmas, a bit of 'meta' positioning allows the characters to interrogate the Doctor's fictional status. The dialogue from Robin at the end gets to restate the Doctor and Doctor Who's credo in bold terms, and draw parallels with the older legend: "A man born into wealth and privilege" who finds "the plight of the oppressed and weak too much to bear" until... "one night he is moved to steal a TARDIS" and "fly among the stars, fighting the good fight".

Connectivity: 

You can't get better than this: The Crusade and Robot of Sherwood take place at exactly the same time: 1190 AD. Ish. Richard's away fighting the crusade, and John is on the throne, with tyranny - in the form of the Sheriff - abounding. As such, there is lots of swordplay, knights and horses in both stories.

Deeper Thoughts:

As originally broadcast? The concept of the special edition or 'director's cut' of a movie emerged in Hollywood in the 1970s, and gained ground in the 1980s and 1990s in sell-through formats like VHS, Laserdisc and DVD. By the turn of the century, it was an established practice to the extent that the idea of a definitive version of a film had become a point of contention. To pick a prominent example, whether your favourite version of Star Wars was the original, the special edition from 1997 or the DVD version (which George Lucas tweaked even more) was a matter of individual taste. Whether you could have a copy of your favourite version at home and watch it regularly, though, was less up to you. The initial theatrical versions of the original trilogy were for a long while unavailable on home video formats, which made some fans unhappy. Special Editions were usually of films, though. It was neither an opportunity nor an issue for TV shows as generally they are made with lower budgets than feature films, and that doesn't leave much scope for having unused footage for reinsertion into a new edit, nor of obtaining budgets for reshoots or new effects. One would be forgiven for thinking that Doctor Who, whose budget was even more constrained than other programmes of its type, would be even less likely to have this capability. Interestingly enough, despite this, it did prove to be something of a trailblazer in this regard.

As early as 1990, only a few years into the video range, the BBC started to work on releases for VHS that went beyond just repackaging stories exactly as broadcast; The Curse of Fenric tape, released in February 1991, was a new extended version with many minutes of newly inserted material. It wasn't quite as big and bold a presentation as those involved in it wanted, but it was a start. Such a thing was possible because the latter years of Who's production in the 1980s had a contingent of stories that ran overlong and needed to be viciously trimmed for broadcast slots, and also had a producer savvy enough to have realised that keeping all this additional material would come in handy one day. A number of other stories from the period got a similar treatment during the 1990s, and even some earlier stories had additional scenes or alternate versions of episodes released on tape, such as Inferno and Carnival of Monsters (they may have been presented that way accidentally, but it's definitely in the spirit of Doctor Who to innovate inadvertently as well as on purpose!). In the mid-1990s, the first VHS release to have a version with improved visual effects applied was The Five Doctors Special Edition (see here for more details).

That Five Doctors release was made by a loose group of individuals, known as the Doctor Who Restoration team, who came to have a bigger and bigger role as time went on in improving the pictures and sound of what went onto the Doctor Who VHS tapes. They were technical experts, but they were also enthusiasts, and their extra efforts elevated (and still elevate in the case of the Blu-rays which they are also involved with) Doctor Who for home purchase high above almost all other shows on disc or streaming service. As DVD became mainstream, they were allowed even more scope for presenting alternate versions. In general, these did not prove contentious, as - unlike in George Lucas's fiefdom - the originals were always on the discs alongside the altered versions. Instead, the arguments that there were centred more on the restoration work. This is also not an area for discussion unique to Doctor Who by any means - the line between what is acceptable and what is not is a blurry one. There can be no hard and fast rules, even when trying to stick to keeping things as broadcast: picture noise and video wobbles for example may have been there on transmission, but they don't have any aesthetic or dramatic value, so most people would have no problem with them being fixed (it wouldn't be much of a restoration with them left in, after all).

When does improvement turn into tinkering? The end credits on the 1960s stories were caption slides on a roller, which was manually turned, I believe. As such, on the original unrestored episodes they wobble drunkenly. For the DVDs, they were replaced with electronic lettering made to match as closely as possible, but running smooth. Much better, but for some watching they stick out as being a bit too good compared to what was achievable when the stories were first made. There was a medium-sized controversy, 'Spannergate', around changes made to the story The Pirate Planet in the default version, where an effect of a spanner flying out of an explosion was recreated and looked a bit different to, but a lot better than, the original effect. It crossed the line for some, but a few seconds of a superimposed spanner don't have a huge amount of aesthetic or dramatic value, really. So, does it just come down to trying to match what the nostalgic viewer first experienced at home? If one is strict about that, most of the Jon Pertwee stories would be in black and white, as colour televisions weren't owned by the majority of households. There has to be some thought given to the intent of the programme makers, I think. They didn't intend to have their captions wobble or their spanner effect misfire. 

Robot of Sherwood is another story where an alternate version exists, and where the intent of the programme makers is interesting to consider. Originally, it would have been made much more clear in the finished programme that the Sheriff of Nottingham has been robotised. During the final swordfight, Robin would have sliced the Sheriff's head clean off, only for it to keep talking, and for its headless robot body to walk over, pick it up and reattach it. The programme, though, was scheduled for broadcast soon after the Islamic State murders of hostages, including James Foley, by beheading. The scene was therefore felt to be insensitive, and was edited out. In this case, the version broadcast did not match the intent of the programme makers, but the change had been made at their instigation for a reason external to concerns of narrative. Had it not been for the leak of the episode's early rough cuts (as mentioned above), they may not have even felt the need to advertise the fact and nobody would have been the wiser. The Blu-ray release went with the shortened version, but then it was only released a few months later, so it was probably still too soon. Thus far, though, the full original version has never been released. Surprisingly, none of the stories from 2005 onwards, where the material and the budget probably could have been found, has ever had a special edition release. This seems odd, in stark contrast to the classic series whose stories are still getting upgrades (the latest being the enhanced CGI, including scarier rat, of The Talons of Weng-Chiang). Give it a few years, though, time enough for the Beeb to wonder about a revenue stream so far untapped, and we may yet see Rose: Special Edition, or Dalek: The Director's Cut, or even Robot of Sherwood Including Previously Censored Material... 

In Summary:

It's the epitome of the Doctor Who romp, but it's also a bit of a conjuring trick, an illusion, disguising it's underlying theme about heroism. So, a romp l'oeil? Anyone? Romp l'oeil? No? Please yourselves.