What’s the Episode? “The Robot Revolution”, the first episode of Season 2 (let’s not get into the whole numbering thing again).
What’s It All About, JG? The episode starts with Belinda Chandra (Varada Sethu) getting a star certificate from her awkward boyfriend Alan (Jonny Green) before cutting forward 17 years, where she’s a nurse working in a hospital and living in shared accommodation with other twenty-somethings. A robot turns up and abducts her, just as the Doctor arrives to try and prevent said abduction (and Mrs Flood does a bit more fourth-wall breaking). She’s taken to the planet MsBelindaChandra, the one that Alan named after her, to be made queen and marry the AI generator. The Doctor turns up to try and save her, cry, and generally put things right. The robots on this planet rebelled against the population for what seemed to be no reason. The AI generator actually turns out to be Al (as in Alan), her old boyfriend, who has been wired into the planet’s system and was responsible for said robot revolution via some timey-wimey shenanigans and time slippage. He’s stopped by touching two versions of the star certificate from different times which reduces him to a single egg and sperm. Trying to take Belinda back home, because she does not want to be there, the Doctor discovers the TARDIS bounces off 25th May 2025 and so they need to go the long way round.
Is It Any Good? It’s better than “Space Babies” but then again so is practically everything this side of “The Twin Dilemma” so that’s not saying very much. Mostly, though, the answer is “not especially”. Season openers are hard to write and in truth, RTD has only really landed it once, with “Rose” (you could make a case for “Partners In Crime”, though Tate probably saves it more than Davies). “Rose” is an absolute masterclass of how to introduce a premise, set of characters, threat level, and resolution, all within forty-five minutes and all of it making sense. Indeed, it’s one of the best introductory stories in television, I would argue. “The Robot Revolution” is not that.
Yet it doesn’t just fail in comparison to previous outings, it mostly fails on its own merits. The scripting here is hyper-frenetic but, while it’s not incoherent as such, it’s very messy and clumsy. It mistakes speed for energy and they’re not the same thing at all. There’s a huge blur of events in the first ten minutes or so of the episode, which includes our introduction to Belinda, the establishment of her situation, her life, the robots that turn up to abduct her, her protestations, the actual abduction, Mrs Flood’s brief appearance, the Doctor turning up too late, her being on the rocket ship, a time slip, arriving at the planet… It’s utterly relentless but that relentlessness never becomes compelling. It’s dizzying, but not in a good way, and terribly difficult to care about.
In the middle of this, Varada Sethu has to try and provide some kind of anchor and fortunately, she’s largely up to the task. Her role in last season’s “Boom” (referenced here and hand-waved away in the same way Freema Agyeman’s appearance in two distinct roles was, to say nothing of Eve Myles or, indeed, Peter Capaldi) was a bit of a waste of a clearly gifted actor and her irritation at being swept up in an adventure she really doesn’t want to be a part of is refreshing and well portrayed. While, other than her big “take me home” speech at the end of the episode, she doesn’t get a lot of meaty drama to work with, she’s still an appealing on-screen presence, her snappishness is a very nice change of pace, and it’s light-years away from the bland inconsequentiality of Ruby Sunday last season.
But because the pace of the episode is so fast (and again, we’re not mistaking speed for energy), there’s relatively little for her to get a handle on until that big final scene in the TARDIS. Otherwise, she’s mostly rushing around following the Doctor and also trying to sacrifice herself because… well actually, it’s worth asking why. After the Doctor rescues her from the first attempt at marriage to the AI, they escape to a rebel bunker where she decides it’s time for her to take responsibility because this is her fault and it’s time she owned her name.
But… how is any of this her fault? Her weird creep of an ex-boyfriend dragged her here after she rightly kicked him to the kerb, she’s had nothing to do with the development of the situation on the planet, and the Doctor doesn’t nudge her in the direction of self-sacrifice – quite the reverse, in fact. The only thing that pushes her to do it is the anger of the other rebels (rebels so poorly sketched out their character names might as well be Muscle Boy and Other One). She’s pretty much just being gaslighted, isn’t she?
Anyway, it’s just as well she’s decent because there’s nothing else character-wise to get excited about. As mentioned, the “rebels” in this episode are so thinly characterized that they barely even seem to be on screen half the time and lack presence so much it’s a wonder the cameras can even pick them up. There’s one point where the roof of the bunker the rebels are hiding in threatens to collapse and Muscle Boy (pardon me, Manny) holds up it through the strength of glistening muscles alone. The scene is directed like there’s going to be some kind of reveal here, like he’s half-cyborg because the robots tried to convert him or something. But no, he’s just a cross boy holding up a roof who’s been working out a lot, apparently. Good to know that a robot revolution doesn’t get in the way of bro gains, I guess. The Doctor also sheds a tear over some rebel who was killed when he and Belinda are rescued but since she’s had about four lines prior to her death it has no impact whatsoever. We’re told the Doctor knew her for six months while planning Belinda’s rescue but that’s the problem – we’re told it but see nothing, so some barely-more-than-an-extra gets zapped, the Doctor busts out his Signature Crying Move, then we all move on. There’s not even a hint of character there so why should we care?
As for the Doctor themself, well, Ncuti Gatwa turns up and does his thing and for the most part it’s the same thing he did last year so if you’re into that then that’s great. It still often feels like there’s a gap between his performance and the character – what previously I referred to as the difference between watching Doctor Who and The Adventures of Ncuti Gatwa In Time And Space – and that tension remains largely unresolved. But “largely” isn’t completely this time at least, and once more it’s that final TARDIS scene that helps things along. When Belinda rightly calls him out for doing things like scanning her DNA without permission or insisting that she’s not just another adventure, his smile falters and we see cracks appear in the facade. It’s a great moment. The episode needed a lot more of that because it finally gives Gatwa a register other than “delighted gay guy” or “crying” to play in and he really embraces it and at last feels like the Doctor. Hopefully, there will be more of this going forward but it is at least welcome here.
So in summary – nope, not good but not a disaster on the scale of the previous season’s opening episode. That’s something. Right?
Would You Recommend It? This is a very frustrating question to answer this time out because although the correct answer is, “not really”, there’s nearly enough for the answer to be, “yes”. Belinda is a nice change of pace for a character. Seeing the Doctor’s facade crumble in the face of genuine anger from a companion is a terrific moment for the fifteenth Doctor that we need more of. The plot isn’t much but if it had been put together more coherently it would have sufficed while we got on with some character work. And some of the design work is great too. Alan, who we’ll get to in a bit, may not be the most effective villain in Doctor Who‘s history but the effects and make-up around him are amazing. The zap effect when rebels get killed off in the initial rescue scene is great too – the way they sort of freeze in the air and then disintegrate looks really excellent. And there’s some real visual inventiveness on display when the two diplomas touch and we see the Doctor, Belinda, and Alan zip forward and back along their own timelines. That looks fantastic and also not really like anything else the show has done up until now.
What a shame, then, that the thing that unites this episode more than anything else is just how lazy it all comes across as. So much of this is just stuff we’ve seen before. Some of the design work might be great but the retro-futurist TinTin robots, rockets and ray guns just look clichéd at this stage. They were charmingly retro in the Tennant era – twenty years later, it just looks like nobody’s managed to come up with a better design (even if this is resolved later and it turns out we’re in the Land of Fiction or something, it’s still rubbish). Similarly, “polish polish” is just the same “gadget gadget” “gag” from “The Waters of Mars”, done less effectively for being so bloody obviously derivative.
Belinda (and Sethu) may be refreshing as a character type of the sort we’ve not much seen since Tegan (last seen on screen a mere just-over-a-season ago) but the actual details of the character just come over as a Martha redux, right down to her being the “second” companion of a rebooted season (I’m not getting into whether Micky, Adam, or Captain Jack count as companions but Martha’s clearly intended as “following Rose” in a way they aren’t). Belinda calling out “timey-wimey” with, “Am I six?” is the same gag as the War Doctor calling it out as childish back in “The Day of the Doctor”. The “oh it’s not AI it’s Al” as the Big Reveal is exactly the same shit wordplay we got last season with Susan Triad and was frankly worn out as a conceit around at least “The Name of the Doctor”.
And oh yes, Al/Alan. Look, I’m never going to object to politics in Doctor Who. And I’m never going to object to calling out things like incel culture in Doctor Who. Doctor Who has always been both socially progressive and political and it should absolutely remain that way. But again, this is just so lazy. Belinda, on realising that the “AI” is in fact her old boyfriend who’s been able to take over by a freak slip of time, responds, “Planet of the incels!” Except… it’s not. It’s a generic (extremely generic) robots-and-rebels runaround where nobody else even has enough time or character to be an incel, much less act like one.
Is her ex a creepy incel? It seems that way from what we see – he’s dismissive of Belinda, says girls aren’t good at maths, clearly doesn’t care about her feelings at all, and so on – but other than the clumsy opening scene, we don’t spend enough time with him (or indeed any time with him except a very short flashback) to really establish that. He might just be a gawky adolescent who doesn’t quite know how to act around women yet on a first date. He’s not – for Plot Reasons – but again we’re just told this rather than seeing it. The structure of the episode actively fights against us understanding how or why Alan is that way because it’s too busy rushing around to spend any time investing in its principal protagonist. And of course, he’s sallow-skinned, plays computer games, wears a hoodie etc – all the laziest incel stereotypes. There’s a difference between using shortcuts to get information across and just not bothering to sketch in any details and this episode is firmly in the latter camp.
And Doctor Who doing an episode about incels, or toxic masculinity, is a great idea! Especially with a Doctor who, it’s fair to say, is the campest, queerest iteration of the character we’ve had so far. Putting those two things on a collision course could be amazing. Or do it as a Doctor-light episode where the companion gets to explore the hows and whys of incels or toxic masculinity. That would be equally great, especially if that companion is a young, attractive non-white, intelligent woman of exactly the type incels feel threatened by. All of that would be fantastic. But that’s not what this episode is. This is just a bog-standard crap-robots-fight-crap-rebels runaround with a weak attempt at justification welded onto it to try and make it look like this is about something. But it isn’t.
So if this isn’t as bad as “Space Babies” it’s still not especially great. Season Two is off to a rocky start and while there are a few glimpses of how things might be better, they are only glimpses at this stage. The final TARDIS scene is great and genuinely interesting in a way that virtually none of the rest of the episode is, and it’s hard to fight the feeling that this is all very tired and RTD just doesn’t have much gas left in the tank. The problem isn’t that Doctor Who has run out of ideas after twenty years of the revived show, the problem is that he has and because the show is still pulling on an increasingly small pool of talent, this problem is getting amplified. The show desperately needs fresh ideas and perspectives and very little about this obvious, just-get-it-out-there opening episode suggests we’re going to get it. I hope this season turns it around because I genuinely want Gatwa’s era to be brilliant, but so far it’s barely managed to reach “fine”. Poor old Belinda getting stuck in this era. Maybe this is all a Weeping Angel fantasy. Maybe Belinda blinked.
Scores on the Doors? A very generous 5.5/10
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