Thanks to all the huffing and sighing about Doctor Who being woke, pretentious or overly silly, it’s often easy to lose sight of the fact that the show’s basic aim is to entertain. It should be fun.
And The Robot Revolution is fun – pleasingly silly in every sense of the word, and a high-energy opener to Ncuti Gatwa’s sophomore season as the Doctor. This time around, though, he’s minus one companion Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson – at least for the time being) and in search of another.
That would probably be Belinda Chandra (Varada Sethu). She’s just a regular nurse, but the Doctor is turning up at her place of work and desperately trying to find her – to the point where he accidentally switches off all the energy in the hospital.
This bit is glossed over, but I’m pretty sure that would do some catastrophic things to the building’s life support systems, operating theatres, etc… we’re just ignoring that? Okay!
Anyway. Sure enough, that day Belinda finds herself kidnapped by aliens and taken to their home planet… which happens to be named Missbelindachandra. So far, so silly: I love it. Apparently, the Missbelindachandra-bots view her as their queen, and would like to arrange a forced marriage that involves her becoming mechanically integrated with their AI overlord, who is also in possession of some rather questionable views on gender.
Fortunately, the Doctor is not going to let that happen, and so begin some timey-wimey shenanigans as the pair attempt to resolve the civil war raging between machines and humans (it all feels rather Tennant-era Who in its premise) – while also figuring out just how Belinda has ended up as the leader of a remote alien planet. And it also takes the time to skewer toxic masculinity – very of the moment.
Yes, people die. Yes, Ncuti Gatwa takes a moment to shed a tear over their dead bodies – wasting no time. Could we please turn down the waterworks slightly this season? It’s starting to grate slightly.
Fortunately, the chemistry between Gatwa and Sethu is excellent. Belinda’s biting, quippy personality is a nice foil for the Doctor’s lightning-rod exuberance and despair, and her unwillingness to be impressed by him is a nice touch that makes her different from most of his other travelling companions. “You’re dangerous,” she tells him, appalled, at the end of the episode, and demands to be taken home.
However, it’s not all good. As with many Who episodes, the show stumbles at the final hurdle – having set up a compelling arc, it fails to stick the landing.
Things implode in act three, thanks to a few all-too-convenient plot developments and Belinda’s unearned heroism. To be honest, immediately deciding that you’re happy to sacrifice yourself to stop a civil war on an alien planet does feel a tad too worthy to be giving us at the very start of a season.
