November 14, 2024

The Robots of Death

The Long Way Round

“They're programmed to destroy us. She's gotta be strong to fight them. So she’s takin’ lots of vitamins.'Cause she knows that it'd be tragic if those evil robots win.”

As I mentioned when talking about Death to the Daleks recently, plenty of Doctor Who fans have anecdotes about finally getting to see an old Doctor Who story, and being disappointed by it. The reasons given usually include that its production, in terms of budget or scale, did not match up to what their imaginations had conjured up while reading the serial’s Target novelisation.

It is, as an anecdotal form, so commonplace as to perhaps be redundant; something that maybe need filing away with “It’s not as good as it used to be!” or “It’s gone all political!” in the box of “things that we’ve all said and heard so many times that maybe no one needs to read or say them again”.¹

So, no, I’m not threatening to do that. Instead, I’m going to try and offer a kind of counterexample? Because while I had read The Robots of Death before I saw it, if I’m honest the novelisation left very little impression on me. Or rather it left the wrong kind of impression on me. I could remember what happened. Whodunnit, etc. But it wasn’t a book that made me desperate to see the story. Not that seeing the story, even imagining seeing the story, would have been a thing when I read the book.

Looking through that book now that’s harsh, but only a little. It’s a very slim volume that even pre-teen me would have finished off in an hour or so, and is one of Terrance Dicks’ solid, journeyman efforts. It’s from 1979, a year where he turned out five Doctor Who books, including four in six months. Everything is there (and there are some fun little differences that suggest Dicks worked from a rehearsal script without ever have seen the show)² but isn’t, or rather wasn’t, inspiring.

Perhaps this is why, when seeing the story did become an option, as BBC Video releases filtered in the local rental shop in 1987 and 1988 I, if not resisted this story, then certainly preferred to see both Day of the Daleks and revisit The Five Doctors before giving it a go. It felt to me at the time that my resistance lasted for ages. But that possibly means I saw it a week or something after I would otherwise have done. But who knows, time moves very differently when you’re ten.

So, the scales fell from my eyes when I first watched it right? Well, not really, no. But I liked it well enough. The rattlingly good dialogue. The excellent robots and the human characters’ excellent hats. I was even excited to see the wooden TARDIS control room, which I’d seen pictures of in Peter Haining’s The Key to Time (1985) which I had on semi-permanent loan from the county library.

But it wasn’t, not yet, a story I felt compelled to return to in the way I did those other, early VHS which I’ve already covered here. I don’t think I even copied the rental videotape. This isn’t a story that’s metaphorically tattooed on my brain, like Revenge of the Cybermen or Day of the Daleks. Or at least not in the same way they are. It’s a story that dwelt, indeed dwells, in my brain despite the absence of repeated viewings. Rather than one imposed on it by them. This is a story I can quote far less of, and occasionally still be surprised by, than many fandom would instinctively consider “lesser” (and I might even agree).

I’m not sure why. Looking at it now, I might try and offer reasons or excuses: It takes a long time to get the Doctor and Leela into the actual story and it’s Part Two before they speak to anyone else. But this isn’t one of those “regular cast only” opening episodes, such as The Dead Planet or The Ark in Space Part One. Instead, we periodically cut away to new characters, doing world-building with each other.

In these scenes, a fine cast sketching out a whole society in words, the Storm Mine serving as a microcosm of the society on Calder. Colonial. Ferociously capitalist. Class-stratified, but also riven by the kind of class conflicts that can result for those pursuing social mobility. Multi-ethnic, but not in a way that’s an obvious (or inobvious, frankly) analogue for the society in which The Robots of Death was made. It’s complex, thought-through and weird, but the characters don’t know that. In 2024, that’s one of the most appealing things about it. In 1988? I’m not sure. Maybe I just wanted to see Doctor Who and his tremendously-appealing-in-a-way-I-didn’t-yet-understand new companion actually doing things?

Equally, there’s a little more horror in this story, including visible human blood, than would be permitted at any other point in the series’ twentieth century history, and a subplot about a man going insane takes up big chunks of it. The horror here is not “frightening”. It’s more generally just unpleasant. I don’t remember being disturbed by any of it, but even now Poul collapsing at the sight of a Voc’s blood-smeared marigold is something I admire rather than like. Not least because David Collings treats it with the gravity of Pinter or Play for Today.

That slight distance is true of my reactions to the story today. This is a fascinating serial. Well scripted. Thoughtful. For the most part exceptionally acted. It has beautiful design work. But it is something I respect, rather than love. It’s not, I don’t think, a terribly lovable thing.

It may be an excuse, but I think The Robots of Death might actually be the first Doctor Who story I was a little too young for. As I would learn some years later Robert Holmes, the script editor for this series and the two before it, and a mentor to Robots of Death scriptwriter Chris Boucher, said during production that he saw Doctor Who as aimed “at the intelligent fourteen year old, and I certainly wouldn’t let any child under ten see it”.

I don’t know. But then so much critical writing is about explaining or justifying a response that remains, at its core, fundamentally emotional. The result of an attempt at communication. Oddly, a story that’s itself grounded in the idea of how the Robots fail to communicate with humans due to an absence of body language and unconscious cues, this is a story that I didn’t quite connect with. Something fell in the gap between signal and receiver, and I’ve never quite grasped what it was.

In another gap, that between The Robots of Death being released on VHS and me discovering that had happened, I had become a great fan of the Joan Hickson starring Miss Marple series. It was probably after seeing “Terror of the Vervoids”, as while I remembered that story well in the years after its transmission, I didn’t ever quite make the link between it and Marple as a pre-teen. Instead I’d latched onto the rampaging monsters and spaceship-nearly-crashing-into-a-black-hole aspects. And the Doctor’s one-off waistcoats. (Fans are an odd bunch, aren’t we?)

But of course The Robots of Death is not a whodunnit. Not really. That’s one of its clevernesses. It’s a story that presents as a whodunnit, and in which the characters think they’re in a whodunnit, but in which the audience already knows who-actually-dunnit because they’ve seen them do it - and even before then, well, check the title.

Because the point is not that the answer isn’t in plain sight. The title isn’t, as fan wags have long had it, a spoiler. It’s that the answer to the question the story’s murder plot poses is inconceivable to everyone on the Storm Miner. It’s Chris Boucher’s world, they just live in it.

There is a secondary mystery, as to who is controlling the Robots and why. But even that is not so much something that the audience can work by playing by the rules of Golden Age Detective Fiction (TM) as are told when we see Dask’s barely distorted face on a screen. Sorry, no, not Dask. Taren Capel.

As with the much latter, much lesser and yet much more lovable “Terror of the Vervoids” (on which it is an obvious influence), there’s a conceptual issue in the story, deliberate or otherwise, that it is easy to characterise as one about a kind of slave or indentured servant revolt that ends with Doctor Who deciding that the best thing to do is kill those who’re fighting (and killing) for their freedom.

That’s not something easily squared with the personal politics of Chris Boucher (or Pip and Jane Baker come to that). But Boucher here makes a better fist of disrupting that possible, story-disabling analogy. His robots are not alive, after all. That they talk and move means they offer an imitation of life, but not its essence.

In 2024 I own a robot vacuum cleaner that often rattles around the long corridor in our house, a strip of carpet that becomes dirty through constant foot traffic. My small son’s fascination with its movements, the way it seems to make decisions about where it goes next, imbues it with personality it doesn’t have. Something that would be even worse if, like the kind of voice-activated AI assistant we as a family don’t have³ it could actually talk back.

Will I hesitate when the time has come to have the Roomba⁴ taken away for recyling? I might, but only for a second. You can’t kill what only imitates life. No more than you can murder an apple live video. But in fiction, in a story, and a story is by definition is open to interpretation, existing outside the realm of the strictly literal as a collection of signs and signifiers on which we impose meaning, there’s a danger this fine distinction becomes elided with humans’ habit of looking at other living things and deciding they’re not really alive in the way we are anyway, so it doesn’t matter.

Although one of the most interesting things about this story is that if Taren Capel is right, and let’s decide for a moment he is, about the robots’ sentience, then he explicitly does not confer on his “brothers” the freedom he promises. He instead makes them subject to his own individual will, rather than confined by the collective one; driving them into a disturbed killing frenzy as he changes their brain chemistry without their consent.

One of the most chilling scenes in the story in when Capel chains a robot down and performs a kind of brain surgery on it. With what amounts to a giant knife. While hooded. “Priority Red! Priority Red!” intones the distressed robot, describing what’s happening to it as being “violated” as its hands desperately try and grasp something, anything to alleviate its own horror. Or its imitation of horror.

Capel is like a member of rock band the Grateful Dead spiking a reluctant friend or fan or follower’s meal with hallucinogenics, because they believe they’ll objectively be better on “the other side” or the experience. Any argument about the Robots’ personhood is going to have to deal with the fact that Capel is at least as cruel and unfeeling about those he’s ostensibly fighting on behalf of, as those he’s fighting them for are. There is, there remains, a lot to chew on in these four episodes.

I hope I did some of that when I co-wrote two sequels⁵ to this story as part of the Kaldor City audio series, towards the end of the last century. My main memories of it should be of watching it on a loop and taking endless notes, trying to work out if dialogue ruled out a plot development we wanted to do, or if there was room in the story’s worldbuilding for X or Y. But they’re not. They’re of certain images, certain lines, certain characters; the pure thrill of one of the spikiest and hardest-to-unpack Doctor Who stories of all. It is, to paraphrase its most clipped and anthologised scene, bigger on the inside.

It’s taken me a surprisingly long time to write this relatively short edition of Psychic Paper. For a long time, I put it off. Like I did the serial that’s its topic. I couldn’t quite find a way in. But then this week, or at least this week as I write this, notable fash-adjacent techno fraud Elon Musk has started pushing the idea of bipedal robot servants for the home. Chris Boucher once joked that Colonel Oliver North had “based his character on Travis”, a homicidal space commander from Blake’s 7 and it seems, quite frankly, that Elon Musk has somehow done a similar thing with Taren Capel.

Must promises that his robots will “Watch you sleep overnight and monitor your breathing, heart rate, sleep patterns and it will also protect you from home invasions”. Not noticing that you can achieve all of those with a smart watch and a video doorbell. A comparison prompting comments even amongst those left on the binfire social app Musk owns that at least those two items together won’t decide to strangle you in the night.

Somehow we have reached a placed where Musk, a ludicrous beneficiary of an immoral colonial society, one with curdled fantasies of bestowing freedom and a tendency to actively oppress anyone who opposes his whims, wants to sell you a Voc. He hasn’t built any, of course. Because having accidentally invented the bus a number of times, Musk has gone one better and invented the Mechanical Turk. His robots are, currently, just blokes in suits. But then so were The Robots of Death.

It’s Chris Boucher’s world, we just live in it.