It’s taken twenty years, but RTD has finally given us a story about a space planet in the future with rebels running up and down corridors.*
Introductory episodes are a tricky business, given that they have to devote a large part of their runtime to creating a new companion and introducing the Doctor and their world to them; and, these days, set up a whole new arc or mystery connected to the new companion. RTD’s favoured approach of a new companion and/or Doctor every year makes this a necessity, so each of his seasons tends to start with a fairly thin story, although he’s too good a writer not to add some extra depth to the adventure.
So, “The Robot Revolution” might be a bit of a runaround, but it fulfils its primary objectives, which are to introduce Belinda and to be entertaining for 45 minutes. Cliched and silly it might be, but it’s tremendous fun, and Belinda is never anything less than fantastic throughout. The basic idea of buying and naming a star leading to aliens thinking you’re their queen is obvious but extremely fun, and I don’t actually recall it being used in sci-fi before (feel free to correct me). At least it’s better than in real life, where naming stars through commercial companies is completely meaningless.
Varada Sethu is brilliant as Belinda, giving an entirely believable and likeable performance as someone who is entirely done with this shit, be it work, romance, or space/time adventures with ancient aliens. She sells the character perfectly even when she verges on the unrealistic, as she does occasionally when she’s a little too easily accepting of the bizarre situation she finds herself in. (Although, this is 2025 Britain in Doctor Who, where alien invasions are a regular feature of recent history.) It’s been a long while since we had a companion who doesn’t want to be one, especially on screen. Donna comes close, but only for her first appearance, and after that she’s desperate to join the Doctor. The last companion genuinely in this vein was Tegan, and of course, she came round as well.
What both the script and Sethu’s performance show so well is that Belinda is both supremely capable and used to being underestimated and taken for granted, especially by men. Alan is clearly one in a long line of men who have treated her as less than she is. Her attitude to the Doctor is perfect: we finally have someone who is suitably impressed by the wide universe that has opened up in front of her, but has no time for the Doctor and his posturing. While the Doctor isn’t exactly a man, he usually presents as one, and while his attitude of superiority might come from being a Time Lord it still comes across another arrogant bloke. It works especially well with the Fifteenth Doctor, whose charm is his primary weapon. Belinda simply refuses to be seduced by this. Sethu and Gatwa have fantastic chemistry, but it’s of a completely different sort to Gatwa and Millie Gibson, with an entirely different dynamic.
It's good to finally have someone call the Doctor on his invasive behaviour as well. I don’t think we’ve had anyone pick him up on this sort of thing since Rose was angry at the TARDIS translating her thoughts without her permission back in “The End of the World.” The Doctor does this sort of thing to friends and foes alike, in all their regenerations, but the smile on Fifteen’s face as he does it makes it especially satisfying when Belinda calls him up on it. As for the mystery he’s investigating, I’m tentatively engaged. While I wish that occasionally Doctor Who would just recast an actor they like in a new role without making a big thing of it in-universe, I like that it’s simple enough that Mundy Flynn is just Belinda’s descendant, while also accepting there must be more to it than that because families simply do not produce identical people generation after generation. We’ve clearly also got some kind of time loop situation going on here, even beyond the one that the episode itself centres on. (It might also be significant that we have an episode coming up set in 2008, the year Alan bought Belinda’s star, but then again, it might not.) Oh, and the imminent destruction of the Earth, for a change.
Everything that happens on planet Missbelindachandra One is hewn from purest cliché, which is rather the point, as it’s been warped by evil Alan’s manipulations. That doesn’t make it any less cliched, of course. The sets and CGI mattes are great, the robots are fun (even if they’re essentially just Hydroflax with a Vardy’s face on), and everything chugs along nicely. However, the humans on the planet are paper thin, most notably Sasha 55. While I love the idea of the Doctor spending six months having an adventure off-screen and building relationships that we only come into at the end, there’s nothing in Sasha’s character or Evelyn Miller’s performance to tell us why he cares for her. Yes, she’s got “doomed potential companion” written all over her, and Gatwa’s acting sells the Doctor’s grief beautifully, but there’s nothing there that suggests he should care about her more than any of the other mooks who get vapourised. Polishbot had more character.
Really, though, all this fluff is there to hang Belinda’s story on, and to make a point about controlling and misogynistic men. This is also quite thin on the surface, but there’s more going on under the hood. Alan’s obviously a prick at the beginning, but not necessarily dangerous, which only highlights the slippery slope men can go down in our society. “Planet of the incels” may be glib, but it’s also a pretty good description of our own. As much as Alan’s transformation and his desire to “weld” with Belinda are nods to Superman III, the concept – both the welding and the enforced marriage – are clearly an allegory for rape. There’s very little made of Alan’s apparent plea for death via his every ninth word, but nothing at all made from his subsequent message: “Belinda mine forever.” It’s the only such hidden message that isn’t spelled out for the viewer, and the most important, showing us that whatever suffering he’s gone through, he genuinely feels entitled to Belinda. This is a fun, silly episode, but it could be made as something much more serious in a more adult series without changing that much.
There really is a lot to love here, even if on the surface it’s by-the-numbers Doctor Who. The Blinovitch Limitation Effect – not that it’s called that here, but that’s what it is – is genuinely satisfying for once, giving us a trippy loop through time rather than the usual fizz of sparks. (Although the Doctor explaining how two of the same atoms can’t occupy the same space at the same time should have been dropped, since there won’t be a single atom in common between the two versions of the certificate.) There’s some nice, dark comedy here, best illustrated by the robot casually vapourising the cat. Most importantly, though, solidly good fun.
*Thanks Miles Reid-Lobatto for that one.
Settings: England, 24th May 2025; planet MissBelindachandra One, around the same time; briefly England in 2008.
Title Tattle: Just a tweak, and "Revolution of the Robots" would be the archetypal Doctor Who title.
Maketh the Man: The Doctor’s outfit at the beginning of the episode, a blue pinstriped kilt with an optional tartan fleece, is absolutely gorgeous. Sadly he has to swap it for beige fatigues for the rest of the episode, although naturally Ncuti Gatwa makes these look amazing as well. Hopefully he’ll be back in the kilt before the season’s out.
Flood warning: Mrs Flood is back, suddenly living next door to Belinda and talking to the camera again. Her “You haven’t seen me,” when the Doctor shows up is the first time I’ve actually enjoyed the character, so hopefully she’ll grow on me as she crops up throughout the season. I’m still finding it hard to care too much who she is given what a let down all the reveals were last season, although I am tempted by the idea she’s Iris Wildthyme. RTD is a fan of Paul Magrs, after all, and if Beep the Meep can show up on the TV series, anyone can. I haven’t seen Mrs Flood drinking heavily, though, so it seems unlikely.
