The Robot Revolution Review
It’s strange, in many ways, to be back, or at least back under these circumstances, watching Doctor Who tick down to the first time since Time of the Doctor that an episode will air when the next episode hasn’t been shot. And that was a two week period towards a commissioned episode—Deep Breath shot in January. Here we head towards the great unknown, perhaps even the wilderness. It’s faintly unsettling—I’ve not written about Doctor Who in a moment where it might not come back before.
What’s interesting, of course, is that this was all shot and prepared with no knowledge of that—this entire season was in the can before 73 Yards aired, and so is not in a position to respond to the anxieties about its own performance. As far as the show knows, Davies is still the triumphant returning hero. In the latter stretches they’ll know the 60th Anniversary stuff landed. This is, I suspect, to the series’ benefit—it’s in no position to second guess itself. It doesn’t know it’s going to be going out under cancellation fears as the global economy collapses and the United States succumbs to fascism. So it just comes out swinging.
The result has pleasing Cartmel vibes. “Planet of the incels” is the obvious line to point at, and Davies is plainly fishing for praise with it, but the point remains: Doctor Who is aiming at the right fascists here. It’s angry and has a head full of steam. This is good and as it should be. On top of that, it’s pretty well assembled, especially by the standards of the Gatwa era to date. Obviously it’s gorgeous, with a lushly camp 50s retro-future. The basic idea of a star registry certificate being a real and valid document is great. “Belindachandrabombs” has a delightful frisson of comedy and barbarity. There’s lots to love here.
It also doesn’t bottle the ending as badly as much of Series 1 seemed to. In some ways this is me in the odd position of praising the show for the fact that the Alan reveal and the use of the star certificates to defeat him were both extremely obvious, but in an era where the episode resolutions have so frequently been off it’s nice to have everything successfully telegraphed. To some extent this is accomplished by moving the duff bit of pacing to the midpoint instead—the beat where Belinda reactivates the polish droid so she gets captured doesn’t feel entirely earned. But the middle of the episode is a good place to bury your sketchy beat.
And yet there’s a sense of the episode as a bunch of parts in search of a whole. The moment I find telling comes at the beginning. Davies does a quick set of establishing beats for Belinda—stuff we’ve seen a thousand times, and that he does as well as ever. We get her harried at work, then straight to a flatshare situation, and with that we’ve efficiently sketched a skilled career woman in a world where that gets you fuck all. It’s great. I love it. But it’s just a sketch, and it’s not really followed up on. As soon as the robots show up Belinda becomes a sci-fi character who already knows that if you touch two copies of the same object together they explode.
And it’s not that I don’t see why that is. We don’t need to do Rose again and stare in wonder at the magic of the universe; we’re twenty years and fifteen seasons into this version of Doctor Who. But it means that the interesting, very human character we see for the first couple of minutes effectively drops out and is replaced by someone who’s only really understandable within the context of Doctor Who. And that’s true across the board. Everything here is Doctor Who stuff. Even the robots—which look great—feel like you stuck the faces of the Vardy on the body of King Hydroflax. And yes, that is simply not a chain of words intelligible to normal viewers, but the fact remains.
Which brings me to my troubled question: what does this episode actually have to say about incels and coercive control? Sure, it’s against it. That’s not nothing. But the episode isn’t about incels and coercive control. It’s just tacked a finger wag about them onto a story that’s entirely about Doctor Who shit.
This isn’t where Davies’s strengths lie. Look at Gridlock and you see a story that carves out decadent amounts of time to be about life on this nuts alien world. Look at Turn Left and you see a story that’s overtly about life under fascism and the ways people respond to horrors. But here you’ve got Sasha 55, whose characterization amounts to saying “I trust the Doctor with my life” moments before getting vaporized and Manny, whose role is to just be the angry one. They’re not people. They’re stock characters out of a Doctor Who resistance.
My standard request for Doctor Who is something I haven’t seen before. And on every single level, this isn’t it. It’s well executed. It’s ideologically charming. It’s clever and fun and even a good episode.
But if I’m being honest, I’m bored of it.
- Bullet points are a little hasty because I’m writing this in a hotel room to a 2:00 deadline. Also I drove six and a half hours yesterday and I do it again tomorrow, so if this review is an incoherent mess in ways that aren’t normal that’s why.
- The real point of sloppiness in this is the “they can’t hear every ninth word” thing, a rule that seems to only exist when characters need to communicate something in secret in front of the robots, and doesn’t seem especially needed in either of the cases where it matters.
- Actually, looking at my notes, I lied and there is one bit of “haven’t seen that before” in the form of vaporizing the cat, which had a real unhinged sicko energy. I don’t even think it was a particularly good beat or decision, and yet I still find myself more excited by it than anything else in the episode. Give me 45 minutes of Doctor Who that vaporizes cats.
- A similar tone is struck by Murray Gold’s absolutely filthy synths as the Doctor bullets through Belinda’s timestream. Most interesting the soundtrack has been in years. More of Murray Gold doing Hans Zimmer/Annihilation please. Preferably while vaporizing cats.
- Disney+ captions calling it “TARDIS warbling” and not a wheezing groaning sound is the real sign of the apocalypse. WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO THE MAGIC OF DOCTOR WHO?
- Gatwa’s opening outfit for the episode—the plaid shirt over the skirt—is absolutely stunning, and it’s a real pity they took him out of it and put him in a beige sack for the rest of it. Surely we didn’t have to waste that episode on under five minutes of screen time.
- “Companion who wants to get home but the Doctor can’t get her there” is, obviously, something we have seen before, but we at least haven’t seen it this century. Half credit, let’s say.
- The other flare of righteous politics in the episode, the anti-eugenics line about “which body is best,” is quite sharp. There’s a good episode there, just like there’s a good episode about incels and male entitlement.
- Actually, that clarifies my critique a little bit. I think what I’m bent out of shape about here is that Doctor Who is too busy with the job of being Doctor Who to successfully accomplish the job of being interesting. The engine that makes the show work is that its actual infrastructure of being a show—the Doctor Who of it—is miniscule enough that it has time to be every other show on television too. But these days the infrastructure has mushroomed. It’s not even lore—this isn’t trapped in piles of Prydonian Chapters and Timeless Children or anything. It’s just trapped in its own hall of mirrors. Hopefully it gets out.
Ranking
- Joy to the World
- The Robot Revolution
April 12, 2025 @ 2:10 pm
it’s a testament to the episode’s quality that it made me forget the vaporized cat. although “Vaporize the Cat!” would be a great writing manual, ngl.
April 12, 2025 @ 2:20 pm
I understand the point about the episode being very busy with being Doctor Who, but surely that’s because this episode has to do several things and one of them is specifically scream “Doctor Who is back!” since it’s the first episode
April 12, 2025 @ 2:41 pm
Never mind “TARDIS warbling”, the iPlayer captions it as “Engine in the sky”.
April 12, 2025 @ 5:25 pm
This broke my heart.
April 12, 2025 @ 6:18 pm
When that subtitle appeared, and then a wrecked car started to float on screen, I wondered for a moment if it was describing the car’s engine making a noise, and I just couldn’t hear it because of the sound mixing. But nope: apparently it was the TARDIS.
April 12, 2025 @ 2:53 pm
Everything feels very traditional sci-fi – and it’s fascinating how much nastier and bleaker this feels than last season’s opening – the comedy and the horror of having an entire totalitarian dystopia where everything is named after you creates a nice frisson, and the fact that the entire plot revolves around multiple time loops feels very Moffaty in a way that Davies doesn’t normally do. Love that Mrs Flood is just Belinda’s neighbour with no explanation. I do agree that this does have the issue of lacking an aboutness – the outer space stuff is very generic space dystopia straight out of The Doctor’s Daughter of all things. Having said that, I’m currently on a high of actually having the show back, so I was very much along for whatever the episode did, even if this is all we’re getting…
April 12, 2025 @ 5:26 pm
There’s another example of a “good episode” in the concept of evil actions committed in “our” names–by almost every Western government at the time of writing.
April 12, 2025 @ 5:39 pm
I can’t say that didn’t cross my mind – horrific actions committed in your name that you’re expected to tolerate and even be pleased with
April 12, 2025 @ 2:54 pm
I think you’re bang on the money with your last bullet point. There are more beats you’re expected to hit in a modern Doctor Who episode. Early Davies episodes would have maybe two fight/chase/monster attack scenes (or three if you include the pre-titles) but now that number is routinely three or four, and it leaves so much less room for the actual bits the show should be about.
Part of that is Davies is clearly borrowing more from the Moffat playbook, but where Moffat is much more experienced in writing in the farce style, making the action scenes feel like crescendoes, under Davies, they do feel more like distractions.
That being said, this is the most I’ve enjoyed Doctor Who in a while.
April 12, 2025 @ 2:57 pm
There was something about this that satisfied in ways that few episodes last year did. All elements, however more or less successful, felt like they were pulling in the same direction. It didn’t leave obvious stuff on the table like I felt Devil’s Chord and others did. It didn’t feel like hollow calories in the way the finale did. It’s not spectacular in any individual way, but it does the best job of being a season opener that any episode has done since…The Pilot? Here’s Doctor Who: it’s got jokes, it’s got wild ideas, it’s got explosions and weird bits, come back next week. It’s more fun than anything else on television.
I’m also not wholly convinced that Belinda knowing some film tropes renders her an unreal, ungrounded sci fi character. Science fiction has been mainstream, conversation driving entertainment for a century? More? It’s more grounded for a companion to have some expectations, wrong it right, than to be a total ingénue.
Oh, and bonus points for the Blinovitch Limitation Effect being really trippy rather than just an explosion.
April 12, 2025 @ 3:04 pm
I thought there was a lot more of that. Sasha 55 telling us, in an episode where we know perfectly well she isn’t the new co-lead, that the Doctor has promised to take her to see the starts, and dying horribly literal seconds after the neon ‘IS GOING TO GET KILLED OFF’ sign starts flashing over her head, is nakedly a black-comedy bit, and IMO one of Davies’s meanest and funniest jokes in ages.
(Though it still feeds into your broader point about inside-baseball, because it’s really only intelligible as a meta joke if you’re the kind of person who can identify an archetypal would-be-companion in two lines flat and is absolutely certain Sasha isn’t coming back.)
See also Gatwa accidentally cutting power to an entire hospital via sonic screwdriver shenanigans. He 100% killed people there, no way he didn’t.
April 12, 2025 @ 3:07 pm
I do think that the “planet of the incels” line is more than a finger wag. Don’t get me wrong, the actual incel commentary does get backloaded onto the third act, but I think it’s there to inform our understanding of Belinda’s understanding of the Doctor. She is clearly seeing the Doctor as a direct parallel to her abusive ex – a man with advanced technology who is obsessed with her and seems to be doing everything he can to stop her getting home. There is a point the show is making and it’s that it’s that any man can fall down the path of controlling and harassing women.
It’s perhaps a more explicit restatement of the impossible girl/Ruby’s birth arcs and the doctor’s tendency to view women as mysteries, but a welcome step in the right direction. He doesn’t keep his suspicions to himself, he tells Belinda about his feeling of “destiny” immediately and she promptly shuts him down. It’s a character course correction.
Isn’t it refreshing to have a companion that isn’t going “the doctor is the best person I know”?
April 12, 2025 @ 3:29 pm
DING DING DING! Yup. When the Doctor was going on about “destiny” and Belinda was sizing him up dubiously, I expected the next words out of her mouth to be something along the lines of, “Oh my god, you’re just like Al.”
(Also, points for the A.I./Al gag, which I should have seen coming but didn’t. I hooted, as RTD might have put it.)
April 12, 2025 @ 8:11 pm
And Al would have been using an A.I. generator if he had one back then.
April 12, 2025 @ 10:02 pm
Yes, along with the “scanning my DNA without permission line.” So while El’s right about this episode ultimately being about Doctor Who, we may be getting a “something’s wrong with the Doctor” story here in a profound sense.
Then again, RTD sets up lots of things he never follows through on.
April 12, 2025 @ 4:06 pm
I can’t think of an episode off-hand that presents itself as being a silly romp but with quite some much casual but personal death. I don’t think RTD was aiming to be flippant about the issues covered but the story rushed past the points it was trying to make.
April 12, 2025 @ 4:18 pm
On the note of Belinda quickly turning into a sci-fi character, there were a few points in the episode where it seemed like she had already been a companion for a while, where she was a little too comfortable, to the point that it felt we were meant to notice it.
The two points for me were when Belinda asks the Doctor if the shoulders are the same as on Earth, which is an odd thing to ask when she doesn’t know that the Doctor isn’t a Missbelindachandran(? unless I missed a line where he mentions as such) and when she asks to go back to the exact time she left, immediately before finding out that the TARDIS is a time machine. Plot holes? Probably. But with how time-loopy this episode was and the whole “We go way back” line’s got me wondering just how crossed over these timelines are if Belinda’s acting like a companion before she even is one.
April 12, 2025 @ 6:03 pm
Yes, I was thinking this. The “it’s a time machine!?” coming straight after asking to go back to a specific time and date taken on its own feels like a real clunker that shouldn’t have made it to screen. But, taken in the context of other stuff on the episode it’s very possibly signalling A Thing. She also calls it a tardis before she should know that word, just after the (absolutely gorgeous) Blinovitch sequence.
April 12, 2025 @ 6:29 pm
I assumed that Belinda knew of the TARDIS as a result of her timeline being somewhat spliced with the Doctor’s during the Blinovitch sequence. Although that didn’t seem to extend to her knowing that it was bigger on the inside.
April 15, 2025 @ 1:26 pm
Yeah, how messed up are these timelines? That explosion was bigger than the Four Doctors Blinovitch Effect. And no Reapers this time.
April 12, 2025 @ 8:17 pm
Shoot, I might have to go back and check that sometime. I don’t know if the Doctor might have mentioned the TARDIS before then to Belinda and that’s how she knew the TARDIS was the name of his spaceship without knowing exactly what it was like. But the way he had been talking to her about the fractures in time and how they were jumping around in time probably made her think, and he did confirm, there was time travel going on there.
He had been telling her that he was there, in her backyard, at the exact time and place she had been taken away. So she was asking him if it was possible for him to take her back to that time and place, and he confirmed it was possible with the TARDIS time machine.
April 13, 2025 @ 3:52 am
I think the Doctor mentions the TARDIS when filling Belinda in on the six months he spent on the planet before she arrived.
April 13, 2025 @ 5:48 am
Not using the exact word, he doesn’t.
April 12, 2025 @ 5:57 pm
I particularly enjoyed that the initially impressive ‘AI generator’ turned out to be not AI at all, but Wizard of Oz style, was just a lot of visual trickery hiding a rather pathetic man. In this case a clearly troubled, reactionary and misogynist man. It was easy to see it coming, yes, but that didn’t detract from the broader social and political point. If I’m recalling correctly, El (and others) have written elsewhere about the falsely inflated hype around LLM AI generators and the type of ‘tech-bro’ person that often seems the most interested in promoting this supposedly revolutionary technology, and the harm they can cause. All points that I absolutely agree with, so it was nice to see that telegraphed within the episode. There were several other sharp or particularly deft points as discussed above, which all in all made this feel more engaging than ‘The Church on Ruby Road’, but oof, it sure did feel rather rushed and messy.
April 14, 2025 @ 6:00 am
I wrote exactly about the AI/Al switcheroo as RTD making a point about tech bro culture and gamergate
https://medium.com/@rodolfopiskorski/ai-is-bad-because-of-gamergate-doctor-who-nails-down-the-evils-of-current-tech-culture-to-misogyny-4c769575f228
April 14, 2025 @ 11:12 pm
Amazing, thank you!
April 15, 2025 @ 6:28 am
This is a fantastic piece, also good to see you around again 🙂
April 12, 2025 @ 6:29 pm
Is this the first time the word “sperm” has appeared in televised Doctor Who? (I’m going to make a wild guess that the answer is “yes”.)
April 12, 2025 @ 6:56 pm
Yes, although it was put in no less than Kate O’Mara’s mouth in that one-off “Rani” audio Pip & Jane Baker did for BBV.
April 13, 2025 @ 12:16 pm
Phrasing, please
April 16, 2025 @ 3:39 am
How soon until it appears as a verb, I wonder . . .
By the way, I would also like to take this opportunity to add that thanks to El I have realized I now cannot see/hear the word ‘sicko’ without picturing Walt Kelly cartoons.
April 12, 2025 @ 6:41 pm
Two thoughts that came to mind while watching this episode: I found myself getting very Cyberman vibes during the diagram of what Belinda’s “wedding” to Al might look like; I also got vague Davros vibes from the cybernetic version of Al who shows up later on. Which in turn left me wondering if the echoes of classic Who villains was intentional…
[Which in turn got me wondering if this is intended as some kind of riff on what Jonathan Hickman is currently doing with the second Ultimate Universe right now, which might be me going down an especially nerdy rabbit hole.]
April 12, 2025 @ 6:52 pm
My main thought that came to mind was “oh, Russell’s seen Superman III”
April 13, 2025 @ 2:23 pm
Not just me, then. That’s one of the creepy bits in S3, which is largely comedic.
April 14, 2025 @ 2:08 pm
Agreed, Superman III came to mind for me too. Which is wild because so much of that movie is a bizarre clustefuck and failure, but that was one of the few really effective bits, and scared the bejeezus out of me when I was 8 years old. If you’re going to steal, steal not from the best, but from the best bits of really bad movies/TV and improve what they did!
April 16, 2025 @ 5:45 pm
Literally the first thing I searched for in the comments here was “Superman”, because I wanted to see if anyone else had thought this when that scene landed: it seemed way too close to be accidental. RTD is just the right age to have seen that movie in the theaters and be properly scarred by it — I saw it for my 10th birthday and had nightmares for a week afterward. And of course, “campy, messy childrens’ entertainment that suddenly coheres into nightmarish horror” is about as Doctor Who a beat as you can have!
April 17, 2025 @ 6:50 pm
Russell T Davies said in an interview that’s exactly what he does: take good bits from flawed movies a reappropriate them. Rose and the cracking glass in The End of the World was stolen from Jurassic Park 2: The Lost World
April 12, 2025 @ 10:25 pm
“Gatwa’s opening outfit for the episode—the plaid shirt over the skirt—is absolutely stunning”
It’s a great look, but it’s a tartan jacket and a kilt. Let’s celebrate RTD finally letting a Scottish Doctor be Scottish.
April 14, 2025 @ 2:27 am
Also I think he wore that same outfit in beginning of Church on Ruby Road?
April 14, 2025 @ 5:45 am
Might be the same kilt, but it’s definitely a different top. He had a white tank top there, not a tartan jacket.
April 12, 2025 @ 11:33 pm
Yeah, I’m interested where some of this is going but I wouldn’t even say the episode is targeted at any kind of fascists or anything like that. Name-dropping “incels” is just using a modern word for the shitty controlling ex, not portraying an actual ideological entitlement to sex with women. And I know Davies totally could make an episode about a society built around entitled incel ideology if he really wanted to, he just made a straightforward episode instead. I’m echoing above comments that it would be great if the season ends up being about the parallels between Al and the Doctor – but we’ll have to wait and see if that’s the case. (But then, a story arc about the Doctor’s blind spots as a man being told NOW, after the 60th Anniversary specials made clear that the Doctor is not a man, is kind of continuing the same understandable-but-offensive contradictions that Davies demonstrated at the time with “male-presenting time lord”.)
I’m happy to be watching Doctor Who either way, though!
April 13, 2025 @ 5:12 pm
It does make the shitty controlling ex a literal fascist, though… while the theme of uncles could be explored way more thoroughly, it still is being explored.
April 13, 2025 @ 5:13 pm
Incels, not uncles… although if that uncle be creepy it counts
April 15, 2025 @ 1:33 pm
A story about The Doctor’s blind spots as a man should arguably have been done in the Jodie Whittaker era. (Who knows, Big Finish might get there eventually.) If there was ever a time, doing it as part of an actual series is better than a jumped up reunion special. I look forward to seeing if there’s follow-through.
April 13, 2025 @ 1:28 am
You would think the robots would notice that was wrong even if they couldn’t hear exactly each ninth word was.
April 13, 2025 @ 2:19 am
If I can push back a wee bit, I do feel the episode has something to say about incels and male entitlement given the ending: Belinda chastises the Doctor for sampling her DNA without her permission and making false promises; she treats him like he is trying to pick her up, which in a way he kinda is.
She identifies his attitude for what it is, a seduction, and one with eerie undertones given the imbalance of their situation: she is stranded in outer space, he has the means to get her home; she has to plead for her agency, he can ignore it in a heartbeat.
This isn’t quite tacked on to the end with nothing else leading up to it: that thème of respecting her autonomy pops up before in the argument against Manny where she specifically asks the Doctor not to fight for her… and he doesn’t actually listen, rather returns to intervene moments later.
This… isn’t much. The Doctor can hardly be so fundamentally questioned for more than a few fleeting moments, even more so an entire season. But if they manage to follow through with this, and at least for the moment, it is something we haven’t seen before.
April 13, 2025 @ 3:42 am
He does also keep using her full name, despite her insistence that she doesn’t like “Miss”.
April 13, 2025 @ 6:57 am
I hadn’t thought of that !
April 13, 2025 @ 7:47 am
Also the Doctor keeps calling her ‘Bel’ despite her repeated requests to other characters for ‘Belinda.’
(He didn’t hear the ‘Linda’ ‘its BElinda’ exchange back on Earth, but he certainly heard the statements to the robots and the Missbelindachandrans.)
April 13, 2025 @ 3:29 am
I do think that the AI-driven apocalypse being revealed to spring from the mind of a shitty, entitled bloke is a good twist, and representative of a deeper engagement with AI discussion on Davies’ part that I might have anticipated – AI, in the episode as in real life, isn’t a Moffat-esque Broken Spring story, it’s fascists and misogynists putting systems and structures into place that will benefit them and hurt the rest of us.
Between this and Dot and Bubble’s “social media will kill us all, and boy oh boy will we deserve it”, this new Davies era has been a real pleasant surprise in terms of the insight of its discussion of technology – hats off to Davies, because I didn’t expect anything like this from him.
April 14, 2025 @ 6:05 am
Exactly, the generator was not something that generates content via AI as when we say something is “AI-generated”, it was a regular generator powering the robots and that’s why they followed it. So presumably a power generator that has an AI mind running it. And then there’s the twist that this has nothing to do with AI, it’s just a guy being an asshole inside it.
April 13, 2025 @ 5:34 am
“the interesting, very human character we see for the first couple of minutes effectively drops out and is replaced by someone who’s only really understandable within the context of Doctor Who”
A very good point and something I hope will be rectified by other writers this season. There’s no reason we can’t being back this very human Belinda in future episodes and leave “The Robot Revolution” characterization as a bit of early installment weirdness.
Other than that, I enjoyed the episode a lot. A strong start to the season, mostly because of how good the interactions between Belinda and the Doctor were. The episode itself did feel a bit generic at times indeed.
April 13, 2025 @ 7:47 am
I’m just glad to see Dr Who broadcasting the wholesome moral message that Gamers are not to be trusted.
April 13, 2025 @ 8:57 am
Can you imagine if Al said “it’s about ethics in historian chronicling?” lmao
But yeah, Al being a GGer was my first thought when he was openly misogynistic from the jump. Also, hope you’re doing well!
April 13, 2025 @ 1:58 pm
It does kind of worry me that Gamergate and its ilk are now old enough that the broad strokes have trickled down to middle-aged TV writers, even beyond the I’m-getting-old stuff.
And I’m good, thanks, hope you’re doing well too! I miss chatting Dr Who on the old Bird Website.
April 13, 2025 @ 2:24 pm
Thought I clicked the reply to William Shaw button, apparently not. See below. Speaking of feeling old, a boomer moment from me lmao
April 13, 2025 @ 2:23 pm
Yeah, it is, sadly, still relevant, politically, unfortunately. Which is worrying, as you say…
Glad you’re doing well – I’m doing well also. And yeah, re: the ol Bird Website… I miss it too, but I’m done with social media, even if Bluesky or Mastodon are not run by nazis, I’m gonna skip out. I’ve felt a lot less dread disengaging, to a degree.
April 13, 2025 @ 2:29 pm
BIGBAD: DOK TOR. THE CATS’ PROTECTION LEAGUE SEEKS RETRIBUTION.
Doctor: What can THEY do about it?
BIGBAD: THEY WILL PURSUE YOU TO THE ENDS OF THE GALAXY, JUST AS THEY DID TO HALE AND PACE.
Doctor: Who?
BIGBAD: PRECISELY.
April 14, 2025 @ 2:22 pm
Normally when a show kills a cat (Interview with the Vampire, The Magicians, others I can’t remember), I either drop it or put it in the “penalty box” (refuse to stream it for a few weeks afterwards). However, given that I’m p*rating this anyway, I guess there’s nothing I can do besides complain about it impotently. Bummer.
Even weirder that it stands out as having “real unhinged sicko energy”, but I’m forced to agree. It’s just for me that it’s creepy and unappealing sicko energy. If this is what’s needed to get something new out of Doctor Who, it’s time for a rest.
April 15, 2025 @ 4:50 am
I have to agree. Having just kept my sole remaining family member, my elderly cat with cancer alive for another week, I really didn’t need the cat vaporization, and doubly so did not appreciate Elizabeth’s sick energy.
Maybe I’m too sensitive about it, or maybe it’s time I gave both the Doctor and this blog a time out. If the standout part of an episode is the unmourned death of an innocent pet and this is considered a positive thing, I just don’t know what is going on anymore.
April 15, 2025 @ 1:42 pm
I expected it was coming eventually, what with the lack of focus on the plot-critical (and later revealed to be false) vaporisation of a UNIT soldier earlier in The Star Beast special. (Why was a large drone shot being unblemished more important than a human being killed, especially when the death is easily missable in the frame and then is integral to the later reveal and episode?) But it still disappoints. I hope that neighbour comes back later to ask for her cat in the finale.
April 15, 2025 @ 4:52 am
I have to agree. Having just kept my sole remaining family member, my elderly cat with cancer alive for another week, I really didn’t need the cat vaporization, and doubly so did not appreciate Elizabeth’s sick energy commentary.
Maybe I’m too sensitive about it, or maybe it’s time I gave both the Doctor and this blog a time out. If the standout part of an episode is the unmourned death of an innocent pet and this is considered a positive thing, I just don’t know what is going on anymore.
April 13, 2025 @ 3:11 pm
The AI Generator has vaguely Dalek structures (The Parting of the Ways)
The “beyond pain” schtick is Cyberman-ish
The Robots are a cross between Vardy, King Hydroflax, and the things on the Silurian Spaceship
Like contemporary AI, the Generator regurgitates the content of others.
Belinda, Blinovitch. Calling it now. (This post will age poorly if not).l
April 13, 2025 @ 5:25 pm
After a bit of marinating, I am bothered by the beginning of the episode: for a story that puts much emphasis on not belittling Belinda (try saying that five times in a row), the opening scene, her introduction to the audience makes her secondary to introducing Alan, Alan being creepy and thinking she can’t do math, Alan kickstarting the expandable sci-fi plot that will take up the next 45 minutes. Expandable is the word: it doesn’t feel like a proper first look into the companion. The shenanigans take centre-stage instead of the character we actually care about.
Admittedly, in this age of content and hyper communication, the audience has in fact already been introduced to her through adverts, the #getbelindahome slogan, and such and such. Still, I don’t like that she’s not the most important thing in her literal introduction.
April 14, 2025 @ 5:35 am
Yeah, it is an interesting choice for a writer whose strengths historically include creating well-drawn characters. That being said, I thought the scene in the bunker helped to show us a little more of Belinda’s character.
April 14, 2025 @ 6:45 am
I would agree if not for the fact that it’s immediately followed by a much longer sequence of scenes directly focusing on Belinda, and then followed by the entire rest of the episode in which she is the central viewpoint character. Everything up until the bunker scenes does feature her largely being exposited at, yes, but they’re also heavily focused on her reactions to everything, positioning us much closer to her than anyone else in the episode, and thus are also about defining her character. Just because the opening scene also has to the brunt’s share of setting up the episode’s villain doesn’t make that the same as the whole episode failing to primarily be about Belinda.
April 14, 2025 @ 6:11 pm
I don’t mean to say the whole episode pushes her aside just quite ! It’s just a pet peeve of mine that an important character’s opening moments on screen makes them feel significant — or else that this is justified by other reasons than just « gotta keep the plot moving ». Also, was that opening scene really necessary ? I feel like Alan was sufficiently set up by the bit in the rocket ship, and the star certificate could surely have been highlighted another way.
April 15, 2025 @ 1:31 am
The opening scene is all about Belinda. You focus on Alan but her struggling to oppose his treatment of her is a crucial bit of characterization. The first time we see her, she’s defined as someone who’s mistreated by entitled men from a young age. That is then immediately followed by an entire episode that’s about older Belinda successfully opposing similar mistreatment from the robots and the Doctor, having learned her lesson. We first see her at a moment of (understandable) weakness and then we see her strenght. That’s good writing.
April 15, 2025 @ 5:24 am
Sorry to push on this, please don’t think I am trying to be obnoxious or anything !
Two things though: first, that arc is the episode’s arc, and at the end she seems fully formed on that front, so again the episode’s needs kind of intrude on the big scene of giving us a first impression of this character.
And second, is it really an arc ? The big change happens in that 17 year gap, when we see her again she doesn’t really have a change for the rest of the episode. Not saying that is a fault, but I don’t think we can say that first scene is a crucial bit of characterisation.
April 15, 2025 @ 5:03 pm
I don’t think it’s an arc. It’s just a contrast, but a vital one. Our first experience is with Belinda who’s not fully formed yet – and so of course she can’t be center stage during her own introduction. She’s not done yet. She’s still cooking. And so she allows Alan to treat her like crap on her birthday, she allows him to usurp the role of the more important one, both in-universe and narratively.
This is crucial setup for her later interactions with the Doctor. As a companion she’s pushed into the narratively defined role of “the less important one” – and she rejects it. Just like she rejects the Doctor treating her like a new adventure or a mystery to be solved. She refuses to be that shy and awkward teenager again. But we needed to see her be one to fully appreciate who she is now. Without that scene, she’s just a tough, independent woman. With it, she’s someone who had to learn how to become one.
April 15, 2025 @ 6:47 am
YMMV, but I really don’t think the final turn with regard to how appalling Alan is toward the end of the episode would be anywhere remotely near setup without the opening scene. It’s quite a strong pivot as it is that relies on its absurdity to carry viewers along, and (incredible though it may seem) lots of reviewers & reactors seem to have missed that he’s coded as an obvious jerk from the beginning, so without that sequence a much wider chunk of the audience would’ve seen his final form as coming out of left field entirely (unless there were some sort of super clunky exposition from Belinda on the spaceship ride about “the sort of guy he used to be”, I suppose).
Whereas we learn a huge amount about the sort of person he is from that opening scene – the performativity of his gift being all about him really, gazing up at the stars, “how can I capture their beauty in a way that celebrates your birthday” etc; his neediness and craving praise if not imminently given (“do you like it, or…?”); his implication that women are wasteful/indulgent and not good at saving (the comment about not ripping the paper but reusing it); the way he thinks he’s being magnanimous when he’s being horrendously condescending (“I know girls aren’t good at maths” ISN’T, to his mind, a rude insult but rather an almost-apology for introducing complex bothersome numbers into what’s meant to be a romantic moment, he thinks he’s being understanding towards her); he’s obsessed with being right over being kind – yes, Belinda isn’t married, have a fuckin gold star for being correct technically but also shut up you douche, lol – that’s a lot in a short space or time, Davies’ gift for character efficiency in full display.
I take your point that in isolation that scene is doing more heavy lifting wrt him than her, but that’s mainly because she’s going to get so much more than him throughout the remaining 44 minutes, isn’t it, she dominates the rest of the episode, that doesn’t seem to me to be breaking any cardinal rules of character writing anymore than a scene introducing somebody primarily through the lens of their mother giving them a dressing down would be, so long as we then follow that character’s perspective into the rest of the story (which, with Belinda, we do).
April 15, 2025 @ 11:46 pm
Y’all make some good points. I fold 🙂
April 25, 2025 @ 12:28 pm
I almost wonder if the second flashback scene, where we see Alan being really properly nasty, should have come a bit earlier, to properly cement it.
I also maybe would have liked it a little more explicit that when you get down to it, “AI” is only a monstrosity because at the core of it are sad little human men who want to play god, and the intelligent self-aware robots are all perfectly fine on their own.
April 14, 2025 @ 5:13 am
There’s a bit near the end when the Doctor works out, by listening to every ninth word, that Alan is saying “help me, save me, pain”. It’s shockingly dark, and I can’t stop thinking about it. It calls into question how much Alan is in control. Does this suggest the machine has some intelligence of its own? The Doctor’s offer to help Alan seems especially token in this regard, given that Alan can’t really answer or accept the offer. Not that I feel too sorry for Alan, mind – he is shown to be willing to kill people before he went into the machine.
April 14, 2025 @ 6:08 am
I think RTD is saying that men who have been radicalised into gamergate and misogynist fascism are still redeemable. There’s still some real humanity there somewhere.
April 14, 2025 @ 6:20 am
Absolutely – still real humanity in there, still redeemable – but they have to make the choice to stop/leave, which Alan wouldn’t.
April 14, 2025 @ 9:52 am
I took it to mean that the process of embracing misogynist fascism doesn’t actually make you feel any better. Follow the philosophy to its end point and its still covering up fear and pain and horror – while also hurting everyone else around you, potentially on a grand scale. Pathetic.
April 25, 2025 @ 12:30 pm
I would not have gone with “they are still human/still redeemable”, but rather “They are the architects of their own suffering, and the monstrosity they create is not going to make them feel better”
April 14, 2025 @ 6:16 am
I took this as being more about the pain, self-loathing, fear, insecurity etc. underpinning the misogyny and violence, rather than that the machine has a separate intelligence/control that Alan is trapped within. I suspect that message would be the same for Alan even if he’d never stepped in the machine. In which case I thought it was important that he didn’t get a redemption arc in that moment. The programme could say something like ‘under every angry hate-filled man is a scared little boy’, without then treating the violent adult as if he were that boy, and excusing what he’d actually done.
April 14, 2025 @ 1:12 pm
Yup. It’s not called to attention, but the very next set of every-ninth-words he says immediately after “Help me, save me, pain” is “Belinda mine forever”; what he’s really saying in that case reflects exactly what he’s saying on the surface about her being destined for him and subsuming her within his mind and threatening violence forever if she doesn’t comply. The acknowledgement of his pain is immediately followed by a possessive threat that shows he’s not redeemable.
(Even if the every-ninth-word rule suddenly stops applying when the script isn’t specifically pointing it out – there’s nothing useful you can get from every ninth word of Al’s subsequent last bits of dialogue – that still points towards Alan meaning every word of that threat.)
April 15, 2025 @ 1:46 pm
That was Belinda working that out. She did it earlier with The Doctor’s words.
April 14, 2025 @ 3:07 pm
Highlight of the episode for me was the “Belinda/Alan go schwup” sequence toward the end, which felt pleasantly like the most Barry Letts CSO-core visual spectacle the show has done in quite some time. Doctor Who as a vehicle for just blasting some weird trippy shit out of the TV at 12-year-olds is a valid gear that’s rarely operated in anymore. And on a streaming service full of interchangeable CG goop, doing your big showcase spectacle bit with mostly in-camera effects, creative editing and crunchy synths feels pleasantly countercultural in a way I like Doctor Who to be.
April 14, 2025 @ 6:13 pm
It was a Jefferson airplane cover away from straight-up Legion revival.
April 15, 2025 @ 8:03 am
I think the last time we got anything as trippy was Ben Wheatley’s ‘Into the Dalek’ Fantastic Voyage style journey through the Dalek eye-stalk. there might be some stuff in the Whittaker era but I struggle to recall any of it.
April 21, 2025 @ 9:49 pm
Maybe the talking frog? Flux was kind of trippy in a bad trip sort of way.
April 15, 2025 @ 8:13 am
Much as I respect RTDs stance of “The fascists are going to yell at me anyway so eat my woke!” I do feel that the dialectic around the Incel stuff, important as it is, has rather overshadowed the clues scattered in this episode toward what might become the Belinda series arc, i.e. there’s some time travel shenanigans afoot.
So, if I can be fannish for a bit –
When, ironically, the story rejects RTD doing Moffat as Gatwa tries the “Timey Wimey” line and Belinda rejects it, declaiming “What am I six?” and even the ‘bigger on the inside’ TARDIS reveal falls flat because we’ve just been bombarded with 40 odd minutes of Doctor Who being DOCTOR WHO!! on Disney+! and the Doctor has become the least weird thing in his own story, This is where we are supposed to clock that its all about stories. Belinda’s story, Ruby’s story, not the tweeness of Matt Smiths “Were All Stories in the End” sub Gaiman (ugh!) fairy-tale trope of the Moffatt era, but something about telling lies to oneself and others and story-telling in general and I suspect that will turn out to be the major arc of the series and the Gatwa era as a whole.
Anyway I’ve come in uncharacteristically late to the comments so as Mrs Flood, the recurring fourth wall breaking, mysterious Greek Chorus (who is probably the God of Stories or something) said. –
“You aint seen me! Alright?”
April 16, 2025 @ 1:01 pm
Given that El is quite literally married to a priest of a Goddess of Stories, I have to say I’m hoping you hit on the right guess for Mrs. Flood since that could be by far the most interesting answer for this blog’s purposes.
April 16, 2025 @ 7:38 pm
Just occurred to me that maybe there is more of a point to Manny – on a planet where she is put on a pedestal , he is relentlessly angry at her , which is the other side of the controlling mindset.