RF:Ph04:Ch63: Doctor Who and The Robots of Death
Star Wars had very much established robots as supporting characters in science fiction. This had been a long process in film, including Forbidden Planet, where Robby had star billing but was not entirely essential to the story. Where Asimov’s robot stories centred robots in the plot, their status in science fiction meant that robots might now appear incidentally as secondary characters, serve as plot points or just be part of the general scenery.
Star Wars had also set a high bar in terms of the general look of science fiction in the late 1970s. While famously not as expensive as it looked, Star Wars presented spaceships, robots, and advanced technology in a convincing way. Unfortunately, that was not good news for the now venerable British TV serial Doctor Who. The show had always relied on the viewers bringing their imagination along for the visual experience. Special effects had to be done cheaply, especially as the show would jump around in time and space for its setting. However, Doctor Who did have access to the BBC’s extensive experience in costume design, and the time travel premise allowed for some synergy with the BBC’s historical dramas.
Aside from the iconic cyborg monsters we have already discussed (the Cybermen and, of course, the Daleks), robots, cyborgs, androids, and intelligent computers had been cropping up in multiple story lines. Just as in wider science fiction, robots might turn up in a Doctor Who story as an incidental feature. For example, in the 1975 story The Pyramids of Mars, the mummy servants of the god-like Sutekh are robots in bandages. Given the uncanny powers of Sutekh, they could have just as plausibly been undead corpses in bandages, but robots fitted the Doctor Who‘s style of blending science fiction into other genres.
A full survey of every robot that appeared in the series would be a major project in itself. We will be meeting K9 in a chapter soon, but this essay is going to look at a 1977 story in which robots are central, rather than being incidental.
The Robots of Death, written by Chris Boucher, is an overtly Asimovian robot story. In her Tardis Eruditorum entry on the story, El Sandifer characterises the story as taking the Asimov robot detective story (Caves of Steel, The Naked Sun) and reworking it into an Agatha Christie-style murder mystery.
“So off the bat there’s something to be said for the story taking Asimov’s idea and repatriating it to the British idiom, showing that the British mystery tradition is as suitable to the sort of thing Asimov does as the American tradition Asimov uses. Indeed, he even takes a shot at Asimov – Poul and D84 are clearly analogues for Baley and Olivaw, and by the end of the story one is dead and the other has had a complete nervous breakdown. Far from imitating Asimov, Boucher goes out of his way to screw over Asimov’s characters.”
https://www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/oh-its-a-robot-the-robots-of-death
In the story, The Doctor (Tom Baker) and his new companion Leela (Louise Jameson) arrive via the Tardis on board a giant futuristic sand mining vehicle. They quickly become embroiled in a murder mystery in which the crew of the sand miner are murdered one by one.
If you haven’t seen it then “crew of the sand miner” is accurate but misleading. This is not a story with the aesthetics of Alien. When we are introduced to the crew, they are lounging around, and the interior of the sand miner is more like the BBC’s attempt at a futuristic hotel. All of the human crew wear fabulous outfits, and several of them have large headpieces. Commander Uvanov has a particularly notable headdress that is sort of like an Art Deco bishop’s mitre. They all have complex facial makeup, and the implication is that they are the product of a decadent society.
So if the crew are not coded as working-class miners, who is? The clue is in the title. The sand miner is run by robots, and these robots are absolutely gorgeous. They are such a clever design that it is astonishing they were just used for this one serial. The people playing the robots are dressed in metallic padded clothing, which is suggestive of a servant’s uniform. What really makes the design is the full head mask, which is a metallic face in a kind of sculpted style. The back of the head is covered in a similar sculpted design intended to suggest stylised hair in stacked waves. The faces and clothing style of all the robots are the same, but they come in different colours.
Meanwhile, the exterior of the sand miner is deeply unimpressive, but the less said about that, the better. It was the 1970s, and Doctor Who was on a tight budget, and well, never mind those exterior shots, just look at how beautiful the robots are!
What I really like is the effort that went into giving each of the crew very individualistic costumes that nevertheless all make aesthetic sense with the uniform design of the robots.
Aside from the Asimovian elements, the story is littered with references to notable science fiction. The sand miner suggests Frank Herbert’s Dune, and plausibly, you could see the story as being set in the Dune universe just prior to the Butlerian Jihad. We also have a character named Poul after Poul Anderson, and the mysterious character Taren Kapel is named after Karel Čapek. Doctor Who is ostensibly a science fiction series, but it frequently crosses over with other genres (particularly in this specific era), so we have this strange folding of Doctor Who into science fiction, with the genre crossing over with itself.
The murder mystery itself is thin. While the crew are convinced that the robots can’t be murdering people, viewers saw a robot commit one of the murders and the title “The Robots of Death” is a substantial hint. Notably, when a robot does turn murderous, its eyes glow red. I’m not sure this is the first instance1 of this trope, but it notable one.
The twist is that the robots are being reprogrammed by the sinister human Taren Kapel, who is trying to foment a robot rebellion. Even this fact is revealed well in advance, and the identity of which crew member is actually Kapel becomes easy to guess as the story progresses.
Even with the flaws in the mystery and the terrible models, and even with the cast of actors1 perhaps having a bit too much fun with everything, this is a celebrated and beloved Doctor Who story. It makes great use of Asimovian ideas but places them in a much more pessimistic story. By the end, The Doctor thwarts Taren Kapel’s plot, but the damage has been done. Earlier, The Doctor suggests that the idea that the robots might harm humans could cause the collapse of the civilisation, and so even though Kapel loses, the course has been set. As El Sandifer notes in the earlier quote, the character Poul is driven mad by the realisation that the robots have committed murder. The kindly undercover investigator robot D84 is murdered by Kapel. Two of the human crew survive unscathed, but this story is like Hamlet in terms of the litter of corpses.
What the episode does well is engage with a range of ideas. The term “uncanny valley” had not been introduced into English until 1978, but The Doctor explains to Leela why the robots are unsettling. Leela, as a character, is supposed to be a kind of tribal/primitive person who is descended from the survivors of a technological society. So there is an interesting contrast in the story between Leela as a post-collapse character and the crew who are from a society on the brink of collapse. Leela is quick to pick up on the body language of the crew (The Doctor condescendingly explains the term), but can’t read the robots in the same way. This disparity between appearance and affect is the cause of “robophobia”, and it is this condition that eventually incapacitates Poul.
Meanwhile, we learn that Taren Kapel has the opposite psychological issue. Having been raised by robots (a nod to the spacers in the Naked Sun), he now identifies with them. In the final episode of the serial, he wears make-up to make his face resemble the robot’s. Where Asimov assumes that robot-human conflict is inevitable, he also assumes that the conflict could be resolved. In this story, it is unclear if the conflict can ever be resolved, and the Butlerian Jihad would appear to be a more likely outcome.
At the very start of this project, I suggested that when we encounter robots in popular culture, they represent fragments of a broader meta-story which I call the Robot Fabulas. The Robots of Death does not contain all of those fragments, but it does pull many of them together into a coherent whole.
- The good robot who interceded on behalf of human-robot coexistence. This is D84, the metallic black robot.
- The robot companion. Again, D84 plays this role both as an implied companion to Poul but also as a temporary companion to The Doctor.
- The robot rebellion/uprising, which is the essence of the plot.
Where this mapping gets complicated is that Taren Kapel takes on even more roles than D84. Kapel (when sort of disguised as a robot) plays the role of the robot leader of the rebellion. This also makes him a kind of Prometheus figure in the story, and indeed, he is shown injecting the robots to change their inherent nature. He is not strictly a creator figure, though, as the robots existed before him, and to some degree shaped his psyche. He can also be seen as the puppet master, directing the robots to act. Notably, while not strictly the creator figure, he is still named after the creator of robots.
If this all sounds very serious, then I have again misled you. The story is full of high concepts, but also intentionally silly moments. Indeed, before the plot really gets started, Leela sums up The Doctor’s absurd explanation of trans-dimensional engineering with the memorable line: “That’s silly”.
Silliness will save the day in the end, with an appropriate antidote to Taren Kapel’s grandiosity. Leela secretly releases helium into Kapel’s lair, so that when he gives orders to the robots, his voice becomes squeaky. As the killer robots no longer recognise Kapel’s voice signature, they murder him on the basis of his previous order to kill all the humans.
The Robots of Death remains a fan favourite for good reason.
Next time: I’m still working on the running order for this phase!
- HAL in 2001 is presented as red, but it is not a colour shift to indicate that HAL has become murderous. ↩︎
- The cast are all actors who have been in something you know, including the guy with the parrot in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. ↩︎
#bbc #DoctorWho #ncutiGatwa #scienceFiction #tv
