The Robots of Death is one of those Doctor Who stories that’s become a perennial favourite among fans because – and I hope you’ll forgive the lapse into lit-crit jargon here – it’s really, really good. Every aspect of it, in fact, is good, and every aspect is good from the beginning. We get one of the best TARDIS scenes, as the Doctor tries to explain the ship’s dimensions to Leela in a way she rightly calls out as silly. From there, we’re introduced to the society on board the Sandminer, a futuristic ship staffed by humans and their robot servants with a gorgeous, well-thought-through Art Deco aesthetic. It’s got a multi-racial cast, which is both impressive politically and immediately sells you on the idea that this is a more peaceful, more cosmopolitan, less tribal society that is therefore more vulnerable to a sudden, violent disruption. The modelwork is fantastic, and even the one bit that’s slightly below par – the Sandminer crashing into some rocks – is followed up with the most convincing “falling about on a spaceship set” acting this show has ever seen.
All this seemingly effortless quality is good to watch, but it’s a bugger to get a long essay out of. This is the second of Chris Boucher’s three scripts for Doctor Who, all of which are fantastic, but you could argue this is the least ambitious of them. The Face of Evil revolves around a head-spinning rethink of the Doctor’s role in the show, without which modern stories like Bad Wolf and Time Heist couldn’t exist. Image of the Fendahl involves a hidden origin for the whole human race which has had less influence on the series going forward – Doctor Who has an unusually rich array of secret origins for the human race to choose from – but is still audacious, powerful stuff, the closest the series has got to the existential dread of H.P. Lovecraft. The Robots of Death is a murder mystery with robots, and it’s not even the first story that can boast such a concept.
As many fans have observed, there’s a clear influence from Isaac Asimov’s stories about Elijah Bailey and R Daneel Olivaw, particularly The Caves of Steel. The Bailey and Olivaw stories were written to prove that science fiction could be successfully merged with other genres, so you could make a fair claim that without those stories the genre-scrambling format of Doctor Who would be impossible. Presumably Asimov chose detective fiction as his test case because he realised the common trick of detective fiction – that the killer must turn out to be the least likely suspect – is irresistibly well-matched to his own robot mythos, in which there exists a whole sector of society defined by an inability to kill.
Boucher repeats this clever trick and adds another of his own. In Asimov’s stories, Elijah Bailey is a human and R Daneel Olivaw is a robot; the buddy-cop cycle of the 1980s was some way off when he wrote them, but both Lethal Weapon and The Caves of Steel can claim some plausible ancestry in the hard-boiled detective fiction that proliferated in mid-20th century America. In bringing this into Doctor Who, Boucher doesn’t make the common mistake of assuming the Doctor will always fit into any action-hero mould that the show is transplanting. Tom Baker’s Doctor is always going to be closer to Miss Marple than Mike Hammer, and Boucher uses his science fiction setting to add a new twist to the whodunnit format Agatha Christie patented. The environment outside the Sandminer is so inhospitable that no-one can get out and no-one can get in. The temptation to cheat – to bring a suspect from outside in to commit the murders – is effectively closed off.
So every twist Boucher brings to his twin inspirations of Asimov and Christie has heightened the essential strengths of their ideas, as well as made them more suitable for Doctor Who. This is a clever way to set up an SF mystery, but it would collapse at the final hurdle if Boucher couldn’t satisfyingly tie it all together. Fortunately, he proves equally skilled at this most crucial part of mystery writing, with the Doctor’s method of defeating the killer standing out as both harking back to the show’s original educational brief as well as its current brief of being weird and funny and violent. (Speaking of the latter, this is far from the nastiest story of Season Fourteen, but the repeated image of a robot with a massive syringe plunged into its head is oddly unsettling) Even the aforementioned Art Deco design, which is usually appreciated simply for being beautiful, speaks to this story’s skill at playing SF and non-SF influences against each other. The 1920s chic is utterly appropriate for a Christie pastiche, while also being old enough to look strange, decadent and otherworldly.
The character who embodies the shift is, appropriately enough, Boucher’s own contribution to the regular cast, Leela. The trick to writing Leela, which other writers will sometimes forget, is remembering that she isn’t stupid: she is completely uneducated but fiercely clever. Perhaps no story shows this off better than The Robots of Death, where she’s mostly free of the comedy savage-talk that later stories would give her, and shows off her natural curiosity and ability to find wonder and joy in seeing other planets. (The revival series would make sure to give each companion a moment like that early on; it’s much rarer in the original series, where the function of a companion was mostly just to get out of the TARDIS doors and get into danger as soon as possible)
Most satisfyingly, it’s Leela’s supposedly primitive nature that helps solve the mystery – as well as introducing one of the serial’s most forward-thinking elements. To the Doctor and the crew of the Sandminer, the robots are beautiful, high-functioning pieces of technology, but to the hunter Leela, all she can see are “creepy mechanical men” who lack the natural body language she is particularly alert to. Leela’s suspicion of the robots not only helps to keep her alive, it helps the Doctor eliminate suspects as both Poul and Zilda’s motives turn out to be tied (in very different ways) to a phobia of robots, a phobia Leela is better positioned to understand and diagnose than the Doctor.
In Boucher’s script, it’s called “robophobia”; today we know it better as “the uncanny valley”, a phrase which would be coined one year after The Robots of Death was transmitted by the British art critic Jaisa Reichardt. Leela is therefore not only ahead of the other characters, she’s ahead of the writer, the production team and the audience at home. Perhaps no other companion has come closer to matching the Doctor’s status as a trickster figure, someone whose strength comes from the ease with which they can slip between worlds. To bring things back around to the start, who else would have the gall to describe the Doctor’s explanation of dimensional transcendence as silly – and who else would get the audience to agree with her?
Next: The Talons of Weng-Chiang (1977)
