The Robots of Death - Episode 3

After the cliffhanger was resovled, I thought that the sinking of the mining ship was going to take longer than it did. I think had the story being underrunning then this might have taken more than a few minutes. As it is, the story doesn’t really waste much time and hits the ground running. The conversation why Leela asks why they do what they do on the mining ship is a nice one because it shows the sadness that the crew face whilst they may not want to admit it. This is where the purpose of Leela starts to make sense because due to the primitive nature of her mind she can puncture the pomposity and absurdity of certain situations and ask the sort of questions that most people probably wouldn’t want to ask.

The shot of SV7 with black eyes that turn red is a very creepy shot and it’s a simple and yet effective shot. This is when Doctor Who is at its best, its when it manages to make the most simplest thing scary. It’s something that works with the weeping angels in the new series but in the classic era its not that regular occurrence. The question of who is making the robots go bad is given a nice bit of mystery when the person is seen on screen yet he is wearing a hood type thing so the closest we get is a close up of his face on a TV screen. The robots start to go a bit mad and go on to kill everyone but they aren’t very good at it and it almost seems like a half-hearted idea.

I like how the Doctor befriends D84. D84 is the ‘dumb’ one so it allows the Doctor to treat him childlike. The humour that D84 brings is perhaps the only bit of humour in the entire episode and story because there are several shots which are quite graphic such as blood appearing on a robots hand, the mangled head of a robot, a robot pulling its hand off after its stuck in the door. I could go on for ages but I wont. After being bereft of anything dark in the previous story,  

It takes 22 minutes for Uvanov to make an appearance. Due to the fact that the story was so good, I forgot that he was even in the story. He arrives just moments before the cliffhanger and the episode ends with one of the robots trying to strangle the Doctor. This is the second time in nine episodes that the Doctor has been strangled. This one is less graphic than when Goth did it in ‘The Deadly Assassin’. It’s still a good end to a good episode. I think that this is one of those rare instances where the story could have been extended, not by much (maybe an episode) but this is definelty the better of the two by Chris Boucher.