The Robots of Death - Episode 4

I’m going to start on a totally random note and start with the target novels. I am working my way through them and was tempted to start on Robots of Death. It’s quite a fun thing to do where you read the novelisation of the TV story and see the difference between the two versions. I think that Robots of Death is one of those that will be better than the TV version but at the moment I am reading ‘The Deadly Assassin’. Now back to the main bit of business. The final episode is one that I hope isn’t going to disappoint me. It’s funny because I have seen all of these stories countless times and yet I am still unsure sometimes whether I am going to like the episode or not.

The reprise is still good and its resolved when Uvanov kills V4 in quite a violent way by stabbing it in the back of the head. The fact we don’t see it is perhaps worse than if we had seen him stab V4. This is another example of the tone being somewhat stronger than it would have been during the Letts’ era. There is a shot of the robots surrounding the Doctor and Uvanov and I thought that this was a great sinister moment and credit for this moment as well as other moments go to Michael E Briant who shows yet again why he is perhaps the most underated director in Doctor Who.

Taren Capel is the mad scientist who has changed the robots behaviour. He’s also known as Dask and the revelation that he’s wearing the robots costume and has similar face paint on is quite well done because its revealed quickly even though Dask hasn’t been in the story too much and yet when we see him back it seems like a perfectly normal thing. David Ballie’s performance has been really good and in fact all the performances from the surviving supporting cast members have been really good and the annoying ones bit the dust early which is the right way.

The Doctor uses helium gas to change Capel’s voice and this leads to Capel being killed by SV7. Killed by his own creation which seemed like the most sensible way for the story to be wrapped up. I thought that it was ended in a perfectly fine manner and the only thing that I take issue with is that the build up seemed to lack the sort of build up that I would have expected. That said I thought that this was a perfectly fine end to a really good story and I am really looking forward to the next story but I will talk about that a bit more in the next episode review.