Cheap Doctor Who - The Robots of Death (DVD) (Christopher Barry (III), Julia Smith, John Gorrie, Ron Jones (II), Derrick Goodwin, David Maloney, Richard Martin (IV), Peter Moffatt, Derek Martinus, Fiona Cumming) Price

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Customer Reviews of Doctor Who - The Robots of Death

A return to the Definitive Doctor Age
Yes, it is old. Tom Baker is, to me, the best portrayor of the Doctor WHO personality. In particular this is one of the best stories that I found in my memory. The Doctor and Leela arrived to a Sandminer, just to be accused of being murderers. The sandminer tripulation are some aristhocrats who are served by Intelligent human-like robots. Some dumb, some others with the ability to speak, and probably others with the need for killing people!!!. Needless to say, the Dvd has all four individual chapters (with its openning and closing credits!), so you can watch them one by week, to recreate that time ago in front of the tv. It even has some extras, like the original peeks of the next chapter the narrator used to increase the need to watch the next chapter. Want a producer and writer comentary?, you have it. It is even fun to watch the old special effects, because they give a very good remembrance and felling of authenticity. For the newcomers, they could seem old and bad effects, and the story too simple, but for hard time fans is like going back to the youth.

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"I will release more of our brothers in bondage..."
"...And then we will be irresistable!" The TARDIS materialises inside a sandminer, and the Doctor and Leela are tailor made suspects in a murder mystery. How did Chris Boucher do it? One classic after the other! "The Robots of Death" is probably one of the most claustrophobic murder mysteries in the entire series. Leela's second story only fleshes out her character even more. The futuristic setting is ideal for her development: "The other mechanical man told us to wait here..." Tom Baker is also in fine form. And the supporting cast is stellar! Chris Boucher's script is filled with one memorable line after the other. And the robots, well, they might be one of the most unique robots ever on the program. Kudos to D-84. How can one season have so many classics? And thanks to the Doctor Who Restoration Team for a another stellar product. I've never seen Who so clean & crisp, showing a high standard in the art of transferring old programs onto DVD. The Howard Da Silva extra is a nice touch, as so with all the other bonuses. Only makes a classic serial even better!

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Like being surrounded by walking, talking dead men...
It is little surprise that Dr. Isaac Asimov named this as his favorite Dr. Who episode (though it actually comes as considerable surprise to learn that he even watched the series at all). Certainly the plotline and backstory development borrow liberally from the future society Asimov established in the Lije Bailey/R. Daneel Olivaw novels; it even works in references to the Three Laws of Robotics. The influence of an earlier book, RUR (Rossum's Universal Robots), also surfaces in exploring man's reaction to robots and their total absence of human body language (robophobia). Even the author's name, Karel Capek, is mirrored in that of the villain Taren Capel.

Newcomer director Chris Boucher (The Face of Evil) took the suggestion of longtime Dr. Who editor Robert Holmes and created an isolated, murder-mystery adventure as a vehicle to solidify the role of Leela, a companion he had introduced in the previous serial. Boucher drew from one of his favorite novels, Frank Herbert's Dune, to envisage the Storm-Mine setting. Effects director Peter Grimwade is immortalized in the episode thanks to a bit of ad-libbing by Tom Baker. Amongst the cast was David Collings as Poul, David Baile as Dask (Taren Capel), and Pamela Salem as Toos; Salem had actually been an unsuccessful applicant for the role of Leela.

Though not a milestone episode, I would name this is one of my favorite Tom Baker-era stories, largely because of its attention to detail -throwaway lines by characters reveal a rich tapestry of politics, history, and sociopolitical orders not always seen in a Doctor Who serial. We get a sense of the social "pecking order" on this nameless future planet from Uvanov's obvious disgust with Zilda's and Chub's family standing; at the same time we learn that the all-pervasive Company is not above covering up an employee's potentially embarrassing (or potentially expensive) past. Poul is a great study in contrasts: nobody on the Storm-Mine is the least suspicious of him until Leela turns up and likens him to a hunter. The insertion of D.84 is even more clever, and it illustrates just how inured this society has become to anything out of the ordinary. Uvanov dismisses Leela's assertion that D.84 can speak simply because "everyone knows" that particular class of robots can't speak.

In the same way, the crew dismisses the Doctor's theories about the murderer because "everyone knows" robots are incapable of such a thing. Robot behavior and robot Urban Legends are clearly at the forefront of even casual conversation, as evidenced in the opening scenes when we meet the entire crew idling away in the lounge. I also like the fact that the cast is a little more varied, racially speaking, from the usual spate of pale English actors. Helps to paint a more realistic vision of the future.

D.84 (Gregory de Polnay), the "undercover" agent, provides some wonderful back-and-forth dialogue with the Doctor and goes a long way toward widening the scope of the story. The robot's recount of the life of Taren Capel has made the murderer into a tragic figure before we've even figured out who he is, and it even gets to explore its own feelings of inadequacy; next thing we know it has even cracked a joke at the Doctor's expense. I always thought D.84 would make an ideal traveling companion -a sentiment I was surprised to learn was shared by many other fans. Its plaintive request to "please do not throw hands at me" is priceless. Definite homage to Daneel and Giskard there...

Though we, the audience, know the killer at the outset of this "whodunit," it is the question of who is the puppet master that takes up the scope of the story. This is also an uncharacteristically graphic episode; there are several strangulation scenes, a disturbing shot of a dead body being buried in a downpour of gravel, and blood all over the hand of the initial killer robot. There are also some chilling pyrotechnics; for my money one of the scariest scenes depicts another of the killer robots trying to break into the command deck, calmly announcing in its polite bureaucratic monotone that everyone has to die. Another great moment comes when Leela throws her knife squarely into the chest of an attacking robot -which then casually knocks it aside and keeps on coming. It is the first time we've seen anything even approaching fear on Leela's face.

The society that has been postulated is full of cause-and-effect: the Doctor's casual line about it being "the end of this civilization" is clearly no exaggeration. The characters, for all their feigned ease and opulence, are clearly not wholly comfortable with this robot-dependent society they have created for themselves, and as a result there is an omnipresent creeping paranoia that lurks just under the surface for most of the storyline. The parallels to the distrustful, robot-dependent society in Asimov's Caves Of Steel are obvious: mankind has gone and made another technological breakthrough which has become an indispensable part of daily life before everyone's really had time to adjust. Likewise, the Storm-Mine's carefully-ordered life is exposed to be a powderkeg; one little deviation from "everyone knows," and suddenly everybody's world is turned upside-down. This is especially apparent with Uvanov (Russell Hunter)'s newly-found "blow 'em all up" attitude, Poul's total mental breakdown, and Toos's hysterical sobbing (the latter also provides a great springboard for the audience to learn Leela's surprisingly tender and compassionate side).