‘Doctor Who: The Robots of Death’ (1977)

Thanks to everyone who voted on my ‘What Do I Watch?’ Tweet last night 😉 You came this close to getting a ‘Blake’s 7’ post (not a bad thing, maybe another time…) but a last minute flurry of votes ended up with a clear winner in ‘The Robots of Death’; hence this post 😊

‘The Robots of Death’ is one of those stories that I picked up from the library, back in the day, but had never actually seen until last night. I was glad the vote swung in that direction then, especially as ‘The Robots of Death’ is one of those stories that has a reputation as a ‘fan favourite’. If I see a story with that label, it’s pretty much inevitable that I end up watching it just see what the fuss is all about. And so I did…

On a distant, barren planet, Storm Mine 4 trawls across bleak deserts and through fierce dust storms in search of rare and valuable metals. Onboard the sand miner is a small skeleton crew, who alternate between indulgent relaxation and skilled mining work. The mundane, day-to-day duties of the miner are attended to by a much larger complement of servile robots.

This is a society of that is dependant on robots for all areas of life, the people comforted by the knowledge that the strictest safeguards are built into each and every robot’s programming. So when one of the sand miner crew is murdered, suspicion falls in two new arrivals.

The Doctor and Leela arrive on board and are immediately accused of being the suspects, but the Doctor deduces that the killer is possibly not human. More deaths occur – can he persuade the remaining crew members that the killer may be a robot?

It’s really easy to look at ‘The Robots of Death’ and just think, ‘oh, another murder mystery…’ I’m not going to lie, that’s exactly what I thought as episode one finished and episode two began. And to be fair, it’s not a bad murder mystery in itself. You know that the killer is a robot but all the robots look the same so you’re suddenly in the middle of a story where the murderer really is hiding in plain sight. You can feel the paranoia as people are locking themselves away from each other (they really can’t believe that the killer may be a robot…) but all they are doing is separating out and making themselves easier to kill… I found it all really tense.

But ‘The Robots of Death’ is more than that. Not only do the murders draw out other mysteries (giving the support a degree of depth that you don’t normally find) but there’s also some exploration of life itself, how the robots interact with it and whether certain robots can attain it (D84 isn’t far off). It’s very subtly done and again, adds to the depth of this story. It’s really interesting as well to see Leela (literally in her first adventure ‘off planet’) meet the ‘creepy mechanical men’ and start to broaden her horizons around the many forms that life can take.

And you know I don’t normally say this about a ‘classic’ Doctor Who story story but the sets are absolutely amazing and the robots themselves look stunning (and just the right kind of sinister). It’s a story that is definitely a treat for the eyes as well as the ears.

I don’t know quite where ‘The Robots of Death’ fits in my own personal list of favourites (fairly high up, I would think but let me make my mind up) but it is abundantly clear where the ‘fan favourite’ tag came from. I’m really glad that I found a copy and can see myself watching this one more often.