Tony plays Dum.
When you call your Doctor
Who story Robots of Death, you pretty much dispense with the whole ‘whodunnit’
element of your plot, right from the off. Clearly, it was a robot. That, and
the fact that we actually see a Robot go red-eyed and murdery within the first
handful of minutes, means it’s something of a storytelling miracle that Robots
of Death by Chris Boucher is the tight, tense thriller it is – at least until
you understand what a robot is in the culture of the Sandminer
crew. It’s a knife. It’s a gun. It’s a thing, with no more will of its own than
either of those objects. And as the National Rifle Association was once fond of
saying, ‘guns don’t kill people. People kill people.’ That’s a distinction that
lets Robots of Death have its shock title, and still be mysterious. The robots
are not ‘whodunnit’ but ‘whatdunnit.’ The who is the person who turned the
robots into weapons of destruction, and we don’t find out who that is until
quite late in the day, once almost everybody else has been killed.
Robots of Death is right
up there in terms of its storytelling and tension – it’s Agatha Christie in a
sci-fi world, and as such, it’s been approached once or twice in 52 years, but
rarely if ever bettered. The design is highly striking, the robots themselves
are both beautiful and anodyne, making them all the creepier when they bring
their mundanity of function to the business of killing people. Chris Boucher’s
dialogue, heavily edited and embellished as it was, still works to create vivid
characters, and a wider world beyond the Sandminer, for all we never go beyond
the confines of its claustrophobic enclosures. Like many stories regarded by
fans as ‘the greats,’ it’s been seen almost as sacrosanct, too perfect to
disturb with anything so vulgar as a sequel. That said, the world and the
threat cast long shadows in fans’ minds, and the world of Robots never really
died – in 1999, Boucher wrote a sequel as a BBC novel, Corpse Marker, and the
same year he was involved with Magic Bullet productions, who produced the
Kaldor City audio stories to broaden out the world of Robots of Death, and
actually, if thinly, link it to the world of Blake’s 7. While Corpse Marker
successfully re-ran the formula of Robots of Death but expanded it to the whole
of Kaldor City, the Magic Bullet audios set the idea of Robots of Death against
a wider social and political context. Since then though, the Robots have slept,
and in New Who, they’ve been rather subsumed by more specific and down-to-Earth
versions of the same idea – ubiquitous tools gone bad. Think of The Sontaran
Stratagem as Satnavs of Death, or The Bells of St John as WiFi of Doom, and you
get the idea. Probably the least said about Voyage of the Damned, which wanted
to be Robots of Death so badly it nearly squeaked, the better.
Step forward Big Finish
then, with an alternative direct sequel to the original Robots of Death.
Step forward Nicholas
Briggs in particular, who both wrote and directed Robophobia, the Seventh
Doctor story that sees the gameplaying Doctor on a space freighter carrying
157,000 Robots of Potential Death, and a human crew to boot. And let the games
begin.
One of the main reasons
Robots of Death is difficult to follow with a sequel is because the story is
complete in and of itself. Boucher found two logical ways to extend and expand
the story, but if you put a Robot of Death on the cover of your story, the pull
of the original story is so strong that you actually expect certain things –
humans dying, no-one knowing who killed them, investigations, company agents,
the Doctor being accused, someone having Robophobia, and an undercover
psychopath intent on killing everybody. You almost demand it, or there’s no
real point in it being a Robots of Death story. The danger though is that if
you include all that…don’t you just end up with Robots of Death, all over
again? How do you make it different enough to warrant its own existence, while
hitting all the gracenotes you want it to hit?
To be fair, Big Finish
manages to walk this line well in Robophobia. In the first place, while still
very clearly the same society, it takes us away from the Received Pronunciation
of the Sandminer crew with their Founding Family aristocratic boredom, and puts
us at the grubbier end of the social spectrum. Most of the crew of the Lorelei, the ship full of dormant robots
in Robophobia, have northern or regional English accents, William Hazell
playing pilot Bas Pellicoe slightly camp in addition, adding to his casual
likeability, while TV’s Sontaran du jour, Dan Starkey, has fun stomping about
the place as security officer Cravnet, with a West Country accent (for the
uninitiated, think Matt Lucas in The Husbands of River Song). Toby Hadoke, now
heard in more and more Big Finish titles, was new to the game in 2011 when he took
on the role of Security Chief Farel, and given the other roles he’s played,
this is a welcome slice of hard edging for him. The same is true of Nicholas
Briggs himself, who’s gratifyingly almost unrecognisable as Captain Selerat –
gratifyingly because he has one of the most recognisable voices in the Big
Finish world, but here that’s subsumed in the performance.
It actually feels slightly
odd to have the Seventh Doctor in this story, where yes, plenty of people die
(though many of them appear to get killed en masse, and off screen, minimising
the impact of their slaughter) and many Robots of Deaths standards appear –
bloody robot hands, shattered robot face-masks, the master robot control switch
etc – but the McCoy incarnation eventually seems just right for the nature of
this story; the Doctor who knows everything already, but nudges the real
investigation along. There are certainly grey moral areas to the Doctor’s
relative passivity in this story, given the body count, but there’s classic
McCoying here too – poignant questions that explode like hand grenades of
silence in the middle of angry, scared people’s rants, a refusal to jump to
conclusions, and most especially of all, a quiet, caring speech to help save millions
of lives at a crucial moment of high tension.
The story is probably
unique in that it does give an insight into what the Robots of Death are like
when they’re not busy slaughtering people, and in a way, it reclaims them from
the status of hapless victimhood that the original Robots gave them by way of
excusing their actions. It’s rather a neat flip, even if it does seem like one
made because there’s nowhere else to really go with them.
Robophobia does one other
thing beautifully well – it shows the evolution of a potential companion.
Nicola Walker stars alongside Sylvester McCoy as his one-off companion here,
and as Med-Tech Liv Chenka, she channels Pamela Salem’s Pilot Toos through a
more modern, less languid sensibility, asking all the right questions, feeling
the sorrow and the anger when her friends are killed, but recognising that itch
at the back of her brain that says all is not what it seems to be, and that
trusting the Doctor might be the right thing to do. In the early days of
on-screen Doctor Who, it was occasionally the case that actors would impress
the Production Team so much they would be invited to become companions on the
strength of their showing – both Peter Purves and Frazer Hines joined the
Tardis crew that way. Walker pulls off the same trick here; she gives Liv
Chenka the attitude, the open mind and the trust that great companions are made
of, and though she’s never travelled with McCoy’s Doctor since, Big Finish was
keen to bring back both the character and the actress when the opportunity
presented itself in the Dark Eyes series, and she’s become the Eighth Doctor’s
latest companion, allowing Walker to explore different facets of Liv’s
personality in response to a very different Doctor.
Robophobia is not Robots
of Death. It’s probably not the equal of the original, looked at with cold and
dispassionate eyes. But in the fact that it finds a new if slightly obvious
story to tell with the Dums, Vocs and SuperVocs, that it ties itself directly
to the original, that it allows McCoy to do his trademark dark and twinkly
imp-man Doctoring and gives him a great speech, that it’s boldly characterised
and played to show us a different stratum of the same society, that it flips
and redeems the story of the robots who kill, and that it marks the beginnings
of a great audio companion, Robophobia comes a damn sight closer to matching
the original than you might ever have thought possible.
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