Kerblam!
Tony clicks ‘Buy Now.’
The Robots of Death is a
classic Doctor Who story where almost everything seemed to go right. Its
depiction of a society so advanced by robotic assistance as to be almost
entirely indolent, steeped in reliance on their electronic underlings and ripe
for a shake-up was believable and rendered in lush scenery, gorgeous, if
slightly bonkers costume and exotic make-up. The design elements, the script,
the robot look and sound, the logic of the baddie-reveal, it’s all more or less
perfectly crafted to make you want to stick it in your player and re-watch the
gubbins out of it, even decades later.
There have subsequently been a few attempts to re-bottle the lightning of The Robots of Death, and for the most part, they’ve been well-meant but poorly judged affairs. Witness Voyage of the Damned, with its Heavenly Host practically screeeeeaming to go rogue and kill everyone right from their first scene – nice idea, unnecessary in a TV outer space disaster movie, and not really working because they looked disapproving from the beginning, as though they just wanted an excuse to slaughter you.
There have subsequently been a few attempts to re-bottle the lightning of The Robots of Death, and for the most part, they’ve been well-meant but poorly judged affairs. Witness Voyage of the Damned, with its Heavenly Host practically screeeeeaming to go rogue and kill everyone right from their first scene – nice idea, unnecessary in a TV outer space disaster movie, and not really working because they looked disapproving from the beginning, as though they just wanted an excuse to slaughter you.
Kerblam! is probably the
closest Doctor Who has ever got to re-capturing the magic that The Robots of
Death brought to the screen.
That’s a big statement,
but there’s enough in the episode that treads familiar lines to let the
comparison stand. A large physical environment, a robotic workforce with
relatively few human beings, introduction to a handful of those humans, and an
ongoing quest to find out whether each of them is an innocent or a mastermind with
a deadly plan. What’s more, in the Kerblam! Men and the robo-workers, the
production team has come perhaps closest to the upbeat, service-culture-heavy
look and sound of the original Robots of Death. There’s something so determinedly
cheery and friendly about the Kerblam! Men and the robo-workers that their very
upbeat nature is enough to send a shiver down your spine, while they wait a
good long while before actually trying to kill anyone.
There’s some fun banter at the start too – and frankly, Jodie Whittaker wears a fez better than any other Doctor in history. The process of explaining every last little detail about the Kerblam! warehouse operation gets tedious in a hurry though, writer Peter Tighe clearly having absorbed the Series 11 tone memo that things should never be knowingly underexplained. And the characterisation of the people we meet is somewhat button-pushing. Claudia Jessie’s Kira Arlo is the ‘Lynda-with-a-Y’ of this story, so achingly sweet and orphaned and optimistic she absolutely has to die to inject some impact into the story, and even Lee Mack’s Dan Cooper is almost punchably likeable, so clearly, when he gives a warning to Yaz and then heads off into the warehouse stacks in her place, he’s never going to be seen alive again.
There’s some fun banter at the start too – and frankly, Jodie Whittaker wears a fez better than any other Doctor in history. The process of explaining every last little detail about the Kerblam! warehouse operation gets tedious in a hurry though, writer Peter Tighe clearly having absorbed the Series 11 tone memo that things should never be knowingly underexplained. And the characterisation of the people we meet is somewhat button-pushing. Claudia Jessie’s Kira Arlo is the ‘Lynda-with-a-Y’ of this story, so achingly sweet and orphaned and optimistic she absolutely has to die to inject some impact into the story, and even Lee Mack’s Dan Cooper is almost punchably likeable, so clearly, when he gives a warning to Yaz and then heads off into the warehouse stacks in her place, he’s never going to be seen alive again.
Perhaps the oddest – and
most reality-reflective – change from Robots of Death to Kerblam! is that in
the older story, robots were very much subservient to their humans. In
Kerblam!, reflecting the rigid, soul-sucking policies of (ahem) certain online
retailers’ back-end operations, the robo-workers are the voices of the system
and its diktats about unproductive conversations, workplace productivity and
the like. They’re walking time and motion studies, with that irritatingly perky
tone of corporate wellness in their robo-voices even as they reprimand you or threaten
your livelihood. Or even, the idea floats itself in your brain, as they
threaten your life.
The system, though – or at
least, so we’re told – is ‘not the problem’ at Kerblam! The system, showing a
kind of sentience, is actually the one that calls the Doctor in to investigate
(‘You might also like: to help me before people die in their thousands’), and
in fact it only kills people in order to provoke an empathic response in the
hidden genius among the workforce, who’s working toward an act of corporate
terrorism to bring about the kind of ‘Buy Now’ version of Robophobia among
Kerblam! fans and collapse the company’s credibility in the market.
Here’s perhaps the thing.
Charlie, the hidden mastermind, actually works
as a modern Taren Capel – he’s so obviously underwhelming as a human being, he
slides through most of the episode being ‘the dopey janitor with the crush on
Kira,’ meaning that if the reveal of him as the corporate terrorist had been
better handled, taking more breath, it would have been a pleasing revelation,
and we the audience would have gone ‘Ohhh, it was him all along.’ We don’t get
a chance to do that though, because the clock is ticking from the moment Ryan
realises Charlie’s behind the way Kira dies to the moment when he goes bang, so
it’s all delivered in a kind of suicide-jacket rant that makes the change in
him difficult to process. It’s also problematic that he’s not actually wrong in his beliefs, only in the
lengths to which he’s prepared to go to make them heard, so while of course we
don’t want Kerblam! customers to die,
(not least because they’re most of us), it feels like the Doctor should
actually be on his side, ethically, while still stopping him in his tracks. You
can argue that the changes Judy will be fighting to implement at the end of the
episode is evidence of the Doctor doing precisely that if you like, but it
feels rather a tenuous victory.
While we’re at it, again,
there’s very little for the Doctor to actually do to defeat the villain in this story – a bit of sonic twiddling,
a reprogrammed drone and a couple of spoken commands is essentially the scope
of it, and Kira, the unbearably sweet avatar of optimistic innocence who
thought her complain-and-you’ll-be-replaced contract was an opportunity to make
people happy, is destroyed without much of a by-your-leave, seemingly to push
an emotional beat in the plot.
Killer bubble-wrap, by the way? Yep, that works – or rather, it could work, in the show that gave us killer daffodils, killer armchairs, killer sweets, killer rock and roll, killer wi-fi, and that has before now blown up Cybermen with love.
Killer bubble-wrap, by the way? Yep, that works – or rather, it could work, in the show that gave us killer daffodils, killer armchairs, killer sweets, killer rock and roll, killer wi-fi, and that has before now blown up Cybermen with love.
Did it work? Not really, no. It worked as a
kind of camp, let’s-see-how-far-we-can-push-it, self-referential weapon of mass
destruction, but did it make us scared of bubble wrap? Probably not – its one
on-screen use to kill Kira was well-directed and shocking, but it needed more
time to establish itself as a deadly threat in an episode which spent the
majority of its run-time effectively making us scared of robots again.
Essentially, Kerblam! did
quite a lot right – the atmosphere was mostly believable, its attention to
warehouse-work detail and oppressive schedules made it relatable, and it
delivered an effective lesson on the dichotomy of easy-click online retail
websites: the ease and convenience of Thing-Having they provide makes people
happy, while the companies themselves pay only minimal lip service to the
notion of their workers’ quality of life, so you know every time you use them
you’re enabling the misery of others. We’re left, after Kerblam! with a kind of
soupy uncertainty over the rights and wrongs of the existence of such
planet-changing organisations, rather than, as perhaps we’re used to in the
wake of the Capaldi Doctor, with a strong position on who’s right, who’s wrong
and who’s a bunch of pudding-brains.
Coupled with all that
though was button-pushing characterisation, too much faffing and infodumping
early on, too little time between the villain-reveal and the villain-death for
us to take in or care about the reasons for his actions, leading to an
unbalanced eventual impact, and characters, particularly Kira, sacrificed with
a relish somewhere between carelessness and callousness. It’ll bear re-watching
in years to come, because of all the things it does right, but as with many
episodes in Series 11, there’ll always be that nagging sense that one more
script edit could have made the whole experience ultimately much more
satisfying.
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