Please do not throw hands at me, asks Tony
Robots Of Death is one of the most elegantly designed,
classically plotted Doctor Who stories ever broadcast. While in essence, it’s
Agatha Christie in space – a small group of upper class people and the servants
who do the real work in an enclosed environment, but then people start dying –
the lightly layered context of the world in which the story is set has
fascinated people ever since. Kaldor is a long-established colony that brought
a concept of aristocracy with it, the ‘First Families’ akin to British lords
and ladies who came over with William the Conqueror, or the descendants of
American Mayflower settlers, happy in their societal privilege.
But then there are the
robots.
The robots twist the
historical perspective somewhat, because what they are is a permissibly
kickable caste – you don’t have to be polite to a robot, any more than you do
to a kettle or a cash machine. It’s a thing, a mobile personal assistant, it’s
Siri on legs or Alexa with an art deco face. The robots turn the Kaldorans not
into aristocrats, but into Imperial Romans, owning their own three-level slave
workforce.
Here’s the thing. When Robots
of Death was broadcast, it was Agatha Christie in space, yes, but it was
also pure science fiction – personal robots were a dream of the future or of
pure invention, like flying cars, missions to Mars and worlds interconnected
instantly by webs of data.
The future is very nearly
now. Mars is in our sights, flying cars have been experimented with and
self-driving technologies will make them more likely, you’re reading this on a
worldwide web.
And the robots are coming.
So interestingly, while the Kaldorans reach back to the political reality of
Imperial Rome, they also, now, are an analogue of our future. Imagine
Siri did have legs and could go do your grocery shopping while you were
at work. Hell, imagine Siri could go out and do your work, leaving you to wait
in for a grocery store’s walking Siri to turn up with your shopping. Robots are
our future, and the Kaldoran robots have never been as relevant as they are
now.
Here’s the other thing.
They’re fiendishly tricky
to write single stories for.
Once you’ve told the story
of Robots of Death, as the Fourth Doctor predicted, it’s probably the
end of that civilisation. Once the slave class can be programmed to kill their
masters, you have a civilisation with a deadly secret, but what else you
can do with the robots is an enormously tricky question – there’s the straight
flip, as Big Finish did in Robophobia, and then there’s an evolution of
the nature of both humanity and robotkind, as it did in Sons of Kaldor.
But it’s actually easier, if you’re going to re-use your robots, to
drill down into the civilisation that uses them and show how it deals with the
ethics of their use, their existence, and very possibly their increasing
evolution towards sentience and self-determination within an organic population
that really doesn’t want them to have it.
Welcome to The Robots 1.
If you’ve not followed
everything Big Finish puts out with the slavish loyalty of a reviewer, here’s
the score. Liv Chenka (Nicola Walker) is a Kaldoran med-tech (or doctor, as
we’d call them). She’s been in the Doctor’s life a while, first meeting him in
his Seventh incarnation, then teaming up with his Eighth for wild adventures in
time and space. During the Ravenous story arc, we returned to Kaldor and
met Liv’s sister, Tula (Claire Rushbrook), who’s big in robotic development. At
the end of that adventure, the Doctor and his other friend Helen Sinclair flew
off, because Liv had asked for some time to re-connect with her sister, her
home planet, her life. A year later, they flew back, and Liv rejoined the
Tardis crew.
The Robots box sets will tell the story of that
‘missing’ year.
In this first set, we
explore the ethics of robot-assisted living, focusing on three key ways they
could be put to use. In Roland Moore’s Robots Of Life, Liv reconnects
with some old medical friends in a robot-aided hospital where it turns out
people are dying on the operating table, and there’s a very unusual SuperVoc on
standby. Is it a case of robot error, and if not, who’s covering for whom, and
why?
As we mentioned, the
robots are a permissibly kickable caste. Medical ethics are complex enough when
there are only humans involved, and if things go wrong, you can’t sue a scalpel
for killing your relative. But on Kaldor, is it possible to get a scalpel to
take the blame for your wrongdoing? And if it is, is that ever where the story
ends?
Roland Moore takes the
grey areas of medical ethics and flings them into the complex arena of
culpability in a robot-assisted world, while never forgetting the human aspects
of Liv’s return to Kaldor, her connection with her sister and their jerky,
scratchy relationship – they’re bonded by family ties, and they do love each
other and look out for one another, but also, sometimes, they want to hit each
other in the face with a spade. Y’know, like real siblings the universe over.
There’s great chemistry
between Liv and Tula from the word go in this story, taking forward the
relationship we heard in their first story together, Escape From Kaldor.
But whereas that story had to hit the dramatic beats of a one-off episode in a
box set, here we’re settling in for a longer haul, so Robots Of Life touches
on some longer-term issues, memories and realities for the Chenka sisters. The
story blends character relationships and medical conspiracy drama with a
complex underlying philosophical question that’s explored the only way it can
be – by throwing humans and robots into the deep end and seeing how they all
react. The results are perhaps a little surprising, but we can listen to them
as the product of an entrenched robot-assisted society, a society used to its
walking Siris, none of whom are sentient or equal to their human masters.
Or are they?
Robert Whitelock’s The
Sentient, naturally enough given the title, delves further into this
question, as we explore the idea of robot ‘children’ with some degree of
self-aware sentience being developed to fill gaps in the lives of some childless
people. There’s a degree of parental bonding in the process, because there’s an
organic element in the prototype robokind, Vissey, taken from her lead
developer, Rork (Jaye Griffiths) who builds an emotional connection to the new,
potentially sentient robot-child. But there are several levels of philosophical
trouble brewing. Firstly, as Liv says when she discovers the project, they’re
building children with mute buttons for when they become invonvenient, or loud,
or stroppy, and secondly, they’re allowing Vissey unrestrained, unprotected access
to the Kaldoran equivalent of the internet, complete with message boards. More
than that though, the story shows the condescension inherent in liberation from
a form of bondage only at the speed and to the level comfortable for the
oppressor – as Vissey evolves her understanding of the world, it far outstrips
that which her creators would want her to have, and she becomes far less a
child parody, far more a slave revolutionary, tapping into the inevitable
dichotomy of a world which builds itself a slave and calls it their child.
There are uncomfortable questions by the truckload in this story, and it’s
telling that it’s Liv Chenka, who’s seen the universe with the Doctor, who
takes the position that would essentially forever render the Kaldor robots no more
than talking kettles – the position that the kind of AI that Vissey has, with
the ability to evolve into sentience, will ultimately lead to the destruction
of the human population. If you want to get uber-philosophical, there’s a
lesson for us in this story – Vissey learns and evolves by interaction both
with the people she meets online, and by the history of the society into which
she’s being built to integrate. What she finds leads her to an individual but
destructive destiny. Perhaps before we go down the robot route, we should make
sure our society could only be viewed as a positive example for any
intelligence discovering it fresh.
Let’s not hold our breath
though, eh?
Love Me Not, by John Dorney explores the idea of
robots as grief-conduits, if not grief counsellors. When someone we love dies,
would it be possible – would it be acceptable – to install a robot in
our home, with knowledge of their nature, their memories, even their voice?
Where’s the boundary between being a conduit for human grief and replacing the
missing familymember? Becoming the missing familymember?
The husband of one of the
victims who died on the operating table in Robots of Life returns to
work earlier than anyone expects. He’s given a very particular SuperVoc to help
look after his children as he adjusts to his new reality. But as he and the
SuperVoc grow closer, the walls of reality and the rawness of grief collide.
Can Volar Crick (Anthony Howell) tell the difference between reality and
fantasy any more? And can the Chenka sisters help him back from the brink,
while investigating why his wife Jasdar (Annabelle Dowler) died in the first
place?
The first Robots
set does what no Kaldor robots story has had the scope to do since the Kaldor
City audios by Magic Bullet Productions – it takes us down among the people
and the robots of Kaldor and tackles what their co-existence looks like, and
what it means; the challenges, the wonders, the everyday dramas. More than
those audios though, the Robots set fits comfortably within the Doctor
Who universe, and deals with the robots not so much as science fiction, but as
a philosophical reality we need to address in our future. And uniquely, the Big
Finish version of Kaldor has the power of Liv Chenka and her sister Tula to add
human warmth, compassion and sibling bickering to the world of the Robots,
which makes it an irresistible listen.
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