It’s an Agatha Christie drawing-room mystery, with robots! The TARDIS arrives on board a “sandminer,” a huge industrial ship scouring a planet-wide sea of sand for valuable minerals. But the crew aren’t your typical miners: they’re from a civilization that uses robots for all labor, so the human crew (even of a mining ship) live in opulent, well-decorated quarters, getting massages and drinking cocktails prepared by their robot servants, and only bothering to take a hand in actually running the ship when there’s a promising vein of minerals that the robots might lose (because they lack creativity and instinct). So they might be a mining crew but our human characters look and act just like the upper-crust manor residents who feature in the classic old British whodunnits. And just like in those stories, there’s been a murder: one of the crew has been strangled. Naturally the Doctor and Leela are suspected, but the other characters realize soon enough the killer is someone else— someone who has reprogrammed the robots to do the killing for him. But who?
The only thing missing from the scenario is the traditional scene where Hercule Doctor explains the mystery and reveals the killer— the story skips that scene in favor of a climax where the surviving characters are under siege from the killer robots, and our villain is revealed through being the one telling the robots to kill everyone left. But that’s fine— we may have started with Agatha Christie, but this is Dr Who after all and that’s how the climax of the story should be.
This is another great episode and all the elements pull together. The costumes and set design (including the design of the robots) were done in an art deco style to call to mind the whole 20’s-30’s classic Agatha Christie period, and the decorative but blank faces of the robots make them really creepy. The phrase “uncanny valley” had not yet been coined when this story aired, but the idea of it is clearly in view as the Doctor explains why robot-dependent civilizations always have an underlying anxiety that can explode into psychotic “robophobia”— because robots have no facial expressions or body language, and people depend on those things to know how to react to someone. The point is driven home by the utterly impassive voices of the robots even when sent to kill someone, making them even creepier, and by a really nice bit of storytelling when they emphasize early on how Leela, the primitive tribeswoman, is very sensitive to body language and finds the robots creepy from the start.
The episode also scores by avoiding the obvious and having the robots themselves turn out to be the villains. Dr Who has done the mad computer before (notably, in last week’s story) but this time the robots are clearly just machines, doing whatever they’re programmed to do, with no more responsibility for it than a car or a table lamp. It’s a human villain who is dreaming of a robot rebellion, and he’s shown to be completely out of his mind to imagine that his “brother” robots are capable of being free or even caring whether they are— they’re just machines.
But creepy machines, especially when what they’re programmed to do is kill you can they’ll calmly tell you so in the same voice they use to tell you they’ve brought your martini. And that’s where the story is Dr Who all the way through.
Details
- In a virtual repeat of last week’s story, this episode was conceived and plotted by Philip Hinchcliffe and Robert Holmes, and then assigned to Chris Boucher to write. As has often happened in the series so far, it was a last-minute replacement for a story that fell through, and Boucher was on hand after writing the previous episode “Face of Evil,” and since they liked his work on that, Hinchcliffe and Holmes hired him again.
- There are a lot of great lines in this episode. The Doctor tells one person who’s just accused him of being the murderer, “You are a classic example of the inverse relationship between the size of the brain and the size of the mouth.” In another scene, after explaining to Leela the reason why robot-dependent civilizations always have an underlying anxiety, she asks what it means if the killer turns out to be a robot. “Oh,” the Doctor says casually, “I should imagine it’s the end of this particular civilization.” Somehow his offhand tone raises the stakes even more: as if it’s so obvious that such a civilization is a house of cards that it’s not even worth being surprised if it falls apart.
- Leela in particular makes a very good showing, and I’m not talking about her costume. She’s already more independent than even the overtly-feminist Sarah Jane Smith, intelligent enough to figure things out even in a world utterly strange to her, and confident enough not to be overwhelmed by any of it. “Do you know any reason why I shouldn’t kill you right now for what you’ve done?” demands the Captain, thinking Leela’s the killer. Without missing a beat, Leela answers, “No, but you do or else you’d have done it already.” Later when the robots have all been reprogrammed into killers, Leela is frustrated rather than afraid: “You can’t fight them. I’ve tried and they don’t bleed!” When one angry crewman slaps her, she instantly takes him down with a kick to the kneecap. “Try that again and I’ll cripple you,” she warns, and she means it. It’s already clear Leela’s going to be a companion unlike any we’ve had before.
- For the first time in the series, we get an attempt at a coherent explanation of how the TARDIS is bigger on the inside, and we have Leela to thank for it. Way back in the first episode, the Doctor told Ian Chesterton it was like showing a large building on a television screen, but that wasn’t an explanation, it was just part of saying it was as far beyond Ian’s comprehension as TV would be to a primitive. Since then the Doctor’s just tossed off the phrase “dimensionally transcendental” and his companions have nodded wisely so has not to look foolish. Leela actually asks the question. The Doctor demonstrates by holding up two boxes, one bigger than the other, then puts the big one at some distance away while holding up the small one close to Leela. The small one looks bigger because it’s closer— so if you could keep the big box at a distance and also have it close by, it would fit inside the small one. Now, maybe it’s just me but that explanation makes perfect sense as a way to describe the idea that the TARDIS interior is in a different dimension (you could go with a Flatland analogy but that would be less fun).
- Leela, though, is not impressed. She thinks it over for a second and just says, “That’s silly.” The Doctor has to resort back to dimensionally transcendental, “a key Time Lord discovery.”
Next week:
“The Talons of Weng-Chiang” 6 episodes, the season finale, written by the incomparable Robert Holmes, and (sadly) the swan song for the Hichcliffe/Holmes era of Dr Who.
