The Robots Of Death (1977) Review

"Please start making sense, story. Please."

Mesa back! I'm sorry, I'm so sorry for the lack of updates recently, been very busy trying to get my digital life back on track, plus there's been a lot of irritating things in real life too, but I finally finished The Robots Of Death! 

PLOT

The Doctor and Leela find themselves on a sandminer populated by a sparse crew and robots. When the crew start getting murdered one by one, the group turns on one another. The robots however, continue to follow their orders to the letter...

ANALYSIS

Whilst the story succeeds in creating a creepy atmosphere and the Agatha Christie whodunnit gimmick is much better utilized than in The Unicorn And The Wasp, it's let down by a plot far too complicated and bizarre for its own good. Often I found myself completely bewildered by what was going on and the characters weren't all that great either. Oh yeah...

CHARACTERS

Leela continues to grow on me with a great mixture of innocence and savagery. She's just a joy to watch.

Unfortunately, beyond her and the Doctor, there's not much else. The villain, Taren Capel is completely two-dimensional("I like robots... a LOT! Revolution! Humans suck!"), the initially fun, Blackadder-esque Uvanov pulls a 180 and becomes a boring old guy in part four and none of the others are really memorable either.

I guess the lady(whose name I fail to recall) was nice...? 

The robots were great villains, obviously stolen by RTD for Voyage Of The Damned and who can blame him? Equally, D84 was a great hero(although the explanation behind his presence on the ship was lackluster at best). Altogether, they were easily the best part of all this, being creepy as hell when evil and cute as hell when good. You have to question the logic of robots who look like that, though. Who designed them?

NOTES

*The evil robots' red eye effect is great, but also having it appear in the needle thing was too much.

*Also, the first time the needle was used against the robots was cool, but it was used again and again for some reason and became just a random weapon everyone seemed to have by the end.

*What's the story behind the blue-eyed robots?

*If Capel was so obsessed with becoming a robot, why didn't he just turn himself into a cyborg or something? The make-up he wore by the end was just ridiculous.

*I know the Doctor simplified the explanation behind the TARDIS interior dimensions, but it took me a long, long while after the episode before I finally got it.

*Lolz, that silver bandage.

*I want to meet a guy called Laserson.

*The costumes in this story are completely inappropriate for sandmining, even if the whole crew work inside the ship. Couldn't the production crew have dug up the stuff they had in Colony In Space?

*I don't really mind the Doctor getting it wrong with the bumblebee thing. Time Lords aren't infallible.

*Is it just me or is Tom Baker aging really fast? 

BEST QUOTE

"You said I had to keep it going up and down!" - Leela.

I know, there's many great quotes in this one, but most of them were in dialogue and the inverse ratio line is too cliche.

CONCLUSION

The intent is good and there's a lot of great interactions, but the story is just all over the place and becomes a slog as time goes on. Not one I'd go back to.