******TARDIS-SIZED SPOILERS!******

With the return of former showrunner Russell T. Davies, “Doctor Who” was due for a much-needed regeneration after several years of mediocre scripting and missed opportunities under previous showrunner Chris Chibnall. However, last year’s batch of eight new episodes under Davies weren’t necessarily the franchise’s best, and with a few that were just awful (looking at you, “Space Babies”). However, there was a vigor to the show that I hadn’t seen in awhile. The chemistry between Ncuti Gatwa’s Doctor and companion Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson) was innocent and infectious. However, last year’s finale saw abandoned-as-a-baby Ruby resolving her birth mother issues arc, which led to the character’s departure from the show.

This year sees the return of actress Varada Sethu, who appeared as “Mundy Flynn” in the grim war episode, “Boom.” As the Doctor’s new companion, Sethu isn’t playing her futuristic, battle-hardened soldier Flynn, but rather Flynn’s ancestor; an overworked 21st century nightshift nurse named Belinda Chandra. Sethu and Gatwa had some nice moments in their prior episode, but her new character is more average; in keeping with the Doctor’s habit of taking ordinary folk on the journey of their lifetimes. However, as the promo art (very bottom) suggests, this companion has made it clear she doesn’t want to be a playmate for the lonely Time Lord; she just wants to go home.

“The Robot Revolution” (2025)

Written by Davies and directed by Peter Hoag, “The Robot Revolution” opens 17 years ago, with a teenage Belinda Chandra (Varada Sethu) on a date with her pretentious and pushy boyfriend, Alan Budd (Jonny Green). Alan awkwardly gifts her with a Star Certificate; a symbolic diploma of a star named after her–Miss Belinda Chandra. Belinda’s not at all fond of the “Miss.”

17 years later, and it’s the evening of May 23rd, 2025. Belinda is now an overworked nightshift nurse, unaware that the Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) has arrived in his TARDIS, and is looking for her. The Doctor attempts to find her on the receptionist’s computer, and accidentally shorts out the building’s power supply (probably not great for patients undergoing surgery). For some reason, we gather that Belinda is important for an as-yet-unclear reason.

Note: I miss the days when the Doctor’s companions didn’t have greater destinies or planet/universe-saving arcs; I liked it when they were just ordinary folks rising to the call of the cosmos. These days, everything has to be ‘destiny’ or a ‘chosen one’ sort of thing. Oh well. On the subject of the Star Certificate? Don’t laugh, but I got one of those for my wife shortly after we were married. It’s still on our bedroom wall, too.

Belinda goes home to her flat. The old Star Certificate gift still framed on her wall. Later that night, a red, tail-finned rocket right out of a 1950s sci-fi comic book lands outside, and several big red robots looking for their ‘queen’ abduct her on a journey to the planet of ‘MissBelindaChandra-One’; her namesake world, orbiting her namesake star. As she’s taken from her home, Belinda’s observed by her neighbor, “Mrs. Flood” (Anita Dobson); the enigmatic, fourth wall-breaking character from last year who is more than she appears…

Note: The deliberately cartoonish, retro-futuristic robots and rocket are just too silly to be taken seriously, which undercuts their menace, and lessens the dramatic stakes of the episode. And just how did this alien rocketship arrive smack dab in the middle of the suburbs without alerting the entire Royal Air Force?

Strapped into a chair as the rocket blasts off, Belinda tells her captors that it was her ex-boyfriend who gave her the star diploma, and that it’s him they should be whisking off to their planet. Clutching her torn-cornered diploma, she looks out a portal and sees the Doctor’s TARDIS chasing after them. Suddenly, a mysterious temporal anomaly occurs, and she notices the TARDIS is gone. After the bizarre spacetime disturbance passes, Belinda looks to see that they’re orbiting her namesake planet…

Note: The visual FX of this episode really show off that influx of additional Disney money, but they’re stylized to death by director Peter Hoar.

Arriving on MissBelindaChandraOne, a bewildered Belinda receives a queen’s welcome by the robots; right down to a Roomba-like robot whose sole purpose is to clean the floor ahead of her steps. She’s then met by a blandly-attired human named Sasha 55 (Evelyn Miller), who does her best to mask her fright around the robots, and quietly begs for her ‘queen’s’ help. She explains that the robots are their overlords, after they aggressively seized control ten years ago. It’s hoped Belinda will marry the robots’ leader, the AI Generator, in a royal wedding to end the war. Belinda refuses. The Doctor steps forward among the other similarly-clad humans, and is introduced as the ‘court historian.’ Very carefully, the Doctor explains to Belinda that the faulty robots are unable to hear every ninth word; a fault he exploits to warn her of an imminent rebel strike against the robots…

Note: Does the robots’ inability to hear ‘every ninth word’ spoken apply to all of the robots simultaneously? And when exactly do the robots’ audio sensors begin to add up words, or is it syllables? How does a robot differentiate between a word and a syllable? A seemingly clever idea that quickly falls apart upon examination.

The rebels, led by soldier Manny (Max Parker), use smuggled energy weapons in an explosive assault on the robots in the court. Unfortunately, the robots have superior forces, and Sasha–who’s become close to the Doctor–is killed. During their retreat to the rebel camp, the Doctor tells Belinda that the temporal anomaly that they encountered allowed him to arrive on the planet six months ago (which explains his comradery with Sasha and Manny). As Nurse Belinda tends to wounded rebels, she notices some physiological differences with the humanoids on her namesake planet, as the Doctor then chooses to reveal his own twin hearts.

Note: I still have issues with Ncuti Gatwa’s Doctor’s constant tearful reactions; in this case, to Sasha’s death. It’s not as if the Doctor hasn’t seen death before, or caused it many times himself. As I said in my overview of last year’s episodes, I wish this incarnation of the character would save the tears for greater effect. Tears are an apex of anguish, and they should be used sparingly for this millennia-old character who’s seen more than their share of tragedies.

Realizing the Roomba robot might be tracking them on behalf of the robotic overlords, the Doctor deactivates it. The Doctor then tells Belinda that her star certificate and the certificate in possession of the AI Generator are not mere copies of each other; they are the exact same copy somehow. That very same certificate traveled backward in time millennia ago, and became the basis for this civilization’s mythology. Belinda speculates on what would happen if the exact same document occupies the exact same space at the exact same time. The Doctor says it’d cause a temporal paradox. He then tells Belinda about her resemblance to a descendant of hers he’d met many centuries from now (“Boom”). Feeling the resentment of the surviving rebels, Belinda offers herself to the AI Generator to spare their lives. She reactivates the Roomba robot, and follows it to the AI Generator’s chamber…

Note: Once again, the cute little Roomba robot is one of those ‘wacky’ trappings that undermines the serious stakes of the titular robot revolution. I realize this is a sci-fi fantasy series, but the overly stylized robots and comical “Flash Gordon” production design of this episode is at odds with the rebellion’s grim story of survival. It’s a tonal roller coaster to go from ‘wacky future world’ to “M*A*S*H.”

Belinda is then brought before the dreaded yet comical AI Generator. It calls her Miss Belinda Chandra, and she voices her disdain for the prefix “Miss.” The AI Generator then asks if she’s married, which reminds Belinda of something her suffocating ex-boyfriend told her on a date 17 years ago. The AI Generator’s outer casing opens … revealing a cyborg hybrid of her aforementioned ex-boyfriend Alan, whose nickname name “Al” has been misread/misinterpreted as “A.I.”

Note: The “Wizard of Oz”/“V’ger”-like revelation of Alan as the AI Generator isn’t quite the big surprise it’s built up to be, but it’s still a great makeup; reminding me of the character “Vera,” who’s turned into a creepy, silver-skinned cyborg by Gus Gorman’s supercomputer in “Superman III” (1983); an otherwise forgettable action-comedy film, save for that memorable, nightmare-fueling moment. There’s also a heavy Star Trek ‘Borg‘-vibe as well. Nothing new here, but lots of homaging. At least they didn’t trot out the Cybermen again…

Alan explains that when Belinda mentioned him to the robots during her abduction, they returned for him as well. He arrived on the planet some ten years before before the time warpage, and the robots made him their new bionic ruler. With his cybernetic empowerment, the rejected loser Al took advantage of his newfound abilities by leading a robotic coup that destroyed their peaceful relationship with the humanoid inhabitants of MissBelindaChandraOne. Belinda tells the Doctor how it was Alan’s controlling behavior that led to their breakup. Staring at the Borgified Alan in utter disbelief, she murmurs “A planet of incels.”

Note: Nice bit of commentary on today’s similarly controlling and oppressive billionaire tech bros, who are literally trying to reshape our world to their whims.

Growing impatient, Alan demands that Belinda take hold of his star certificate to begin her cybernetic transformation. The Doctor quietly drops the copy in his possession to the floor, which the Roomba robot delivers to Belinda. Realizing what she needs to do, Belinda presses it against the copy in Alan’s hand, with predictably chaotic results. A time paradox ensues, and Alan’s reduced to a microscopic zygote; which is then quickly mopped up by the loyal Roomba ‘bot. AI-Generator’s robotic reign of terror is over.

Note: The zygote of Alan wouldn’t have survived outside of a human womb anyway, but having the Roomba robot ‘clean up the mess’ was a nice touch. If only all of today’s oppressive, manipulative tech bros were so easy to sponge away...

With the inhabitants of MissBelindaChandraOne grateful, Belinda and the Doctor are escorted back to his returned TARDIS, which was impounded under Alan’s reign of terror. Before they board, the Doctor tells her he’d like to investigate the mystery behind the Star Certificate’s effect on this planet. Not sharing in the Doctor’s insatiable appetite for mysteries, Belinda reluctantly follows the Doctor inside of his TARDIS…

Note: Other than the Doctor’s flashback where he recognizes Belinda’s resemblance to her future descendant Mundy Flynn from “Boom,” I wonder if there’s some other cosmic significance to actress Varada Sethu’s return to the Whoniverse?

Belinda is typically awed by the TARDIS’s larger interior dimensions, with the Doctor sharing in her (short-lived) amazement. However, the otherwise unfazed Belinda tells him that she’s not going to be an adventurer with him. She asks only to be taken home. After several failed attempts, the Doctor realizes something’s actively and willfully preventing the TARDIS from complying. 

Note: We’ve seen the sentient TARDIS resist the Doctor’s destinations a number of times before …

The TARDIS materializes halfway between Belinda’s namesake planet and Earth, and the Doctor opens the door to space (protected by the atmospheric envelope that surrounds the ship). Unable to find the problem, the Doctor says they’ll just take the ‘long way round.’ The TARDIS then dematerializes away…

In the TARDIS’s wake, we see debris strewn across interstellar space; a section of the Eiffel Tower, half of the Empire State Building, an old car, a framed copy of the Star Certificate, and finally, a calendar with the last marked off day being May 25, 2025.

Note: Ah, the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower; those ever-reliable sci-fi staples of world-ending cataclysms.

The End.

Summing It Up

Heavy on style, but surprisingly light on substance, “The Robot Revolution” is a disappointing series’ opener. The production design of the planet and the robots resembles one of those retro-futuristic AI-generated videos you see on YouTube, and while it’s very tongue-in-cheek, this garishly cartoonish look undermines the stakes of the titular robotic revolution, let alone the terror of an incel ex-boyfriend gaining cybernetic omnipotence. This episode could’ve offered a deeper, more thoughtful commentary on 21st century relationship nightmares. Instead, it’s a collection of bright, shiny robots and hollow messaging.

Ncuti Gatwa continues to make the role of the Doctor his own, and I like what he brings to the table, though I wish he’d use the tears a bit more sparingly for greater impact. Varada Sethu has big shoes to fill, and I’m curious to see where her ‘reluctant companion’ story goes, though she doesn’t quite share the electric chemistry that Millie Gibson’s Ruby Sunday had with Gatwa’s Doctor. However, this is only one episode, so I’m more than willing to see how that plays out over the next seven or so.

The irony of this episode’s ‘AI Generator’ villain is that “The Robot Revolution” itself feels a bit like an AI-generated Doctor Who story; the Doctor discovers another companion with a great ‘destiny,’ and ends another oppressive cybernetic regime (mercifully not Daleks or Cybermen, at least), etc. Like other big ticket sci-fi franchises lately, Doctor Who’s creative unevenness continues; though at least it’s better dressed, and with a bit more spring in its step…

Where to Watch

“Doctor Who” is available to watch/stream on the BBC in the UK, and on Disney+ in most other markets.