Review: Doctor Who: The Robot Revolution

 A new season ... a new set of adventures for Ncuti Gatwa as the Doctor, and as usual with the introduction of a new companion, the old one is pretty much all but forgotten immediately!  Poor Ruby ... but apparently she crops up again later on ... a little like Rose, or indeed Clara, who just didn't know when enough was enough.

'The Robot Revolution' is a tough tale to start a season with in that it's very 'timey wimey' and you need to keep your wits about you to understand all the twists and turns courtesy of an unexplained 'time fracture' (shades of 'City of Death'!) which sends Belida Chandra all over the place.

So 17 years ago, a would be boyfriend buys Belinda a Star (well he buys a certificate saying that the star is now called 'Miss Belinda Chandra' and of course that has no significance beyond the Earth and the bank balance of whoever sells these things ... but let's gloss over that!). 17 years later and Belinda is working at a hospital as a Nurse, and the Doctor is inexplicably looking for her. He keeps missing her, even as she goes home, and then in the middle of the night a rocketship arrives along with a bunch of robots who kidnap her, claiming she is their Queen. They also bring along with them the certificate which she had kept above her bed.

These Robots want her to marry the AI Generator which runs the planet Miss Belinda Chandra (so called because that's what it was named - actually the star was named that, not the planet, so presumably the planetary inhabitants somehow knew that the star was called this (on Earth) and so named the planet likewise).

It gets confusing because the Doctor arrived six months previously, and has managed to become a historian of some sort, and the Robots cannot hear every ninth word (!) and so he relays a message to Belinda about rebels and an attack ... 

Ten years previously, the robots went and grabbed Alan Budd, Belinda's would be suitor because she told them to do this in the rocketship and the time fracture and timey wimey. So Alan was made sort of king of the planet and put in a machine and changed into some half (literally) human half-robot thing which now wants Belinda to marry it! Are you keeping up!

But he's not a nice person - an Incel Belinda calls him - so thanks to a convenient duplicating of the star naming certificate, Belinda is able to get the two 'the same' certificates to touch and the resultant explosion kills Adam and sets the planet back to be ruled normally again and for the robots and humans to live in peace. Hoorah!

There's some strangeness going on as well ... how does Belinda know what the TARDIS is called? She seems to pull the word from the air. And how are she and the Doctor connected as the Doctor keeps claiming? And why at the end can he not get the TARDIS to go to 24 May 2025? And why are the destroyed remnants of the Earth floating around in space along with a calendar which suggests that the destruction happens on 24 May 2025?

Oh and Mrs Flood lives next door to Belinda and again breaks the fourth wall, telling the viewers that they haven't seen her.

Visually the episode is a delight with the effects really knocking the budget out of the park! The spacerocket is pleasingly retro and the Robots are nice and clunky. The makeup for Adam is amazing when he is part robot - very impressive.

So as a season opener I enjoyed it a lot. There's a lot to like (even if the Doctor cries again), and Belinda seems likable and sparky if a little complainy and obsessed with getting back home ...