Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...
Day 466: The Robots of Death, Episode Two
Dear diary,
I do love a good murder mystery. I think we all do, really. I’m currently half-way through finally watching the first series of Broadchurch - it’s taken me this long to find the time! – and I’m absolutely loving it. Twists, and turns, and everyone is a suspect. That’s the best part: every five minutes I proudly declare that I’ve solved the mystery and pronounce another new character as the killer. If I do it every time we’re introduced to someone new, then the balance of probability will be in my favour when the mystery is revealed. On the subject of which – hush! I’ve managed to avoid spoilers for this long, and I refuse to fall at the last hurdle!
The Robots of Death, while perhaps not as effective as Broadchurch, is having a similar effect. The suspicion is being cast on every character in turn, and I’m constantly updating my guess as to who might be behind the murders. To begin with, I wondered if it may be a robot which has gone rogue (it’s suggested at the start of the story, with the tale of the Voc masseur). I then started to think that maybe it was a Voc which had developed its own conscience (a concept not dissimilar to Xoanon in the last story), and decided to get rid of the humans who controlled him. Then we’re given another piece of evidence – someone is actively ordering the robots to commit the murders.
My absolute favourite murder mysteries are the ones where you’re trapped in a confined space – there’s only a finite number of suspects, and the paranoia all starts to set in. It’s a concept well used throughout literature, and even Doctor Who has done it more than once. The one that immediately springs to mind is The Web of Fear, where everyone starts suspecting everyone else as the pawn of the Great Intelligence. Similarly, my favourite Agatha Christie book is And Then There Were None, where a group of strangers are called to a remote island and bumped off one by one in accordance to the words of a nursery rhyme. It’s very clever, and thinking about it while watching this story is making me want to dig out my well-worn copy again.
I’m not sure who is commanding the Vocs to kill at this stage, or quite why, and I like that. I have my suspicions, sure, but I’m not going to bring them up – this story is such a well known and popular one, that you’ll all be laughing at me if I’m wrong! I love the way that it’s being set up, though, as someone who clearly sympathises with the Vocs, and sees them as more than just servants. I think I’m right in saying that they’re dressed as a Voc when they hand over the ‘Corpse Marker’ here, though it’s surely not to make the robot think that he’s receiving orders from another of his kind? There’s a lovely shot of the killer’s feet moving along the corridor as he approaches the Voc, and it beautifully mirror’s a shot of an actual robot’s feet in yesterday’s episode. It’s little flourishes like that which really help to add a bit more to a story.
During yesterday’s episode, I commented that the model sequences in this story were particularly impressive. We get a lot of new shots again here of the Sand Miner out and about on the planet surface, but I’m more impressed today by the way full-scale shots are being incorporated into models, to create the illusion of a very long shot – almost giving us the same kind of scale in the locations that The Hand of Fear was blessed with. We mainly get these shots here to give us a distant shot of the main ‘bridge’ of the vehicle, and to show a series of gangways, through which the robots move.
I’m sure it’s not the first time we’ve seen this technique employed in the series (though I can’t quite pin-point where else it’s been used!), but it’s being done really very well here. It’s more support for my hope that we’re seeing another evolution of how good the model effects can look in this programme. The only downside is that the same close-up of a model is used to overlay shots of – what I think are supposed to be – different gangways: one with the TARDIS parked on it, and one without. As I say, I think these are supposed to suggest two different locations, but use of the same image of the model led me to wonder if the TARDIS had been moved again without me noticing!
