Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...
Day 468: The Robots of Death, Episode Four
Dear diary,
Crikey – I bet Mary Whitehouse loved this episode! The shot in the closing moments of yesterday’s episode, where a robot’s hands close around the Doctor’s neck isn’t overly alarming (I think being part of the cliff hanger affords it a slightly ‘over the top’ feel), but there’s a shot here as one of the Vocs strangles Leela, and it’s really brutal. Even I watched it thinking ‘bloody hell’ – it feels incredibly harsh, and even though it’s brief, it really does make an impact.
You then have the moment when one of the Vocs is stabbed, through the head, with a Laser Probe. That in itself is a fairly strong image for Doctor Who, but then the creature just continues on, heading towards the camera, with arms outstretched, chanting ‘Kill, kill, kill…’ This episode is surely one of the most striking that we’ve had in a long time, if not ever. During Revenge of the Cybermen, one of the few things I found to praise was the way that the tin men were showered with bullets, only to keep on going – it’s the same thing we get here, but this time around it feels as though they’ve really upped the tension.
Director Michael E Briant was behind both of these stories, so perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised that this is such a strong area? He’s always been a very competent director (There’s a lot of things he’s done which I’ve really enjoyed, including The Sea Devils and The Green Death), but this has to be his finest hour. Fitting, probably, since it’s also the last time he’ll direct for the programme. There’s so many little directorial flourishes, which set this one out above your standard Doctor Who fare.
I said yesterday that this serial could only be described as ‘lavish’, and I think that’s still something which holds true today. After yesterday’s entry, someone informed me that, having been told he’d not be back to produce the next series, Philip Hinchcliffe gave the order that his final few stories should really go all out – budget be damned! I’m not sure if I quite believe that: Though the rebounds on budgets for Who wouldn’t have been Hinchcliffe’s problem the following year, he was still working for the BBC, so the consequences would have found their way back to him one way or another!
Still – true or not, it’s looking really rather brilliant. I always think of John Nathan-Turner as being a producer who was best at making sure that the money was seen on screen, but this is probably the first time that you’ve really been able to see how much has gone into this. There’s loads of the robot costumes – while I’m sure parts of it are clever direction to make it look like there’s more that you’d expect, there has to be a fair few to begin with, just to fill these shots. You really get the impression that this is a world populated by robots, and the idea that they far out-number the human crew (even before they start bumping them off), and they look so expensive! This extends out through the costumes for the rest of the cast, too, with everyone given their own unique (and high quality) outfits to wear, and they’re all such a contrast from the regular ‘space’ design.
I’ve said in the past how much I love the ‘grungy’ look to space stories – those ones that the 21st century version of Doctor Who is so fond of. A world in which things don’t always work. They’re greasy, and grimy, and rusting. It’s not the sterile, white future promised to us in the 1950s, but a future that’s far more believable, and not a massive leap from the world we live in today. This story presents us with a different – but equally as interesting – version of things to come. That future world, where robots exist to do our bidding. A world where the human crew of a mining mission like this can relax in the lap of luxury until they’re needed to do the more fiddly parts of the job. A world quite unlike those we usually get given in this programme. It’s been a great little side step, and I hope that other future-based stories don’t disappoint after the inventive design of this one.
