DOCTOR WHO: The Robot Revolution

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There’s an arc to being a modern Doctor Who fan and it goes like this: 1) An excited response to new casting/showrunner news, 2) a season of increasingly disappointing scripts, and finally, 3) a begrudging, snorting, eyerolling attempt to make it through another season. There’s a fourth step of abandoning it completely, and we honestly weren’t sure we’d be back for this one, let alone recapping it, but we have to admit, there was some good stuff in this first episode of season “2.” Yes, we’re back on our bullshit, and we’re not even going to try to pretend that Doctor Who isn’t as well, but we saw a few things in this first episode of season “2” that feel just intriguing enough to get us back on board.

And let’s be clear: we were so mad at the finale to last season that we spent at least half of this episode checking off all of the signs that we were in for more of the same. We tended to be pretty supportive of showrunner Russell T. Davies’ penchant for bombast and nonsense throughout last season, but when he wound up all but telling the viewers that they were idiots for believing said nonsense, he lost us and he’s going to have to work hard to get us back. Unfortunately, his old tricks were all over this one. We could tell from the jump that: “Are you married?” was going to come up again; that the little polishing robot was going to feature in the denouement, as were the two versions of the star certificate; that the constant references to AI were a fakeout; that the boyfriend was the real villain and that Davies had executed another of his tortured word play clues, as “AI Generator” was revealed to actually read “AL Generator,” skipping lightly past the fact that the latter term doesn’t any sense, never mind that the character is only ever referred to as “Alan” through the entire episode. It was all very “Susan Triad Technologies is an anagram for SUTEKH!” And yes, we groaned out loud at “Planet of the Incels.” Davies has always used his time on the show to address social issues, from gay marriage to racism to trans rights. We’ve certainly never been opposed to it, and have even celebrated it in the past, but it’s coming off more than a bit heavy-handed here. Given the show’s lackluster ratings and uncertain future, not to mention the train wreck that was least season’s arc, we wish he’d just focus on telling good timey-wimey stories and stop trying to piss off the perpetually pissed off.

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HOWEVER…

This was a fun, well-constructed time travel tale that laid the groundwork for the season to come in a way that left us a little optimistic about it. Varada Sethu’s Belinda might be the best Companion introduction we’ve seen in at least a decade. She was sharp, funny, kind, prickly, observant, and she read the Doctor for filth. One of the best things Davies could do for modern Who is to break the modern Companion mold completely and deconstruct all the detritus that’s sprung up around the role. He clearly thought he was doing that with last year’s tweaking of the Impossible Girl trope, but he didn’t tweak it so much as yell “Psych!” at the conclusion. While you can easily see bits and pieces of Martha, Donna and Bill (the three most argumentative and challenging of the modern companions) in Belinda, at this stage, it’s nearly impossible to introduce a female companion that isn’t going to feel like a riff on a previous one. There’s nothing new about a potential companion being distinctly unimpressed by the Doctor either upon meeting him or upon leaving him, but what we liked about Belinda is how easily she had him figured out on almost no information at all. “Are you some sort of time detective?” had him burst out laughing in response, but we suspect that’s because he was so uncomfortable with how easily she summed him up. “I am not one of your adventures” is a stunning thing for someone to say to The Doctor a mere hour after meeting him, but not nearly as laugh-out-loud shocking as her retort “Am I six?” when he broke out his much beloved “timey-wimey” or as bracing as her angry “Don’t shush me” when he tried to defend her.

But what really intrigued us was the implication that the show is ready to explore one of its darker, and least explored undertones. It’s one thing for a Companion to point out that the Doctor is dangerous. They all do that at one point or another. But what Belinda did was point out how reckless he is with other people’s lives and how little consideration he seems to give them. Note how he blew out all of the power in a hospital (which will absolutely cause several medical crises) with no thought at all, or how he dramatically mourned Sasha 55 but never spares a thought or a moment, let alone a single, slowly falling tear, for any of the other half-dozen people who died in the same attack. We’ve seen the Doctor surreptitiously test the DNA or check the timeline of Companions more times than we can count, but we’ve never seen any of them make an issue of the fact that he never asks for consent. What’s most interesting about all of this is that the Doctor seemed not just annoyed, but right on the border of being enraged at being called out like this. He doesn’t mind being called a madman in a box – it flatters him – but to be called untrustworthy? By someone he’s trying desperately to impress? He clearly didn’t like that at all.

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As for mysteries, well. We won’t claim we’re not intrigued by some of them, but we’re not going to hang our enjoyment of the season on any of them being resolved well. The Doctor mentioned that he traveled through Belinda’s entire timeline “like a bullet.” “You and me, we go back years,” he told her, although we’re not loving yet another version of the Amy/Clara lifelong companion arc. It was fun to see Mrs. Flood again and we wonder if that means that Belinda lives on the same street as Ruby. That doesn’t seem likely, so the implication seems to be that she’s inserting herself in the lives of Companions before they become Companions. This opens up so many possibilities as to who she could be, not least because it implies she’s a time traveler. The fandom loves to point out that “Flood” is a water-themed name, like Pond or River, but we’ve been bitten once by Russell T Davies and his penchant for silly mysteries, and we’re quite happy remaining twice shy about them (whatever that means). Give us a season where a Companion finally calls this Time Lord on his centuries of bullshit.

[Photo Credit: BBC Studios/Disney/Bad Wolf]

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