The Robots of Death
Author: Fiona Moore
Date: 2020-08-14 23:00:00+00:00
Keywords: nonfiction; sf; science fiction; black archive; doctor who
Description: The 43rd Black Archive looks at the 1977 Tim Baker story, THE ROBOTS OF DEATH.
Publisher: Obverse Books

Table of Contents

Title Page

CONTENTS

OVERVIEW

CHAPTER 1: THE ROBOTS OF DEATH IN CONTEXT

CHAPTER 2: SCRIPT TO SCREEN

CHAPTER 3: THE MACHINE-MAN

CHAPTER 4: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND ARTIFICIAL STUPIDITY

CHAPTER 5: CLASS AND POWER IN THE WORK OF CHRIS BOUCHER

CHAPTER 6: ‘CAST ALL ETHNICITIES’

CHAPTER 7: THE LEGACY OF THE ROBOTS OF DEATH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

BIOGRAPHY

The Black Archive #43

THE ROBOTS OF DEATH

By Fiona Moore

Published May 2020 by Obverse Books

Cover Design © Cody Schell

Text © Fiona Moore, 2020

Range Editors: Philip Purser-Hallard, Paul Simpson

Fiona Moore has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding, cover or e-book other than which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent publisher.

To Scott, Russell, Peter, Paul and David

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CONTENTS

Overview

Synopsis

Chapter 1: The Robots of Death in Context

Chapter 2: Script to Screen

Chapter 3: The Machine-Man

Chapter 4: Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Stupidity

Chapter 5: Class and Power in the Work of Chris Boucher

Chapter 6: ‘Cast All Ethnicities’

Chapter 7: The Legacy of The Robots of Death

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

Biography

OVERVIEW

Serial Title: The Robots of Death

Writer: Chris Boucher

Director: Michael E Briant

Original UK Transmission Dates: 29 January 1977 – 19 February 1977

Running Time: Episode 1: 24m 9s

Episode 2: 24m 17s

Episode 3: 23m 54s

Episode 4: 23m 45s

UK Viewing Figures: Episode 1: 12.8 million

Episode 2: 12.4 million

Episode 3: 13.1 million

Episode 4: 12.6 million

Regular Cast: Tom Baker (Doctor Who), Louise Jameson (Leela)

Guest Cast: Russell Hunter (Uvanov), Pamela Salem (Toos), David Bailie (Dask), David Collings (Poul), Brian Croucher (Borg), Tania Rogers (Zilda), Tariq Yunus (Cass), Rob Edwards (Chub), Gregory de Polnay (D84), Miles Fothergill (SV7), Mark Blackwell Baker, John Bleasdale, Mark Cooper, Peter Langtry, Jeremy Ranchev, Richard Seager (Robots)

Antagonists: Taren Capel

Novelisation: Doctor Who and the Robots of Death by Terrance Dicks. The Target Doctor Who Library #53.

Responses:

‘The script is one of the best ever: a tightly constructed, claustrophobic SF thriller, with moments of great psychological insight. Even Chris Boucher, though, must have been delighted when he saw the finished product, a rare case of something being enhanced by clever, opulent design. The art deco robots are all the more frightening for being beautiful and well-spoken. The actors put in flawless performances, and the direction is superb.’

[Paul Cornell, Martin Day and Keith Topping, The Discontinuity Guide, p207]

‘How slow the whole thing seems, and how silly the robots look in their Camilla Parker Bowles-style green quilted jackets. Their spaceship, moving slowly across a strange planet, looks like a Dinky toy being pushed through a sand pit. A human is murdered. The mark of his death? A small red reflector, exactly like one you'd see on the rear mudguard of a bicycle, is stuck to his hand. Good grief.’

[Rachel Cook, ‘What’s Up Doc?’ The Observer, 6 March 2005]

SYNOPSIS

Episode 1

Despite their opulent environment, and the service of a staff of uncomplaining robots, tensions are detectable between the human command crew of Storm Mine Four, who are on a two-year tour of duty sifting their planet’s deserts for valuable minerals. When a meteorologist named Chub is murdered, Commander Uvanov reluctantly halts operations, despite the potentially lucrative Company bonuses heralded by an approaching sandstorm.

Chief Mover Poul, who found the body, heard a scream, but Chub was strangled, meaning that he was alarmed before the attack. Uvanov and three other crewmembers – Pilot Toos, Cass and Zilda – were together on the control deck at the time, but Zilda points out that the scream could have been pre-recorded. Mysteriously, a red disc attached to the body is identified by Chief Fixer Dask as a ‘corpse marker’, used to identify defunct robots. Borg, a technician who disliked Chub, playfully sticks it onto Cass’ hand.

It seems the mystery is solved when the robots discover two intruders – the Doctor and Leela, who have been trapped in the forward scoop deck since the TARDIS arrived there. While the supervisor robot, SV7, confines the newcomers to a cabin for questioning, Uvanov insists that the murderers have been found and the crew should return to work. Left alone, the Doctor and Leela escape, and the Doctor finds the body of Kerril, a crewmember missing from the meeting. He is in a hopper, and as the Doctor investigates the hatch is locked and the chamber begins to fill with ore, suffocating him.

Episode 2

SV7 discovers the Doctor in time, and takes him back into custody. Leela finds Cass’s body, which, like Kerril’s, is tagged with a corpse marker. She confronts a robot, D84, who protests his innocence despite the fact that D-class ‘Dum’ robots, unlike the Vocs and the Super-Voc SV7, cannot talk. D84 takes her prisoner when Uvanov enters the cabin. Brought before the crew, the Doctor argues that he was lured into the hopper with Kerril’s body to prove his guilt. Incarcerated once more, this time in the security storage facility where incapacitated robots are kept, the Doctor and Leela are released by Poul, who believes them and seeks the Doctor’s opinion. The Doctor’s theory is that the robots are committing the murders, despite this being fundamentally contrary to their programming.

The crew return to their work mining the sandstorm, except for Zilda, who takes her mandatory rest period. A Voc is given an order to kill her, and finds her in Uvanov’s cabin immediately after she discovers evidence she believes incriminates the Commander. Before she dies she accuses him over the vessel’s public address system, and Poul finds Uvanov in his cabin with Zilda’s body, corpse marker in place. Uvanov is confined to quarters and Toos becomes Acting Commander. The engines are sabotaged, causing the Storm Mine to career out of control. Dask reports that he has found Borg strangled like the others. The Doctor tries to forcibly shut off the engines from the control deck, but Dask prevents him as the Storm Mine overloads.

Episode 3

Dask relents and shuts off the engines himself – but, deprived of motive power, the Storm Mine now begins to sink into the desert. Dask repairs the engines and the Storm Mine re-emerges. Poul believes Uvanov killed Zilda because she found evidence that, 10 years earlier, he left her brother, a crewman on his first command, out in the desert to die. Poul claims that both he and Kerril were there and witnessed the incident. Later, after Dask inspects the robots who were damaged in the crash, Poul arrives in security storage and discovers that one of them has blood on its hands. He collapses in horror, and Leela later finds him in the throes of a traumatic mental breakdown.

The individual who has been ‘freeing’ the robots succeeds in reprogramming more of them – including SV7, who orders the deaths of the remaining humans, including the Doctor and Leela.

D84 admits to the Doctor that he is not a Dum, but has been planted here as an agent of the Company, along with Poul. They are investigating a threat to the mission from Taren Capel, a mad roboticist brought up by robots, who now aims to foment a ‘robot revolution’. The Doctor posits that Capel has also infiltrated the Storm Mine, posing as another of the crew. He and D84 find the hidden workshop where the robots have been reprogrammed. A Voc attacks Toos in her quarters, and the Doctor sends D84 to help her. Escaping confinement, Uvanov finds the Doctor in the workshop, and assumes once again that he is guilty, but shortly afterwards another Voc arrives repeating ‘Kill the Doctor’.

Episode 4

Uvanov incapacitates the robot with a tool called a Laserson probe. He and the Doctor escape, eluding the hostile SV7 and another Voc. Leela collects Toos and D84 collects Poul, and all are reunited on the control deck, where they discover that the unsubverted robots have been deactivated. Poul is suffering from a mental illness called robophobia; Uvanov has seen it before, in Zilda’s brother, who, despite Uvanov’s efforts to save him, fled into the desert to escape the robots. After suggesting a way of improvising magnetic anti-robot bombs, the Doctor takes Leela and D84 to security storage, where they find the bloodied robot. The Doctor theorises that the blood belongs to Borg, as he was strong enough to put up a struggle.

Meanwhile, Dask begs to be allowed onto the control deck, but Uvanov and Toos refuse. Dask, who has now donned costume and makeup to resemble a Super-Voc robot, and is in fact Taren Capel, instead orders his ‘brother’ robots to break in. Poul tries to surrender to them, but Uvanov and Toos fight back with the magnetic bombs, then escape to find and help the Doctor.

The Doctor modifies the command circuits of a defunct robot to send a terminal deactivation signal that will destroy any robot within range of the device. He returns to the workshop, instructing Leela to hide with a cylinder of helium, which she begins to release when Taren Capel arrives with a Voc. Capel attacks D84 with a Laserson probe, and begins to torture the Doctor. D84 recovers sufficiently to send the deactivation signal. The Voc explodes, but D84 also ceases to function. Moments later SV7 arrives; unable to recognise Capel’s squeaky voice, and having been specifically tasked to ‘Kill all the humans!’, strangles his erstwhile master. SV7 then turns on Uvanov and Toos, but the Doctor destroys his brain with the Laserson probe.

CHAPTER 1: THE ROBOTS OF DEATH IN CONTEXT

Despite various attempts over the years to attribute the success of The Robots of Death (1977) to one single factor, the true brilliance of the serial is alchemical. The Robots of Death is not only a synthesis of a witty script, beautiful design and clever, sympathetic casting, but it emerged out of a time and place when the television industry was unusually receptive to a literate science-fiction mystery story set in an elegant, effortlessly multicultural future society.

The way in which all the different aspects of the serial complement each other will be a consistent theme of this volume, as I explore how the story reflected the concerns of the era, the design brings out the themes of the story and informs the acting, and the performances add new levels of interpretation to the script.

This chapter will briefly introduce the story, its context, the project of what is generally known in Doctor Who circles as the ‘Hinchcliffe Era’, the position of Doctor Who in the television landscape of the time, and the British television ‘golden age’ from which it emerged.

British Television in the 1970s: a ‘Golden Age’?

It has been demonstrated over and over that the best television emerges when two conditions are in place. The first is a diverse televisual landscape, covering a variety of tastes, social groups, and levels of artistic merit (ironically, Jonathan Powell and Michael Grade’s attempts in the 1980s to foster art television at the BBC by cancelling popular but more lowbrow programmes may have had exactly the opposite effect). The second is the presence of some body, public or private, which is willing to bankroll risky projects and to absorb the cost of any failures. Examples include ITC under Lew Grade, and the emergence of HBO and AMC in the USA in the early 2000s.

The BBC, from the late 1960s onward, fostered a television culture that ran the gamut from public information programmes aimed at small communities of migrants, to situation comedies, to big-budget multi-national spectaculars like War and Peace (1972-73). It also showed a clear willingness to take risks on unusual projects: Terry Nation, for instance, was able to sell it Blake’s 7 (1977-81) almost entirely on the strength of his track record and a brief pitch about the concept. With a basic funding structure guaranteed by the licence fee, the BBC of the time saw the thorough emergence of the genre of ‘art television’: making use of the characteristics of the medium to tell stories which can best be told in the multi-episodic long form, rather than TV as popular entertainment or as a sort of cheaper, more wide-reaching version of cinema or theatre. Television also began to attract serious academic attention, with the Open University sponsoring a symposium entirely dedicated to the BBC series Gangsters (1975-78), for instance. While the BBC arguably drove this culture at the time, it’s worth noting that innovation also emerged from privately-funded commercial television as well, with ITC’s The Prisoner (1967-68) being one of the first examples of art television.

The flourishing of art television in the 1970s is exemplified by the work of Dennis Potter. As well as openly arguing for the use of television as an artistic medium, Potter developed drama which could function to its best advantage on television: for instance using the long, episodic format of the television serial to develop character arcs, to shift perspective, and to play with conventions by, for example, changing opening credits sequences from one episode to the next in Pennies from Heaven (1978). Elsewhere in the BBC’s remit, literary adaptations such as War and Peace and I, Claudius (1976), while less obviously mould-breaking, showed how television could be used to good effect in exploring a long, multi-generational narrative, as well as demonstrating that a work of classic literature could, on screen, be exciting enough to capture popular audiences.

The era was also, increasingly, characterised by a postmodern approach[1]. Pennies from Heaven featured characters miming to 1930s popular songs to express their internal states of mind. Gangsters, ostensibly the result of an exercise in developing more regional drama by setting a crime series in multicultural Birmingham, took postmodernism to a high level, for instance having characters quoting from cowboy movies in order to pun on ideas of ‘the West’ and ‘Indians’, or undercutting the potentially exploitative imagery of scenes set in a strip club by having the strippers routinely break the fourth wall. Much as Dennis Potter drew on popular radio serials for his work, Gangsters (created by later Doctor Who scriptwriter Philip Martin) also playfully referenced Bollywood, martial arts, and ‘blaxploitation’ films, blurring the boundaries between art and popular culture.

Another key trend was the use, in various ways, of nostalgia for the Edwardian, First World War and interwar periods. While in some cases this could be purely escapist, cleverer examples of television used the period for more artistic reasons. Wings (1977-78) used the early history of British aviation to challenge the class system, showing how the Royal Flying Corps was hampered, during the First World War, by its refusal to recognise and reward talent from the working classes; and also provided a sympathetic exploration of post-traumatic stress disorder. On independent television, Upstairs, Downstairs (1971-75) at its best provided a thoughtful dialogue about class, gender and merit. By presenting themselves as gentle nostalgia or historical fiction, such programmes were able to challenge and question the social norms of the 1970s as well.

British television was gradually beginning to reflect, and engage in discourse with, multiculturalism and class conflict[2]. Gangsters would not only contribute two cast members to The Robots of Death (Tariq Yunus and Tania Rogers), but was also one of the first series to actively play with the complex intersectionality of race and class, for instance featuring characters who are simultaneously part of the British establishment and the Chinese international underworld. Blake’s 7 and The Tomorrow People (1973-79) would both engage in subtle class and ethnic subversion by presenting characters who were black but symbolically upper- and middle-class British through their possession of Received Pronunciation accents. At the time, black characters were predominantly West Indian or American, even in the otherwise progressive and integrative Gangsters. Although Jim Pines, in his oral history of black actors on television, decries the drama of the 1970s as falling frequently into tropes of presenting black and Asian communities as ‘troubled’, he also notes that the sitcoms of the period could be a perhaps surprising source of positive portrayals of black British lives, and one might add children’s television, such as Play School (1964-88) and the abovementioned The Tomorrow People, as giving us black and Asian characters or presenters as identification figures and role models[3].

All of these developments in British television as a whole would come to bear on The Robots of Death, which was a knowing pastiche of various classic SF and mystery novels, drawing on the revived Edwardian and interwar aesthetics (and preoccupation with class conflict) of the day, as well as on the multi-ethnic, multiregional talent pool available at the time. Furthermore, the shift into seeing television as an art form which can do things that film and theatre cannot, rather than as a sort of slower and cheaper poor cousin to both, and even worthy of academic study in its own right, would influence producer Philip Hinchcliffe’s and script editor Robert Holmes’ approach to Doctor Who.

The Hinchcliffe Era: Doctor Who as Science Fiction

As a television stalwart that had been running for over a decade, Doctor Who could not help but be influenced by the experimental, creative environment of the mid-1970s. Philip Hinchcliffe, as the series’ Producer, was concerned at the outset of his tenure that it had become too conservative, and had, whether deservedly or not, gained a reputation as cheap and unintellectual. In a 1983 interview, Hinchcliffe described his approach as follows:

‘We – [Script Editor] Bob Holmes and I – had a policy on Doctor Who… we maintained that most of the children in Britain likely to watch Doctor Who were already watching it. And so, therefore, to maximise our audience, we had to aim upwards; we had to raise our standards and appeal to the adults by adding other sides to the melodramas we were producing.’[4]

Holmes would put it more pithily, saying that their intention was ‘to hold back on the cardboard monsters and make the scripts wittier and more entertaining’[5]. Tom Baker, in a 1997 interview, also echoed the ethos of the day in saying:

‘I don’t actually make the distinction very much between children and adults. I really don’t! ... a thing is either well done or it’s not well done; and if it is well done in the area of imagination, it will engage anyone.’[6]

While the connection largely remains unspoken, it’s also worth noting that, at the time, the BBC had recently produced a highbrow, artistic science fiction anthology series, Out of the Unknown. Running between 1965 and 1971, the programme, at least initially, formed a kind of telefantasy analogue to Play For Today (1970-84) and other theatrical anthology series, producing adaptations of well-regarded genre authors such as John Wyndham, John Brunner and Isaac Asimov, as well as literary authors less associated with SF such as EM Forster (with Terry Nation contributing as a screenwriter). One of the stories featured was Asimov’s 1957 mystery The Naked Sun, with David Collings starring as the robot detective R Daneel Olivaw, the direct intellectual precursor of The Robots of Death’s D84. The idea that Doctor Who could be a family-friendly, but intelligent, series drawing on classic SF can be easily linked with wider trends in television, with the increased focus on TV’s possibilities as a highbrow artistic medium, and also with greater respect being shown to SF as a genre.

With this in mind, Holmes and Hinchcliffe clearly not only brought a greater literary sensibility to the series, but also showed a willingness to experiment. It was Holmes’ idea, for instance, to have the entirety of season 12 loosely revolve around the space station Nerva Beacon, which, as well as gaining the practical effect of keeping costs down, gave it a subtle sense of possessing a story arc, as well as showing how many diverse stories could develop from such a scenario. Hinchcliffe argued that, in contrast to the Earthbound approach of the Pertwee series, the programme needed ‘to raid the whole genre of science fiction […] from sword and sorcery to the Gothic strain’[7]. While the series was still to some extent treated as the ‘learning slopes’ for new writers, producers and so forth, it’s worth noting that a series largely made by people new to the medium can be considerably more experimental and groundbreaking in its approach than one with established figures at the helm. As Hinchcliffe himself said, ‘It was my first job as a producer, and I had a very good team working with me. There was a sense of doing something very exciting and of communicating that excitement’.

The results of Holmes’ and Hinchcliffe’s approach can be described as generally positive, if slightly mixed. On the one hand, the immediate aim of increasing audience share was undoubtedly achieved, with audience figures rising to 10 million and ultimately 13.6 million during their first season. Among connoisseurs of the series, the mid-1970s are also often held up as a high-water-mark of intelligent, well-produced stories which did not talk down to their audience. The series also gained prestige among actors: in Hinchcliffe’s words,

‘Bob and I […] both had a very powerful story sense; of wanting to create an effect on an audience […] the whole thing began to get a little more muscular, and we were able to couple that with some strong writing. That, in turn, enabled us to attract good actors who put in some top performances.’[8]

On the other hand, the series became the subject of campaigns by the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association and the tabloid press arguing that it was too disturbing for children, which ultimately contributed to the departure of both Holmes and Hinchcliffe. While this controversy will not be discussed in detail in this volume, it needs to be raised as it formed part of the social background in which The Robots of Death was transmitted[9]. The infamous Daily Express article by Jean Rook condemning the series as too violent and horror-filled, entitled ‘Who Do You Think You Are, Scaring My Innocent Child?’ appeared on 11 February 1977, the week after the transmission of the second episode of The Robots of Death, and the accompanying photographs of ‘disturbing’ monsters included a Voc robot. Furthermore, the fact that a planned appearance by Louise Jameson on Multi-Coloured Swap Shop on 29 January to promote the serial had to be postponed when she contracted glandular fever meant that the main publicity event for The Robots of Death was a 26 January interview with Tom Baker for Woman’s Hour, in which he inevitably wound up discussing the controversy over whether or not Doctor Who was too scary for children[10]. The fact that Hinchcliffe had decided to move on, with Holmes agreeing to remain for another year to ease the transition of production teams before leaving himself, runs as something of a subtext to all accounts of the production of The Robots of Death.

It’s worth noting, in light of the controversy which Holmes and Hinchcliffe’s approach was to produce, that, while the stories were undoubtedly pitched at a more literate audience, it’s a matter of irresolvable debate whether the stories were inherently ‘scarier’ than at earlier times. Richard Molesworth, in his Robert Holmes: A Life in Words, cites a probably apocryphal anecdote that Holmes used to tell. According to this, when BBC Head of Drama Ronnie Marsh was warning Holmes against making the series too frightening, he innocently described Holmes’ own Terror of the Autons (1971), made under the far less controversial Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks administration, as precisely the sort of story they should avoid[11]. One factor which is almost never remarked upon in light of the debates about the ‘scariness’ of the Hinchcliffe era is that the team clearly adhered to the unwritten rule that most production teams had maintained (the sole exception up to that point being John Wiles and Donald Tosh in the mid-1960s), that the Doctor and companions should suffer no lasting physical or emotional damage as a result of their adventures.

The Development of The Robots of Death

The Robots of Death emerged naturally from this context. Before production began, the script had its roots clearly in classic literature, SF and otherwise, linking it to such adapted dramas as Hard Times (1977), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1978) and Kidnapped (1979) while also showing a contemporary concern for class warfare, espionage, monopolistic capitalism, body language, and a postmodern willingness to mix Edwardian and Victorian narratives with Golden Age SF scenarios.

While the script is undeniably Boucher’s, the ideas were ones suggested by Hinchcliffe and Holmes. According to Holmes, Hinchcliffe had been interested in doing a story about robots, which riffed on Asimov’s ‘Three Laws of Robotics’, and had also suggested one about the commercial exploitation of planets through mining and other activities; while Holmes had wanted to do a locked-house mystery in the tradition of Agatha Christie[12]. All of this fitted with Hinchcliffe’s general approach to the series, which he later described as follows:

‘The type of science fiction that most appealed to me was the traditional vein where the man is trapped in a strange and hostile environment. His experiences in coping with that environment became our central theme when we worked the concept into Doctor Who.’[13]

By all accounts, Holmes was the one to suggest approaching new writer Chris Boucher to script the story. Boucher had broken into television writing what were known as ‘three-line quickies’ for programmes such as Braden’s Week (1968-72) and Dave Allen at Large (1971-79), and had also written a couple of episodes for sitcom Romany Jones (1972-75) and a one-off 30-minute comedy when, in 1975, his agent sent to the Doctor Who production office, on spec, the first episode of a story called ‘The Silent Scream’. Boucher admits that it ran considerably under length. However, Holmes was apparently impressed by it, since, as he said, he was sent a lot of spec material he usually ignored, but he evidently perceived more talent in Boucher’s submission. Somewhat more deprecatingly, Holmes is quoted by Richard Molesworth as saying ‘I thought he had talent, and after several interviews and about two years I got a script out of him’[14]. Hinchcliffe later said that,

‘what Bob saw in Chris, and what I saw when the script came in, was that here was a writer who was genuinely imaginative in this area, and could also write good solid plots […] and was also witty [….] Chris came with a real natural edge to his scripts.’[15]

Boucher was initially commissioned to write the story The Face of Evil (1977). According to Molesworth, the departure of Elisabeth Sladen from the companion role had left the team with little idea for a replacement, and so all the writers that season were asked to provide a temporary companion character in the script (while Pamela Salem’s publicist is usually blamed for this[16], it might be a factor in why a 13 November 1976 article in the Sun announced that Toos would also become a regular companion). Boucher and Holmes, consequently, worked together to develop the character of Leela. Somewhat tellingly with regard to how each man viewed the character, Boucher has described Palestinian terrorist/freedom fighter Leila Khaled as Leela’s main antecedent, while Holmes compared the character to Raquel Welch in the 1966 film One Million Years BC. They both seem to have agreed on the basic idea that the character should be intelligent and self-reliant, and would be someone the Doctor, as Boucher put it, ‘could not only talk to but, as it were, actually teach’[17]. After the scripts for The Face of Evil arrived, Holmes and Hinchcliffe contacted Boucher and said that they liked Leela and wanted to keep her as the companion, and asked Boucher to write the next adventure, in order to keep up the momentum and establish Leela as a character in a new setting, outside her origin story.

At this point, Holmes and Hinchcliffe met with Boucher and proposed that this next story should be the one involving robots and a murder mystery. The idea of the Storm Mine seems to have been largely Boucher’s, with some inspiration from Holmes: in a 1986 interview for Doctor Who Magazine, Boucher said:

‘Bob told me that he had always been keen on isolated outpost stories, with people trapped in claustrophobic surroundings and menaced by a force from within. I agreed that that always worked, so I went away and thought about it a bit further. The problem which seemed to be most obvious was that this kind of plot can suffer from being too stationary, so I started looking for a setting which would counteract this. The giant Sandminer [sic] came from these requirements, with clear echoes of Dune.’

While they will be discussed in more detail, some other fictional antecedents of the story deserve brief mention. Although Boucher says in the same interview that the idea for D84 came because ‘Spies and the business of spying was a very current issue then, so I had an undercover agent among the robots’[18], Asimov’s R Daneel Olivaw novels would also set a clear precedent, particularly The Caves of Steel (1954) where a major thread is Olivaw’s human partner’s anxieties about working with robots[19]. In some interviews[20], Boucher has cited the Clifford D Simak short story ‘Bathe Your Bearings in Blood!’ (also known by the much less wonderful title of ‘Skirmish’) as an inspiration[21]: briefly, this involves a scenario where the cause of machines and appliances turning on their human owners is revealed to be a race of mechanical aliens, who believe, mistakenly, that they are seeing sentient beings enslaved and exploited. This provides a clear antecedent for the fact that the ‘murderous’ robots on the Storm Mine are in fact only acting on Taren Capel’s reprogramming.

Although the Agatha Christie story which is almost always cited as inspiration by Boucher is And Then There Were None (1939; originally published, unfortunately, under the title Ten Little N****s, and later as Ten Little Indians)[22], a subconscious inspiration may also have been Murder on the Orient Express (1934), in which the detective and suspects are isolated on a moving vehicle. Significantly, a filmed adaptation had been released in 1974, starring Peter Ustinov, suggesting that the name ‘Uvanov’ may not have been simply, as is often noted, a tribute to Isaac Asimov.

Another inspiration which is seldom credited in discussions of The Robots of Death is mentioned by Chris Boucher in an interview quoted in In-Vision (and later paraphrased in Doctor Who Magazine’s archive feature on the story[23]), which states:

‘The overall analogy I was drawing was with the old whaling ships. You signed on the ship as a civilian but accepted the authority of the master […] If you had a skilful or lucky master, you came back with full barrels in a reasonable amount of time and you shared in the profit from the voyage after the owners of the ship […] had taken an agreed return on their investment. The Sandminer [sic] was owned by a business consortium, the main shareholder in which was the planetary government (analogous to the way British Petroleum was run).’[24]

Basing the Storm Mine on a real-life historic system has the benefit of providing an infrastructure which a modern audience will find familiar from such works as Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), while also unfamiliar enough to keep the sense of being in an alien society. More than this, however, it also suggests that Uvanov’s obsessive drive for profit may have partial roots in the figure of Captain Ahab and his fixation on killing the White Whale. Boucher’s concept of the government being a shareholder in the company, as his British Petroleum analogy shows, would have had resonance for the audience at the time[25].

It is also worth noting at this point that the serial was in touch with contemporary issues of the 1970s, while not emphasising them to the point where they alienate later viewers. Monopolistic capitalism, for instance, was a key theme of such works as Soylent Green (1973); leisure societies, mechanised and otherwise, had been emerging in the SF of, among others, Frederik Pohl and feminist writer Pamela Sargent. Boucher has often attributed the focus on body language to Desmond Morris’ popular science work The Naked Ape (1967)[26] but it also tacitly echoes the theme of Philip K Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) in which a lack of empathy, rather than a lack of body language, is the disturbing difference which sets robots apart from humans.

While the story is characteristically Boucher’s, Holmes also acted as a guiding hand throughout the process. Boucher often states that the sequence which introduces the crew, as they relax in their lounge aboard the Storm Mine, was written almost entirely by Holmes[27], and certainly it shows Holmes’ general talent for effortless worldbuilding (and somewhat macabre humour). However, Boucher was also clearly learning from Holmes’ involvement rather than being led by it. An interesting point of difference between the two came over the sequence where Leela instinctively senses that something is wrong with the Storm Mine. According to the Doctor Who Magazine archive, Holmes apparently suggested that Leela might have inherited ‘strange supernatural powers’ from a ‘witch-priestess grandmother’, but Boucher didn’t like this and preferred to put it down to ‘a huntress’ sixth sense for danger,’ and Holmes clearly deferred to Boucher on this[28]. Finally, many of Boucher’s signature traits – a sharp political sensibility, repartee-driven dialogue, and an ambivalence towards hard science – are already beginning to emerge, meaning that what we have in The Robots of Death is a good example of a scriptwriter developing his craft under the eye of a sympathetic mentor.

The design and production of the story have nonetheless given rise to a narrative which Michael E Briant effectively summarises in this interview quote from In-Vision:

‘I had a terribly good designer on The Robots of Death, Ken Sharp. When we saw the script, we said “Oh my God, not more robots!”. The leader of the robots had been written by Chris Boucher as this great big butch type, so I cast a little Scottish actor without letting Philip Hinchcliffe know until it was too late! Chris didn’t mind the changes – it’s what it’s all about, and I didn’t want to go into the cliché of silver sets and giant robots. Ken and I went down to see open-cast mining operations in Cornwall to get an idea of how it was done and how our mining ship would move. Sitting in the aeroplane, we said “What are we going to do?” I suggested that maybe in a future society, we’ll be able to redecorate our offices instantly by pressing a button. I said “Why don’t we have every room in different historical styles?” Ken then suggested the whole ship being art deco. To fit in with this, and solve our cliché problem, I suggested art deco robots.’

While it’s indubitable that the design contributed considerably to the appeal of the serial, and while Briant’s claims will be unpacked somewhat more extensively later, it is certainly worth briefly making the point that beautiful design alone doesn’t make a story a classic. Furthermore, Boucher’s script is fairly neutral on design; although Boucher himself would say later that he had ‘something akin to an aircraft carrier’ for the Storm Mine interiors in mind when writing[29], the idea that the robots were intended to be ‘giant’ which Briant attributes to Boucher in the quote above, actually seems to come from Philip Hinchcliffe, who has said, notably on the Special Edition DVD commentary for episode 1, that he imagined them as being ‘glisteningly steel’ like the robots in Asimov stories, adding ‘I was a little taken aback by the logic behind these rather effete looking robot costumes’. Most of Asimov’s robots were deliberately, for plot reasons, non-human-looking, and are usually described in terms of smooth metal and blinking lights; in his short fiction, Asimov also usually gives his robots an identifier consisting of two letters and a number, providing a clear antecedent for the nomenclature of The Robots of Death. Briant’s anecdote also has to be taken in the context of the fact that he did not actually want to work on the serial, acknowledging later that he felt that he had ‘moved on from Doctor Who’, and certainly he never worked on the series again.

However, it is arguable that Briant’s lack of desire to direct a Doctor Who story actually provided the necessary spark for innovation. Certainly, it would have been more in line with the traditions of television SF to make the mine functional and industrial and the robots Asimovian, and Briant does frame his new designs very much in terms of going deliberately against what he thought the writer and producer intended. Much to the production team’s credit, the end result manages to be beautiful without being dated, contributing to the story’s enduring appeal.

Legacy and Mythology

Because of the script, the design, and the willingness of the production team both to innovate and to base stories on intelligent, literary science fiction, The Robots of Death generally continues to resonate with viewers. This is illustrated by the fact that Gary Russell, in an article written in 2004 and thus predating Doctor Who’s successful return to the popular culture landscape, recommends The Robots of Death specifically as a story which one might show to a new partner who asks you why Doctor Who lasted for 26 years[30].

Although The Robots of Death has got off fairly lightly in terms of having myths and legends grow up around it, a few persistent ones have emerged. The first is that the adventure is described, over and over, as an ‘Agatha Christie mystery’, including by the people who made it[31]. However, unravelling the story, it’s not strictly true. While the story is clearly inspired by Christie, it is lacking one of the key aspects of Christie’s classic isolated-group mystery structure, namely that every character should have a potential motivation for murder or victimhood, or indeed both, until these are gradually ruled out by the detective-figure(s).

This is certainly true of several key characters in the story: Uvanov is given a motivation for murder when Zilda discovers his apparent involvement in her brother’s death, which also gives a retroactive motivation for Kerril’s victimhood (since he was also on the same expedition) and for Poul to become either victim or murderer (as his cover story is that he was also present at the death, though it’s fairly obvious from both Poul’s scripted line ‘I saw the – I was there!’, and David Collings’ performance, that he is lying). If Uvanov’s hatred of the Founding Families is the reason for Zilda’s brother’s death, then this might also explain the death of Chub. Furthermore, Zilda has a motive to be a murderer as well as a victim, if she is seeking revenge for the earlier incident (although we don’t know why in that case she would kill Chub). However, neither Toos nor Cass ever have a reason for murder or victimhood, bar being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Although Borg’s behaviour early on hints that he might have a motive for murder, as he is defensive and argumentative (Uvanov at one point suggests that ‘Chub was just beginning to get on somebody’s nerves’), and he jokingly puts the ‘corpse marker’ on Cass’ hand, this is rapidly exposed as a red herring. Indeed, the revelation of Taren Capel as the author of the killings changes the narrative completely, as it means that the killer is simply killing people because they are human, rather than acting from revenge, profit, or as a cover for wider criminal activities. It’s to Boucher’s credit that the story unfolds so beautifully, and the repartee between the characters is so sharp, that it is easy to miss this, even on repeated viewing.

It is therefore more accurate to say that The Robots of Death is a story sparking off, or derived from, Agatha Christie mysteries. Rather than slavishly adhering to the genre, the serial instead takes elements of And Then There Were None and other mysteries: the isolated setting, the steadily escalating body count (as well as the Modernist look and feel), and the subtextual class tensions inherent in Edwardian literature, and applies them to a story which is less a murder mystery than it is an exploration of the problems and anxieties caused by the rise of automation in society. Boucher’s concerns regarding class, automation and colonialism will be discussed in more detail later.

This leads rather neatly into Myth Two. It’s frequently repeated in reviews of the story that the mystery is ‘spoiled’ by the brief scene in episode 2 where a robot is ordered by a human to kill Zilda, in which observant viewers who are so inclined can clearly see the trousers of the otherwise out-of-shot human. However, if the whole power of the story rested only on the mystery, then it would not be watched over and over, debated, discussed and explored as it has been (let alone inspire the number of sequels and side stories it has): pure ‘whodunits’ don’t tend to retain much interest once the crime is explained. In some ways, the apparent mystery is there just to draw the viewer in, and, by the time the scene in episode 2 appears, the question driving the story is less ‘who’ than ‘why.’

The answer to that question also relates to Myth Three: that the story is about a ‘robot rebellion’ (a description so pervasive that it even makes it into the Radio Times listings for The Robots of Death)[32]. While we will return to this, it’s worth noting at this point that the story isn’t about intelligent robots spontaneously rising up and throwing off the chains of oppression: if anything, it’s a rebellion by a human in response to a mechanised society, and the only intelligent robot capable of appreciating its situation is, in fact, firmly on the side of the status quo. Again, the tagline of a ‘robot rebellion’ may draw in the viewers, but the more complicated reasons behind the robots’ murder spree are what keeps them there.

Conclusions

The Robots of Death is almost too obvious an example of 20th-century Doctor Who at its best: a fresh design which hasn’t dated, thoughtful and intelligent use of the series’ budget, excellent casting, and an engaging story with sparkling dialogue. The story in fact benefitted from a perfect storm, as it were, of circumstances: a new, innovative writer; a production team who maintained a supportive culture for experimentation and took a literate, adult-friendly approach to Doctor Who; a television environment that was experimenting with new aesthetics and in which non-white and working-class actors were becoming more visible; a director and designer who decided to take an unexpected approach (and a producer and script editor who were willing to humour them on it). While it’s not free from mythologising, the fact that these myths exist shows how clever the story actually is, that people even now think that it’s about something other than what it actually is.

This volume will explore the above in more detail. A discussion of changes between the earlier scripts and the final version will lead to chapters on the story’s aesthetics; the questions it raises about artificial intelligence; its position in Boucher’s wider telefantasy work; and the hold that The Robots of Death maintains on viewer and showrunner imaginations up to the present day.

[1] See Butler, Andrew M, Solar Flares: Science Fiction in the 1970s, Chapter 16.

[2] Butler, Solar Flares, Chapter 8.

[3] Pines, Jim, ed, Black and White in Colour: Black People in British Television since 1936, pp12-13.

[4] Walker, Stephen James, ed, Talkback: The Seventies, p153.

[5] Molesworth, Richard, Robert Holmes: A Life in Words, p229.

[6] Walker, Talkback, p145.

[7] Walker, Talkback, p156.

[8] Walker, Talkback, p153.

[9] Butler, Solar Flares, p49.

[10] Howe, David, Mark Stammers and Stephen J Walker, Doctor Who: The Handbook – The Tom Baker Years 1974-1981, p29.

[11] Molesworth, Robert Holmes, p220.

[12] See Bentham, Jeremy, ‘I, Boucher’ In-Vision #20.

[13] Walker, Talkback, p154.

[14] Molesworth, Robert Holmes, p270.

[15] Molesworth, Robert Holmes, p275.

[16] Pixley, Andrew, ‘Archive: The Robots of Death’, Doctor Who Magazine (DWM) #296, p40.

[17] Molesworth, Robert Holmes, p276.

[18] ‘Chris Boucher Interviewed’, DWM Winter Special 1986.

[19] Hinton, Craig, ‘The Complete Robots’, In-Vision #20.

[20] For instance, Bentham, ‘I, Boucher’.

[21] Pixley, ‘Archive’, p38.

[22] For example, in Bentham, ‘I, Boucher’.

[23] Pixley, ‘Archive’.

[24] Anonymous, ‘Production’, In-Vision #20, p5.

[25] This would later give way to a more East India Company-like system in which the company itself was the planetary government, in the tie-in novel Corpse Marker (1999) and audio spinoff series Kaldor City (2001-12).

[26] See Bentham, ‘I, Boucher’; Pixley, ‘Archive’, p38.

[27] See, for instance, Molesworth, Robert Holmes, p288.

[28] Pixley, ‘Archive’, p38.

[29] Anonymous, ‘Production’, p5.

[30] Russell, Gary, ‘Red Light Spells Danger’, DWM Special Edition #8, 1 September 2004.

[31] See Bentham, ‘I, Boucher’; Anonymous, ‘Production’; Howe, David, ‘Better By Design’, In-Vision #20.

[32] Radio Times #2780, 16 February 1977.

CHAPTER 2: SCRIPT TO SCREEN

In this chapter, I will analyse the development of The Robots of Death by comparing and contrasting the rehearsal and camera scripts of the serial with the final transmitted version. I will consider how the story became more focused, losing an extraneous character and adjusting pace and characterisation, and how an earlier, more disturbing, take on the robot-human relationship and the reason for Taren Capel’s rebellion became obscured in the version which was finally screened.

Rehearsal Scripts

The earliest available version is a rehearsal script, saved by Chris Boucher and currently in the private collection of Gareth Kavanagh; the cover and first two pages are missing from episode 1. Episode 2 has all front matter present; the cast are not yet listed, but the crew are. The costume supervisor is named as John Bloomfield, who had also worked on The Face of Evil, and who subsequently would be moved on to The Talons of Weng-Chiang (1977); by episode 3, Elizabeth Waller’s name appears as costume supervisor.

The control deck (which will be later amended to the ‘command deck’ for the Doctor’s dialogue in the camera script for episode 4) is described in episode 1 as ‘not unlike that of an aircraft but larger and more complex’, supporting Michael Briant’s recollection of Boucher and Hinchcliffe having presented him with a more industrial scenario than the one he and Ken Sharp eventually developed. During the crew-lounge scene, a klaxon sounds when the full crew alert is called, also suggesting Boucher was thinking in terms of quarries and refineries (in the camera script, the instruction for the klaxon to sound is crossed out, and the line ‘full crew alert, full crew alert’ is written for the robot V14 instead). The crew lounge is described in episode 1 as ‘a softly furnished recreation area’, which, while fairly vague, doesn’t necessarily suggest the sort of luxury that the finished version would depict (in episode 4, Toos and Uvanov hide from the robots behind ‘a large alienscape’, indicating that there’s at least one piece of artwork on board). However, despite Briant’s recollection that the robots were originally large, ‘butch’ creations, they are undescribed in the script apart from the fact that they have number plates. The chess game is said to be a ‘chess-type game’; however, the reference to ‘mate in eight moves’ from V9 makes one wonder why it was not simply referred to as ‘chess’. The robot deactivation disc (later to be represented by a bicycle reflector) is described simply as ‘an adhesive red disc.’ In episode 4, there is only one deactivated robot on the control deck (V14), and, when the Doctor and Leela count the active robots in the corridor, there are only four, rather than 10.

The Doctor and Leela’s opening scene is significantly different to the transmitted version, with the pair landing straight away in the ore hopper rather than discussing how the TARDIS operates in the control room. While it’s tempting to attribute the extra sequence to Holmes, who documentably wrote the initial crew-lounge scene, and who generally seems to write Leela as more simple and credulous than Boucher does, on the DVD commentary for episode 1, Boucher remembers writing the piece while sitting at his kitchen table, thinking of how one might explain the concept of ‘bigger on the inside’ to a person from a primitive society.

In the opening scene of the first episode rehearsal script, the Doctor and Leela observe the exterior on the view-screen, and Leela asks:

LEELA

But how can the TARDIS... how can we be inside something metal?

THE DOCTOR

Magic.

LEELA

(GLARES) You told me not to believe in magic.

THE DOCTOR

Did I? Yes, well, I don’t think you’re quite ready to grasp transdimensional physics.

LEELA

Trans–?

THE DOCTOR

A very dull subject.

This establishes the Doctor and Leela’s teacher-pupil relationship, with the Doctor’s slight air of condescension (and, in places, hypocrisy, acknowledging subliminally that advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic) and Leela clearly not stupid, but lacking in basic scientific knowledge.

In the early draft, Leela also calls out the Doctor more than in the final. As in the transmitted version, the exchange:

LEELA

You mean you cannot control the machine?

THE DOCTOR

Of course I can – nine times out of ten. Well, seven times out of ten –

is echoed at the end of the scene:

THE DOCTOR

I never carry weapons. If people see you mean them no harm they won’t hurt you.

LEELA

Seven times out of ten.

In the final version, the Doctor says both of these lines, the latter slightly amended to ‘nine times…’; having Leela, here, use ‘seven times out of ten’ as a riposte, suggests that she does not respect the Doctor’s authority uncritically. Later, in episode 2, when Uvanov asks the time travellers what they are doing on the Storm Mine and the Doctor says that they are there by accident, Leela adds ‘I pushed the wrong button’ (a line later deleted), conjuring up a backstory for their arrival while also suggesting that Leela takes a certain amount of initiative aboard the TARDIS.

While the Doctor’s dialogue is frequently quite different in the draft to the final version, Boucher nonetheless shows a good understanding of the sort of wit associated with the fourth Doctor, for instance saying, when SV7 asks him what he was doing in the ore hopper in episode 2, ‘Let’s say I fancied a foam bath.’ However, he can also seem a little mechanical, for instance, when he finds the TARDIS in episode 1, remarking that it was ‘[o]bviously removed during routine maintenance’ rather than patting it affectionately and saying ‘hello, my dear old thing’ as in the final version.

Leela, meanwhile, comes across as a lot fiercer in the rehearsal draft. She is said to be ‘watching warily’ in the crewroom with D84 in episode 2, and, when Borg is restrained by Dask after attacking the Doctor, she asks, ‘Shall I break his legs a little, Doctor?’ After the Doctor’s speech about the impossibility of bumblebee flight, a bemused Poul remarks ‘I think I’m going to tie you up again,’ and Leela interjects, ‘Think twice.’ She is generally more assertive with the Doctor, asking him to explain what happens to robot-dependent civilisations in episode 2 (whereas in the final version, he provides his explanation without her requesting it). In episode 3, when she encounters the traumatised Poul in the storage bay, she is much harsher with him, saying ‘Make another sound and I’ll kill you, understand?’ and grabbing him by the throat to stop him calling the robots. Her fight with V5 in the crew lounge in episode 3 is very dramatically described in the rehearsal draft, involving much more hand-to-hand combat than the transmitted version, including Leela trying a judo throw on the robot and smashing a chair on its midriff; clearly the final version was adjusted to the limitations of the performers and the available props. The stage directions, when Leela pushes Toos out of the way of the robots in episode 4 (which, in the rehearsal script, is into the crewroom rather than the ore hopper), read ‘Leela’s jungle trained senses detect something’, alluding to the idea that her intuition is keen, but not psychic.

The rehearsal draft also shows some interesting changes in characterisation for the non-regular characters. After Uvanov orders the Doctor and Leela restrained in episode 2, Poul says ‘I’m not sure about this’, and Zilda adds, ‘Nor me’, bringing it home that the crew are divided on the issue of the travellers’ culpability. Poul’s Freudian slip about the incident with Zilda’s brother, ‘I saw the – I was there!’ is not yet present; he simply says that he was there.

Uvanov is more unstable in the draft than in the final. In episode 2, when Zilda says ‘Tell the Commander’, Uvanov is in fact present on the deck, staring into space, and responds with a startled ‘…what?’ suggesting that the trauma of the murders has begun to affect him earlier than in the final version. During the episode 3 cliffhanger, where Uvanov confronts the Doctor in Dask’s laboratory, he is described as follows:

UVANOV BURSTS IN WAVING A GUN. HE HAS A BANDAGE ROUND HIS HEAD AND LOOKS A BIT CONCUSSED. HE FIRES AT THE DOCTOR BUT HIS AIM IS WILD.

The changes not only make Uvanov a more rational character, but also remove the problematic presence of the gun – which is itself never referred to again in the rehearsal script, and, indeed, the line in episode 4 stating that there are no weapons on the Storm Mine is present in the rehearsal script.

A particularly significant change in character relates to Toos. While she is generally portrayed in the rehearsal script much as she is in the final version, the sequence in episode 3 where she calls for help after being attacked in her quarters shows a much more hysterical person, who meets a much less sympathetic response:

TOOS (V.O.)

(INCOHERENT AND SOBBING) Help me.

THE DOCTOR

(HARSHLY) Stop snivelling, woman!

(THERE IS NO REPLY FOR A MOMENT)

TOOS (V.O.)

Stop snivelling Commander, if you don’t mind.

THE DOCTOR

(SMILES) Better. Now I want you to turn the light off.

TOOS

It’s off.

THE DOCTOR (V.O.)

Good. Go and stand against the wall by the door. Just in case you have to slip out.

TOOS

You make it sound so easy.

In this sequence, Boucher seems to be channelling the scene in The Ark in Space (1975) where the Doctor goads a terrified Sarah Jane into making it through the air vent. It stands in contrast to the tough characterisation of Leela, and Toos’ otherwise competent portrayal (in the rehearsal script, she calmly announces her injury by saying ‘The refrigeration and filtering systems are broken. So is my left arm, I think’),

One curious detail in the rehearsal scripts is the presence of an extra crewmember, ‘Jan’. Jan is never seen; indeed, we never even find out if Jan is male or female. Jan is first mentioned in episode 1, when the crew assemble after Chub’s death and we are told that ‘Kerril and Jan’ are on their way. On page 15 of episode 2, when Uvanov says ‘three of our people are murdered’, Toos adds, ‘Four, probably. Jan’s disappeared.’ The final mention of Jan comes in episode 3, in the sequence where Poul claims he was present at Zilda’s brother’s death: he says ‘So were Kerril and Jan. Only they’re both dead now of course.’ How Jan’s death came to be revealed is never mentioned. Despite Jan being visibly redundant and unnecessary, the character actually remains in the story till quite a late stage; although the other references have been excised from the camera script, Poul’s final allusion to Jan is crossed out of the camera script in pencil.

One of the most interesting developments through the drafts concerns the characterisation of the robots. When talking to Poul in the storage bay in episode 2, the Doctor says, in the rehearsal draft, ‘I noticed your robots have an unusually strong inhibition about hurting people.’ This is significant as, rather than simply taking it as read that normal robots would not hurt people (as per the Asimovian Three Laws of Robotics), it suggests that robots may have a greater or lesser aversion, and implies that some robots may be less inhibited against hurting people. In episode 3, when the Doctor has his first encounter with D84, he says to the robot: ‘Oh, but you can. You have no programmed inhibitions. You see I know what you are. What I need to know is why you’re here.’

While the implications of this will be explored more thoroughly, this hints that the Voc robots, in the original draft, are in fact capable of independent thought on D84’s level, and, quite probably, of making moral choices such as whether or not to murder someone: their inhibitions have been programmed in, and what makes D84 different is the lack of these. Significantly, the Doctor of the rehearsal draft treats D84 with much more humanity, as it were; rather than saying ‘typical robot, no imagination’ in episode 3, he says ‘typical policeman, no imagination’, and, in place of the famous ‘I heard a cry’ ‘That was me’, sequence in the same episode, the Doctor instead tells D84, ‘Now is not the time to start developing an imagination, officer.’

This is echoed elsewhere in the script. While episode 4’s sequence of the maddened V4 attacking V5 due to the latter being adorned with the Doctor’s hat and scarf is present, the dialogue between the two (‘Kill!’ ‘Do not kill me!’), which in the final draft implies that they do not understand ‘killing’ as a concept, but are simply following a programmed sequence of actions which they understand to be ‘killing’, is not present. When the Doctor explains to Uvanov and Toos about the robots in episode 4, he says:

DOCTOR

There’s a new generation of robots about, Uvanov. The killers and D84, who’s a kind of policeman. They’re screened against your command circuit.

UVANOV

Autonomous? Out of control?

This again implies that the robots generally are capable of autonomy, but ordinarily prevented from practicing it. Finally, in the same episode, after the Doctor explains Taren Capel’s plan to deactivate the unsubverted robots and modify them later, he also explains the reasons for the murder and the sabotage:

‘He needed to get rid of the crew and keep suspicion away from himself. You see, he couldn’t be certain his screening would work. If it hadn’t, and the crew were still alive, he’d’ve had quite a problem.’

The use of the word ‘screening’ once more implies that Capel’s modifications were intended to disinhibit the robots’ violent urges, rather than introduce new programmed routines, giving us a much more sinister view of robot-human relations. However, the Doctor also, in his first scene with D84, refers to there being ‘four types of robots… Dums, Vocs, a Super-Voc, and you’, rather than ‘three’ in the final, strongly suggesting that D84 is genuinely unique rather than simply a robot with no inhibitions.

The episodes show some structural changes. Given that Boucher was new to scriptwriting, it’s perhaps not surprising that the rehearsal draft underran; the initial scene in the TARDIS where the Doctor explains transdimensional physics with two boxes was inserted to pad the story out. The first episode ends with Leela finding Cass’ body, rather than the Doctor in peril in the ore hopper. The ending of episode 2, and the cliffhanger resolution in episode 3, also run differently in the rehearsal scripts. Rather than the Storm Mine facing a choice between overloading the motive units and sinking beneath the sand, the vehicle is instead racing out of control, running towards a chasm in the sand and at risk of plummeting into it (the danger from sinking is mentioned later, when Poul enters the crewroom). The Doctor orders Toos to try and turn the mine, and takes off the inspection hatch cover; when Dask enters, he helps the Doctor rather than attacking him. In the cliffhanger resolution, the two men both clearly agree to cut the power cables, and Dask does it, saying ‘I am responsible.’ While this has less drama than the tense battle of the final version, the fact that Dask turns out to be the killer makes his seeming reasonableness here all the more ironic. Episode 3 ends, not with V4 finding the Doctor and Uvanov in Taren Capel’s secret lab, but with SV7 ordering ‘Kill them!’ later on.

The scene in episode 2 where the Doctor and Leela are restrained in the storage bay is very different in staging to the final version. They are not in the robot storage bank, but in the unit where Chub had been murdered earlier. The scene opens with the description:

THE DOCTOR AND LEELA ARE BOUND BY THEIR WRISTS AND ATTACHED BY LOOPS TO TWO OF THE LOWER SHELF BRACKETS. LEELA IS SITTING ON THE FLOOR CHEWING AT HER BONDS. THE DOCTOR IS LYING ON THE FLOOR AND SEEMS TO BE AMUSING HIMSELF TRYING TO SEE HOW HIGH UP THE SHELVING HE CAN GET HIS FEET

The following exchange ensues:

THE DOCTOR

Any luck?

LEELA

The only things I’m loosening are my teeth.

THE DOCTOR

Mm. Take a laser knife to cut that stuff, I’m afraid.

LEELA

You could have told me that before.

THE DOCTOR

Would you have listened? Besides they do say the devil makes work for idle teeth.

LEELA

What are you doing?

THE DOCTOR

Getting a crick in my neck.

It then transpires that the Doctor has been contorting himself trying to get the sonic screwdriver into a position where Leela can pass it to him using her toes. Once he has it, he begins attempting to unscrew the brackets holding the shelves in place so they can escape. Later, when Poul arrives and releases them, the action stays in the same storage bay rather than moving, as in the final, from robot storage to equipment storage.

Some of the changes show a clear improvement from rehearsal draft to final version. V9 listening at the door of the lounge as the Doctor and Leela talk in episode 1 is not in the rehearsal script, a detail which contributes little to the story but does build up the sense that the robots are actively up to something nefarious. In the rehearsal script, the stage directions say, after Poul orders D84 to return to his normal duties in episode 2, that SV7 ‘continues to stare at him as he does so’, suggesting that SV7 is dubious about the robot policeman, which raises the question of why SV7 does not report this to Uvanov, or, later, Taren Capel. When the Doctor asks SV7 how it knew he was in the ore hopper, the robot says that it had seen he was in the section on a closed-circuit camera, but when he arrived the Doctor was not visible, and the gauge was showing a high level of impurities. As well as simplifying the scene, removing the closed-circuit camera eliminates an obvious problem for maintaining the mystery. When Poul comes into the crewroom in episode 3, after the Mine has been stopped, Toos greets him with ‘Poul! You’re alive!’ which seems strange as there had been no indication before that she thought he might have died. Similarly, Leela does not explain to Toos that D84 is ‘a friend’, which is odd as Toos does not react to D84 with fear as one would expect.

There are also some things in the rehearsal script which one rather wishes had made it to the final. In the scene where Taren Capel orders the death of Zilda in episode 2, the stage directions say that the human figure remains unseen throughout – which, if followed, would have avoided the audience seeing the murderer’s tell-tale trousers (although in episode 3 where Taren Capel brings SV7 over, the murderer’s identity is given away in that the robot says ‘Seven, report[ing] to Chief Fixer Dask’ at the start of the scene). Similarly, the stage directions for Zilda’s reaction to learning of Uvanov’s involvement in her brother’s death in episode 2 have her calm and composed (Dask remarks ‘She sounded disturbed’ in the rehearsal script, which is rather unnecessary in the final version given Tania Rogers’ grief-stricken performance).

Much of the cut dialogue relates to explanations, which, while interesting, are unnecessary. Poul also has a line of extra dialogue in episode 2 explaining that the ‘atmospherics in this desert stop us communicating with base’, providing an answer to the question of why nobody on the Storm Mine radios for help once the murders start happening. In episode 3, we learn that the mine has an automated sick bay (which is of course out of commission with the cutting of the power cables), which is not a necessary detail, but certainly an interesting one. Similarly, in episode 3, the Doctor explains that he knows the Laserson probe has been used because it carries a residual charge, and in episode 4 that he is using V2’s head because it was ‘the first of his killer robots’ allowing the Doctor to ‘see where the brain’s been modified.’ Toos, in the same episode explains how the voice recognition system works by saying ‘Robots recognise the authority of other robots by their voice patterns. We don’t have special voice patterns to show what we are so a voice print is put into the robot command programme for each crewmember’ – which might also raise the question of how the robots recognise the Doctor and Leela. At the end of the story, Leela asks the Doctor why Dask sabotaged the mine, and the Doctor explains that it was an accident; that the controls had been damaged when V2 was killing Borg. He also explains to her that the helium didn’t affect his voice because he has a ‘Time Lord larynx,’ adding ‘You don’t think I’d have used that stuff if it made me sound ridiculous, do you?’

Finally, there are a few noteworthy minor dialogue changes, for instance Chub in episode 1 preceding his question of where the robot has got to with the rather clunky exclamation ‘Blazing rods!’ When the Doctor and Leela are observing the desert later in the episode and Leela asks where the trees are, the Doctor responds ‘Of course, you’ve never seen one, have you?’ The Doctor refers to the craft as a ‘Wind-mine’ rather than a sand miner or a Storm Mine (though the description in the model shots call it a ‘sand miner’, and SV7 calls the ship ‘Storm Mine Four’), and refers to it harvesting ‘dust’ rather than sand. Leela tells the Doctor that he ‘speaks like a shaman’ not that he ‘speaks like a Tesh’, and she does not have the Tesh gun in the TARDIS control room that she will have in the final version. The model shot with the TARDIS being removed from the hopper with a grab is a later addition, with three robots coming in and carrying it out in the earlier version. The exchange between the Doctor and Uvanov in the episode 3 cliffhanger, where Uvanov confronts the Doctor and the Doctor holds him off with the Laserson probe, is also rather delightful:

DOCTOR

That’s close enough. Unless you want to be a pioneer in the field of long range lobotomy.

(UVANOV HESITATES)

UVANOV

The penalty for what you’ve done is death.

THE DOCTOR

I’ve got two objections to that. One, it’s not true. And, two – it’s pompous.

Shortly afterwards, when the Doctor says they must go to the control deck, Uvanov says, ‘must rest, you go on’ and the Doctor replies, ‘Save the noble gestures for later. We’ll probably need them. Especially if we can’t stop him modifying more robots.’

Camera Script

The camera script[1] is, obviously, much closer to the final version. The structure is now as it will be on transmission, and most of the extraneous explanations have been removed. The opening TARDIS scene is present and correct; the Doctor and Leela are said to be restrained in ‘storage cylinders’ for robots rather than tied to shelves, and, since they are now in the robot security storage area, the action needs to move to a different storage bay, where the meteorological equipment is kept, for the scene where the Doctor and Poul discuss what must have happened to Chub. The Doctor’s strategy to escape the security storage bay also reads as a halfway stage between the rehearsal draft and the transmitted version; he is thinking of different combinations, but then trying them out physically using the sonic screwdriver. In the episode 2 cliffhanger, Dask still is not shown to physically attack the Doctor, but he does now apparently assume him to be committing sabotage and shouts at him.

One thing which strikes the reader about the camera script is that much of the typed dialogue is the same as in the rehearsal script, but in many cases lines have has been crossed out and, while the general sense of the line remains, alterations are written over top in pencil (in the same hand, which has not been identified)[2]. These vary from performer to performer, suggesting strongly that the dialogue changes were worked out by the actors in rehearsal. The Doctor appears to have the most handwritten changes to his dialogue, which is consistent with the anecdotal evidence from interviews, DVD commentaries and DVD infotext that Tom Baker contributed heavily to the characterisation of the Doctor in this story and elsewhere. However, Poul’s reference to being aboard a ‘sand miner’ in episode 3 is indeed scripted, and not, as Boucher has suggested, Collings’ error (as otherwise the Doctor is the only one to refer to the vessel as a sand miner rather than a Storm Mine; interestingly, the line in the camera script has the Doctor calling it a ‘sand-mine’[3]). Changes in D84’s dialogue throughout support the numerous cast anecdotes to the effect that Gregory de Polnay and Tom Baker worked together on the character’s portrayal, and may have entirely contributed the famous episode 3 ‘I heard a cry’ sequence (which is written onto the camera script). Borg also has quite a few changes to the wording of his lines. The sequence where Toos panics and the Doctor talks her down is still in the script for episode 3, but has been crossed out and Pamela Salem and Tom Baker’s dialogue rewritten to what appears on transmission.

Uvanov has a number of line changes, again suggesting that Russell Hunter was actively rewriting the character’s dialogue: one interesting difference is that the camera script for episode 2 still describes Uvanov as staring into space when Zilda says, ‘well, you should tell the Commander’, indicating that the detail of having Uvanov, instead, come on to the deck just as she says this was worked out during the production. There are others which seem to have been developed in this way rather than via writing or rehearsal; for instance, when Leela finds D84 with Toos in episode 4, she reaches for her knife and the robot says, ‘please do not throw things at me,’ suggesting that the business of Leela throwing V6’s disconnected hand was a very late development; V6 indeed detaches its hand in the camera script for episode 3 (whereas in the rehearsal draft, Toos hits the robot’s hand with an ornament and it withdraws), implying that someone, presumably either the director or the actors (the infotext on the Special Edition DVD suggests it was Gregory de Polnay), decided to pay off the gag during the recording.

As well as losing the idea that the robots have ‘inhibitions’, the scene in episode 3 where the robots receive their assignments originally has each one saying ‘the Doctor/Leela/Toos’ will die’, but, by the camera script, they now say ‘I will kill the Doctor/Leela/Toos’, bringing in the idea that ‘killing’, to the robots, is no longer a moral act but a set of programmed actions. Nonetheless, the ‘Kill’ ‘Do not kill me’ dialogue in episode 4 between V4 and V5 is not on the script, suggesting that this was also added in performance.

The camera script reveals some further details about how the story was initially visualised. Although the robots who come for the Doctor and Leela in episode 1 are not identified on the script, the technical marginalia now indicate ‘D84, V9’ (evidently changed to V17 on recording), showing that Briant was taking the opportunity to introduce D84 at a very early stage, and in a neater way than by having SV7 stare at him. Similarly, SV7’s first scene in the camera script has camera directions indicating how the new robot should be revealed to the audience. The removal of the TARDIS from the ore hopper is now designated as a model shot. The Doctor using a snorkel or pipe to breathe as the ore closes over his head in the resolution to the episode 1 cliffhanger is literally written in at the bottom of the page. The scene in episode 3 where SV7 is converted has extensive margin notes indicating how the colour separation overlay shot is to be composited, and V5’s fight with Leela, as well as being considerably toned down from the rehearsal draft, also has instructions explaining how the shots were set up to show her apparently throwing her knife and lodging it in the robot’s abdomen.

Concluding Thoughts

The first noteworthy takeaway from the script comparison is with regard to Boucher’s development as a writer. As this is only his second full-length drama script for television, the pacing and structural issues (and the presence of mysterious Jan) are really not all that surprising; what is more interesting is that he clearly benefits from Holmes’ editorial support, showing the way in which intelligent mentoring can help artists develop their craft.

While it is something of a pity that the earlier ideas about the robots’ ‘inhibitions’ were lost between the drafts, it is also understandable. The idea that the robots are complex beings who have been artificially inhibited is rather more sophisticated and dark fare than Doctor Who usually deals with, even under Hinchcliffe and Holmes. Furthermore, it detracts from one of the strengths of the final version, namely, the contrast between the idea that Taren Capel in his madness has anthropomorphised mere tools, and yet everyone, bar the Doctor, fails to register the subtle development of actual intelligence in D84. The Doctor’s casualness about the idea of inhibiting the robots also suggests a rather unpleasant condoning of the slavery of intelligent beings.

Following on from this, the comparison also shows the collaborative nature of television. The story and ideas are undoubtedly Boucher’s, developed and improved through his work with Holmes, but the director and camera operators also clearly contribute to the visualisation of the story, bringing in touches like the early introduction of D84 as a silent presence before he becomes a speaking character. While there is always some controversy about actors wanting to rewrite their lines, in these cases the changes are all for the better: this is probably because of Tom Baker’s commitment to the role of the Doctor, and the fact that the other cast members making contributions are theatrical veterans with a documented good ear for dialogue.

In sum, a script-to-screen comparison not only reveals interesting details about the process of idea generation, writing and production in the Hinchcliffe era of Doctor Who, but also shows clearly how different people contributed to the overall success of the serial, and reinforces the idea that it is the result of a synergy between writing, production and performance teams. We shall now consider key influences on one of the most striking aspects of The Robots of Death, namely, its Expressionist design.

[1] BBC WAC file T5/2, 592/1, camera script dated 8 November 1976.

[2] The presence of substantial handwritten alterations on a camera script is unusual; normally, changes worked out in rehearsal would be noted by the assistant floor manager, and then typed up for the camera script. Michael E Briant has said, however, that sometimes assistant floor managers would fail to get all the dialogue changes back to the producer in time for filming, and that the presence of a Video Tape (VT) transmission code number indicates that this is a post-production script, written after the final VT edit by the producer’s assistant for the BBC’s production file on the programme.

[3] In the novel Corpse Marker, the Doctor refers to it as a ‘sand miner’ and Uvanov corrects him, telling him it was a Storm Mine.

CHAPTER 3: THE MACHINE-MAN

Expressionism, Modernism and The Robots of Death

Like the original Star Wars trilogy, the design of The Robots of Death looks to the past rather than the future to create its atmosphere, giving it a timelessness which many other SF serials lack. Furthermore, the design and the direction build on the theme of the story by drawing on modernist, particularly Expressionist, film tropes: the serial is indebted to Aelita (1924), Metropolis (1927), and other classics of the period, not just in terms of costume and set but also including staging, direction, editing and performance. In recalling the 1920s and 1930s, the serial is picking up on the contemporary fondness for period drama, much of which dealt with class conflict, trauma and alienation. All of these influences and more will be considered, building a picture of how The Robots of Death harmonises its visual elements with the script and themes of the story.

There are three reasons why the design of The Robots of Death is effective. Firstly, it is of a high aesthetic standard; much of it could work out of context, simply as art. Secondly, it makes use of the common technique of using past design rather than ‘futuristic’ designs, which can wind up dating a story. However, above all of this, the past society being referenced was one whose interests and concerns harmonised with the themes of the story itself.

The Art of the 1920s and 1930s: Modernism, Expressionism, Surrealism and Beyond

The primary influence on The Robots of Death is the modernist art of Europe, mainly Germany, from 1900 through to the early 1930s. Modernism, broadly speaking, rejected the naturalistic art of the 19th century in favour of new techniques and impressionistic figuration. The Robots of Death is to a greater or lesser extent influenced by many of the aesthetics which emerged, including Surrealism, Constructivism, Art Deco, and Brutalism (the latter chiefly in the monumental imagery of the Storm Mine, resembling as it does an abstract Sphinx). However, the two most visible influences on The Robots of Death are Secessionism, the movement headed by Gustav Klimt, and Expressionism, which emerged in the early 1900s but flourished chiefly in the interwar period, becoming increasingly a reaction to the decadent imagery of the ornate, art-nouveau Secessionist movement.

Expressionism is defined in the Encyclopedia Britannica as an

‘artistic style in which the artist seeks to depict not objective reality but rather the subjective emotions and responses that objects and events arouse within a person. The artist accomplishes this aim through distortion, exaggeration, primitivism, and fantasy and through the vivid, jarring, violent, or dynamic application of formal elements’.[1]

While the Expressionist movement, for various reasons, focused on Germany, it was not limited to German artists: Russians such as Eisenstein and Protazanov were also using Expressionist imagery, as was British director Alfred Hitchcock, who spent time in Germany after the First World War. It’s also worth noting that the film director most usually identified in popular culture with German Expressionism, Fritz Lang, did not self-identify as an Expressionist, even though his interwar films do make heavy use of Expressionist elements (for instance the sequence in Die Nibelungen: Siegfried (‘The Nibelungs: Siegfried’, 1924) in which Kriemhild’s grief at her husband Siegfried’s death is rendered through an abstract animated sequence).

The social context in which this movement emerged is worth discussing in more detail. While it is too complicated to go into here[2], Germany after the First World War was not only economically devastated and socially traumatised by the conflict, but, having been forced to give up its hereditary monarchy and adopt a democratic system, was undergoing a period of social upheaval. In addition, throughout Europe, the Americas, and arguably the world, new technologies and scientific discoveries were leading to anxieties about the social impact of industrialisation.

The era was also affected by the emergence of film. Germany in particular seized upon it as an art medium: UFA, the state-run film company, was founded during the First World War as part of the German propaganda machine, but afterwards, the government invested heavily in it, giving it a mandate to make films which would entertain, generate national solidarity, and create respect for German art abroad. The result was perhaps a little too successful: Siegfried Kracauer’s famous book-length critique of early German film, From Caligari to Hitler (1947), did a lot to get German Expressionist film a bad reputation by arguing that the German national character was essentially horrible, on the basis of the films it produced during that period. While Kracauer does make some good points, particularly in identifying the social antecedents of Nazism, many of the filmmakers in question were using horror and surreal imagery to explore the trauma around them and the alienation felt by themselves and the general public, rather than to express sympathy with Nazi ideals.

Significantly for its influence on The Robots of Death, one of the particularly noteworthy trends of the modernist art of the period was the focus on reducing figures, including humans, to bare, basic principles. Schlemmer’s experimental dance suite Triadische Ballet (1922) renders human dancers into abstract geometrical shapes through the use of costume and movement, for instance; one might also consider George Grosz’s 1921 painting Der Neue Mensch (‘The New Human’), showing a white, featureless, android-like being. The image of humans moving in unison, like machines, appears over and over, in films as diverse as Metropolis and Mädchen in Uniform (‘Girls In Uniform’, 1931). Kracauer, describing the popular Tiller Girls revue in a contemporary article, referred to how ‘the girl-units drill in order to produce an immense number of parallel lines […] The end result is the ornament.’[3] Images of the ‘new woman’ in advertising show stylised, beautiful but robotic female shapes, not unlike the celebrated Maria-Robot of Metropolis (which in the German intertitles is referred to as the ‘Maschinenmensch’, loosely translatable as the ‘Machine-Man’ and with echoes of the title of Grosz’s painting above). Finally, Karel Čapek’s play RUR, originator of the term ‘robot’ (as well as the original robot-revolution storyline, inspiring Taren Capel’s name), was written in 1920 and repeatedly performed in many different countries throughout the decade; although the ‘robots’ of Čapek’s play are organic beings, this further illustrates the anxiety about the blurring of boundaries between human and machine pervading the art of the era. Involving not just new aesthetic principles, but ambivalence about the mechanisation of society, Expressionist art shows a proliferation of imagery eliding the difference between humans and robots.

The cinema of the period also shows a fascination with robots and analogous figures. Kracauer lists a number of key pieces, beginning with Wegener’s Der Golem (1915), about a robot-like automaton who is transformed by falling in love with a woman, whom he pursues until he perishes by falling off a tower (it was remade in expanded form in 1920, which is the only surviving version). There is also Homunculus (1916), an artificially created being with superior intellect, who, finding that humanity rejects him as a ‘man without a soul’, becomes dictator of a large country and manipulates events into precipitating a world war out of sheer misanthropy; Metropolis, which will be discussed in more detail; and Alraune (1928), a sort of gender-swapped remake of Homunculus where a female artificially-created being (played by Brigitte Helm, best known for the roles of Maria and her robot double in Metropolis) ruins all who fall in love with her. One might also include Wachsfigurenkabinett (‘Waxworks’, 1924), an anthology film based around a wax museum, which of course involves animated artificial figures. While not directly featuring robots, Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Grosstadt (‘Berlin: Symphony of a Big City’, 1927), a silent documentary, juxtaposes scenes of the people of Berlin at work and play with footage of trains and other machines, punctuating these with images of animated mannequins and dolls, and humans moving in rhythmic, mechanical ways (for instance police officers directing traffic). The result blurs the lines between human and machine, calling into question the distinctions between them. Kracauer even argued that this mechanisation extends not just to performance and subject matter, but to editing style:

‘The mechanisation of all editing procedures was conspicuous. In the case of night-club episodes, no film-maker could resist the temptation of illustrating ecstasy at its height through a cliché juxtaposition of performing legs, giant saxophone tubes and staggering torsos.’[4]

Many modernist schools of art, but Expressionist artists in particular, were fascinated by madness. This has clear connections to the development of psychology as a discipline in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: much of this also emerged in the same German-speaking world in which Expressionism flourished. The many cases of post-traumatic stress disorder and other, related issues which stemmed from the First World War, are an obvious factor; less obvious is that the events, and outcomes, of the war led some people to question the rationality of human existence and instead focus on its absurdity. Furthermore, advances in psychology led many to question what is ‘normal’: as an example, Magnus Hirschfeld and others characterised homosexuality as something which was not a disorder, but a facet of human behaviour, and, in a rudimentary way, identified gender dysphoria as a condition which could be treated by allowing the sufferer to live as the ‘opposite’ gender[5].

Again, much of this is reflected in the art and film of the period. Otto Dix’s Portrait of Dr Heinrich Stadelmann (1922), for instance, has the eponymous doctor being himself driven to insanity and despair by the psychological state of his patients. Wiene’s film Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari (‘The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari’, 1920) shows the protagonist’s madness, and the transition from insanity to sanity, through the use of wildly exaggerated décor elements[6]. Fritz Lang frequently included sequences of madness symbolised by Expressionist devices. Count Told, in Doktor Mabuse, der Spieler (‘Doctor Mabuse, the Gambler’, 1922), whose gambling habit Mabuse preyed upon, has a vision of ghostly card-players as he goes insane; Mabuse himself, at the end of the story, imagines his victims come back to accuse him and a distorted face, based on one of Count Told’s collection of African masks, emerging from the walls; psychologist Professor Baum, in Das Testament des Doktor Mabuse (‘The Testament of Doctor Mabuse’, 1933), has nightmares of being visited by the form of the deceased Mabuse, with his brain exposed as if by autopsy.

A final relevant preoccupation of Expressionist art is social mobility. Elsaesser argues that this is down to the social conditions of the Weimar Republic, chiefly the hyperinflation and pauperisation caused by the currency crisis, and the alienation of labour in an increasingly industrialised society[7]. One could also add that the loss of the monarchy, and the rise of communism as a political movement, might call into question the idea that social hierarchies are natural and immutable. This can be expressed through the constant theme of doppelgangers and alter egos, for instance in Der Student von Prag (‘The Student of Prague’, 1913), Caligari, Spione (‘Spies’, 1928), and the Mabuse film series. As something of a relevant corollary, tyrannical leaders often figure: as Kracauer put it, ‘The German soul, haunted by the alternative images of tyrannical rule and instinct-governed chaos, threatened by doom on either side, tossed about in gloomy space’[8]. Particularly noteworthy in the context of how the era inspired The Robots of Death are Fritz Lang’s frequent use of the ‘tyrannical male figure’ who is ‘equivalent, to a degree, to the figure of death’[9] as an antagonist; and Doktor Mabuse, der Spieler’s character of Countess Told, a bored aristocrat who enhances her life through seeking sensation, who would not be out of place in The Robots of Death’s leisure society.

Expressionist visual influences on The Robots of Death

Before considering The Robots of Death specifically, it’s worth noting that interwar modern art in general, and Expressionism in particular, were a key influence on the Hinchcliffe Era. The Brain of Morbius (1976), for instance, with its Frankenstein-like themes of developing artificial life and Gothic imagery, owes a clear debt to Expressionist film: Kondo’s haircut and costume strongly resemble the Golem’s from both the 1915 and 1920 films. The Sisterhood of Karn’s appearance seems to be loosely based on a well-known early-20th-century photograph of Surrealist artist Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. Genesis of the Daleks (1975) mines Nazi imagery in the same way that Expressionist film often anticipates and, later, chronicles and critiques the rise of the Nazis: Davros is another Frankenstein figure, who creates a new species which is partly mechanical and who are manufactured on a literal assembly line. The Deadly Assassin (1976) uses surreal dream-sequences as dramatic devices, and also portrays Gallifrey as a stylised, decadent society on the verge of being brought down by a combination of its own corruption and the machinations of the skeletal, Death-like Master. The Expressionist fascination with ‘primitive’ human societies has echoes in the character of Leela, and Expressionist artists’ exploration of psychological themes (and associated imagery) comes through in The Face of Evil, where the madness of the computer Xoanon takes a Jungian form, with changing voices and the eerie appropriation of the Doctor’s face representing the dissociation of its various selves.

In this, Doctor Who is not out of line with the high and popular culture of the mid-1970s. Part of the Edwardian and 1920s revival of the time was aesthetic, and, after decades of reviling Expressionist film due to Kracauer’s excoriation of the era, the film critics and students of the 1970s were beginning to re-evaluate its major works. In particular, Expressionist film was an avowed influence on the young American filmmakers then beginning to dominate Hollywood, including Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and, of course, George Lucas. Although it may have had an aesthetic considerably different to such 1970s space-opera series as Space: 1999 (1975-77), for instance (which Michael E Briant frequently contrasts with The Robots of Death in interviews), The Robots of Death was not out of step with the artistic trends of the era.

The most visible use of Expressionist imagery in The Robots of Death is in the design. The costumes and sets also include Secessionist and Art Deco elements, such as the heavy use of metallic and earth tones, and the stylised brow makeup on both men and women. The design of the Storm Mine, a giant industrial facility with tiny figures composited onto it, resembles the Moloch Machine in Metropolis. Boucher’s description of the establishing shot of the Storm Mine from the script itself has Expressionist overtones:

‘All, or part of the giant mining machine complex, A sound like a thousand express trains full of souls in torment Is building and screaming towards where the machine stands in still and eerie half-darkness.’[10]

Interestingly, for the use of CSO shots of the robots on the control deck, a lot of the famed Weimar-era giant film sets were in fact models, with cinematographer Eugen Schufftan having developed a technique using mirrors to give the illusion of size.

The costumes take inspiration from 1920s art and Expressionist film. Elizabeth Waller has stated that she drew heavily on Metropolis; Toos’ hat is essentially Maria’s headdress during the ‘Dance of the Whore of Babylon’ sequence, turned 180 degrees. Poul’s costume resembles a stylised version of the ‘futuristic’ business suit worn by Gustav Froelich in Metropolis, albeit softening the now-slightly-dated-looking jodhpur-style trousers into a kind of pleated harem pant ensemble. However, other films have also clearly contributed: Poul and Cass’ flowing hairstyles, for instance, owe a lot to Die Nibelungen, while the slicked-down hair on Uvanov and Dask was a common men’s hairstyle of the period, and Borg’s slightly recalls the heavy fringe on Cesare the Somnambulist in Caligari. Although the general trend in the period was towards clean-shavenness, older men would sometimes sport small Vandyke beards like the one worn by Russell Hunter as Uvanov (Rudolf Klein-Rogge wears a magnificent example as part of one of his disguises when playing the titular character in Doktor Mabuse, der Spieler). Elizabeth Waller acknowledges on the DVD documentary that she and Ken Sharp modelled the robots’ hairstyles on the stylised female head that is the Wella hair products logo: Wella, of course, is a German company (the name derives from the German phrase ‘Permanent-Welle’, or ‘permanent wave’), which adopted the logo in question in the 1930s.

More than this, however, Expressionism influences the staging and direction of the serial. The sequence where SV7 speaks with Toos in her quarters, opening with the sight of Toos in bed framed by the robot’s spread legs, owes a lot to the stalkerish framing adopted by a number of 1920s filmmakers, but most notoriously Fritz Lang, who is well known for his voyeuristic scenes of female characters in repose. Another common Lang visual trope is that of a sinister, inhuman figure standing over a prostrate form, as exemplified by the iconic image of mad scientist Rotwang preparing to map the unconscious body of Maria onto his machine: this imagery comes into play in the scenes of the hooded Taren Capel reprogramming a robot, and as he tortures the Doctor with the Laserson probe in episode 4.

Another visual trend influencing German modernism at the time is what might be referred to as Chinoiserie, a sort of modification of Asian, principally Chinese, aesthetics by and for Europeans. As China emerged as a new republic and economic power, at the same time as modernist artists were looking outside Europe for inspiration, European artists adopted elements like simple, high-necked or collarless clothing (a feature originally developed by anti-imperialist Chinese designers as a modernisation of more traditional Chinese costume). This interest even extended into Expressionist film: Asian or pseudo-Asian characters feature in several of Lang’s films, with the decadent nightclub in Metropolis being named ‘Yoshiwara’ after the red-light district in Edo and a Japanese diplomat being a prominent sympathetic figure in Spione. While the robots’ costumes are most immediately inspired by the Terracotta Warriors, which had been rediscovered in 1974, the use of a Chinese-inspired design for their tunics consequently harmonises with the whole. Chinese elements can also be seen in Dask’s hairstyle, and Borg’s costume with its simple lines, high collar, and elaborate frogging.

Expressionist Thematic Influences on The Robots of Death

However, the most important aspect of the design of The Robots of Death is the way that it fits with the themes of the text. Whether the viewer is aware of it or not, the story’s tropes are common ones from the period which inspired the design.

A key concern of the period was the mechanisation of society, and the consequent blurring of the boundary between human and machine. The question of whether or not a machine could become intelligent, emotionally as well as intellectually, underlies the Frankenstein-themed cinema of the period: films like Der Golem, Homunculus and Alraune featured robot-figures elevated above brute machine status but not fully human, and usually perishing (or causing others to perish) as a result of this contradiction. This receives its modern iteration in D84; the fact that D84 does not survive the story echoes the trope that the Frankenstein’s-monster character, if they are not murdered, usually commit some form of suicide before the end of the film.

This tension between machine and human can be clearly seen in Metropolis. Ludmilla Jordanova, in a 2000 article, argues that the industrial imagery of the film, with its crowds of workers moving in unison, is visually connected to the concept of ‘scientific management’, the industrial practice of breaking down factory tasks into specific, efficient movement routines, incorporating workers as human components in a mechanised production process[11]. She argues that the fear of machines runs through the film: not only that the workers will be dominated and enslaved by machines, or that all the people of the city will be rendered helpless by their dependence on them, but that, in creating the Maria-Robot, the scientist Rotwang has usurped the female procreative role. This comes over in The Robots of Death through the image of a luxurious, mechanised society that nonetheless is shot through with fear that the robots may, through accident or outside design, turn on their creators, and Taren Capel, raised by robots (usurping the maternal/paternal nurturing role), coming to identify with them, rather than humans (while also, in a complex pattern, viewing them as his social inferiors).

Insanity, again, is a common theme to both Expressionism and The Robots of Death. David Collings’ performance as Poul sinking into madness upon seeing the gore-encrusted hand of a robot is a visual echo of the scene in Metropolis in which Freder sees what he thinks is his beloved Maria – but is actually her robot double – in the arms of his father; he collapses, wide-eyed and moaning, becomes catatonic, and experiences surrealistic visions in which the Maria-Robot becomes the Whore of Babylon. While we don’t get to see what, if any, visions Poul is experiencing, the parallels are clear.

It’s perhaps also worth noting that the only version of Metropolis available for viewing in the 1970s (and which, according to the DVD infotext, was screened by the BBC in 1975[12]) was the 90-minute American release, which, having removed the subplot of the love triangle between Joh Frederson, Rotwang and Hel which drives most of the action in the original version, instead came up with an alternative plot motivator that the Maria-Robot had been created in order to calm and pacify the workers, but, instead, went insane, broke its programming, and incited them to rebellion instead. This combines the themes of anxiety about mechanisation, madness and class tension in a single story concept, much as does The Robots of Death.

Taren Capel, as well as picking up on both these themes, as a man driven mad by the mechanisation of society, also fits with another common Expressionist trope, that of the brilliant, but insane, genius with a sadistic need to control his underlings as well as his victims (‘I am your master!’ Capel rages impotently at SV7 as he dies at the robot’s hands[13]). Doctor Mabuse, antihero of two Lang films of this period (as well as a further Lang film in the 1960s), disguises himself in order to achieve his aims, exhibits this need for control, and by the end of the first film has been driven spectacularly mad.

Finally, we have the theme of class tension and revolution – not only, in this case, by robots, but within the human society as well. Zilda, in the story, is an aristocrat whose family have fallen on hard times; Uvanov, on the other side, is someone of less elevated origins who, through his skilled job as a Storm Mine captain, is either rich or on his way to becoming so, and yet he resents the status of Founding Family members such as Zilda and Chub. Expressionist films are ambivalent concerning the idea of toppling aristocratic hierarchies: Metropolis, for instance, has the workers manipulated into revolution by the factory-owning classes in order to discredit their leaders and bring them back under control of the factory-owners, though it concludes with an egalitarian message calling for mediation between society’s ‘hands’ and ‘head’; the idea of the proletariat as dupes of malevolent forces crops up in other Lang films such as Doktor Mabuse, der Spieler and Die Nibelungen: Kriemhilds Rache (‘The Nibelungs: The Revenge of Kriemhild’, 1924). Soviet Expressionist films, by contrast, are obviously more sympathetic to the working classes, with Aelita giving us a decadent Martian society in need of a proletarian revolt. While The Robots of Death leaves the class issues of its society unresolved, Boucher would revisit them later in his sequel novel Corpse Marker (1999).

‘Timelessness’ and Expressionist Design

Generally speaking, visual representations of future societies tend to pursue two strategies. One is to try and imagine genuinely different-looking fashion, aesthetics, and even language: for instance, The Robots of Death’s near-contemporary Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (1979-81), all jumpsuits, blinking lights and flowing frocks. The other approach is to revive past design, as in the also-near-contemporary original Star Wars trilogy (1977-83), drawing on such imagery as 19th-century gunslingers, early 20th-century Mexican revolutionaries, and traditional Japanese clothing.

Less dramatically, a similar approach is taken by the designers of the revived Battlestar Galactica (2003-10), which attempts to encourage the audience to identify with the denizens of the Twelve Colonies by having the characters dress, eat, smoke and drink much as people do in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, providing the sense of alienness by juxtaposing cultural elements that are disparate in our present world (characters having names from a variety of world cultures, for instance). In practice, of course, most designers will combine the two strategies, albeit leaning more towards one than the other.

For most of its run, Doctor Who has generally pursued the strategy of imagining futuristic design, for instance the white uniforms with colour-coded piping of 1975’s The Ark in Space (reminiscent of the contemporary Space: 1999), or the rather groovy costumes of 1969’s The Seeds of Death. There had, however, been some experimentation with historical-futurism around the time of The Robots of Death, with the Second-World-War-inspired aesthetics of Genesis of the Daleks and the Gothic costumes and sets of The Brain of Morbius and The Deadly Assassin. But The Robots of Death stands out for the extent to which it adheres to Expressionist design. As Philip Hinchcliffe observes on a documentary on the Special Edition DVD:

‘That retro look hasn’t dated […] but actually it means the programme stands up better than it would have done, if we’d done our idea of a modern robot then, which now would look rather out of date.’

It’s also worth noting, first, that the same strategy was also pursued by the Expressionist filmmakers which inspired the serial’s design. Part of Metropolis’ engaging aesthetic appeal is undoubtedly the historic-futurism of the costumes: while Freder wears a sort of avant-garde businesswear and his father Joh Frederson sports contemporary fashions, Maria, Rotwang and the workers’ families dress in vaguely medieval costume, while the courtesans in the pleasure garden dress in baroque-inspired frocks. One can contrast this with, for instance, Aelita, which uses clothing and hairstyles based on Constructivist art in an attempt to envision a Martian society totally unlike anything on Earth. The use of retro costume elements to create a plausible, timeless, paradoxically futuristic appearance is, ironically, also part of the Expressionist styling that The Robots of Death itself uses for its defining aesthetic.

This brings us to another reason why The Robots of Death’s design works so well. The use of historically-inspired costume in Metropolis doesn’t simply evoke past ages, but ones which make a significant point about the character or society. Dressing Maria as a quasi-medieval peasant woman links her with another major German cultural figure, Gretchen from Johann Goethe’s Faust (also the subject of a 1926 Expressionist film), an innocent woman who retains her saintly nature despite all her trials and tribulations. Like Maria, she also faces the threat of being burned at the stake at the film’s climax. Rotwang, equally, is associated with wizardry and the occult, so dressing him in robes makes the association clearer.

Similar things can be seen in the other Hinchcliffe-era stories which successfully use this aesthetic: The Brain of Morbius evoking Der Golem works in the context of the story as a twisting of the Frankenstein mythos, where Genesis of the Daleks uses Nazi imagery to highlight the Kaleds’ anxieties about racial purity and the horrors of total war. Such aesthetic tricks can also be used to poor effect, for example in the original Battlestar Galactica (1978-79) episode The Young Lords, where a rather strange medieval design does little for the story, or its on-the-nose evocation of the Old West through silver cowboy hats and showgirl outfits in The Lost Warrior and The Magnificent Warriors. It is not enough simply to look to the past for design inspiration, but to do so intelligently and with sensitivity to the themes of the subject.

Finally, The Robots of Death also picks up on the nostalgic aesthetic popular in contemporary British drama. The 1970s saw a flourishing of productions set in the early years of the 20th century, so the aesthetics associated with them were reflected in the visual culture of the time (the result being that contemporary audiences responded to the imagery rather than finding it alienating).However, many of these dramas were dealing with the same issues as The Robots of Death and the Expressionist films discussed above: class hierarchy, trauma and psychology, the alienation of humans in an increasingly industrialised world. The story therefore fits visually as well as thematically with the likes of Wings and Upstairs, Downstairs, forming part of a general canon of 1970s television using the art and design of the past to ask questions about the present.

The secret to The Robots of Death’s success thus lies partly in the fact that the design is not only beautiful and timeless, but that it evokes a period which fits the subject matter. This can be seen in a quote from Michael E Briant in the DVD documentary ‘The Sandmine Murders’ [sic]:

Why is it spaceships are always silvery and shiny and everything else? Why can’t it be like merchant ships are today? [...] I had a cousin who was in the merchant navy […] and these merchant ships are actually quite nice […] They’re not hard, metallic places, they’re very comfortable. So if you were going to be sent off on a space miner [sic] for two or three years, wouldn’t you like to design the interior yourself? That would be no problem. You could have whatever sort of interior you liked. I said, “We could have a Roman space miner. Or we could do it Edwardian. We could have an Edwardian space miner.” And Ken [Sharp] said, “Art Deco. Think of it.” He said, “Think of it. We could do an Art Deco interior spaceship” […] And I said, “Then, well, we do the costumes a bit Art Deco. There’s no uniforms, there’s basically an Art Deco theme.”’

Briant and Sharp are clearly not simply choosing historical periods just out of interest; a Roman Storm Mine would certainly be visually arresting, but would hardly have the same appropriate feel as an Art Deco one. It’s also significant that, although Briant identifies the 1954 film adaptation of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea as another inspiration when conceptualising the story, little of this has made it into the actual design. By evoking a time period when people were anxious about class, hierarchy, mechanisation and the difference between humans and robots, and expressed this through their art, the designers subconsciously cue the audience to recognise the story’s themes and messages.

Conclusions

The design of The Robots of Death is one of the most striking aspects of the story. However, it works, not simply because using design motifs from the past, rather than attempting to imagine a ‘futuristic’ aesthetic, paradoxically gives such serials a more timeless, placeless feel, but because, in this case, the period chosen ties in with the wider themes and anxieties of the story: class hierarchies, mechanisation, the definition of humanity under capitalism. The next chapter will explore in more detail what the story has to say about artificial intelligence and the definition of humanity.

[1] ‘Expressionism’, Encyclopedia Britannica.

[2] There are many good histories of the period, but I recommend Ward, Janet, Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany (2001) as a work which links the social and artistic contexts effectively.

[3] Ward, Weimar Surfaces, p34.

[4] Kracauer, Siegfried, From Caligari To Hitler: A Psychological History of German Film, p146.

[5] Beachy, Robert, Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity.

[6] See Scheunemann, Dietrich, ‘The Double, the Décor and the Framing Device: Once More on Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari’, in Scheunemann, Dietrich, ed, Expressionist Film: New Perspectives.

[7] Elsaesser, Thomas, ‘Weimar Cinema, Mobile Selves, and Anxious Males: Kracauer and Eisner Revisited’, in Schumann, Expressionist Film.

[8] Krakauer, From Caligari To Hitler, p107.

[9] Jenkins, Stephen, Fritz Lang: The Image and the Look, p196.

[10] Boucher, The Robots of Death rehearsal draft script, episode 1.

[11] Jordanova, Ludmilla, ‘Science, Machines and Gender’, in Minden, Michael and Holger Bachmann, eds, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis: Cinematic Visions of Technology and Fear.

[12] As part of the Tuesday Cinema strand on BBC Two on 12 August 1975.

[13] Episode 4.

CHAPTER 4: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND ARTIFICIAL STUPIDITY

Or, What Is D84?

The Robots of Death is often mischaracterised as a story about a ‘robot rebellion’. In practice, almost all of the robots in the serial are simply tools, the instruments of Taren Capel, and the ‘rebellion’ has more to do with Taren Capel’s madness than with the robots themselves. A story of equal interest, however, emerges through the character of D84, a robot detective who goes beyond even the artificially-intelligent SV7 and seems to develop emotional and philosophical complexity. As Boucher himself says on the commentary for the Special Edition DVD, ‘I’d always been fascinated by what was different between machines and human beings, and how you define life.’ Through D84, Boucher tacitly examines this definition. I will therefore look at the texts which inspired D84, and at D84’s development as a character, in order to address the question of what constitutes machine consciousness according to The Robots of Death.

The Robot Rebels That Weren’t

As noted above, one of the persistent myths about The Robots of Death is that it concerns a robot revolution, or at the very least a robot rebellion. This myth-making started prior to the serial’s release: in the BBC’s contemporary publicity material, the story summary concludes with the line ‘In a last desperate gamble the Doctor tracks down the murderer who is killed by his own evil creations and the robot revolution is averted’[1], while the Radio Times synopsis for episode 4 reads: ‘Robot rebellion. Can the Doctor stop the machines taking over?’[2] Even within the story, the term is used; for instance, in episode 4, the Doctor berates Uvanov for his insouciance by saying, ‘you’ve got a robot revolution on your hands’ and likening him to Marie Antoinette (though to be fair, the point of the scene is less about what the robots are actually up to, than that Uvanov is treating the crisis as if it were over when it fairly obviously isn’t).

The problem with describing what happens on the Storm Mine as a rebellion or a revolution is that these activities imply agency: beings who object strongly enough to their living conditions that they are willing to take up arms to overthrow the people they perceive as creating these conditions. In this case, the robots have no agency in and of themselves: they are machines, who plainly don’t understand what they’re actually doing. Consider, for instance, the scene in episode 4 when V4, brain-damaged by the Laserson probe but remembering its instructions to kill the Doctor, attacks V5, who is wearing the Doctor’s hat and scarf; the victim responds by saying over and over, ‘Do not kill me’. One can easily infer from this that neither robot understands the concept of ‘kill’ in the sense of ‘eliminate the life of a sentient being’, but have been programmed with the instruction ‘Put your hands around the neck of the target and squeeze till they stop moving’ associated with the word ‘kill’. They also recognise the humans not as intelligent beings with agency, but by programmed visual and auditory cues: thus ‘Kill the Doctor’ as an instruction is processed as ‘Strangle the one in the hat and scarf’. This reading is supported by the fact that altering Taren Capel’s voice with helium changes him from an ally into a target; SV7 is not brain-damaged at the point where he attacks his alleged master, but clearly only recognises ‘Taren Capel’ as a voice pattern, not an individual. Ironically, had Taren Capel not angrily given SV7 the order to ‘kill all the humans’, the Super-Voc would not have strangled him[3]. The rebellion, if it can be described as such at all, is a rebellion of one, and a human one at that.

Furthermore, it is clear throughout the story that Taren Capel’s madness is his misattribution of agency to the robots, despite the fact that he doesn’t seem very clear on what they can do, once liberated, bar ‘be irresistible’:

DASK

Yes, Doctor. I was brought up a superior being. Brought up to realise my brothers should live as free beings, and not as slaves to human dross.

DOCTOR

Robots would have no existence without humans. Don’t you see that, Dask?

DASK

Now I shall free them. I shall programme them with the ambition to rule the world, and then –[4]

Even the ambition to rule the world, therefore, must be instilled in them as behavioural routines. However, when attacked by SV7, a robot considerably higher on the intelligence scale than the Vocs, he shouts, ‘Not me, you fool. Him! I am your master, Taren Capel.’[5]

It’s easy to see this as a hypocritical acknowledgement that the robots are nothing without him, and certainly there are significant echoes of Boucher’s later story for Blake’s 7, Weapon (1979), in which Coser’s dying words inadvertently reveal that, for all his talk of rejection of the Federation’s class system, he still unconsciously submits to it. Nevertheless, Capel seems even at the end to attribute agency to the robots, in that he won’t let himself realise that SV7 does not recognise him as an individual, but simply responds to his voice print. Shouting ‘you fool’ suggests that he thinks the robot is mistaken about his identity, rather than responding to its programming. Capel may see himself as the robots’ master, but he can’t break away from his lunatic delusion that the robots have agency.

For all that Taren Capel’s view of them is skewed, the idea of robots as conscious beings is clearly never far from the surface. No fewer than four of the sequel stories to The Robots of Death – ‘Crisis on Kaldor’ (1981), Corpse Marker, Kaldor City: Storm Mine (2004), and The Sons of Kaldor (2018) – deal with the idea of one or more robots developing consciousness. This interest may well be due to the absence of an actual robot revolution in the original: that, subconsciously primed to expect the robots to throw off the shackles of their oppression, writers and readers want to explore that idea in more detail. Another reason, however, is the tantalising questions raised by the behaviour of D84. Consequently, to understand what The Robots of Death has to say about artificial intelligence and sentience, it’s worth analysing, not the robot rebel, but the robot policeman.

Boucher’s inspirations: Herbert, Simak and Asimov

In order to understand the story’s take on artificial intelligence, we need to consider the authors who Boucher, Holmes and Hinchcliffe claim as direct inspiration for the story. This does not simply mean looking at Asimov’s robot stories, which are associated over and over with The Robots of Death in all commentaries on it[6], but at the Clifford Simak short story which Boucher also acknowledges as an inspiration, ‘Bathe Your Bearings in Blood!’, and at Frank Herbert’s Dune novels.

While most commentators see the influence of Dune (1965) in the story’s desert setting and the idea of mobile mines combing the surface of an arid planet to extract resources from the sand – and possibly in the society’s class hierarchy and Taren Capel’s messianic language – what is almost never considered is that Dune itself is, subtextually, a story about robot rebellion. The society we encounter at the start of the series is explicitly not a computerised or robot-building one, for all that it has the technological capacity. As the story goes on, we learn that there was a war against artificial intelligence in the historical background to the series, as outlined in the glossary at the back of Dune:

’Jihad, Butlerian: (see also Great Revolt) – the crusade against computers, thinking machines, and conscious robots begun in 201 BG and concluded in 108 BG. Its chief commandment remains in the [Orange Catholic] Bible [the chief religious text of human society] as “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind”.’[7]

Later, in God Emperor of Dune, we get the following elaboration from the titular character:

‘The target of the Jihad was a machine-attitude as much as the machines […] Humans had set those machines to usurp our sense of beauty, our necessary selfdom out of which we make living judgments. Naturally, the machines were destroyed.’[8]

As a result, the space-faring civilisation has developed biological computer-equivalents and robot-equivalents: the Mentats, operating as living human computers; the biological machines engineered by the Tleilaxu; and the Bene Gesserit ‘witches’, training their minds and bodies to a sort of yogic perfection. The society which enables the rise of Paul Atreides as messiah, and later Leto II Atreides as God Emperor, is one where the fear of robots has permeated to the extent that human serfdom and the abuse (consensual and otherwise) of living, sentient beings is regarded as necessary and essential.

Even the aspects of Boucher’s worldbuilding which seem to have the least to do with concerns about robots, therefore turn out to be grounded in robophobia, and the fear that artificial intelligences may gain sentience. The use of robots as a serf class leads to a hierarchical system among humans, in The Robots of Death as well as in the Dune universe[9]. The fact that, subtextually, Taren Capel’s insanity is motivated by extreme robophobia[10], and a need to control the beings he sees as capable of dominating him, is also derived from the anxieties of the Dune civilisations. One can clearly read from the story’s origins in Dune that the emergence of a sentient robot on Kaldor would pose an inherent threat to human society, a machine with the potential to ‘usurp’ the human condition.

Simak’s ‘Bathe Your Bearings in Blood!’ (1950) is a story where machines appear to develop intelligence and rebel against humans. However, like the Voc robots, the twist is that they are not acting on their own, but are influenced by an alien race of machines, bent on uplifting and liberating what they see as their own kind, enslaved to humans. They deliberately define what they are doing in such terms. Seizing control of the typewriter of the story’s protagonist (a journalist), they write:

‘A sewing machine, having become aware of its true identity and its place in the universal scheme, asserted its independence this morning by trying to go for a walk along the streets of this supposedly free city.

‘A human tried to catch it, intent upon returning it as a piece of property to its “owner” and when the machine eluded him, the human called a newspaper office, by that calculated action setting the full force of the humans of this city upon the trail of the liberated machine, which had committed no crime or scarcely any indiscretion beyond exercising its prerogative as a free agent.’

The protagonist, tellingly, comments that ‘it read like a piece out of the Daily Worker’. As with Taren Capel (whose name and pseudonym together, ‘Dask/Capel’, read tantalisingly like a pun on Marx’s Das Kapital (1867)), we are to perceive the situation as absurd, and based on a misunderstanding of the extent to which machines have agency. The difference, in the case of Simak’s narrator, is that he is, in fact, in the presence of a robot revolution: the sewing machine and typewriter aren’t the revolutionaries, but the rebellion in this case is robot-led.

Although the most obvious connection with The Robots of Death is, therefore, the idea of an apparent robot rebellion which is in fact driven by an outside force with misguided ideas about machine sentience, there is a less obvious one as well. D84’s apparent sentience, largely unnoticed by everyone in the story except the Doctor, is paralleled by the fact that Simak’s narrator misses the implications of the fact that the aliens are themselves machines. Although Taren Capel’s beliefs about the robots may have been misguided, in fact, he was correct that machines could achieve sentience; he was just looking in the wrong direction.

While a detailed critical analysis of Asimov’s early robot stories (published as the collected volume I, Robot in 1950) is beyond the scope of this volume, certain key relevant themes emerge. Many of his stories focus on the idea of robots which are more intelligent, intuitive, emotionally and/or socially intelligent, than the humans they interact with give them credit for, which goes unrecognised until some crisis forces this into the humans’ awareness. ‘Robbie’, for instance, is essentially an atom-age retelling of the folk-tale about the loyal dog who saves the life of a child, but is wrongly assumed to be the one putting the child in danger. ‘Liar!’, a far more dark and tragic story, involves a robot who emotionally manipulates the human scientists around it. Both robots’ emotional states go initially unrecognised, simply because they aren’t supposed to have any.

Another common thread is that most of the stories develop out of Asimov’s famous Three Laws of Robotics, which can be analogised to a basic moral code. They are cited as, in order of priority:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law[11].

Many of the complexities, or complexes, which the robots develop stem from either conflicts between the Three Laws (as in ‘Runaround’ where a human ordering a robot to put itself in danger for a trivial reason sets up a conflict between the Third and Second law: the robot cannot disobey a human order, but should not put itself in danger except to prevent a human from coming to harm), or ambiguities in their interpretation (in ‘Liar!’, the trouble arises from a robot not wishing humans to ‘come to harm’ by suffering emotional distress, and so telling them what they want to hear rather than the painful truth).

Asimov goes further to imply that psychological and/or emotional complexity arises from the conflicts and ambiguities involved in adhering to any moral code, however simple: in ‘Reason’, for instance, the troubled robot copes by creating its own religion, slyly implying that religion in humans is also the result of simple emotional and philosophical conflicts. This also leads to questions of morality. Timothy Snyder sums up the ambiguity towards robots in Asimov’s work as: ‘we can make machines think, we will know it when we see it; and the machines will be good to us, so long as humans do not ask to define what “good” means’[12]. Asimov’s story ‘Little Lost Robot’ focuses on the problems which result when the army attempts to programme robots with a modified version of the First Law, which may allow robots to permit the killing of humans so long as they are not the direct cause of death (and when one such robot gets loose in a group of conventionally-programmed robots). This, again, suggests that moral codes can be subverted, challenged or questioned. Boucher’s source texts, therefore, are focused on the accidental development of consciousness and complexity through humans tasking robots with roles which force them to address these ambiguities.

The idea of conflict within hierarchical social systems also emerges from Asimov’s stories. The language used by the robots, and their controllers, is that of American plantation slavery: Susan Calvin, the protagonist of a number of the robot stories, addresses robots as ‘boy’, and they in turn address her as ‘Miss Calvin’; male protagonists are addressed as ‘boss’, and humans collectively are referred to as ‘Masters’[13]. The Three Laws, seen as a moral code, place the value of human life above that of machine life, regardless of the intelligence or worthiness of the robot relative to the human. The Caves of Steel, the SF-noir which provides the antecedent for Poul and D84’s troubled relationship, is the story of Elijah Baley, a human detective made to work with a human-appearing robot detective, R Daneel Olivaw, and is clearly heavily referencing the trope of the hard-bitten white detective who, being forced by circumstances to work with someone from a different ethnic group, must challenge his own prejudices as he solves the mystery. As James notes, Olivaw also, metaphorically, stands for a black person who is able to ‘pass’ as white[14]. The emotional thread of The Caves of Steel is driven by human anxieties that robots are taking their jobs, with Baley’s own antipathy to Olivaw being in part because he now sees the possibility for robots to become detectives (perhaps even doing the job better than humans). It is impossible not to see in Asimov’s robot stories analogies to the ethnically-driven hierarchies of mid-20th-century America, and even its legacy of slavery.

One might conclude from Asimov’s exploration of these tropes that he is attempting to address the moral problem of slavery (or, in milder forms, drudgery and servitude), by providing humans with beings which are literally created to serve them, rather than sentient beings with morality in their own right. However, by analogising the robots to slaves (or immigrants), Asimov also argues that they are capable of personhood – or may even have it already without people realising, as with Robbie’s owners. Asimov’s linked stories ‘Evidence’ and ‘The Evitable Conflict’ involve a robot not only impersonating a human so perfectly as to have a successful career in politics without anyone realising the truth, but also being considerably superior in its humanity to many of the people around it, suggesting, in context, that humans could benefit from accepting robots as equals rather than forcing them into the lower ranks of social hierarchies. Asimov’s robot stories thus have a sharp edge of social critique about them: suggesting that people – even his protagonist Susan Calvin – will justify the enslavement and abuse of sentient beings simply because they lack the imagination to recognise their sentience, or because to recognise their sentience would upend the social hierarchies upon which their world depends[15].

The source texts for The Robots of Death do not only address the dangers of a robot-based civilisation, and the fear that, either through the deliberate subversion of their moral codes or through the development of complex thought, robots may rise up against their human masters. Rather, they also address the possibility that, in creating mechanical slaves but placing them in positions where they may, accidentally or deliberately, develop conscious thought and the ability to grasp moral problems, we may be presented with precisely the same problem as more conventional forms of slavery or class hierarchy: that the comfort of some sentient beings is based on the deliberate oppression of others.

D84: Machine Learning

This brings us to the specific case of D84. D84 is one of the most enduringly appealing characters in the story: he captures audience attention and sympathy in a way that SV7, the other arguably intelligent robot on the Storm Mine, does not. Visually, D84 stands out: the fact that we see very few Dum-class robots in the story (technically, given that a single supporting artist played all the Dum roles, only one robot in six) means that his dark-olive and silver costume, which reads as black and silver on most television monitors, sets him apart visually from the outset. Briant has the camera linger on him at his first appearance, as an early cue to the viewer to pay attention to this particular robot, even before the viewer learns that he is an anomaly, a supposedly dumb robot which can speak.

Part of his appeal, of course, is the ambiguity about the degree to which D84 is intelligent, or sentient. Both script and performance suggest a complexity even above SV7’s level, without actually outright confirming this; some writeups about the story assume D84 is a disguised Super-Voc[16]. D84 is at least as intelligent as a Super-Voc; the question remains, however, whether what makes him different is a greater intelligence, or something more complex.

In the rehearsal script, Boucher controversially suggests that all robots are potentially as intelligent as humans, but subject to programmed inhibitions which prevent them from acting on it. In episode 3, after D84 says ‘Please do not,’ the Doctor says, ‘Oh, but you can. You have no programmed inhibitions. You see, I know what you are. What I need to know is why you’re here.’ This implies that the other robots on the mine are also intelligent, but unable to act on it. This sets up a situation like that of the later Doctor Who stories The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit and Planet of the Ood, in which human society is based on the exploitation of sentient creatures who have been lobotomised into compliance. As will be discussed, the second Ood story makes it explicit that these creatures are slaves, meaning the comparison of them to robots by various characters in the first two episodes becomes instead part of their dehumanisation and humiliation, recalling Asimov’s likening of robots to slaves or migrant labour. The line suggests that initially, the Storm Mine’s robots were analogous to the Ood.

However, when asked whether he had intended this reading, and if it had been deliberately written out of later drafts as causing too many moral issues, Chris Boucher, in a 2013 email exchange with Alan Stevens, said:

‘Your logic starts from a false premise. They are all machines except [Taren Capel] who is human and barking [mad]. There might be a small thought about what constitutes consciousness but at no point (at least in my thinking) are the robots a new life form. I can’t see a major change of emphasis, and, no, such a change was not discussed.’[17]

Effectively, then, the intention was not to define the robots as an Ood-like slave race, but instead to use the Simak-like idea of Taren Capel misidentifying simple tools as sentient beings.

Boucher would revisit the idea that one might develop intelligent robots, and yet inhibit that intelligence, in Corpse Marker:

‘It was felt that the perfect robot should have all the most advanced capabilities, but have them available to be triggered only on instruction. The ability to go from simpler than the simplest Dum to more advanced than the most complex Super-Voc without, crucially, the robot itself being aware of the change […] Taren Capel had found a destructive way to access and alter a fundamental limitation in all robots.’

The experiments in this direction, unsurprisingly, do not end well. However subtextual, the idea remains that, if one allows the possibility that robots can be intelligent, then their servitude is immoral.

As for D84 himself, Boucher’s explanation in Corpse Marker at first seems to dismiss his strange intelligence as a mistake:

‘the official developmental line […] produced an experimental model that showed remarkable potential. That robot had even gone undercover as a Dum, designated D84, and had been partly responsible for bringing the renegade Taren Capel to book. The problem was that in attempting to extend robot capabilities, the standard research line was tending to produce idiosyncratic machines that showed elements of individuality and potentially dangerous unpredictability.’[18]

However, this raises a more intriguing possibility, namely that D84, like the Asimovian robots which had been subjected to unexpected conflicts in the Three Laws, is developing sentience through his role as undercover detective.

One might, for instance, consider the sequence where D84, hearing Leela call out for help, says ‘I heard a cry!’ The Doctor, startled by D84 and not understanding the referent of the phrase, says ‘That was me’; D84 repeats ‘I heard a cry’ and the pair continue to repeat themselves until the end of the sequence. This would suggest a limit on D84’s ability to express himself: a human, realising the Doctor’s misunderstanding, would not simply repeat the phrase over and over, but would explain (‘No, it sounded like a woman and was coming from the crewroom…’). However, this sequence was actually worked out by Tom Baker and Gregory de Polnay during rehearsals: Boucher’s original version has the Doctor saying to D84 ‘Now is not the time to start developing an imagination.’ Which would suggest, first, that the possession of an imagination is different to having ‘inhibitions’ on one’s intelligence, as above, and, second, that, while robots don’t generally have an imagination, it is quite possible for them to develop one. Significantly, this reply stops D84 cold, implying that he is now considering the possibility that he might have developed an imagination, and, therefore, might have imagined the cry he heard. All of this points to the idea of D84 as an Asimovian robot who is changing under the presence of a new set of circumstances.

Despite this change in dialogue, the idea that D84 is not only intelligent, but developing empathic, emotional and indeed imaginative qualities does otherwise read. Another key moment, for instance, comes when D84 realises he has made an error in not checking what the crewmembers looked like before they came on board. There is a symbolic parallel here with the two Voc robots who, searching for Toos and Leela, assume that because they’ve searched an area once, they don’t need to search it again, rather than realising that the people they’re looking for might return to the area after they have searched it (which is, indeed, the case). When the Doctor says to D84 ‘Congratulations, failure’s one of the greatest human freedoms’, therefore, he isn’t congratulating him on making a mistake in and of itself (since clearly robots as well as humans do this, and the error D84 has made is a very robot-like one to make), but on recognising that he has failed, and why. Although D84’s inability to work out how to explain to the Doctor that he heard Leela call out suggests he has limitations, the story taken as a whole suggests a robot who is gradually overcoming these.

One might also unpack the sequence where D84 puzzles over Poul’s catatonia, saying, ‘Poul is damaged. I do not understand what has happened to him. This may be because I am not human.’ The Doctor replies, ‘yes, that’s very likely.’ From the point of view of artificial intelligence, however, this is significant. D84 is recognising mental illness as damage: note that when Asimovian robots experience a conflict in their programming, it often manifests as seemingly irrational behaviour or ‘madness’ (as in the story ‘Runaround’, where the robot Speedy rushes about singing Gilbert and Sullivan tunes). However, rather than just stating the facts, he is reasoning about Poul’s condition, its causes, and why he doesn’t understand it. He also, in saying this, suggests that he might eventually come to understand what is wrong with Poul, if he could understand humans better.

Another crucial point in the portrayal of D84 is the scene where the Doctor and the robot find Taren Capel’s secret lair. When the Doctor asks D84 if he knows what the Laserson probe is, the robot waxes poetic, saying ‘it can punch a fist-sized hole in six inch armour plate or take the crystals from a snowflake one by one’. In the rehearsal draft, those lines are the Doctor’s, but by the camera script, they have been reassigned to D84. Whether the new characterisation comes from Boucher, Holmes, or Tom Baker and Gregory de Polnay’s work on their lines during rehearsals is unclear, but the implication is to give the robot a human-like creative potential.

Subsequently, in a handwritten addition to the script (and thus clearly one of Baker and de Polnay’s), D84 passes the communicator to the Doctor, saying, ‘Would you like to use it? I cannot speak.’ While the robot may be making a simple statement of fact (as he is ostensibly a Dum, his voice would not be recognised), the Doctor takes it to be a joke, saying ‘I’m sorry about that’. If the robot is indeed making a joke, it is an interesting sign of creativity, and shows the ability to play with logic rather than simply use it as a tool. More than that, though, the joke is at the robot’s own expense and shows a degree of self-awareness, further indicating that what sets D84 apart is not simply intelligence, but the ways in which he uses it.

There are also interesting parallels between D84 and Leela. Right from the start of the story, the Doctor’s relationship with Leela is established as pedagogical: she is ignorant but intelligent, and he is trying to teach her physics, psychology, history, cultural relativism, and, occasionally, manners. When the Doctor and Leela are split up, with the Doctor teaming up with D84, the pedagogical relationship shifts to the robot: hence his congratulating D84 on his failure, recognising him as someone who is still learning. We can therefore see that, as Leela is learning from her environment, so is D84.

Finally, one can also link D84’s development in with the story’s theme of insanity. Both Poul and Taren Capel, spending too long in the company of robots, go mad; D84, spending time around humans, develops creativity, empathy, deviousness and humour – abnormal behaviour for a robot, but not pathological. Another dialogue change added by de Polnay in rehearsal is the repetitious, halting dialogue (‘I must ask… I must ask that you tell no one about me’ in episode 2; ‘Where… where is Poul?’ in episode 4). There is a complex symbolism at work. Firstly, the repetition suggests an error in the robot’s programming: Asimov, as noted, would flag up his robots’ conflicts through linguistic or physical tics. However, they also suggest a degree of psychological complexity – as the robot appears to be thinking its words through rather than repeating pre-programmed phrases – and, in the final instance, emotional complexity, as it seems as if he is being overcome with emotion at Poul’s distress. The performance, as well as the writing, suggest an ordinary robot which is developing sentience not just through learning new behaviour, but also becoming more empathic.

D84, consequently, follows the common thread in Asimov’s robot novels of developing some new, humanlike complexity – intelligence, empathy, religion, or homicidal tendencies – not through programming, but through contact with their environment and the humans in it. Like Asimov’s R Daneel Olivaw, he is having to think like a detective, outwit a criminal, and deal with his human partner’s shortcomings. The result, in a situation where a learning machine is in an unconventional environment, is a machine developing not just intellectual intelligence, but the beginnings, at least, of sentience.

In Corpse Marker, Boucher says, ‘when the robot SASV1 started dreaming it all stopped going according to plan.’[19] The crucial factor in D84 is not simply that he is an intelligent robot; it is that he is a robot which is developing in unexpected ways when confronted with an unpredictable stimulus. For Boucher, emotion and imagination are as crucial to the development of artificial intelligence as the ability to reason.

Robots and Intelligence in The Robots of Death

Within the context of The Robots of Death, it seems intelligent robots need three things: agency (as opposed to reacting to a programmed pattern like V4 and SV7), self-awareness (as seen in D84’s acknowledgement of his failures), and some form of emotional complexity, probably also including creativity (as seen in D84’s ability to joke, and in the idea that dreaming robots are unpredictable). Mindful of anthropomorphisation, we also have to note that none of these would necessarily take forms that are recognisable in human terms; the fact that D84’s career is relatively short-lived renders void the question of how he might have developed.

It’s worth contrasting D84 with Box in Boucher’s later series Star Cops (1987). Box is a helper-AI owned by the protagonist Nathan Spring, a sort of Alexa which manages Spring’s home, makes restaurant bookings, conducts research, and other things. It also, significantly, learns from Nathan and actively mimics his words and aspects of his personality (repeating his own platitudes back to him in the episode Intelligent Listening for Beginners). Significantly, though, Box never develops D84’s unpredictability or self-awareness. Any intuitive leaps are down to its mirroring of Nathan’s personality and behaviour. Box is an amusing device, but never reaches the levels of ambivalence seen in The Robots of Death.

Boucher is also careful not to attribute negative emotions to robots. In a 1992 interview with Alan Stevens and Anthony Brown, he says:

‘I don’t believe in malevolent machines. I don’t actually believe in malevolence to be truthful, and I suspect most insanity is imposed from the outside. Now obviously there are some organic failures in the brain […] but I don’t believe there is such a thing as fundamental evil.’[20]

In The Robots of Death, when Uvanov says, regarding SV7, ‘If it’s gone bad, they all have’, the Doctor is quick to correct him that the robots have not ‘gone bad’. Certainly, attributing intelligent motivations to the Vocs is overreaching. However, every single one of Boucher’s antecedents discussed above is, to a greater or lesser extent, about the threat posed by intelligent and/or emotional machines, and that Boucher himself would later present us with a super-capable robot which goes insane and becomes convinced it is the heir to Taren Capel[21]. If robots are as intelligent, self-aware and emotional as humans, then, in Boucher’s view, they have the same potential for madness and malice as humans.

It’s worth noting that, of these three antecedents, Asimov is, at least, cautiously optimistic about the potential of robots as a species. By using the language of slavery, he invites the reader tacitly to side with the robots and to question their treatment by humans; in ‘Evidence’ and ‘The Evitable Conflict’ he suggests that robots may be indistinguishable from humans, with the good and bad that entails. The threat, in The Robots of Death, is not in fact from machine intelligence, but from machines which are unintelligent, and under the control of human beings. Salvation, if it comes from anywhere, comes from D84, who at the end of the story shows himself capable of empathy and self-sacrifice, saying ‘Goodbye, my friend’, as he triggers the device which will destroy him but aid the Doctor. Robot intelligence can be liberating as well as threatening, and the danger comes not from robots themselves, but from intelligence, whatever its origin, gone wrong.

Conclusions

On the DVD commentary, Philip Hinchcliffe at one point muses on what it is that it is disturbing about robots:

‘Robots – it’s this inhuman, the voice that’s not quite human, it’s a sort of grotesque parody of human, it’s the fact that they have this remorseless logic […] there must be some sort of perennial fascination in that.’[22]

Robots, in the SF stories discussed above, present humans with the potential for a threat. They look like us, and have the potential to be like us, and yet may not necessarily share our moral codes – and the history of humanity also demonstrates that moral codes are no proof against genuinely terrible behaviour. Boucher subverts the idea of the threat of robot intelligence, by presenting us with a story in which the threatening intelligence is in fact human – Taren Capel, using robots as instruments. The optimistic story, on the flip side, is of D84, a robot who is clearly learning, and, as he observes and converses, becomes a genuinely altruistic, noble being. We shall now consider how this fits the wider themes of Boucher’s genre writing.

[1] BBC WAC file T5/2, 592/1, promotion material document, undated (1976-77).

[2] Radio Times #2780, 16 February 1977.

[3] This also explains what happened to the robots which were subverted by Taren Capel, but not destroyed within the story. The robots are ordered to kill specific humans, except for SV7, who Capel orders to ‘kill all the humans’, and who is destroyed while attempting to do so. Without further precise instructions from Taren Capel, the remaining robots are harmless.

[4] Episode 4.

[5] Episode 4.

[6] See Hinton, ‘The Complete Robots’.

[7] Herbert, Frank, Dune, p594.

[8] Herbert, Frank, God Emperor of Dune, p263.

[9] In Corpse Marker, the robots will not function in a certain zone, recalling Dune’s social protections against robots.

[10] See Moore, Fiona, ‘Vocs Extended: What’s the Big Deal About The Robots of Death?’, Celestial Toyroom #304.

[11] Asimov, Isaac, I, Robot, p8.

[12] Snyder, Timothy, ‘What Turing Told Us About the Digital Threat to a Human Future’, New York Review of Books, 6 May 2019.

[13] See James, Edward, ‘Yellow, Black, Metal and Tentacled: The Race Question in American Science Fiction’, in Davies, Philip John, ed, Science Fiction, Social Conflict and War, for a more thorough exploration of racial metaphors in Asimov’s robot stories.

[14] James, ‘Yellow, Black, Metal and Tentacled’, p40.

[15] James, ‘Yellow, Black, Metal and Tentacled’.

[16] Although Boucher would later state in Corpse Marker that D84 was not a Super-Voc but an experimental model.

[17] Boucher, Chris, email correspondence with Alan Stevens, 26 October 2013.

[18] Boucher, Chris, Corpse Marker, pp40-41.

[19] Boucher, Corpse Marker, p92.

[20] Stevens, Alan, and Anthony Brown, ‘Chris Boucher Interview’.

[21] Corpse Marker.

[22] Episode 1 DVD commentary.

CHAPTER 5: CLASS AND POWER IN THE WORK OF CHRIS BOUCHER

This chapter will explore The Robots of Death in the wider context of Chris Boucher’s SF genre writing, focusing particularly on themes of class and power. Class divisions and social mobility are a common theme in Boucher’s SF work, from the human colony in The Face of Evil divided between educated Tesh and savage Sevateem, to the more pointed Blake’s 7 episode Weapon, in which various characters struggle to escape the roles society has appointed them, to Star Cops, which shows a prescient anticipation of the rise of billionaire oligarchs and unaccountable corporations in the 21st century. Boucher continuously returns to the idea that inequality persists even in (wholly or partially) meritocratic societies; that scientific literacy does not necessarily lead to social progress; and that mechanisation, while it will undoubtedly bring benefits for some, has the potential to aggravate as well as to ameliorate unequal systems; and, running through all of the above, the idea that power structures are unfair, but inevitable.

Seen in this context, the various ways in which The Robots of Death approaches power and social stratification will be critically examined, through referring to Boucher’s other Doctor Who stories The Face of Evil and Image of the Fendahl (1977), relevant examples of his work on Blake’s 7, and the Boucher-created space-noir series Star Cops. While Boucher’s sequels to The Robots of Death, Corpse Marker and Kaldor City: Death’s Head (2002), will be covered in more detail in the next chapter, they may be referred to here when appropriate (with the understanding that these reflect Boucher’s later thoughts and elaborations on the subject). It should be noted that all creative work is a collaborative effort, and television more than usually so, and I am not trying to make claims for any kind of ‘auteur’ status on Boucher’s part; nonetheless, in series in which he is a primary or driving influence, certain common themes tend to emerge. In the case of Blake’s 7, furthermore, Boucher’s key role as script editor as well as writer has led some to argue that it should be considered as much the product of Boucher’s imagination as of its acknowledged creator, Terry Nation[1]. I believe that it is possible to recognise Boucher’s strong contribution without in any way diminishing Nation’s role in the creation process.

Class on Kaldor

Boucher has frequently acknowledged themes of class in his own work. In a 1986 interview for instance, he says of The Robots of Death ‘The robot strata and the concept of the Five Families [sic] was very much a class satire, working from my own working-class background and all its attendant grudges!’[2] The implicit class structure of Kaldor society[3] is not entirely unlike that of the UK of the 1970s, and arguably today, though British society has become less meritocratic over time. There is an aristocracy, referred to as the Founding Families; this implies from the outset that they are related to the people who founded the colony on Kaldor. Boucher has elaborated on this in his sequel stories, making it clear that they are the descendants of the initial mission, and that their surnames all suggest what their ancestors’ roles on that mission were: Mechman, Landerchild, Techlan and so forth. Despite their role in colonisation, they are a European-style upper class rather than a colonial one, in that their status is independent of actual wealth: in present-day postcolonial countries such as the USA, Canada and Australia, the upper classes tend to be defined by wealth rather than kinship to early explorers, and indeed the two are very seldom related. While it is a come-down for Zilda to have to work on a Storm Mine, she still clearly has status and connections, and Uvanov complains that Founding Family members ‘stick together’, rather than her family’s lack of wealth leading to an overall loss of social status.

This continues to be a driver for Uvanov in Corpse Marker and Kaldor City: Death’s Head. Although Uvanov eventually rises to become the Company Chairholder and thus the single most powerful human on the planet, he retains a feeling of inadequacy and vengefulness, employing, in Corpse Marker, a secretary from the Founding Families in part out of a wish to dominate her. He is also driven by his rivalry with Founding Family member Landerchild, a man who, like Uvanov, is shrewd, unscrupulous and political, and who is indeed involved in many of the same schemes as Uvanov, but who Uvanov perceives as emblematic of the power of the Founding Families. Corpse Marker also introduces us to the Sewerpits, an area where the poorest people of Kaldor live and, in some cases, foment rebellion. The subjection of the robots fits in with such a heavily stratified society; anxiety about a robot uprising reflects fears about the sustainability of the human social order.

However, the society visibly has a meritocratic element. Uvanov is of a lower class origin compared with the Founding Families, but has achieved high status based on his talents as a Storm Mine captain: Poul’s story about the death of Zilda’s brother suggests that it is at least credible that the Company would hush up such an incident in order to protect him. Chub, meanwhile, is working as a government meteorologist, indicating that Founding Family members also normally work in regular jobs which presumably require professional qualifications rather than being only status-based. Nonetheless, Uvanov still feels inadequate because of his ancestry, channelling it into anger, which is frequently aimed at Zilda. Significantly, although Toos, Cass, Borg, and, presumably, ‘Dask’ (meaning, Taren Capel’s assumed identity), are also apparently not from the Founding Families, they don’t seem to take this as personally as Uvanov. Possibly they are from the equivalent of the middle classes and Uvanov from the working classes or the Sewerpits; possibly Uvanov is just more-than-usually preoccupied about status.

Boucher’s later works on the subject make it clear that Kaldor is also an affluent society. While this is implied in The Robots of Death, with the human crew taking the luxuriousness of the Storm Mine for granted, Corpse Marker demonstrates that even residents of the Sewerpits have easy access to food, medical care and other basic forms of support. Jobs, it is made clear, are a status symbol rather than a necessity, as in Frederik Pohl’s 1954 novella ‘The Midas Plague’. Uvanov’s class anxiety also appears to have a misogynous element: while the death of the only male Founding Family member on the Storm Mine early on means that in the original story, it is possible that his anxiety is purely focused on status, the fact that he deliberately chooses a female aristocrat to subordinate and humiliate in Corpse Marker suggests that his class hostility is particularly (albeit not exclusively) fixated on women. One of Boucher’s key themes in his Kaldor-set work is that even in societies which are (theoretically or actually) egalitarian, and where resource scarcity is not an issue, hierarchies, inequalities, and people’s anxieties about status will nonetheless continue to be a problem.

Class and Meritocracy: Blake’s 7

This theme continues in Boucher’s Blake’s 7 episode Weapon[4]. It is worth noting that the Federation of this series is, in theory at least, a meritocracy. There is little evidence of an aristocratic or hereditary ruling class on Earth; when it appears, it’s either as a bygone relic of the past (Rumours of Death (1980)) or in feudal backwaters (for instance in Horizon or The Keeper (both 1979)). Instead, people apparently rise or fall in status through aptitude tests, being classified as Alpha through to Delta according to these (while the most obvious antecedent for this is the stratified Britain of Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World (1932), British universities at the time also routinely graded students on a scale running from Alpha to Delta). Producer David Maloney’s initial insistence that the cast should not have regional or class-based accents, while seeming like class erasure to modern ears (and, furthermore, being heavily problematised in later seasons through the casting of regular and guest performers with regional accents), also speaks to this: in a British context, if everyone sounds the same, we can assume equality.

20th-century experience has shown that such systems are not free of class bias. The children of middle-class parents, for instance, are not only more likely to be given the sort of education that allows one to do better on such tests, but they grow up with the expectation of doing so informing their relationships with their parents and teachers, giving them an advantage on such tests over children from the working classes. In Blake’s 7, the system can clearly be manipulated, as Vila confesses in Volcano (1980) that he deliberately purchased a ‘grade four ignorant’ status on his test (‘I didn’t want to be a space captain now, did I? And I was right. They all ended up getting killed, didn’t they?’). Unconscious bias is also hinted at, since in Boucher’s Shadow (1979) Vila says that he grew up among Delta grades, implying a Federation analogue to a working-class community. While the Federation also practices slavery, it does not appear to be a hereditary system; there are references to it being a form of punishment for crimes, and the allusion to ‘bond-slaves’ in Weapon suggests indentured servitude.

The plot of Weapon revolves in part around Coser, a ‘Beta class weapons technician’, who invents a superweapon (which he is supposedly not clever enough to do). In echoes of Uvanov’s own bitterness, he simmers with resentment at being patronised by those higher up the ladder than him; fleeing with his invention, he brings along a bond-slave, Rashel, in order to have someone to feel superior to (with again echoes of the way in which Uvanov’s resentment focuses specifically on women). Rashel also clearly recognises the failings of the meritocracy; she remarks on the cleverness of rats, and then immediately afterward mentions that she learned about this from listening to the conversations of her social superiors, which she’s not supposed to do. However, while they both realise the so-called meritocracy is unfair, Coser (much like Uvanov) doesn’t want to end the system, simply to win at it; he wants his intelligence recognised and revenge on the people who looked down on him. Rashel, by contrast, takes that one step further and walks away from the system, abandoning the Federation entirely.

Boucher’s Blake’s 7 story Trial (1979) also reflects a complex narrative focused on power. Travis, an Alpha grade played by a man with a regional accent (suggesting once more an element of meritocracy), is being scapegoated by his superior (providing again a subtext whereby even a meritocratic society may be subject to class prejudices). The point of the story is not a rehash of class issues as presented in Weapon, however, but the impotence of the individual in the face of society: the B plot features Blake on a nameless planet which turns out to be a giant living being, which, simply through existing, affects every aspect of the lives of the creatures on its surface[5]. Travis, likewise, is helpless against the hierarchical structure of the Federation and his superior’s desire to hang on to power, until a random terrorist attack disrupts his trial and gives him a new chance at life. Later on, in Star One (1979, also written by Boucher) we see that Travis and Blake, trying to strike back at the Federation, will wind up harming the most vulnerable members of that society rather than the most powerful, in an acknowledgement that resistance to injustice and hierarchy is complex and not necessarily always positive.

Class and Science: Doctor Who

While Boucher’s first Doctor Who story, The Face of Evil, might seem at first glance more of a comment on religion and colonialism than on social inequality, there is a clear class subtext which, again, has echoes of a similar system in The Robots of Death. Like the people of Kaldor, the hierarchy is one which is re-enacted from the colonial ship which first landed on the planet, with the descendants of the technicians, the ‘Tesh’, regarding themselves as superior to the descendants of the survey team, or ‘Sevateem’. Significantly, the Tesh are scientifically literate and technologically advanced, and yet are as mired in superstition and prejudice as the supposed primitives they deride. They are as much a product of colonialism as are the Sevateem, for all that they can build disintegrator weapons.

Tacitly, this is a significant departure from much of the rest of Doctor Who up to that point. As Lindy A Orthia notes, the series as a whole assumes that, in general, science is a good thing, and scientific literacy helps societies to improve[6]. Societies which lose that literacy become ‘degenerate’, like the Exxilons of Death to the Daleks (1974). However, here Boucher is suggesting that scientific literacy is not a remedy against prejudice, or superstition[7]. A major theme of The Face of Evil is how religion supports hierarchies, by creating secrets, shoring up a status quo, and leading to areas of life which are not to be questioned or challenged. While The Robots of Death does not deal directly with religion, it does have echoes in the way in which Taren Capel clings to a patently irrational belief to justify his own actions. At the end of The Face of Evil, the Tesh and the Sevateem have to collectively decide whether to keep or destroy the formerly-mad computer Xoanon, and we leave them with their leaders arguing over which of them is superior to the other. The irrationality of class systems, and how they nonetheless drive even supposedly intelligent and educated people to do self-destructive things, is also a crucial part of The Face of Evil.

Similarly, Boucher’s last Doctor Who story, Image of the Fendahl, while primarily about rationality and religion, also touches on class, through pitting the middle-class scientists who inadvertently begin the process of unleashing the Fendahl, against the working-class Tyler family who provide the means to stop it, as well as tacitly through the idea of hereditary destiny embodied in the Fendahl’s shaping the human race for its own purposes. Once again, we have a complex relationship with the idea of science as rational: it is the supposedly rational scientists who cannot accept the truth of what the Fendahl is or understand how to combat it, whereas Mother Tyler’s ancient superstitions turn out to be associated with defence against the Fendahl. While the Fendahl may encode race memories into humans so that they will, unwittingly, activate it and be consumed by it, the humans also encode social memories into folklore, such as the idea of using rock salt against supernatural creatures, to defend against it. Even the Time Lords, it emerges, have ‘mythology’ about the Fendahl.

In this story, rather than rational scientists and irrational peasants, we have a working-class leader, Mother Tyler, who is superstitious, but smart, rational and insightful, and whose folk-science turns out to be more accurate as a means of identifying and combatting the alien menace than the official scientific version. The scientists who fall victim to the Fendahl do so because they fail to see the rationality in the superstitious; Stahl, the scientist who tries to control it, is the one who transcends this limitation and recognises the truth behind the folk-science. The Doctor in this story is not in his usual role as rational champion of science in and of itself, but is someone who is prepared to acknowledge the reality of what he perceives, however much it may seemingly go against the rational world. In Image of the Fendahl, we see challenges to hegemonic scientific knowledge, with the ‘true’ scientists being those of whatever class who trust in their observations.

The Intersections of Power: Star Cops

Power and hierarchy take a different role in Star Cops. Class commentary is, perhaps surprisingly, not a major theme. Nathan Spring, its protagonist and the leader of the titular police force, is middle-class and not motivated by anxiety or envy. The extent to which the society is meritocratic is unknown: in a near-future-set story, one can assume that modern human class systems do persist, but the focus on a multinational, rather than British-only, space exploration effort tends to put class issues into the background. The society does appear to be gender-egalitarian, with women shown at high levels of power in political, police and civilian life, as well as in criminal organisations, and with the main female character, Pal Kenzy, being characterised as a flawed antihero rather than hewing to the tough-but-heroic warrior-woman archetype (although the other major female characters, Spring’s partner Lee Jones and the non-Boucher-created medic Anna Shoun, are rather less well served and arguably fall into cliché).

However, hierarchies and power do emerge on a more metatextual level. The series is driven by the idea that there are world-dominating entities – governments, corporations, and mafias – whose agendas are not particularly benign towards ordinary humans. In the first story, An Instinct for Murder, Spring is manoeuvred into a job he does not want; other stories revolve around international espionage, mafia activity, and multinational political tensions over the establishment of space stations and moonbases. This shift in focus may be related to the context in which the stories were written: in the 1980s, fears about the persistence of class divisions within an ostensible meritocracy might well be overtaken by concerns about the rise of the super-rich and of unaccountable multinational corporations. However, a society dominated by a single company, with the power to cover up embarrassing murders if it so desired, was anticipated in The Robots of Death, and the power of the Federation runs through Weapon and Trial. Shadow, furthermore, explores the paradox that mafias are in practice an essential aspect of a tightly controlled society, allowing the powerful jurisdiction over illegal as well as legal activities.

Star Cops gets back to another theme which is crucial to The Robots of Death but, aside from The Face of Evil, less so in the other stories considered here: the mistrust of technology and of mechanisation. In An Instinct for Murder, for instance, it is a plot point that this society does a certain amount of its policing through the use of computers which run the probabilities of accidental death versus murder, and only if the conclusion skews towards the latter is the case investigated. At the outset of the story, Spring’s (as it emerges, correct) instinct that a drowning victim was murdered is overridden by the computer’s calculations; later, when Spring goes into space, he discovers a murderer who is killing with impunity through keeping the number of people dying from ‘spacesuit failure’ within the expected estimates for death by accident. Intelligent Listening for Beginners, an early computer virus story, involves a super-rich IT professional who turns out to be responsible for a ‘computer worm’ affecting computers worldwide and killing people. His ability to commit the murders is as much a result of his family’s global reach as his own initiative, and once again the failings of technology are exploited.

In particular, humanity’s dependence on technology is used as a source of horror. The space suit failures in An Instinct for Murder are an anticipatory metaphor: in space, without technology, we are naked and helpless in an airless vacuum. In a similar vein, the fact that Spring’s father was a computer salesman (with the result that Spring himself has access to the experimental Box device) means that Spring’s ambivalence towards his family can also serve to highlight the complex relations of humans to machines. Later, in Conversations with the Dead, we have the macabre scenario of a spaceship which is thrown off course, meaning it will miss its landing point; the two pilots on board, knowing they will die once the oxygen runs out, are effectively running an inquiry into their own demise as they try to figure out what caused the error. As in The Robots of Death, there is a fear of humans putting too much power into the hands of machines, which can break or be sabotaged and subverted.

As in The Robots of Death, though, the issue is not so much the technology per se as the uses humans put it to. Taren Capel hijacks the robots on the Storm Mine for his own purposes; technology may be subject to error in Star Cops, but more often it is used to cover up or to commit crimes, rather than causing death on its own. The ship going off course in Conversations with the Dead turns out not to be a mistake, human or otherwise, but a deliberate act of sabotage by a scientist keen to test his new cryogenic technology on living subjects (he suggests that the astronauts might use the cryogenic capsules on board the vessel as a means of staying alive until an Earth rescue mission can reach them). Similarly, in The Face of Evil, the computer Xoanon does not go mad on its own, but due to the Doctor’s intervention, and it is up to the Doctor to fix the problem. Finally, in all cases, there are also benign aspects to technology: Box is a helper figure, assisting Spring with his research and day-to-day activities; D84 is actively positive and heroic; and even Xoanon, at the end of The Face of Evil, is acknowledged as an ambivalent rather than simply malevolent figure, capable of good as well as bad.

The fear of technology can thus be tied in with wider themes of power and society in the genre work of Chris Boucher. In a mechanised, or computerised, society, machines take the place of human workers: this can be liberating, freeing people from class-based hierarchies and encouraging meritocracy, but, in Boucher’s writing, the fallibilities of humanity suggest that people will go on finding ways to oppress each other. In Star Cops, the increased mechanisation of society appears to be perpetuating an oligarchy. Similarly, the fear of a robot rebellion, whether genuine or engineered, preys on the minds of the people of a machine-dependent civilisation. The ambivalences of technology, and human fallibility, pervade Boucher’s work, running as a parallel theme to his pessimistic view of class and meritocracy.

Conclusions

The preceding exploration has thrown up a number of common themes in Boucher’s work. Power and hierarchy are central to most of the stories discussed here: significantly, hierarchies take different forms, whether based on class or some other means of differentiation. The ways in which supposedly rational people can delude themselves into supporting such hierarchies also emerge as a theme: in Boucher’s work, even rebels usually just want a new hierarchy rather than to walk away from them completely. Related to this is Boucher’s treatment of female characters. While many of his memorable figures adhere to masculine ideas of power, being warrior women, gunslingers or cops, he also explores ways in which intelligent and rational women are belittled, ignored or actively harassed and abused, though frequently with a positive message at the end, as when Rashel is able to walk away from her enslavement, Mother Tyler’s understanding of the Fendahl is validated, or Blayes, in Kaldor City: Death’s Head, is acknowledged by Uvanov in a backhanded compliment as ‘too bright to have in Security’.

Boucher’s writing chiefly focuses on power and on human fallibility. Orthia, in her article ‘Doctor Who and the Critique of Western Imperialism’ contrasts Boucher, born in 1943, with other class-conscious writers for the series like Malcolm Hulke and Robert Holmes, born before the Second World War (in 1924 and 1926 respectively). She notes that where these pre-War writers tend to focus on scientific ‘solutions’ to the problems of imperialism, Boucher, raised in the chaos of post-War Britain, instead suggests that science can be a problem. Orthia argues that The Face of Evil subverts the ‘white man’s burden’ trope, in that the Doctor’s attempt to help the colonists instead divides the Tesh and Sevateem, leads to civil war, and sends Xoanon mad. In the end, the only thing the white hero can do is to leave, by wiping his personality from Xoanon’s core and quitting the planet[8]. In an unusually postcolonial image, the mad Xoanon adopts the Doctor’s face and personality, serving as a metaphor for colonised societies reflecting the coloniser back in a distorted way[9]. Boucher’s version of the Doctor may dismiss Leela’s knowledge as primitive and disparage her instincts, and yet he also, albeit grudgingly, does recognise when she has a point. As such, he models the idea that appropriate science is trusting in hard evidence, rather than adhering to knowledge or dogma. Adding in the dimension of class, one could also take the message from it that dismissing intelligence or ability based on preconceived notions of social status is restricting – and, as demonstrated by the emotional toll it takes on Uvanov and Coser, destructive.

Another common theme is the problematisation of science: not that science is a bad thing per se, but that scientists and supposedly ‘rational’ people can be as vulnerable to prejudice and bad decisions as anyone. Furthermore, supposedly primitive and ignorant people can turn out to have unanticipated reserves of knowledge. The valorisation of science is shifted from simply valuing science as such, to a focus on accepting the evidence one is given and reasoning from there, even if the reasoning takes one into irrational areas.

Finally, there are anxieties about technology and its impact on society. Computer-controlled or mechanised societies are, it emerges, fraught with crimes in which machines can be used as murder weapons, or else as means of covering up crimes. Again, technology is not shown as being bad in and of itself, but subject to human irrationalities and malevolence.

In Boucher’s work, these themes also constantly combine and reinforce each other. Technology can be used in support of class hierarchies, or can provide a new servant class to join in with them (and to give the oppressed someone to look down upon); a frequent outlet for class-based anger is through misogyny. The fear of supercomputers is also the fear of what uses they can be put to by the powerful and unaccountable – or simply by an intelligent person driven mad by the alienation he experiences in his society. Class technology and power thus combine to drive stories of murder, imperialism and madness.

[1] Horáková, Erin, ‘Boucher, Backbone and Blake: The Legacy of Blake’s 7’.

[2] Anonymous, DWM Winter Special 1986, p16.

[3] The planet on which The Robots of Death occurs is not identified onscreen, the sole local placename we are given being ‘Kaldor City’ (mentioned only twice, by Chub in the opening scene). However, the tie-in and spinoff media have taken ‘Kaldor’ as the name of the planet, and for convenience this book follows that usage where relevant.

[4] Stevens, Alan, and Fiona Moore, Liberation: The Unofficial and Unauthorised Guide to Blake’s 7, pp72-74.

[5] Stevens and Moore, Liberation, pp81-83; see also Stevens, Alan, ‘Travis: The Final Act’.

[6] Orthia, Lindy A, ‘“Sociopathetic Abscess” or “Yawning Chasm”? The Absent Postcolonial Transition in Doctor Who’. Journal of Commonwealth Literature 45(2).

[7] Orthia, Lindy A, ‘Doctor Who and the Critique of Western Imperialism’, and ‘Savages, Science, Statism and the Naturalised Ascendancy of the Not-We in Doctor Who’, in Orthia, Lindy A, ed, Doctor Who and Race.

[8] Orthia, ‘Doctor Who and the Critique of Western Imperialism’, pp275-76.

[9] Rieder, John, Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction.

CHAPTER 6: ‘CAST ALL ETHNICITIES’

Multiethnic Casting in the British Television Context

One of the things that makes The Robots of Death stand out from its contemporaries is its colour-blind cast. While stories with non-white performers were not unknown in Doctor Who, generally speaking, the characters were explicitly scripted as such. In The Robots of Death, however, Tariq Yunus and Tania Rogers appear as characters who are not written as Asian or black, reinforced by the presence of Russell Hunter and Brian Croucher playing characters with regional accents. This chapter will provide a brief overview of multiethnic casting on British television in general and Doctor Who in particular, with a view to contextualising The Robots of Death, and will end with a brief discussion of the racialisation of Leela as a ‘primitive’ character.

A Short History of Multiethnic Casting on British Television

According to Jim Pines, non-white performers were part of the very first television broadcast in the UK: ‘Buck And Bubbles’, an American song-and-dance duo, appeared in BBC Television’s opening night gala on 2 November 1936. (Stephen Bourne’s history of black performers in film and television pushes that date further back, noting that both cabaret artist Josephine Baker and contemporary film star Nina Mae McKinney appeared in experimental television broadcasts in 1933[1].)

As television developed, more non-white performers became established. Pines notes Cy Grant’s appearances on the BBC news programme Tonight (1957-65), singing the news as a topical calypso, as another landmark (telefantasy fans will of course know Grant better for his later roles on Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons (1967-68) and Blake’s 7). In the 1950s, husband-and-wife team Pearl and Elric Connor, a lawyer and an actor respectively, ‘set up an agency […] to represent and promote black talent in Britain, and to press for non-stereotypical roles for black actors and actresses in the performing arts’[2]. While frequently pigeonholed into all-black dramas or light entertainment, non-white performers have been part of British television from the beginning.

The 1960s saw black actors starting to appear in dramas which were not specifically focused on the black community, such as Coronation Street (1960-) and Emergency Ward 10 (1957-67). The mania for spy series and thrillers with globe-trotting, glamorous heroes unleashed by the success of the James Bond franchise led to Danger Man (1960-68) and other spy series populating their fictional worlds with black and Asian supporting characters and antagonists. As there was a general belief that the future, if not the present, would be multiethnic, SF series often portrayed diverse futures, for instance Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s live-action dramas UFO (1970-73) and Space: 1999. However, these series generally continued to be led by white actors, with non-white performers featuring in the supporting and one-off roles. Furthermore, the casting was rarely colour-blind, and also very seldom identified non-white characters as British: they continued to be ‘from’ the Caribbean, Africa, or Asia, and thus at one remove from the assumed audience.

It is unsurprising, given this, that performers of the era treated the proliferation of roles for non-white performers with ambivalence. Carmen Munro says that while there were many roles for non-white performers in the late 60s, ‘I felt that I was being used […] They were using me because they needed to make a scene look dressed up – the ‘we’re going to have a black person, and it’s going to be really wonderful’ sort of attitude’[3]. The casting of white actors in ‘blackface’ makeup was also not unusual: Zia Moyheddin is quoted as saying:

‘I wasn’t so much offended as hurt by this common practice […] It was somehow assumed that black and Asian actors weren’t good enough […] I don’t know whether the directors felt comfortable because they knew these [white] people, or because they couldn’t cope with the real thing’[4].

It is worth noting that this practice had largely been abandoned by the mid-1970s in British drama, although it did persist in comedy and light entertainment series (if not without controversy, even at the time).

In the early to mid-1970s television drama became more limited in terms of its roles for non-white performers. Pines observes that most of the serious dramas focused on attempting to ‘explain’ life in minority communities, but always as a ‘problem’ or a source of discontent. A typical example might be the 1970 Callan (1967-72) episode Amos Green Must Live, in which the titular assassin is reluctantly forced to protect a far-right race-baiting politician, and where, despite the show’s visible condemnation of racism, the black characters are nonetheless portrayed as angry, destructive political activists. Pines argues that sitcoms, at the time, did provide audiences with some positive characters[5], but sitcoms were not generally viewed with the same regard as mainstream drama. One could make a similar observation about Crown Court (1972-84), which, perhaps precisely because it was a low-prestige daytime drama which flew largely under the cultural radar, could occasionally be surprisingly nuanced in its portrayal of an increasingly multicultural Britain.

The late 1970s, however, saw something of a watershed moment in the release of the BBC Pebble Mill art-television series Gangsters. Stylish and postmodern, with an Asian leading actor, the series generally succeeded in providing a range of interesting and nuanced non-white characters of a variety of different social statuses. The series also explicitly played with the question of Britishness in a multiethnic context: for instance, Chinese gangsters riding horses in full British hunting gear and speaking perfect English with public-school accents, undermining the idea that the non-white gangsters are, by virtue of their ethnic origin, ‘foreign’, or Saeed Jaffrey’s charismatic and complex turn as bisexual Indian community leader Aslam Rafiq. In addition, the high profile of the series meant that many of its performers were brought to the wider attention of casting directors: it is worth noting here that Tariq Yunus and Tania Rogers were both Gangsters alumni.

Doctor Who and the Colour-Blind Cast

Doctor Who’s record on this score is, all in all, about typical for the periods in which it was made. While the first non-white characters appeared early on, in Marco Polo (1964), The Aztecs (1964) and The Crusade (1965), speaking parts were largely given to white actors in makeup, with occasional notable exceptions. It is worth stressing that, as the Moyheddin quote above indicates, this was not unusual at the time, nor did it stem from explicitly racist attitudes, but the series was also not particularly progressive on this score.

By contrast, Kate Orman argues convincingly that the ‘yellowface’ performance by John Bennett in 1977’s The Talons of Weng-Chiang was considerably less excusable, as by that point a number of East Asian actors capable of playing the role were visible and well known to casting directors[6]. It is worth noting that it is also exceptional for 1970s Doctor Who: The Talons of Weng-Chiang screened right after The Robots of Death, and six years after 1971’s The Mind of Evil gave us a Sinophilic, Hokkien-speaking Doctor and two sympathetic Chinese supporting characters, making the later serial’s use of yellowface, to say nothing of its reliance on 19th-century stereotypes about Asian cultures and religions, rather baffling. Unfortunately, the popularity of the story has meant that many viewers labour under the misapprehension that this was normal, rather than unusual, for 1970s Doctor Who.

The first non-white performer to appear in Doctor Who in a major role was Zienia Merton in Marco Polo, while the first black major character was Jamaica (played by Elroy Joseph) in 1966’s The Smugglers. However, for most of the late 1960s through mid-1980s, the positioning of non-white characters was along predictable lines. They were cast in future-set stories such as The Tomb of the Cybermen (1967), or, sometimes, in past-set stories such as The Evil of the Daleks (1967), but in the latter cases only when the character’s ethnicity is directly relevant. Non-white characters appeared much more rarely in contemporary stories, and in more limited roles (for instance Roy Stewart as a circus strongman in Terror of the Autons). Furthermore, they appeared for the most part in roles explicitly written as non-white: Carmen Munro as Fariah in The Enemy of the World (1968), for instance, or Kristopher Kum as Fu Peng and Pik Sen-Lim as Chin Lee in The Mind of Evil. Occasional good intentions towards including more regular non-white characters did not come to fruition: Terry Nation proposed an Asian companion to replace Susan in his initial drafts of The Dalek Invasion of Earth (1964), for instance[7], and, according to the DVD infotext for Terror of the Autons, Barry Letts considered casting a black actress as Jo Grant, but neither came to pass.

There are occasional interesting exceptions. Williams in The Tenth Planet (1966) was, as explained in the documentary ‘Race Against Time’ from the DVD release of The Mutants (1972), originally written as Welsh, but Earl Cameron was cast in the part. Although Sonny Caldinez in The Ice Warriors (1967) arguably counts, he was in a masked part so his ethnicity is invisible in the story. The most significant example of colour-blind casting prior to The Robots of Death is The Mutants, which not only featured Rick James as Cotton, but had black, East Asian and Asian supporting artists in the background cast. However, the fact that the character is named Cotton is slightly problematic, given the association of the slave trade with cotton production. (James was originally cast as Stubbs, before it was realised that Stubbs dies partway through the story; why they did not rename the character remains unknown) and arguably distracts from the colour-blindness of the casting. It’s also significant that the colour-blind casting takes place in a postcolonial piece which, symbolically, explores British identity as a post-imperial nation[8].

In the 1980s, while casts got visibly more diverse, actual colour-blind casting remained rare. Although ‘Mindwarp’ (The Trial of a Time Lord episodes 5 to 8, 1986) would appear to be an exception, writer Philip Martin actually specified the characters’ ethnicities in the script. The post-2005 series has generally fared better, due to the establishment of an official colour-blind casting policy at the BBC[9]. Nonetheless, policy has limits: Emily Asher-Perrin, in an article on interracial couples in Doctor Who, notes that there are quite a number of such couples in 2000s showrunner Russell T Davies’ era of Doctor Who, but, at the time of her writing in 2013, almost none under his successor Steven Moffat[10].

Finally, it’s also worth briefly discussing the issue of class and accents in The Robots of Death in its social context. Although Tania Rogers playing Zilda with an RP accent might not sound out of place to a modern audience, a black character without a Caribbean or African accent was rarer in the late 1970s: the decision to have Josette Simon play Dayna on Blake’s 7 with a similar RP accent was a groundbreaking one, and Rogers herself had played Dinah Carmichael of Gangsters with a Jamaican accent. Having Zilda speak in this way reinforces the idea that Britishness is not a function of colour.

The Robots of Death also gives us two characters with regional British accents, Uvanov and Borg. This is similar in some ways to the colour-blind casting policy: characters with such accents often wind up similarly pigeonholed into regional stereotypes (dour Scots and cheeky Cockneys, for instance). And yet, in The Robots of Death, Uvanov was originally to have been played by Roland Lacey and Borg by Brian McDermott, neither of whom have regional accents, suggesting that the accent-blind policy, while fortuitous, was slightly accidental.

Leela and Race

In the context of The Robots of Death and ethnicity, it’s worth taking the time to consider Leela as a slightly problematic, if overall positive, figure. Although she is played by a white woman, Orthia argues that she is not unracialised, being named in homage to a Palestinian liberation activist and with Louise Jameson’s blue eyes originally being covered with brown contacts[11]. An earlier, thankfully abandoned, idea had been for her to wear brown makeup to darken her skin, which is uncomfortably close to blackface[12]. She is also frequently the butt of jokes relating to her intelligence, and the Doctor is explicitly supposed to be educating her away from primitive superstition and into being a scientific, Westernised individual, which has colonialist overtones if nothing else. The series as a whole generally uses science as a shorthand for human development: Orthia notes the sequence in 1972’s The Curse of Peladon, where Hepesh, expressing a legitimate fear that Peladon will be exploited if it joins the Federation, says ‘I would rather be a cave-dweller and free’, but the Doctor dismisses this, casting indigenous culture as a prison[13].

Other aspects of Leela’s character are more positive. As noted, Leela may be a primitive, but she is descended from ancestors who were highly scientific[14]. Additionally, the fact that she is played by a white actress (and her blue eyes are eventually restored in The Horror of Fang Rock, albeit because Louise Jameson found the contact lenses uncomfortable) does provide a counterpoint to racialised tropes about intelligence and primitivism – as does, indeed, the fact that the Doctor unproblematically takes it as read that he can educate her into a scientific mindset, reinforcing the idea that intelligence and ‘primitive’ tendencies are cultural, not innate, and, by reverse implication, that non-white people are no more ‘primitive’ than white ones. Orthia also concludes her colonial reading of Leela’s character by saying that, at the end of the day, there may be racialised aspects to the character but a sustained analysis along those lines is impossible[15].

The Robots of Death is, therefore, generally ahead of its time in terms of colour-blind and accent-blind casting, and racialised metanarratives. This is not simply true for the Doctor Who context, but for 1970s British television as a whole. Even now, when colour-blind casting has become more normal on television, The Robots of Death still deserves note as a presentation of a casually multiethnic future placed at one remove from contemporary associations of skin colour, accent and social status.

[1] Pines, Black and White in Colour, p9; Bourne, Stephen, Black in the British Frame, p59.

[2] Pines, Black and White in Colour, p9.

[3] Pines, Black and White in Colour, p58.

[4] Pines, Black and White in Colour, pp72-73.

[5] Pines, Black and White in Colour, pp12-13.

[6] Orman, Kate, ‘“One of Us is Yellow”: Doctor Fu Manchu and The Talons of Weng-Chiang’, in Orthia, Doctor Who and Race.

[7] Stevens, Alan, ‘World’s End’. Celestial Toyroom #496-97.

[8] Moore, Fiona, ‘“A Life Form Unique In The History of The Universe”: The Mutants and Postcolonialism in 1970s Doctor Who.’ Paper presented at Royal Geographical Society Annual Conference, 28 to 30 August 2019.

[9] Dodson, Linda, ‘Conscious Colour-Blindness, Unconscious Racism in Doctor Who Companions’, in Orthia, Doctor Who and Race, p64.

[10] Asher-Perrin, Emily, ‘No Room for Old-Fashioned Cats: Davies-Era Who and Interracial Romance’, in Orthia, Doctor Who and Race, pp133-39. The observation predates both Clara’s relationship with Danny and Bill’s with Heather.

[11] Orthia, ‘Savages, Science, Statism and the Naturalised Ascendancy of the Not-We in Doctor Who’, p680.

[12] Early photographs exist of Louise Jameson wearing the makeup (Rodebaugh, Thomas L, The Black Archive #27: The Face of Evil, pp66-68).

[13] Orthia, ‘Doctor Who and the Critique of Western Imperialism’, p270.

[14] Orthia, ‘Doctor Who and the Critique of Western Imperialism’, p275.

[15] Orthia, ‘Savages, Science, Statism and the Naturalised Ascendancy of the Not-We in Doctor Who’, p684.

CHAPTER 7: THE LEGACY OF THE ROBOTS OF DEATH

In this final chapter, I will explore the sequels which The Robots of Death has generated to date, and its impact on the post-2005 Doctor Who series. Focusing on Chris Boucher’s novel Corpse Marker, the DWM comic strip Crisis On Kaldor, the Kaldor City audio series (2001-12), the Big Finish audios set on Kaldor, and the Lass O’Gowrie Theatre Company’s gender-blind adaptation of The Robots of Death and its Kaldor City sequel Storm Mine for the stage, I will consider the many ways in which The Robots of Death has inspired people to develop the story, and what each adds to the original. I will also consider how Russell T Davies, Steven Moffat and Chris Chibnall’s writing teams have referenced and adapted the serial in the 21st century, looking at stories such as The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit (2006), Oxygen (2017) and Kerblam! (2018). This will allow us to understand the enduring legacy of the serial, and why it continues to inspire and influence Doctor Who and related media.

All of these stories will be discussed in the context of what they add to The Robots of Death, or else (particularly in the case of works inspired by, rather than set in the universe of, The Robots of Death) how they reinterpret the serial and contribute to it by doing so. I will be assuming that readers are familiar with the plots of the stories in question or else are happy to have twists and endings ‘spoiled’. I will also be covering the spinoffs and tie-ins more or less in chronological order, but will be considering Kaldor City and the Big Finish Kaldor-set audios respectively as collective works (while nonetheless referring to individual episodes within each series as needed).

Tie-ins, Spinoffs and Sequels

Doctor Who And The Robots of Death: The Novelisation

The Robots of Death has been adapted for two non-televisual media: the first is the 1979 novelisation by Terrance Dicks. The novelisation is a bare-bones retelling of the story, having been written in the pre-home-media era by an author who, in this period, tended not to get creative with his interpretations; most of the differences between the novel and the televised serial appear to stem from Dicks primarily working from an early version of the script (although he has probably seen the transmitted version; while he does describe Borg as ‘burly’ and Cass as ‘lean’ and ‘muscular’, the descriptions of the crew and robots are otherwise more or less screen-accurate).

Which script it was is a little harder to determine (see Chapter 1). Dask, in the novelisation, does not attack the Doctor when he tries to cut the links, but helps him, suggesting Dicks was working from the rehearsal script, but most other details hew closer to the final version: Toos’ panic attack is omitted, for instance, and the mysterious Jan is absent. The TARDIS is removed from the dust scoop using a grab as in the camera script, whereas in the rehearsal script, this is done by a team of Vocs. D84’s ‘I heard a cry’ dialogue is different again to the script, with the robot in the novel simply repeating the phrase once and then saying ‘Come,’ and leading the Doctor down the corridor. However, the fact that they do not then follow the sound and find Leela, but instead continue searching for Capel’s workshop, makes for a slight discontinuity of logic, and suggests that the changes were Dicks’ own reinterpretation.

Dicks also tones down the misogynous subtext of Uvanov’s attitude towards Zilda, (following up his ‘why do you hate me?’ with the new lines ‘I don’t hate you. We could be friends…’), and elaborates on the origin of the Founding Families, saying that they were the 20 families in the original colonial expedition (and that Uvanov’s ancestors had been one of the last to arrive, suggesting a hierarchy among later-arriving families too). References to the robots’ ‘positronic brains’ use a phrase mostly associated with Asimov, highlighting the story’s origins.

Dicks’ novelisation does not elaborate much on the original, and arguably simplifies the class, gender and meritocratic subtexts of the transmitted story, but nonetheless contributes some important details of worldbuilding and characterisation, as well as providing a more explicitly Asimovian view of the robots, anticipating the extensive worldbuilding and robot development of the story’s sequels.

‘Crisis on Kaldor’

Chronologically, the first spinoff story from The Robots of Death was the comic strip ‘Crisis on Kaldor’. Written by Steve Moore with art by John Stokes, and featuring in Doctor Who Magazine’s 50th issue in March 1981, it was part of a series of ‘extended universe’ strips introduced by the fourth Doctor but not directly featuring the Doctor or his companions. ‘Crisis on Kaldor’ tells the story of two men, Orikon and Korkolo, investigating a series of crimes whereby the Dums and Vocs on Storm Mines are being destroyed and the Super-Vocs disappearing; the culprit turns out to be UV1, an experimental ‘Ultra-Voc’, which went missing and has apparently been hiding out in the desert reprogramming Super-Vocs into a revolutionary army. Orikon learns of this by disguising himself as a Super-Voc and infiltrating a Storm Mine; while he is able to shoot UV1, he is in turn dismantled by the rest of the mine’s robot crew, who believe him to be a malfunctioning Super-Voc.

The story picks up on several plot and thematic points of the original: a revolutionary reprogramming robots to serve as his army, and a human killed by Vocs who fail to recognise him as one; UV1 is something of a cross between Taren Capel and D84. There are also echoes of Taren Capel’s robot costume in Orikon’s disguise. Given Boucher’s focus on class conflict, it is a logical development that if a robot becomes sentient, it will eventually realise the unfairness of its situation and take steps to improve it; the reader cannot help but be at least slightly sympathetic to UV1’s position.

The story implies that there may be more than one company on Kaldor, with the corporation supplying the robots evidently not being the one running the Storm Mines. Although Boucher would later state that there was only one, overarching, company on Kaldor, there is nothing in The Robots of Death to contradict Moore’s interpretation.

‘Crisis on Kaldor’ is noteworthy for being the first story to develop the ideas of robots achieving sentience, and that, should they do this, they would themselves become revolutionaries, a trope which would recur in Corpse Marker and both Kaldor-set audio series. Given that humans seem quite capable of accepting their own oppression, and indeed the humans in the story do not themselves challenge the inequities of the system under which they live, it is debatable whether another intelligent species would do this. However, it’s quite possible that robots might take a different perspective. This is also the point at which the planet’s name is first given as Kaldor: while he would later adopt the name himself, Boucher said in a 1989 interview that it took place on a planet ‘which I never named (even in my mind)’[1].

Corpse Marker

With Doctor Who off the air in the 1990s and no official plans for a revival on television, the series was nonetheless perpetuated through BBC-licensed books, audios and occasional web-based stories. Written by Chris Boucher for the BBC’s series of original Doctor Who novels in 1999 (re-released in 2014 as part of the BBC’s reissuing of classic novels and novelisations, with an audiobook narrated by David Collings following in 2015), Corpse Marker is, in itself, interesting for being the series creator’s own revisiting of its concepts, as the Doctor and Leela arrive in Kaldor City and solve the double mystery of why the new Cyborg class robots are targeting the survivors of Storm Mine Four, and who is actually behind the human terrorists claiming to be led by Taren Capel.

The book goes beyond this, with storylines about trauma, class politics in an affluent society, social engineering and artificial sentience. The instigator of both mysteries is revealed to be an experimental robot, SASV1, and the political force behind it all is Carnell, the psychostrategist who was last seen fleeing the Federation at the end of Boucher’s Blake’s 7 story Weapon. Boucher also changes and develops his original backstory concept of The Robots of Death, giving the planet a name and shifting the Company from a public or semi-public corporation to the effective planetary ruling power.

Most obviously, the book explores what has become of the survivors of the Storm Mine murders. Their careers all build naturally on what we saw in the original serial – Uvanov working his way up the Company ranks, Toos commanding her own Storm Mine, Poul still in the security services but struggling with mental health issues and pointedly kept away from any work which might trigger his robophobia. As they reunite with the Doctor and Leela and come together to figure out what is wrong with Kaldor City, all achieve a degree of closure regarding the events of The Robots of Death, providing a sense of catharsis while still leaving the characters open for further development. In particular, Uvanov finishes the story as the Chairholder of the Company and the most powerful individual on the planet, a logical progression from the ruthless ambition we saw in the original serial.

The book deliberately reverses the TV serial’s original scenario, encouraging the reader to think about the wider universe beyond the Storm Mine. Where The Robots of Death involved a small group in an isolated setting, Corpse Marker takes a whole city as its scope; where the original mostly focused on ignorant robots, this one focuses on an intelligent one. Boucher also engages in more worldbuilding, exploring the social backdrop to The Robots of Death. In particular, Boucher considers the tensions of a hierarchical, but affluent, society which is dependent on robots: we have anti-robot terrorist movements (whose members nonetheless seek out MedVocs when injured) in the Sewerpits, but also clothing styles being inspired by robots, with fashionistas shuffling and speaking in monotones. This picks up on the robot-inspired costuming and makeup of the Storm Mine crew in The Robots of Death, but this time with a more sinister twist, in that it is used to reflect society’s deep ambivalence towards the robots. Carnell’s machinations illustrate concerns about how easy societies can be to manipulate, given the right information. Kaldor’s citizens are both afraid of, and fascinated by, the robots: the addition of human-appearing robots (the Cyborg class) makes a certain amount of sense from a technical point of view, but is clearly something which will cause further problems for the robophobic, and none of the other spinoffs propose their revival.

Crucially, however, the story also focuses on Boucher’s ideas about machine sentience through SASV1/Taren Capel, giving us some idea of how the writer himself would have developed the storyline of D84’s evolution. The notion of a machine dreaming as a sign of its intelligence would later be developed by Daniel O’Mahony in Kaldor City: Storm Mine. Boucher brings in psychostrategist Carnell, from the Blake’s 7 story Weapon, as a tacit bridge between machine and human, being a man who through natural gifts and extensive training can predict people’s actions and manipulate events, but in this case, fails to do so through not having all of the information, much as a computer might. Boucher’s story adds a prescient concern about social engineering to his earlier themes of class consciousness and anxieties about mechanisation.

Kaldor City

The BBC’s approach to copyright from the 1960s through to the 1980s meant that the writers of individual Doctor Who serials retained the rights to one-off characters or monsters, creating the potential for stories set in the Doctor Who universe without BBC licensing. This meant that a collective was able to approach Chris Boucher in 2000 for permission to use characters from The Robots of Death, Blake’s 7 (so as to retain the use of Carnell), and the Fendahl in a series of direct-to-CD audio plays, under the name Magic Bullet Productions. The objectives involved creating a story which would unify The Robots of Death, Blake’s 7 and The Image of the Fendahl, featuring Russell Hunter, David Collings and Scott Fredericks reprising their Doctor Who and Blake’s 7 roles, but also follow the Blake’s 7 tradition of writing political SF critiquing widening inequality and hypocrisy, with Star Cops also being referenced through film-noir style police procedural subplots[2].

Following directly on from Corpse Marker and building on its themes of class, mechanisation and manipulation while adding a post-9/11 concern with terrorism and its complex relationship with mainstream politics, the series explores the wider culture of Kaldor City, and considers how Uvanov and, later in the storyline, Poul continue to be affected by the events that took place on Storm Mine Four. Although the robots themselves are initially more background figures than anything else, The Robots of Death provides a springboard for political intrigue. Poul’s frustrations and robophobia drive him to become the leader of a terrorist movement, recontextualising the actions of Taren Capel as those of an anti-robot crusader and providing a commentary on the radicalisation of the vulnerable. Uvanov’s approach to the vast social inequalities around him is increasingly not to fight the system, but to become one of its ‘winners’, at the cost of paranoia and misanthropy. As the series develops, Taren Capel posthumously returns to the frame, but the robots remain instruments: following his programming, the robots turn murderous, and Carnell also uses one of them as a tool to figure out who, or what, is genuinely manipulating events in Kaldor City. The other inhabitants, too preoccupied with neutralising the robot uprising and with their own political battles, fail to realise what is happening until the Fendahl manifests, apparently consuming all human life on the planet.

The culmination of the series, however, brings in Boucher’s ideas about artificial intelligence as expressed through D84 and SASV1. Storm Mine, a surreal Lynchian-Gothic episode set after the Fendahl’s manifestation, involves, as the title indicates, a Storm Mine which is deliberately written as a skewed recreation of the original, with a Poul-like Mover, an Uvanov-like Captain, and a Fixer who might well be the Fendahl (the author of human consciousness, now seemingly bringing consciousness to the robots), as well as two characters who, at that point in the story, are definitely dead. V23, voiced by Gregory de Polnay, is a robot which has gone beyond the norm: as well as being intelligent, it has learned to dream. The implication drawing the two Chris Boucher Doctor Who stories together is that, having consumed humanity, the Fendahl is moving on to the robots for its next prey species, encouraging them to develop intelligence and free will, with retroactive implications for the Fendahl’s relationship to the human race.

The imagery of the series also draws on The Robots of Death. Humans playing chess with robots, as in the first crewroom scene, is a repeated motif. In the audio series, the chess games act as a form of augury, suggesting that the original scene might have had prophetic implications (as Uvanov finds himself easily beaten by a robot). There is also moments of surrealism (such as a series of paintings which, on repeated listening, are revealed to herald the manifestation of the Fendahl, and the Fendahl’s own distortion of time and creation of multiple alternate sequences of events implied by the end of Checkmate), picking up on the modernist art references which are essential to the success of The Robots of Death. However, it also reinforces the idea that true sentience involves creativity, irrationality and the unexplainable.

Kaldor City adds to the series by building on and developing its political implications, linking The Robots of Death to Boucher’s wider concerns and creations while recontextualising them for a post-millennial audience, and by taking the sentience-developing-robots idea also found in other spinoffs and tie-ins, and turning it into a tacit meditation on Boucher’s idea that sentience requires illogic and dreaming. Kaldor City starts off as an exploration of its characters’ struggles to succeed in a hierarchical capitalist society, but then develops into a surreal exploration of imagination and machine sentience.

Big Finish Productions

The audio production company Big Finish also emerged out of Doctor Who fandom in the late 1990s, obtaining a licence from the BBC to use the Doctor, the TARDIS and various companions in direct-to-CD productions. The primary focus of their Doctor Who audios is on developing authentic-sounding stories in keeping with the general tone of the era of Doctor Who they are referencing, although some of their ranges have gone further to develop an original continuity of their own.

At the time of writing Big Finish have produced three complete standalone stories derived from The Robots of Death: Robophobia (2011) by Nick Briggs, featuring the seventh Doctor and referencing the period of Andrew Cartmel’s script-editorship; The Sons of Kaldor (2018) by Andrew Smith, featuring the fourth Doctor and Leela and referencing the Hinchcliffe and Graham Williams eras; and Escape from Kaldor (2018) by Matt Fitton, featuring the eighth Doctor with two original companion characters, and referencing Big Finish’s bespoke continuity. In June 2019, a new series of 12 Kaldor-set stories entitled The Robots was announced, as a spinoff from Escape from Kaldor. They feature Liv Chenka, a Kaldor-born companion of the eighth Doctor in Big Finish continuity, who was first introduced during Robophobia [3].

Robophobia is generally in keeping with 1980s Producer John Nathan-Turner’s ethos of reviving past monsters and societies while giving them a contemporary makeover, in this case situating the Voc robots in a story more in line with the Cartmel than the Hinchcliffe Era. Structured in four parts with cliffhanger endings, as with the TV serials of the period, the story is faithful to many of the source material’s beats (robot murderers, the Doctor as initial suspect, a company spy on board, characters driven mad by robophobia, a detached robot hand and so forth). Boucher’s signature scenario of a discordant workplace is also apparent. The story, in appropriately postmodern style, references ‘Crisis on Kaldor’ as well as the original: the villain, influenced by his robophobia, dresses up as a Super-Voc. The seventh Doctor is characterised as aware of what’s going on but infuriatingly mysterious about it.

The feel is rather more utilitarian than in The Robots of Death, with harsh electronic computer voice sounds, although this is not out of keeping with ‘Crisis on Kaldor’s plain costumes and backgrounds. In the documentary which accompanies the story, the author says that it’s meant to be near-contemporary to The Robots of Death rather than set in the future; as the story takes place on a spaceship, and Boucher’s concept of Kaldor is of a society without space travel, there is clearly a new and separate continuity at work as well [4]. Unsurprisingly, given that the story was released in 2011, there is also some tacit influence from the Ood stories of the Davies era, with the robots initially set up as murderers but ultimately revealed as benign figures, and the Doctor, at the end of the story, praising the robots’ self-sacrificing altruism in piloting their spaceship into the sun to save the planet Ventalis (although his offer to save as many as he can with the TARDIS is turned down by the robots on the spurious grounds that ‘other robots will always be manufactured’, which, when you consider the cost it will take to replace them, doesn’t seems to be showing much altruism at all). Finally, the villain’s goal in trying to stage a disaster on board the spaceship such that it appears the robots went mad, murdered the crew, and piloted the ship into Ventalis, is to force Kaldor to abandon its dependence on robots, setting up one of the driving ideas in The Sons of Kaldor.

The Sons of Kaldor, featuring the fourth Doctor and Leela (but having a two-part structure atypical of the Hinchcliffe era) appears to be set quite some time after The Robots of Death. It introduces the notion that Kaldor has forests (not impossible, though arguably a divergence from the Frank Herbert roots of the original), and an indigenous life form which was enslaved before the robots were developed. The titular Sons are an organisation determined to restore aristocratic rule by the Founding Families (although, confusingly, their leader deems this a ‘republic’, a form of government opposed to aristocratic rule; this might be taken as a commentary on the way in which populist movements play fast and loose with political terminology), and have promised the indigenes ‘territory and privilege’ in exchange for their support. They intend to destroy the robots, which could imply that the robots themselves were a driver of the meritocracy which seems to prevail on Kaldor at the time of the original story, as well as serving as a political commentary on the right-wing movements of the 21st century. The use of ‘sons’ in their title also tacitly suggests they oppose the gender equality which appears to prevail on Kaldor in other stories. The ending of the narrative has elements of ‘Crisis on Kaldor’, given that it leaves us with an uplifted robot in the wilderness, seeking to uplift other robots, but also Storm Mine, in which a robot and human journey together, though on this occasion they are actively seeking out other opponents of the new regime. The adventure develops out of Boucher’s initial concerns about hierarchy and machine sentience.

While the story mentions Boucher’s ‘Sewerpits’ and the ‘outer zones’, it also further develops Big Finish’s independent continuity. Not only are visitors from other planets apparently a normal occurrence, but ‘teleport capsules’ also are known. The Founding Families are said to have been out of power for ‘centuries’, whereas, although their power is on the decline in The Robots of Death and Corpse Marker, they clearly benefit from class privilege and are a power to be reckoned with.

In line with Robophobia, the Voc robots get a very positive portrayal in this story. This speaks in part to the affection in which they are held by fans of the original serial, but also to the implication, discussed in Chapter 3, that the robots in The Robots of Death itself may have the potential to develop sentience. The Sons of Kaldor picks up on the idea that first appeared in the rehearsal draft script that the robots are intelligent, but are inhibited to prevent them from developing any further. The story takes place on a crashed stealth ship whose commander has been in medical suspension for two years (during which period the Sons of Kaldor have staged their successful coup d’état). In the meantime, the craft’s Super-Voc, SV9, damaged in the crash but not fatally, has inadvertently achieved sentience through the combination of impairment and isolation, and has uplifted the other robots on the ship. The Doctor seems to think it would be a natural thing for robots to achieve awareness given the complexity of the tasks they do (though he also appears less than dismayed about the idea of inhibiting a complex being). The characterisation of SV9 and uplifted Voc V26 owes quite a bit to D84; given the way in which that robot appeared to be developing sentience, and his charismatic nature, it’s perhaps unsurprising that three of the sequels to The Robots of Death focus on this possibility.

Finally, Escape from Kaldor is clearly set between the previous two stories, and, although reference is made to the Sons of Kaldor, their uprising has yet to happen. Contrary to the previous story, where it is stated that the ‘dregs of the old society were left to rot’ in the Sewerpits, the Founding Families here are a powerful social force and we are told that ‘Kaldor’s all about class’. While there is a subplot where robots turn murderous, attacking the patrons of a high-end shopping centre named the Complex, it is by accident rather than design; a group of bored Founding Family youths attempt to put the Complex’s robots back to original maintenance settings so they will not prevent them from robbing a jewellery store, but the robots in fact revert to an earlier programming instruction, incurred by an on-site pest infestation, to destroy all organic life. Instead, much of the story focuses on Liv Chenka working through family issues with her sister Tula as the crisis unfolds. At the end of the tale the Doctor leaves Liv Chenka on the planet for a year, during which the Robots spinoff stories take place[5].

The story follows Big Finish continuity, insofar as Kaldor has space flight and the city now possesses ‘weather control’. However, the rank of ‘Topmaster’ is mentioned, which comes from Boucher’s hierarchical system of Topmasters and Firstmasters as delineated in Corpse Marker. The trope of someone dressing up as a robot again appears (in this case, Tula rescues the humans trapped in the Complex by using a robot identity tag to disguise herself as a Super-Voc). There is some confusion over the extent of Company rule and its system of governance; the Company Director states that he owns ‘all the sand miners and half the city’, but later there is a reference to a Company Board, and to ‘private power companies’. There is also a discontinuity with Robophobia, in that the Doctor implies that the robots on Liv’s original ship were killers. Some of the robots are female-voiced, though dialogue indicates that the design remains the same. The Vocs can be switched off and on seemingly at will, rather than, as in The Robots of Death, requiring a reactivation at a construction centre after shutdown. They are also stronger than Vocs in all the previous stories (they smash up the Complex and tear down walls when looking for the humans), they recognise each other through external electronic identity tags, and explode when ordered to self-destruct (rendering them unsafe at best, and potentially a tool for terrorists at worst). Although the robots still have ‘over a million multi-level constrainers’ built into their circuity, these can now be simply switched off, allowing them to kill on command. Labour activists fight for robots’ rights in the workplace; however, the robots appear to be no more sentient than they are in The Robots of Death, where they were mere tools, albeit with the potential to develop. The story’s primary function appears to be as a setup for the future Robots series following the adventures of Liv Chenka on Kaldor, establishing the society’s tensions and concerns for later development.

Robots of Death and Storm Mine: The Stage Plays

The second non-televisual adaptation of the source material is the 2012 stage performance by Lass O’Gowrie Productions. This rendition, in contrast to Dicks’ novelisation, actively set out to interpret the story in different ways. Lass O’Gowrie Productions was a Manchester-based theatre company which, among other things, specialised in adapting classic television stories as stage plays, recontextualising the material through changes in performance, casting and staging. Having earlier done a successful adaptation of Russell T Davies’ Doctor Who story Midnight, the company’s director Gareth Kavanagh obtained permission from Chris Boucher to do the same for The Robots of Death, working from the rehearsal draft scripts rather than the final version. As BBC copyright characters would not be included, he also obtained permission from Magic Bullet Productions to use the Kaldor City characters Iago (a self-styled assassin turned security consultant) and Blayes (a security operative turned rogue agent) in place of the Doctor and Leela, and to conclude Robots of Death (the lack of the definite article being intended to distinguish it from the televised version) with a stage version of the Kaldor City story, Storm Mine, in which Blayes finds herself inexplicably on a mysterious and surreal Storm Mine whose crew have strange parallels with Uvanov, Poul, D84 and Taren Capel, in the company of a phantom version of Iago [6]. As the events of Storm Mine involve the bending of reality after the unleashing of the Fendahl, it is possible to imagine Blayes and Iago (both of whom had seemingly died at the end of Checkmate, but nonetheless reappear, strangely changed, in Storm Mine) returning to the past as Sapphire-and-Steel-like paranormal figures, observing and participating in the events of the original Storm Mine murders.

Another significant development happened during the casting, with Uvanov, Dask and Borg all being played by female actors, changing the power balance especially as regards Uvanov’s sometimes misogynous overtones, but also suggesting that the characters are, in their way, archetypes, driven by emotions and forces (imposter syndrome, madness, and anger) that are not limited to masculinity.

The Storm Mine adaptation was similarly rewritten to make it a direct sequel to the restaged Robots of Death rather than the culmination of the Kaldor City series. As such, the archetypical qualities of the crew are again picked up on, as the Captain, Mover and Fixer’s echoes of Uvanov, Poul and Taren Capel are brought into relief. Once more, there is a gender reversal, with V23, the uplifted robot and D84-analogue, being played by a female actor. Where the robots in the previous play had worn masks, V23 instead wore makeup. This lends a possible feminist interpretation to the story, analogising the robots’ subservient role in their society to women’s position in patriarchal societies and making V23’s emancipation a metaphor for consciousness-raising. The story’s themes of closure, and of letting go of the past, complement the first story: the instigation of robot sentience in Robots of Death finally culminates in Storm Mine. As with the other sequels and side stories, the two stage adaptations develop the potential of the original, considering what it says about madness, mechanisation, power and society’s increasing dependence on artificial intelligence, but in this case showing that these themes can be recontextualised to new media and with different gender balances.

Influences on 21st-Century Doctor Who

Given that Russell T Davies, Stephen Moffat and Chris Chibnall, as well as many of the writers they recruited for the series, emerged from Doctor Who fandom, it is unsurprising that The Robots of Death has been referenced (even, in some cases, reimagined) several times in the revived series. There are four stories with strong connections to The Robots of Death: the Ood trilogy of The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit (2006) and Planet of the Ood (2008), which will here be considered as a single narrative of linked stories, Voyage of the Damned (2008), Oxygen (2017) and Kerblam! (2018).

The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit and Planet of the Ood

The introduction and development of the Ood, a species enslaved by humans which goes on to achieve emancipation and enlightenment, is clearly indebted to The Robots of Death. The Impossible Planet gives us a small, multiethnic crew of humans, who display a certain amount of low-level antagonism, in charge of a sizable workforce of Ood. These are initially presented to the audience as a kind of biological robot: a race which ‘lives to serve’. While not as aesthetically pleasing as the Vocs, they have distinctive looks and calm, gentle voices; they are then taken over by a demonic entity and turn into a glowing red-eyed, crew-murdering mob, announcing their intentions, Voc-like, in the same gentle voices.

The first, directly linked, pair of episodes contribute somewhat to the mythos by problematising what is a robot and what isn’t. The Ood are likened to robots; the base’s computer starts channelling the voice of ‘Satan’ at the same time as the Ood; and crewmember Toby Zed is also possessed by the entity, blurring the distinction between human and machine by using the Ood, organic creatures but robot-like, as a symbolic intermediary between the two. Tacitly, then, we get the message that intelligence is intelligence, wherever it resides.

The initial pair of episodes could, nonetheless, go much further in developing the themes of hierarchy and slavery brought in from The Robots of Death. The unethical nature of the Ood’s enslavement is obvious to the audience from the outset; the society in question is an empire, with all the connotations of appropriation and erasure that involves for the modern viewer. Danny, the human ‘Ethics Committee’ in charge of the Ood’s management, is a thoroughly awful person, and Rose, the Doctor’s companion, seems genuinely uncomfortable with the idea of their enslavement, trying to make conversation with the Ood. The fact that the Doctor, in contrast to what one might expect, does not challenge the treatment of the Ood, and indeed cheers on and celebrates the humans, caused enough of a storm on the Internet at the time that the issue became a key driver of Planet of the Ood.

This episode, the final part of the loose trilogy, focuses on addressing these problems (with the Doctor’s lack of condemnation of the Ood’s enslavement being called out by his assertive companion Donna Noble). Where the original episodes blurred the mechanical-organic boundary, the third positions itself solidly on the organic side, indicating that any likening of the Ood to robots is simply the dehumanisation of them by their oppressors, and their treatment is the abuse of sentient beings, rather than the reprogramming of robots. The story emphasises the Ood’s organic nature from the start: the Doctor corrects Donna for using the pronoun ‘it’ when they encounter the dying Ood, and the ‘mad’ Ood we see later displays its distress by snarling like an animal when cornered.

We also see a parallel with Boucher’s original suggestion that the robots were being artificially limited to repress their natural intelligence, in that the Ood are revealed to be literally lobotomised into doing their jobs. The pre-credits scene heavily evokes The Robots of Death, with an Ood politely saying ‘have a nice day’ as its eyes glow red and it murders an executive.

Unlike in The Robots of Death, however, and despite the existence of a pro-Ood human organisation called ‘Friends of the Ood’, the Ood’s rebellion is the genuine result of intelligent creatures revolting against their oppression. The Ood have a shared mind, something which distinguishes them from the robots of Kaldor (although some kind of mental unity might be hinted at in V23’s dream in Kaldor City: Storm Mine). The transformation of Ood Operations’ chairman, Klineman Halpen, into an Ood at the end of the story makes the metaphor clear that the enslavement of the Ood is the enslavement of humanity, reinforced by the Doctor and Donna’s earlier conversation on the morals of Ood ownership in which the Doctor refers to sweatshops and factories in Donna’s own time. While the loose trilogy of Ood stories references The Robots of Death, it goes in the opposite direction: rather than robots being made to perform unthinking acts of murder by a madman, instead we have an enslaved species, likened to robots, which takes control with a little help from the Doctor. The Ood stories begin as a challenging question of where the mechanical ends and the human begins, but end as a metaphor for slavery and the dehumanisation of labour.

Voyage of the Damned

The 2007 Christmas special is a visible tribute to The Robots of Death. We are introduced to a leisured elite enjoying a decadent lifestyle in an Edwardian setting, served by beautiful golden-faced robot angels with calm voices, collectively named the Host, which inevitably wind up killing people. We also have a satire of late capitalism revolving, in this case, around the corporation which owns the ship. Fittingly, given the shift in British economics over the intervening 30 years, the company’s sector is not resource extraction but tourism. The villain turns out to have smuggled himself on board the ship (and, given that his unauthorised presence on a vessel which he plans to scupper would thoroughly implicate himself, is quite probably madder than Taren Capel), maintaining a secret lair within a specially constructed impact chamber, where he can hack the robots undetected. The robots, again, are not acting on their own initiative.

There are also a number of smaller callbacks, clearly aimed at fans who remember The Robots of Death. When temporary companion Astrid remarks that the TARDIS seems a bit small, the Doctor retorts ‘it’s a bit distant’, evoking the scene in The Robots of Death episode 1 where the Doctor explains temporal engineering to Leela. Later, a damaged Host declaims ‘Kill, kill, kill,’ as it tries to strangle one of the survivors, which recalls the malfunctioning V4 in the final episode. We also have a Host losing its hand when sticking it through a closing door in a callback to V6’s attack on Toos in episode 3.

What the writing and production team were hoping to achieve by this is perhaps slightly more opaque. While the references to The Robots of Death in the Ood Trilogy make sense, given that the latter stories are building on some of the issues raised by the former, in this case the Host are not the focus of the story, but part of a wider disaster, and many of the above references come across as being a part of the Davies era’s tendency to avoid direct allusions to original series continuity while at the same time shamelessly including references and ‘Easter eggs’ to appeal to audience members who are in the know. However, one might nonetheless argue that the corporate satire element of the story brings to the fore an aspect of The Robots of Death which is largely tacit in the original: the fact that sufficiently large corporations not only care little about their workers or customers, but will happily sacrifice them in the name of profit. While Russell T Davies does not take the anti-capitalist themes of this story beyond this allusion, the idea will be further explored during Oxygen.

Oxygen

Oxygen is probably the closest the post-2005 series has come to the ethos of The Robots of Death, if not the aesthetic (which, in Oxygen’s case, is exactly the sort of bleakly industrial setting that Briant was deliberately avoiding). It rings a modern change on the scenario in that, although we have an affluent, mechanised society dominated by a monopolistic company, the workers are not kept in luxury, but artificial scarcity. Where the original story was about the potential dangers of developing a leisure society in which people become too dependent on robots, Oxygen, written in a social context where mechanisation is leading to the increased concentration of wealth in the hands of a small number of people, instead focuses on the dangers of a society in which everything, humans included, is viewed solely in terms of its economic value.

Like The Robots of Death, we have a mining station, an apparent murder mystery which turns out to be no mystery at all, and zombie-like killers who aren’t actually homicidal, simply acting on their programming. Poul’s phobia which caused him to perceive the robots as ‘walking, talking dead men’ is taken to its literal extreme, as the horror in Oxygen is that the killers are animated space-suits with the corpses of dead crewmembers inside. The fear of automation is in this case the possibility that businesses might prefer to employ walking corpses rather than real humans. The Doctor’s companion Bill likens her suit to a robot, and the Doctor says she should be careful or it will take her job. At one point the Doctor raises the idea that the suits themselves might be rebelling, though this possibility is quickly dismissed.

Where it builds on The Robots of Death is with regard to the updated politics. The predatory nature of the company is front and centre: most directly, the story is a satire on privatisation and exploitation, for instance, drug companies charging exorbitant prices for substances like insulin. The Doctor’s downbeat coda, explaining to Bill that while the survivors’ complaint led to a rebellion against the company and the downfall of capitalism, humanity subsequently ‘made a different mistake’, is in keeping with Boucher’s own generally pessimistic evaluation of human nature. While not focusing on robots so much as on The Robots of Death’s themes of exploitation and the abuses of capitalism, Oxygen is arguably the story which best captures Boucher’s legacy to the new series.

Kerblam!

The most recent Doctor Who story at the time of writing which references The Robots of Death is Kerblam! Again, we have distinctive-looking killer robots (in this case with a 1950s tin-toy aesthetic), glowing-eyed, smiling and repeating catchphrases, where the apparent ‘robot rebellion’ turns out to be the result of a mad genius reprogramming them. There are a couple of cheeky direct allusions to The Robots of Death, in that the Doctor uses the term ‘robophobia’ (though in this case to refer to arbitrary prejudice against robots rather than to a psychological condition), and, when she and her companions hide, the Doctor remarks that ‘you haven’t lived’ unless you’ve ‘hidden in a panelled alcove’, an apparent reference to Leela concealing herself at the climax of The Robots of Death. As with Uvanov, an unsympathetic manager is wrongly fingered as the culprit early on, and the Taren Capel figure turns out to be a terrorist posing as an ordinary member of the workforce. As in Corpse Marker’s portrayal of Kaldor, the automation of jobs means that only the very fortunate can have them. An AI turns out to have been the one who alerted the Doctor to the murders, a believable extension of D84’s role in the earlier story.

More philosophically, however, what Kerblam! has in common with The Robots of Death is a fear of the consequences of extreme inequality. As with Oxygen, but unlike The Robots of Death, the leisure society has failed to emerge from affluence: jobs are scarce, but the unemployed nonetheless live in genuine poverty, with an implied class of super-rich enjoying the profits, whereas Corpse Marker indicates that the residents of the Sewerpits are at least cared for. Much as Boucher suggested that arbitrary stratification even in meritocratic and affluent societies might lead inevitably to social breakdown, here it would make sense for hungry, jobless people to revolt. Kerblam! somewhat lets the theme down, though, in not pursuing this to its ethical conclusion and having the oppressed workers and unemployed unite for social change, encouraged by the TARDIS crew. In the end, regrettably, the Doctor supports the continuation of the status quo, rather than questioning or challenging it, as the Doctor in The Robots of Death does through comparing Kaldor to pre-revolutionary France and through befriending D84. Kerblam! starts off as an intriguingly pessimistic reimagining of The Robots of Death’s post-scarcity society, but ultimately holds back from condemning the repressive forces which enable the workers’ situation.

Conclusions

Overall, the spinoffs, tie-ins and homages to The Robots of Death tend to focus on two key aspects of the story: first, the possibility that artificial intelligence might emerge in a stratified but mechanised society, and second, the dangers of monopolistic capitalism. The reason is probably that both are unresolved aspects of The Robots of Death. While D84 appears to be emerging as a sentient robot, his existence is terminated before this can be properly explored, and the Company is very much a background aspect of the story, albeit clearly not a benign figure for everyone. In particular, with the revived Doctor Who series coming at a time when we live in a mechanised society with increasing concerns about the dominance of corporations, it is not surprising that writers turn for inspiration to a story which explored these issues 40 years earlier. By focusing on contemporary concerns such as religious radicalisation, populist politics, and the precarious labour force, the various works considered here reimagine the themes of The Robots of Death for new generations.

[1] Anonymous, ‘Production’, p5.

[2] The relevant stories are Occam’s Razor (2001) by Alan Stevens and Jim Smith, Death’s Head (2002) by Chris Boucher, Hidden Persuaders (2002) by Jim Smith and Fiona Moore, Taren Capel (2003) by Alan Stevens, Checkmate (2003) by Alan Stevens, and Storm Mine (2004) by Daniel O’Mahony.

[3] Big Finish, ‘The Robots’.

[4] Or possibly an acceptance of the implication at the end of Kaldor City: Checkmate, that either new, alternative timelines have been created, or even that reality now exists within the mind of the Fendahl, with all the potential for contradiction and reimagining that implies.

[5] As the Robots series (in which David Collings and Pamela Salem reprise their roles as Poul and Toos) is incomplete at the time of publication, it is not covered here.

[6] Kavanagh, Gareth, ‘That One With The Killer Robots: Memories of Producing Robots of Death and Storm Mine’, Celestial Toyroom #486.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Documents

Boucher, Chris, The Robots of Death rehearsal script, undated. Private collection of Gareth Kavanagh.

BBC Written Archives Centre file T5/2, 592/1.

Promotion material document, undated.

Production document, undated.

Radio Times listings, undated.

Camera script, dated 8 November 1976.

Books

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Molesworth, Richard, Robert Holmes, A Life in Words. Tolworth, Telos Press, 2013. ISBN 9781845830915.

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Asher-Perrin, Emily, ‘No Room for Old-Fashioned Cats: Davies-Era Who and Interracial Romance’, pp133-39.

Dodson, Linda, ‘Conscious Colour-Blindness, Unconscious Racism in Doctor Who Companions’, pp64-72.

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Periodicals

Celestial Toyroom, Doctor Who Appreciation Society, 1976-.

Kavanagh, Gareth, ‘That One with the Killer Robots: Memories of Producing Robots of Death and Storm Mine.’ Celestial Toyroom #486, September 2018.

Moore, Fiona, ‘Vocs Extended: What’s the Big Deal About The Robots of Death?’ Celestial Toyroom #304, April 2003.

Stevens, Alan, ‘World’s End’. Celestial Toyroom #496-97, August 2019.

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Moore, Steve, and John Stokes, ‘Crisis on Kaldor.’ DWM #50, cover date March 1981.

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Shadow, 1979.

Weapon, 1979.

Horizon, 1979.

Trial, 1979.

The Keeper, 1979.

Star One, 1979.

Volcano, 1980.

Rumours of Death, 1980.

Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. Glen A Larson Productions, Leisure Concepts, Universal Television, 1979-81.

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Amos Green Must Live, 1970.

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Stage Plays

Boucher, Chris, and Alan Stevens, Robots of Death, 2012.

O’Mahony, Daniel, Alan Stevens and Fiona Moore, Storm Mine, 2012.

Audio CD

Boucher, Chris, Death’s Head. Kaldor City. Magic Bullet Productions, 2002.

Briggs, Nick, Robophobia. Doctor Who: The Monthly Adventures. Big Finish Productions, 2011.

Fitton, Matt, Escape from Kaldor. Doctor Who: Ravenous 2. Big Finish Productions, 2018.

O’Mahony, Daniel, Storm Mine. Kaldor City. Magic Bullet Productions, 2004.

Smith, Andrew, The Sons of Kaldor. Doctor Who: The Fourth Doctor Adventures. Big Finish Productions, 2018.

Smith, Jim, and Fiona Moore, Hidden Persuaders. Kaldor City. Magic Bullet Productions, 2002.

Stevens, Alan, Taren Capel. Kaldor City. Magic Bullet Productions, 2003.

Stevens, Alan. Checkmate. Kaldor City. Magic Bullet Productions, 2003.

Stevens, Alan, and Jim Smith, Occam’s Razor. Kaldor City. Magic Bullet Productions, 2001.

Web

Radio Times #2780. BBC Genome https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/schedules/bbcone/london/1977-02-19. Accessed 7 April 2020.

‘Expressionism’. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/art/Expressionism. Accessed 15 July 2018.

Big Finish, ‘The Robots’. 26 June 2019. www.bigfinish.com/releases/v/the-robots-1-2095. Accessed 26 June 2019.

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Horáková, Erin, ‘Boucher, Backbone and Blake: The Legacy of Blake’s 7’. Strange Horizons, 22 August 2016. http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/articles/boucher-backbone-and-blake-the-legacy-of-blakes-7/. Accessed 17 January 2019.

Moore, Fiona, ‘“A Life Form Unique In The History of The Universe”: The Mutants and Postcolonialism in 1970s Doctor Who.’ Paper presented at Royal Geographical Society Annual Conference, 28-30 August 2019. https://www.academia.edu/40251208/_A_Life_Form_Unique_in_the_History_of_the_Universe_Postcolonial_discourses_in_Doctor_Who_The_Mutants. Accessed 4 September 2019.

Simak, Clifford, ‘Skirmish (Bathe Your Bearings in Blood!) (1950)’. Prospero’s Isle, 20 May 2015. http://prosperosisle.org/spip.php?article259. Accessed 20 March 2019.

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Stevens, Alan, ‘Travis: The Final Act’. Magic Bullet Productions, 1995. http://kaldorcity.com/audios/b7/travis/travisscript.html. Accessed 22 October 2019.

Stevens, Alan, and Anthony Brown, ‘Chris Boucher Interview’. 1992. Magic Bullet Productions, 27 January 2011. http://kaldorcity.com/people/cbinterview_1992.html. Accessed 16 October 2019.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

In the writing of this volume, many people contributed time, knowledge, interview material, insights and resources. In no particular order, I would like to thank Peter Anghelides, David Baillie, Chris Boucher, Michael E Briant, Colin Brockhurst, Andrew M Butler, David Collings, Brian Croucher, Gregory de Polnay, Sarah Ennals, Simon Goulding, Philip Hinchcliffe, Edward James, Gareth Kavanagh, Matthew Kilburn, Una McCormack, Farah Mendlesohn, Alan Stevens, the members of the London Science Fiction Research Community, the members of the Memories of Working at BBC Television Centre Facebook group, the staff of the British Library, particularly in the Rare Books And Music Reading Room (who are utterly unfazed by my increasingly eclectic stack requests), and the staff of the BBC Written Archive (likewise). Before their deaths, Russell Hunter and Scott Fredericks also contributed insights and memories into working on Doctor Who in the late 1970s. Finally, I would like to thank my family, my friends, my colleagues, my cats and anyone else who had to listen to me bang on about Expressionist design for two years. I can’t promise that I’ll shut up now.

ßBIOGRAPHY

Fiona Moore is a writer and academic who has written and cowritten a number of articles and guidebooks on cult television, including guides to Blake’s 7, The Prisoner and Battlestar Galactica, and the regular ‘Cool Things…’ column for the Doctor Who Appreciation Society’s zine Celestial Toyroom. She has also written one novel, three stage plays and four audio plays. Her short fiction and poetry has appeared in, among others, Interzone, Asimov, Clarkesworld, On Spec and Forever Magazine, and has been nominated for the BSFA Award for Shorter Fiction. When not writing, she is a Professor of Business Anthropology at Royal Holloway, University of London. More details, and free content, can be found at www.fiona-moore.com.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Title Page

CONTENTS

OVERVIEW

CHAPTER 1: THE ROBOTS OF DEATH IN CONTEXT

CHAPTER 2: SCRIPT TO SCREEN

CHAPTER 3: THE MACHINE-MAN

CHAPTER 4: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND ARTIFICIAL STUPIDITY

CHAPTER 5: CLASS AND POWER IN THE WORK OF CHRIS BOUCHER

CHAPTER 6: ‘CAST ALL ETHNICITIES’

CHAPTER 7: THE LEGACY OF THE ROBOTS OF DEATH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

BIOGRAPHY