A brilliant robotics engineer, Capel had been brought up in the company of robots, with very little human contact or companionship. He related only to robot kind and came to see them as his kin. His sociopathy led to him becoming mentally unstable. He planned to start a robot revolution, freeing his brothers from enslavement by humans. Under the name of Dask, he managed to get himself a job as Chief Engineer on a Storm Mine vessel, which would spend months in the wilderness seeking out valuable ores. This would provide a base for him to create an army. He started to employ Laserson Probes to adjust the programming of the robot contingent on the Mine, overriding their prime directive not to harm humans. As the crew began to be killed off, the Doctor and Leela had to try to discover Capel's alias and stop him from destroying this robot-reliant society. The authorities were aware that he was on board, and had placed two agents amongst the crew to seek him out. They were Poul, and a disguised Super-Voc robot designated D84.
Once his identity had been discovered, Capel dressed himself as a robot and ordered the deaths of all the human survivors. The reprogrammed robots were conditioned to obey his voice.
The Doctor discovered the whereabouts of the workshop he had set up to alter the robots. Leela hid behind a panel and opened a cannister of helium gas. This altered Capel's voice so that the robots no longer recognised him. Ordered to kill all humans, SV7 strangled him.
Played by: David Bailie. Appearances: Robots of Death (1977).
- Bailie is internationally known for his recurring role as Cotton in the Pirates of the Caribbean film franchise. He's the mute one, with the parrot.
- He has reprised the role of Taren Capel on audio, in the Kaldor City spin-off range, and was the Celestial Toymaker for the Big Finish range.
- Capel's name derives from the Czech playwright Karel Capek. In 1920 he wrote a play called R.U.R. - Rossum's Universal Robots - which told of a robot revolution. From this "robot" entered the English language.
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