Well, there's the title for a start.
The story sets out to be a "whodunnit?" - a murder mystery set on a high-tech alien mining machine rather than an isolated country house - but the title gives away from the off that the robots are doing the killing.
We haven't seen a title this stupid since The Android Invasion, which totally screwed up the mystery of the opening instalment.
Proof that Hinchcliffe and Holmes sometimes got it very wrong.
Beyond the killer robots, there is a further "whodunnit?" element in identifying the crew member who is behind these killings. However, this is also spoiled as no amount of Top of the Pops video effects trickery can disguise the fact that it is Dask who we see issuing orders, and his distinctive black and white striped pantaloons also give him away, when the camera dwells on his lower portions.
Dask also seems to know a lot about robots, and tends to be rather po-faced. He might as well wear an "I control killer robots" T-shirt.
Where does the TARDIS materialise? It lands in a metal chamber which is used for collecting minerals blown into it. This appears to be a fixed structure on the surface of the planet - but it then suggested that it is actually part of the Sandminer. Yet the Sandminer is moving to catch a storm, whilst we see the view which the Doctor and Leela see and they are definitely not moving. The geography is confusing.
The robots are incredibly strong, yet the first victim manages to let out a very long scream before dying. Why does the robot not kill him instantly - which it is perfectly capable of doing - rather than risk detection by giving him time to scream? How does he manage to scream like that when he's being strangled anyway?
Poul's nervous breakdown characterises the mentality of this robot-dependent society. Everyone is convinced that robots cannot harm a human. However, when we first meet the crew, a couple of them are happily joking about a robot twisting someone's arm off. It rather undermines what the script is trying to set up - that the mere thought of this could drive people mad or cause their entire way of life to collapse.
What sort of detectives fail to carry out a rudimentary background check, to make sure that each member of the crew is who they say they are? D84 is gobsmacked to consider that their target might have swapped places with someone. They know Capel is on board, yet haven't thought about him posing as one of the crew - the most obvious way of infiltrating it.
Why does Poul scoff at the idea of someone being able to turn robots into killers - when he's been sent to this Sandminer specifically to find someone who is able to turn robots into killers?
If this society is so robot-dependent then surely Poul's robophobia would have shown up before now? People stuck on a long-haul mining mission, trapped together for months at a time, must surely have some sort of psychological evaluation before being selected - so why did that not pick up his phobia?
How exactly does he manage to function, mentally, with a robot partner?
Whilst this may be the fault of his security service superiors, rather than the mining company, the latter must surely be held to blame for placing Zilda on the same Sandminer as Uvanov, when he was in command when her brother died. It's as if they are deliberately putting together a dysfunctional crew.
Toos claims that if SV7 has gone bad, then all of the robots will have gone the same way. But we later see that Capel has had to switch off the unaltered ones.
One minute communicators can tell exactly where someone is (Uvanov knows that Zilda is in his quarters), but the next minute they can't - when Leela has Toos claim to be somewhere else when she's talking to SV7.
SV7 kills Capel because it can no longer recognise his voice. But we have already seen that robots can recognise people visually. And why does SV7 have to ask Toos to confirm it's her, if they recognise voices?
It's suggested that there is a corpse marker for each of the humans who are to die - but surely Capel isn't carrying one himself?
Do we have to put the Doctor's talk of Taren Capel having a robot father down to him speaking metaphorically - in that Capel had a robot father figure? It would be possible for a robot to have been his actual father - though not in any biological sense. Some sort of artificial insemination would would need to be involved, which means that at least one of his biological parents must have been party to it.
Any robot involvement in the process would have been as little more than a delivery mechanism - hardly enough for Capel to regard it as his father.
The robots are all too clearly seen to be wearing Marigold brand rubber gloves.
The Doctor claims that it is aerodynamically impossible for the bumble bee to fly. He had said this before, in The Daemons. A generation of fans believed him, and quoted this "fact" to their school friends: the Doctor said it, so it had to be true.
It was wrong then, and it's still wrong now.
No comments:
Post a Comment