In which the Doctor first encounters Belinda Chandra, who is having serious ex-boyfriend issues...
One night, whilst in the local park star-gazing, boyfriend Alan gives Belinda a gift. This is a certificate naming a star after her - "Missbelindachandra" - which lies in Orion.
17 years later, long after they have broken up, Belinda is a hard working nurse and sharing a house with a group of friends. The Doctor has been searching for her, after being told by someone that she is significant for him.
One evening her home is suddenly invaded by massive robots, which abduct her and take her to their spaceship. This is witnessed by neighbour Mrs Flood.
The Doctor arrives too late to help and Mrs Flood hides when she sees him approach, not wishing to be recognised. He gives chase in the TARDIS.
The robots inform Belinda that they are taking her to their planet - Missbelindachandra One - and show her the certificate, which has signs of great age compared to her copy which has been brought from the house. She argues that it ought to have been Alan they kidnapped as it was he who bought it.
The TARDIS is unable to follow as it hits a time fracture and is forced to divert.
The spaceship also experiences this.
On arriving at the planet, they are met by a woman named Sasha 55, who informs Belinda that the robots are currently at war with a group known simply as the Rebels. They take her to the Royal Chamber where a group of people are gathered to welcome her. Seating her on a throne, the robots inform her of her forthcoming wedding with the AI Generator which rules them. This union will put an end to the war.
When she refuses to go along with this, the robots state that she has no choice. Sasha 55 invites the Royal Historian to explain the history of the planet, which was at peace until a decade ago when the robots rebelled and took over.
The Historian is actually the Doctor, and he sends Belinda a message in code - the robots being unable to hear every ninth word anyone says due to a glitch. He is also able to give the people in the room the message to attack the robots, for they are actually members of the Rebel group.
A gun battle ensues, in which Sasha 55 is killed. The Doctor is distressed as he had promised to make her his new travelling companion. He tells Belinda that he arrived here six months ago and befriended Sasha 55 and together they built the Rebel movement. The time fracture had caused him to arrive early.
The surviving Rebels go to their underground base, where Belinda assists with the wounded.
She finds herself being blamed for what is happening on this planet, as the star certificate somehow managed to travel back through time to form part of the planet's foundation myth.
Feeling guilty at what is happening here, Belinda activates a service robot and this allows the robots to trace her - intent on going through with the wedding if the Rebels are spared and it brings an end to hostilities.
She and the Doctor are taken to the AI Generator which opens up to reveal Alan, now a cyborg integrated into the machine and ruling the planet. When she had told the robots on the spaceship to take him they had obeyed, but the time fracture meant that he was brought here ten years ago. It was he who caused the robots to revolt against the humans, and so he is responsible for the war.
Belinda tells the Doctor that she had rejected a marriage proposal from Alan years ago because she felt uncomfortable with his controlling behaviour.
All this is his revenge against her for that rejection. Whilst Alan has the star certificate of the far future, Belinda holds the one brought from 2025. To join with him, she must hold Alan's copy - but the Doctor swaps the two unnoticed. A temporal paradox results, as the two copies are one and the same from different time zones.
This causes Alan to revert back to a sperm cell whilst the Doctor is able to absorb most of the ensuing temporal disturbance. The robots are now leaderless, and harmony between them and the humanoids can be restored.
The Doctor offers to take Belinda home, and she insists they get back in time for 24th May 2025. For some reason, the TARDIS will not go to Earth on that date and materialises in space - so the Doctor must find a way round this phenomenon.
Departing, they fail to see floating debris from Earth, including a London taxi, bits of the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower, and part of the Great Pyramid - as well as a scorched calendar showing the date of 24th May, 2025...
The Robot Revolution was written by Russell T Davies and was first broadcast on Saturday 12th April 2025. This story launches the fifteenth series since 2005 and, as with the previous series, episodes were released at midnight on BBC iPlayer and Disney+.
This series was the second to be co-produced by Disney, who had agreed to co-fund a total of 26 episodes - which included the 60th Anniversary stories, two Christmas Specials, two seasons and a spin-off series.
The episode also introduces the new companion, Belinda, played by Varada Sethu. She had impressed the production team when she featured in the previous series' episode Boom, where she played the Cleric Mundy Flynn. She becomes the third companion actor to be cast after appearing as another character in an earlier story - Ian Marter having played Lt Andrews in Carnival of Monsters before becoming Harry Sullivan, and Karen Gillan was one of the Sybilline Sisterhood in The Fires of Pompeii before being cast as Amy Pond.
Visually, the inspiration for the story was retro-1950's Sci-Fi, with the robots, their spaceship and their weapons having a tinplate toy-like appearance. The planet has a cartoon-ish quality, as well as being reminiscent of cityscapes seen in the 1930's Saturday morning matinee serials of Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers. The 1980 film version of the former had gone for a very similar look.
In terms of the script, RTD wanted the episode to reflect a hugely topical issue - namely what is termed the "Manosphere" and the Incel subculture. Incel is short for "involuntarily celibate". They are men who find difficulty in forming romantic or sexual relationships, and who blame this on women rather than any inadequacies of their own. They are deeply misogynistic and some have taken this to extremes of violence against women. Alan's controlling behaviour and the great lengths he takes to get revenge on Belinda for standing up to him reflect some of these ideas.
Only a few weeks before The Robot Revolution aired, Netflix streamed the drama Adolescence, which dealt with this subculture. In this a 13 year old schoolboy (played by Owen Cooper, who has won numerous awards for his performance - some as the youngest ever winner) is arrested for killing a female classmate, having been influenced by toxic social media influencers and misogynistic websites.
It's all there in the story, but RTD refrains from bludgeoning the audience with it as some others certainly would.
Several critics thought it more noticeable and actually disliked the way that this serious subject matter was handled within such a lightweight story.
Jonny Green plays Alan. He seems to have been cast for his voice mainly - he's seen under heavy prosthetics for most of his scenes - as he is a regular Big Finish audio actor. This appears to be his only on-screen role to date.
Stephen Love, who plays Robot 1, was also a Wrarth Warrior in The Star Beast, as was Robot 2 actor Robert Strange, who also portrayed the Bogeyman in Space Babies.
The robots were voiced by Nicholas Briggs.
Anita Dobson returns as the enigmatic Mrs Flood, which brings us to this year's story arc.
As well as her, we also have some impending disaster going to befall the Earth on 24th May 2025 - the date of the final episode of this series. Moffat did something very similar with Series 5 and Amy's wedding day - also timed for the final episode's broadcast.
We also have the Doctor unable to reach that date, which is obviously connected, but it will mean that the next few adventures will have to see him attempt to do so, in order to get Belinda home.
There's also mention of a mysterious "he" who has told the Doctor that she is of importance to him.
Overall, it's a season opener from RTD so it's only to be expected that this will be a bit of a bright run-around, with some humour and some striking visuals that will go down well in the trailers. It is so much more successful than the previous year's dreadful Space Babies, so the season feels as if it has gotten off to a better start. Sethu gets more than enough screen time to impress, though we knew quite early on that she would only be staying for this one series.
Things you might like to know:
- Rather than simply ignore the resemblance of Belinda to Mundy, the Doctor claims that they are distantly related.
- This episode was originally to have been a stand-alone story, to be screened mid-series. RTD2 then amended it to make it the companion introduction piece.
- Shots of the Rebel ships attacking the city in the trailer prompted some fans to believe that the Daleks would be appearing, as they resembled their saucers in the brief clips.
- Cars from the 1950's and 1970's were visual inspiration for the design of the robots, which were built up from 34 different 3-D printed components.
- RTD2 added the flatmates to the abduction scene as he realised it was unrealistic for a nurse to afford such a large property on her own. These scenes were recorded as pick-ups during production of a later episode.
- The episode was to have opened with scenes showing Belinda's family, but the writer decided that a story springing from someone getting a star certificate should really open with them getting said star certificate.
- Critics were almost unanimous in disliking the way Sasha 55's death was handled, as the character had been so poorly set up. We're only told she's significant to the Doctor after she's already dead.
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