Robot Part Four

The one where the robot grows to giant size...

Professor Kettlewell may be a genius, but he's also tremendously naive to think that he'll be able to persuade the world to look after the environment better by ganging up with a bunch of fascists with their finger on the atomic trigger. When he discovers that Hilda Winters is deadly serious about exploding the nuclear bombs if the world fails to heed her wishes, he realises the folly of his ways. Despite this, he still agrees to activate the nuclear countdown, which just makes him stupid rather than misguided.

Once the countdown has begun, only then does Miss Winters think to check they've got enough food and water to last nuclear Armageddon. Although the Scientific Reform Society seems to have the world's governments over a barrel, they haven't really thought things through very carefully, have they?

In truth, Miss Winters and her right-wing elitists are defeated just seven minutes into this final episode after the Doctor gains entry to the bunker and quickly stops the countdown (at a highly predictable 002 seconds!). Harry punches Jellicoe, rendering him unconscious, which is the first really useful thing he's done since we met him, and the Brigadier has Jellicoe and Winters locked up (curiously, the exact same fate he had in store for those other nuclear code thieves, Morgaine and Mordred, in Battlefield).

The rest of the episode is taken up trying to defeat the mighty K1 robot, which has gone mad after murdering its creator, Professor Kettlewell (you've gotta love Edward Burnham's melodramatic "silent movie" death scene!). It turns to the one person who has shown it kindness, namely Sarah, but to be honest, it would be so easy for Sarah to escape her metallic captor if she wished. All she'd have to do is run away (perhaps even stroll quickly) because there's no way that robot can catch her up! It's nice that, despite the cumbersome costume he's saddled with, Michael Kilgarriff manages to get some tenderness into his vocal performance, particularly when he tells Sarah that he intends to destroy all humanity, except for her!

Hero of the hour is Warrant Officer Benton, who remembers that Kettlewell had invented a virus which attacked and broke down the living metal from which the K1 was made. All the Doctor has to do is concoct a strong enough serum to infect the robot (if Benton hadn't remembered the virus, who knows how the robot would have been defeated?).

Continuing UNIT's rather inept performance in this story (and generally speaking too), the Brigadier manages to actually worsen the situation by causing the robot to grow to building-size proportions by firing the disintegrator gun at it. I'm not sure how or why this happens. The Doctor says the gun gave the robot an infusion of the energy it needed, but why didn't the disintegrator gun, well... disintegrate it? At the very least it should have had a negligible effect on it, rather than boost it to giant size!

Anyway, this allows director Christopher Barry to use Colour Separation Overlay (CSO) with varying degrees of success to show the rampaging robot. The restoration team behind the 2007 DVD release of Robot cleaned up and improved the CSO fringing effects a little ("It now looks like OK CSO rather than bad CSO"), but it still looks poor in parts, particularly the attempt to make it look like Sarah is on a rooftop. Watching Elisabeth Sladen pretend to clutch a drainpipe which isn't really there is a low point, as are the scenes where we're supposed to believe the little dolly the robot is carrying is a real life Sarah Jane Smith! The production team did the best they could with the tools and budget provided, but the fact is that it never convinces.

UNIT's assault on the robot in the high street is pretty thrilling, with plenty of explosions and machine gun fire (I was quite impressed to see Sarah on the rooftop behind the robot just before an explosion at 16m 30s (pictured) - I've never noticed that before). There's a brief shot where the robot steps on a soldier, squishing him underfoot, which I thought a little gruesome for children's teatime telly, but at least you don't see any blood, or hear the soldier scream in dying agony. And at least the camera doesn't linger to see the robot lift its foot!

The Doctor and Harry arrive in Bessie (the last time the yellow car will be seen in Doctor Who until The Five Doctors). What I love about the denouement is that the Doctor essentially saves the world with a red plastic bucket! Whereas Robot as a script is pure Pertwee era, I just cannot imagine the Third Doctor careering along in the back of Bessie wielding a red bucket of bubbling liquid like a circus clown. He'd build a gadget of some kind, or perhaps a giant spray gun, or maybe drop the liquid from a helicopter above the robot. But the Fourth Doctor saves the world with a red bucket, in the same ridiculous vein as the Tenth Doctor saves the world with a satsuma, or the Seventh Doctor with some honey bees and a little girl's scream. It's whimsical, and the perfect example of how this new Doctor operates.

The final scene sees the Doctor and Sarah addressing what she sees as the tragedy of the robot's demise, and we get the first of many times when the Fourth Doctor will offer somebody a jelly baby. I love the instant chemistry Baker and Sladen seem to have here, with the Doctor hoping Sarah will join him in the TARDIS once more. "Are you coming?" he ventures, looking away coyly as he offers another sweet. Sarah grabs one enthusiastically, almost triumphantly, obviously excited by the prospect of another adventure in space and time. They laugh together warmly. These two seem like old friends already, despite the Doctor having changed his entire appearance and personality.

It's also lovely when Harry (in blazer and cravat) enters and refuses to believe the police box is a time machine. After offering him a jelly baby (the third offering in this scene alone), the Doctor quickly snatches half of it back, but when Harry goes inside the Ship and says "Oh I say!", a whole new era is about to begin.

Interestingly, Harry Sullivan never gets a scene inside the TARDIS in any of his stories, and this fact also made me realise that Sarah Jane doesn't really get all that many herself. We only see her inside the TARDIS in five of her 17 stories, which is really surprising. In fact, the TARDIS interior only appears in one episode between Planet of the Daleks (April 1973) and Planet of Evil (September 1975)!

I also find it interesting that the Doctor offers jelly babies to the two people he invites aboard the TARDIS to travel with him. I find this interesting because, in Logopolis, the Doctor snarls at Nyssa: "I've never chosen my own company!" And I used to think this was true: both Sarah and Adric are stowaways, Leela forced her way aboard, Romana was forced upon him by the White Guardian, Nyssa was brought to him by the Watcher, and Tegan sort of wandered into the Doctor's world accidentally. He even said no to K-9 initially until Leela begged him to take him aboard. But here, perhaps we see the only time the Fourth Doctor truly invites somebody to travel with him: Harry Sullivan!

Robot is a very standard Pertwee era UNIT adventure which, to be honest, wouldn't have been any better had Pertwee been in it. In fact, the best thing about the story is the alarming, exhilarating presence of Tom Baker, who lights up the screen, transfixes your attention, and becomes Dr Who from the moment he speaks. This is a man born to play this part, and it's as if he knows that from the very outset. He doesn't have to try too hard because essentially Tom Baker is Dr Who, and that is a very special quality indeed. We're so lucky Barry Letts cast him. When you think of the other actors who were reportedly considered for the part: Graham Crowden, Michael Bentine, Bernard Cribbins, Fulton Mackay, Richard Hearne, Jim Dale... I'd love to see each of those actors' interpretations of the Doctor, but certainly not at the expense of seven years of Tom Baker.

We're in for a fantastic journey...

First broadcast: January 18th, 1975

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: The Doctor defeating the robot and saving the world with a red bucket while riding in the back of an Edwardian motor car.
The Bad: The CSO rooftop and Sarah Jane dolly.
Overall score for episode: ★★★★★★★☆☆☆ (story average: 6.8 out of 10)

"Would you like a jelly baby?" tally: 03 - The first jelly baby the Fourth Doctor offers anybody is to Sarah Jane (and, wordlessly, the second), while the next is to his other companion in waiting, Harry Sullivan.

NEXT TIME: The Ark in Space...

My reviews of this story's other episodes: Part One; Part Two; Part Three

Find out birth/death dates, career information, and facts and trivia about this story's cast and crew at the Doctor Who Cast & Crew site: http://doctorwhocastandcrew.blogspot.com/2014/06/robot.html

Robot is available on BBC DVD. Find it on Amazon - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Doctor-Who-Robot-Tom-Baker/dp/B000NVI2C4