Look Who’s back. For now, at least…

If – IF – the rumour mill is to be believed, this 15th (stop trying to make season 2 happen, Russell) series of the revived Doctor Who may be the last for quite some time* and on the strength of season opener The Robot Revolution, maybe that’s not entirely a bad thing.

There’s something very familiar about The Robot Revolution, a familiarity that breeds if not contempt, then perhaps a scintilla of impatience? Stylistically, it feels very like a reprise of The Star Beast. Situationally, it feels very like a retread of Smith & Jones. Creatively, though, it feels like the cloister bell is ringing.
The Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) finds himself entangled in a mechanical mutiny on the planet Missbelindachandra One when the dominant robot population abduct a human nurse named Belinda Chandra (Varada Sethu) to be their queen.

Russell T Davies is a writer I have enormous respect and admiration for. He was perhaps the only person who could have successfully revived the series back in 2005 (when revivals were the exception rather than the rule) and there’s no denying that with his nous for combining contemporary perspectives with out of this world concepts he breathed new life into not just the character but the lore and the series as a whole.

At his very best, he’s a wonderfully puckish writer, as adept at lampooning and skewering the zeitgeist as he is at embracing and harnessing it. He’s also unafraid of big swing storytelling, an acolyte of the Joss Whedon school of show running (and, unfortunately it seems, inappropriate working environments) but when he gets it right, there’s few that can match him. At his worst, though, he’s also prone to shortcuts, cutting corners and lazily handwaving any problems away, especially when under pressure and that’s the habit that’s so far manifesting most in the Gatwa era of Who.

As you’d expect, The Robot Revolution is a slick reintroduction of the fundamentals of Doctor Who in the guise of onboarding a new companion and the simple plot is fine, just very rushed and a little disjointed. Belinda’s volte face decision to suddenly summon the robots isn’t well articulated and it feels like there’s just too much going on for the fifty minutes to do justice to. There are plenty of good ideas and rich thematic targets like the naffness of star naming gifts and the toxicity of controlling would-be boyfriends, fertile ground for a series that has, in the past few years, decided that subtext is for cowards and everything needs to be text. But it all just feels like Davies had the outline of an idea but couldn’t quite figure out how to make it work so he placed a time fracture in the middle of the journey – an editorial placeholder turned plot mechanism just to stick the pieces together.

Perhaps most concerning of all, though, is how often The Doctor behaves or acts in a very un-Doctor-like manner during this flimsy adventure. He blacks out a whole hospital at one point and dismisses it as a “whoopsie” moment despite the near certainty that patients in surgery or on life support will have had a very bad time as a result, then later he positively crows as the human villain, reduced to a zygote, gets swept up by an admittedly cute robot vacuum cleaner. I guess life doesn’t begin at conception as far as Time Lords are concerned?

Also, it’s maybe time to talk about how bad the series looks now. The visuals are soupy and saturated and you have to wonder where has all the Disney money actually gone? Despite their relatively restrictive budgets, The Moffat and Chibnall eras both looked far better and more cinematic and even Davies’ pre-HD series had a more authentic and embraceable aesthetic. The series is suffering – perhaps for the first time in its long history – from the curse of enough money. It’s long been established that in cinema and TV – and especially science fiction cinema or TV – that constraints breed creativity. An absence of limits breeds laziness, or at best a lack of discipline.

It’s not all doom and gloom, though. Varada Sethu’s Belinda may be just the shot in the arm the series needs. A reluctant companion (when was the last time we had one of them? Tegan, maybe?) who’s in no mood for the Doctor’s nonsense and just wants to go home is a dynamic that modern Who really hasn’t played with, and the sharp rebuke of the Doctor’s attempt to spin a mystery out of Belinda’s similarity to Boom‘s 51st Century Mundy Flynn was both a great gag and, hopefully, a commitment that last season’s Ruby Sunday season-long tease isn’t going to be repeated.

In many ways, The Robot Revolution feels like a slide back into the crater the Chibnall era landed the show in and while generally since his return RTD has definitely halted the progression of the rot, this episode underlines the issue that he hasn’t done quite enough to reverse or escape its lingering effects. With the future of the series apparently hanging in the balance, it’s a worrying sign that Davies isn’t putting more effort, especially when he only has seven more chances to convince the Disney and BBC Gods of Ragnarök to recommission The Greatest Show In The Galaxy for another season.

* In this day and age of legacy sequels, reboots and reimaginings it’s vanishingly unlikely that a franchise like Doctor Who will remain dormant for anywhere near as long as the last two times.