<i>Doctor Who</i> Teases About Generative AI in &#8220;The Robot Revolution&#8221;

Doctor Who is back! But your regularly scheduled Reactor reviewer is on hiatus until next week, so you get a special guest review for the season premier from me, their beloved companion. Just think of it like one of those episodes in which the Doctor mysteriously disappears, and the companion has to Become the Doctor in the errant Time Lord’s stead. That always goes well. Right?

Recap

Seventeen years earlier: A girl named Belinda (Varada Sethu) is courted by a boy named Alan (Jonny Green). Alan has bought a certificate to name a star after Belinda, but she is dismayed to note that the full name includes the title “Miss.” They share an awkward kiss.

In the present day: Belinda is a hard-working hospital nurse. After a day spent working and narrowly missing the Doctor as he swans about the hospital, Belinda returns to the home she shares with too many roommates, only to be woken in the middle of the night by huge robots, who inform her that she is Queen of the planet Missbelindachandra. As she’s taken aboard their ship, she asks her neighbor, Mrs. Flood (Anita Dobson) to send a message to her parents. The Doctor arrives in time to see the ship take off.

Belinda tries to convince the robots that they want Alan, not her, and experiences a strange warping of time before arriving on the planet, where she finds that the local people have been turned against and enslaved by the “robot overlords.” She is greeted by Sasha 55 (Evelyn Miller), and the Historian—aka the Doctor—warns her of an impending rebel attack. He rescues Belinda, but many rebels die in the process, including Sasha 55, who the Doctor was close with. A rebel named Manny (Max Parker) blames “the Queen” for their deaths.

The Doctor fills Belinda in on how the robots and Missbelindachandrians once lived peacefully, but ten years ago turned violent and took over. Belinda helps out with the wounded and learns that her Star Certificate, which the robots made her bring when they left Earth, is already on the planet, and has been for a long time. The Doctor confirms that they are the same object appearing twice, and that the same atoms cannot exist twice in the same place without a very big boom.

Belinda alerts the robots to her location in order to save the lives of the rebels, and is brought to the AI Generator (the overlord of the robots), which she is supposed to “marry” by becoming a human-robot fusion. She discovers that the AI Generator is actually the AL Generator, her ex-boyfriend Alan, who was accidentally brought to the world ten years earlier at her suggestion, through the time distortion. Alan, who saw the world like a video game he could play and win, is controlling the robots. When Belinda realizes that the Alan-robot hybrid has the duplicate Star Certificate, she uses her own to connect to his, initiating an explosion in which she sees Alan at every age. The Doctor wraps his arms around her, absorbing Belinda’s half of the explosion and saving her.

With Alan gone, the robots are no longer against the humans; the rebels declare their intention to rebuild together and to rename the citadel in honor of Shasha 55.

The Doctor takes Belinda onto the TARDIS, where he tells her about her descendant, Mundy Flynn, saying they must be destined to know each other. But she resists his attempts to make her the new companion and demands to be taken home in time to get to her morning shift. The Doctor tries, but continually finds the TARDIS blocked by a mysterious force. He promises to get her home even if it’s the long way ‘round. As the TARDIS dematerializes, a destroyed taxi and some iconic Earth buildings float through space.

Analysis

This was a delightfully whimsical season premiere, and very on brand for Russell T. Davies. The Doctor uses onomatopoeia to quickly (and adorably) describe some weird time-and-space phenomena. There’s the good old “timey-wimey” paradox of so many of the Doctor’s adventures, with Alan being brought to Missbelindachandra because Belinda told the robots to look for him, while Belinda only arrives because Alan requested her, and while the Star Certificate is somehow already a foundational piece of the planets’ history—a mystery that probably won’t be explained until the end of the season, at the earliest. There’s the Doctor running around looking for the companion as the companion goes about her day and the two continually just miss each other. There’s the Doctor arriving somewhere at the wrong time and having to take the slow path while he waits to catch up to events. There’s a tiny retro robot who all the main characters (and me, the viewer) want to keep as a pet. There’s a misdirect when you think the “other”—in this case, big robots—is the villain when it’s really just a crappy human man. 

And there’s a rule of time travel that should never ever ever be broken, except for this one time because it’s the only way and the Doctor is here to—literally—absorb the explosive results.

It’s a very busy episode, but impressively tight for all that. Every necessary detail is well seeded throughout the script, and somehow there’s still room to breathe and to get to know the new companion as well as some of the secondary characters, like Sasha 55 and Manny. And did I mention that the polish robot was delightful? Because it was. Though it is hard not to notice, at this point, that every robot on Doctor Who sounds like Nicholas Briggs—every single one is either a little bit Cyberman or a little bit Dalek.

It’s also a solid introduction to the character of Belinda, who is endlessly charming and promises to be a very interesting companion. She is somewhat reminiscent of Martha, not just because she works in a hospital but because of the way her personality balances practicality, a strong drive to care for others, and the impression that she maybe lets people walk all over her a little too much but is in the process of growing beyond that. Also, she’s a medical professional who learns about the Doctor’s two hearts on their very first adventure, though Belinda gets to do it using much fancier and more futuristic medical equipment than Martha does. Lucky duck.

Like many of the Doctor’s more recent companions, Belinda is ready to call him out for his behavior when necessary. She particularly notes his scanning of her genetics without asking first, and curtails his enthusiastic desire to travel with her by telling him that she is “not one of his adventures.” In that moment, the viewer is reminded of Donna a little, and of the fact that this Doctor is more ready to accept such a reminder than earlier versions of him were, in part because his most immediately previous personality spent/is spending his life on Earth, learning to heal and being kept in line by one Donna Noble (and family).

Davies also loves to take a thematic cause in his stories, and “The Robot Revolution” is no different. But while his style has never been subtle, and recent trends in television and film run towards scripts that are more obvious and direct, “The Robot Revolution” is particularly engaging because its subject isn’t quite what you first think… except for the fact that it actually is.

We are presented at first with a narrative about the evils of generative AI, a topic that is particularly on the minds of today’s viewers. It is later revealed that the AI Generator is not a robot consciousness at all, but a human one—a surprising turn of events until one considers that the AI generator of our time has no sentience of its own, either. All its evils, as well as any of its goods, are actually those of its creators, sellers, and users. Alan, meanwhile, is initially presented as a condescending and sexist young man, but is later revealed to be the architect of an entire civil war which has resulted in the death and enslavement of a whole planet of people. But, as the flashback scene when he arrives on Missbelindachandra shows, these two aspects of Alan are actually one and the same: He is a man who views an alien world as nothing more than a plaything, as a game he can win over everyone else, be that an entire population, or just one girl who dumped him seventeen years ago.

All in all, this season premiere has been a delight, and I am so excited to see what else Russell, Gatwa, and Sethu have in store for us.  

Time and Space and Sundry

• Another aspect of Belinda’s character that is reminiscent of Martha is the fact that Sethu already played a character on an earlier season of Doctor Who, one who was retroactively declared a relative of the companion she is now portraying. In Sethu’s case it’s Mundy Flynn, a descendant of Belinda’s, while Freema Agyeman first played Martha’s cousin, Adeola, who died at Canary Wharf.
• Belinda’s story is also evocative of the classic Doctor Who character Tegan Jovanka. An Australian stewardess who ended up on the Fourth Doctor’s TARDIS by accident, Tegan’s desire to be returned home was continually thwarted by the TARDIS, the universe, and occasionally the Doctor himself, which seems to be exactly the problem Belinda is going to run into.
• Belinda’s Star Certificate, so important to the history of the whole planet, and probably to the entire mystery of the season, is as without substance as everything else Alan does. It’s implied that Belinda loves some aspects of the gift: She doesn’t like the “Miss” part, and breaks up with the man who gave it to her for being controlling and dismissive, but she did keep the Certificate, and seems genuine when she tells him it’s the nicest thing anyone has ever given her. But if the Star Certificate program in the Doctor Who universe is anything like the International Star Registry of our universe, the gift is also not real, whether Alan knew that or not. Despite being hugely popular, the ISR has no license to register star names, and no professional astronomical organization recognizes any name purchased through them. (On our world, anyway. On some other planet, it may be the foundation of a society. Only Time, and maybe some big red robots, can say for sure.)
• Ncuti Gatwa has such star power that it’s sometimes hard to see anything else while he’s on screen, but I really appreciated how well balanced the episode was. Gatwa continues to shine, but both his performance and the scripting and cinematography really made space for Belinda to take center stage in the episode. Sethu and Gatwa played really well off each other. I particularly enjoyed the humorous moments Belinda was given, including her chugging of chocolate milk before collapsing face down into bed, and her outrage over the fact that the robots killed a cat that didn’t even belong to her.
• Do I think they had to dress the Doctor in the drab clothing of the enslaved Missbelindachandrians in order to make sure Belinda had our complete focus? Yes. Yes I do. Did you see that pinstripe vest and long kilt-trouser situation? I could die. Absolutely iconic.
• And hello again, Mrs. Flood. I did, in fact, see you.

Next week!