Robot (Season 12, Story Number 75)

We have now watched the whole of the first Tom Baker adventure. My memory is sketchy already, as we took in the various episodes over a week or so of late night laptop watching and ice-cream eating adventures. But basically, what happens is this.

- Dr Who regenerates from Jon Pertwee to Tom Baker. We have no idea what caused this regeneration, as we have decided not to watch the Pertwee era, and so it could be due to absolutely anything. My theory is simply that the Pertwee doctor got really bored with being stuck on earth with a rubbish car and having to deal with UNIT’s incompetence and decided to partake of Timelord seppuku. Still: compared to the neverending melodrama of some of the regenerations, this seems to have been a relatively stress-free one. He’s up and about in no time.

- While the Doctor recovers from his paper cut of a regeneration, a large robot with wildly flailing arms and self-esteem issues breaks into a top secret base and steals something or other. This something-or-other turns out to be a disintegrator gun. Sarah Jane Smith does some investigating, and meets the mad-haired professor who made it, and also – CLIFFHANGER – the robot itself. Fortunately the robot fancies Sarah Jane, so doesn’t kill her.

- The mad haired professor turns out to belong to an organisation called the Scientific Reform Society, whose leader – Miss Winters – holds a Nuremburg style rally of scientists fed up with having sand kicked in their faces at the beach, and so who vow to take over the running of the world by any means possible, so they can stop the environment from being destroyed by stupid non-scientists. This, they plan to achieve by threatening to destroy the world via nuclear armageddon.

- Unit attempt to stop the robot / scientists, now holed up in what appears to be a World War II pill box, but thanks to their epic incompetence only manage to throw a few grenades around, fire machine guns uselessly, get themselves killed a bit, and finally the Brigadier mis-uses the ray-gun to accidentally expand the Robot to silly proportions so it now towers over two storey buildings like a low-rent, thoroughly English version of King Kong. Adding to this comparison, the Robot grabs Sarah Jane, who does some excellent screaming.

- Fortunately everyone is saved by the Doctor, thanks to the utilisation of a lovely old-fashioned chemistry set which he uses to make some kind of metal-attacking virus to attack the robot and put it out of its misery. Thoroughly bored of saving UNIT from themselves, at the end of the episode the Doctor buggers off back to the tardis and interdimensional adventuring, accompanied by Sarah Jane and an affable UNIT chap named Harry Sullivan.

It is total hogwash, saved entirely by Mr Baker himself and his wide eyed, grinning, big fat plate of a face.

Ideas

There are a few interesting ideas in this episode. Firstly, can robots feel pain? Can they be morose and irritating? Can they fancy women? This serial provides the answer: yes, on all counts.

Secondly, it asks whether the running of the world should be left to an oligarchy of spec-wearing, vaguely Nazi scientists. The answer provided is clearly “no”. The scientists were quite happy to destroy the entire world in a nuclear armageddon, while hiding themselves in a bunker with a few tins of spam, breeding, waiting a few hundred years for the fallout to subside, and then emerge to create a new society. These are not sensible people.

SFX

The robot looks a bit crap, but walks exactly like a robot should walk. Also, extra marks for flailing arms. But the best use of effects come when the Brigadier attempts to destroy the robot with a tank. He gets very excited about the fact that UNIT ACTUALLY HAVE A TANK, then it comes rolling in, and the camera attempts to film it in close up, with the robot in the distance, to make it look like a proper tank. But it’s clearly about two feet tall.

Overacting

Mrs Winters is the clear winner in this category, her Robot-unveiling speech to the Scientific Reform Society reaching such a mad Adolf crescendo that the whirring of her gesticulation nearly causes her to fall off the stage.

 

So it begins, part two

Doctor Who was one of those shows that I could always count on as a kid. Pretty much where ever you lived, you could flip on the TV to your local PBS station* and find Tom Baker’s face staring back at you. Or sometimes Jon Pertwee. Sometimes one after each other.

You see, it was rough times for Doctor Who fans in the US. When the program was first introduced, the concept that it was a serial didn’t quite transfer with it, and broadcasters decided to just air the episodes in whatever order they pleased. A local commercial station, WTVQ, latched on and was one of four such stations to show the series in syndication, but for the most part, it was on the public channels, and it was all jumbled up out of order. And if you were lucky, and it wasn’t jumbled up out of order, the entire four to fourteen part serial had been clumsily spliced together to make a “Whovie”**.

The “Whovie” was the most common way I saw Doctor Who as a kid, which left my impressionable mind with the distinct impression that Doctor Who wasn’t a series at all, but rather a collection of TV movie adventures of random old men with their hot younger companions. And you know, perhaps that isn’t too far off. The Whovies, as I said, were poorly edited, and sometimes the credits would break in unexpectedly, or they’d have missed a bit of the audio track and in the middle of a scene you’d get that trademark electronic WHOO-OOO-OOOOH screaming through. And the parts they’d cut out were sometimes necessary for understanding the plot, and you’d–if you were like me–be left going, “What does it all mean? Who is this nerd, when it was Troughton last week?”

But I loved it nonetheless. And when the TV movie came out in 1996, my family and I all gathered around the set in eagerness, waiting to see the first new adventure of the Doctor since 1989. I had fallen in love with the Doctor in his absence, and the thought of seeing a new story was like finally getting to see your favorite band live. It was, of course, the greatest disappointment any fan could have imagined. Not long after, PBS affiliates stopped showing the old episodes, and gradually Doctor Who itself faded from the American cultural consciousness.

I forgot about Doctor Who, myself. I turned to Star Trek and The X-Files and grew up geekily anyway, collecting licensed novels and action figures, largely forgetting all about the adventures of the Doctor–which by that time seemed almost dreamlike, feverish imaginings of a child’s mind. Like Crystal Coke, which no-one else in America remembers but I DO. This might’ve continued on until one day my hypothetical ignorant grandchildren would’ve patted me on the head and said, “Oh, Granny, there’s no such thing as Daleks…”, were it not for the new series of Doctor Who.

Now I want a more cohesive picture of the Doctor, minus all that editing and jumbling. And so thanks to the magic of the internet, my delightfully nerdy boyfriend and I can watch the entire show, from the first episode in 1963 to last week’s lo-fi screamer with David Tennant. But we’re not going to. We’re starting with Tom Baker and working our way forward, and we’ve decided to document it all here. The adventures of two young people, both born within the air-dates of the original series (admittedly, one more narrowly than the other), confronting the past and the future with the Doctor. If we don’t go mad first, that is.

* Public Broadcasting Service, America’s version of the BBC, except with much less funding and possibly more British programming. Their main shows today include Keeping Up Appearances, Last of the Summer Wine, and As Time Goes By. That is, if you’re not being tortured by Lawrence Welk.
** Is this not the worst word on the planet? It’s right up there with “blogosphere” and “moist”.

 

So it begins

Dr Who made me the man I am today – sort of. I’m twenty eight years old, and so am towards the younger age of those who can claim to have watched it first time ’round. I barely remember Colin Baker – Sylvester McCoy was my doctor. And he was brilliant – half-remembered episodes like that one with the sweet monster, that one with the fucked-up space circus, and that one with the cat people – are defining childhood almost-memories.

But the man I am today? How do I justify that cod-hyperbole?* Like this: Circa 1988, I was in the process of being indoctrinated by the fascist organisation know as the Cubs, a kind of pre-Hitler Youth feeder organisation for the Scouts. I was a bit suspicious of Cubs, because while it seemed to involve some things I was definitely in favour of, such as pissing about in woods, it also seemed to involve things I definitely was not in favour of, like being told what to do by older people, and acting the same as everyone else. These were, of course, vague misgivings – I was seven / eight years old, after all – but the deciding factor was that Cubs was on Wednesdays, which meant I’d miss Dr Who. So I dropped out of Cubs, disappeared into my own fantasy world, and am the man I am today. And not, for example, the type of person who is comfortable at dinner parties.

What does this have to do with anything? Fast forward twenty years. I have a lovely girlfriend who, despite being a bit younger than me and (the shame of it!) not English, has seen far more Dr Who than I have. I saw the McCoy episodes at the time, have caught a few episodes of Tom Baker era on my friend’s cable/satellite tv back in the nineties (similarly, this is the only way I knew about music videos), and love the new series’ of Dr Who while hating Russel T. Davies, which is, of course, exactly how he would want it.

Lovely Mo, in contrast, has seen loads of it due to the magic of America’s Public Broadcaster** , but in a jiggery-pokery kind of order that means it’s all mushed up in her mind the way the James Bond films are in mine***. So, utilising the magic of modern technology, we have decided it’s time to watch all of them, from the start of Tom Baker’s reign onwards. Well, actually, I think Mo thought we were just going to watch the Tom Baker episodes. But we’re not. We’re going to watch them all.

* Is cod-hyperbole in danger as the fish stocks plummet?
** The ex-magic. They show Keeping Up Appearances now.
*** he jumps off a cliff and opens his union jack parachute then skis down a hill and into a lotus which then turns into a submarine then jaws turns up somehow then someone says ‘no, Mr Bond, I expect you to die’…