Day 195 — July 14th 2021
Robot Parts Three and Four
Robot — Part Three
I don’t think I’ve ever appreciated before just how clever this story is. Obviously it uses lots of the familiar trappings of the Pertwee years — UNIT, an Earth-based threat, Government Officials, Scientific Establishments and Bessie — as a way to ease the viewer into the change of Doctor Who after five years. But it manages to turn a lot of these elements on their head so that they feel both familiar and yes also just as out-of sorts as Tom Baker does.
Perhaps the most obvious example is Bessie — it feels weird to see someone other than Jon Pertwee driving her, to the point that the little yellow roadster has never looked more out of place than here. I think Planet of the Spiders was the first time we ever saw someone else at the wheel, and in that instance it was Benton, so at least it was someone we knew and trusted. Here it’s the stranger with the mop of curls and a long scarf. Even Benton has been altered now, given a promotion to Warrant Officer, just as he received a promotion when he first appeared opposite the Third Doctor Who.
The scientific establishment isn’t run by an increasingly harassed bloke but rather a woman who remains fairly cool and collected throughout. The only time we ever see Miss Winters screaming and shouting is when she’s deliberately trying to stir up her followers in a none-too subtle analogy for a Nazi rally.
Tom Baker’s Doctor Who manages to show the differences from his previous incarnation in subtle ways, too. Where Pertwee would have gotten into the SRS meeting with the use of two fingers in the guard’s chest and a cry of ‘hai’, Baker takes a totally different approach, feigning stupidity and backing away until he’s able to trip the guard up using his scarf. It’s not the only time the length of the scarf is used to great effect in this episode, either. He uses it to pick up clues when visiting Think Tank. It’s lots of really subtle differences, but they’re so carefully seeded in that it absolutely must have been Terrance Dicks’ intention. And let’s be honest, if there’s anyone best suited to knowing the tropes of the Pertwee years…!
We even get a moment when Doctor Who declares that they’ve had ‘enough bangs and flashes for a bit’, which feels a bit like a commentary on the last few seasons’ solution of blowing everything up at the end of the story. That said, I think I’m reading a little too much into that one!
The one element who’s not changed is the Brigadier, and somehow that feels totally right. He’s not the type of character who really does change, and I think having him there as the constant around which everything else is altering works really well. He’s the one person carrying on as if we really were in a Pertwee adventure, and his growing frustration with the situation is a highlight. I especially love the way Baker’s Doctor Who gently mocks him;
The Brigadier: ‘A few months ago, the superpowers, Russia, America and China, decided upon a plan to ensure peace. All three powers have hidden atomic missile sites. All three agreed to give details of those sites plus full operational instructions to another neutral country. In the event of trouble, that country could publish everyone’s secrets and so cool things down. Well, naturally enough, the only country that could be trusted with such a role was Great Britain.’
Doctor Who: ‘Well, naturally. I mean, the rest were all foreigners.’
The Brigadier: ‘Well, exactly.’
I also don’t have anything to really say about it, but there’s a lovely shot in this episode where the Brig is framed by the window of a UNIT Jeep and it looks gorgeous. Just another lovely moment to add in to my praise of Christopher Barry as a director.
Sadly, though, I have to say I’m not a big fan of the direction in this particular episode. It all seems to have gone a little wrong all of a sudden. Where Part Two used some brilliant high and low angled shots to really emphasise the scale of the K1 Robot, this episode seems to forget about all that and just shoot it ‘as is’. It means that the sequence in which UNIT stage a shootout against the Robot — which should be really exciting and a centrepiece of the entire story, akin to the battles in The Web of Fear or Spearhead From Space — falls totally flat. The Robot never looks more like a man in a costume than when it’s shuffling across a courtyard next to soldiers who aren’t all that dissimilar in height to the Robot itself. Certainly you realise how much Elisabeth Sladen’s diminutive stature helped to sell the effect in Part Two.
We’re also treated to a number of other moments which let the creature down. While escaping from the SRS meeting the Robot has to be helped down the stairs by Jellicoe, and towards the end of the episode when the Robot is handed the disintegrator gun, Michael Kilgarriff is clearly struggling to see where he’s reaching for, and the weight of the prop bends the Robot’s arms massively. I told you those wrists couldn’t support any weight.
And then we get perhaps the most infamous part of Robot — the moment UNIT call in a tank to deal with their foe. The other week I took a bit of a dim view of people calling out the tank as a bad effect, but it really does look awful, doesn’t it? I know we’re not watching full HD on the Blu-ray of this one (Robot was shot entirely on videotape, including the location footage. It’s like the reverse of Spearhead From Space), but cleaned up and restored you really can’t help but see that you’re looking at a toy tank being slowly pushed into shot. The only saving grace is just how little screen time the thing gets before the Robot disintegrates it.
This is the weakest episode of the story by far, and one where the direction seems to have entirely fallen apart, sadly. I think I’ve got to go with a 6/10.
Robot — Part Four
You know how we have debates about the ‘correct’ story titles for the early Hartnell serials? Is it An Unearthly Child or 100,000BC? The Daleks or The Dead Planet? The Edge of Destruction or Inside the Spaceship? I think I’m going to start a petition to adopt the Target book title of this one in place of the televised one, because Doctor Who and the Giant Robot is so much more exciting, innit? It’s basically the one Doctor Who himself uses for this story in Planet of the Dead, too, so I think there’s reasonable grounds.
There’s a part of me which isn’t sure what to make of the idea that the Robot can grow to enormous size, because it’s such a ridiculous concept. There’s a point in Part Three where Professor Kettlewell starts talking about his Living Metal and the properties it contains and it feels a bit like the story going off the boil. I can believe in time travelling phone booths and a seven-foot Robot that breaks into secret establishments, but the idea that his metal can function and grow like organic matter is — bizarrely — a step too far. I’m also a little put off because the only time that happens is when it comes into contact with an unlikely external force; being shot with the Disintegrator Gun. Why does that happen? How does that happen? Is there another way to make the metal expand? Why does living metal react like this when everything else shot by the gun is… well, disintegrated? There’s so many holes which the idea opens up that I sort of lose my way a little.
But I don’t care! Hah! Because the idea of the Robot growing to an enormous size is great fun!
It helps that the CSO work here is seriously well done. Maybe that’s another thing to add to my list of ‘deconstructing the Pertwee era’? The last four seasons have been filled with some truly atrocious CSO effects at times, and the first story to feature a new Doctor Who seems to be the one where they finally work out how to do it. It’s ironic because you sort of suspect a big reflective Robot wouldn’t work well like this, but there we go.
The decent effects mean that the final battle against UNIT finally looks impressive — it’s a massive step up from the one we saw yesterday, and you get the sense that they’re genuinely struggling against this foe. There’s a particularly great moment where the Robot stamps on a poor soldier and I cheered! It was really nicely done, the poor old boy.
After all that, the resolution was a bit simple, perhaps. Doctor Who chucks a single bucket of the ‘Living Metal Virus’ at the Robot and it evaporates in about 90 seconds. It doesn’t matter, though, because the whole point is to give our new hero a chance to save the day, and it’s hard not to get caught up in Baker’s big smile as he rides in Bessie back to the Brigadier.
And then we’ve got the closing scene of the story, and that’s where this episode really earns its place in my heart. They’ve kept Doctor Who and Sarah apart for so much of this story, but when they finally bring them together here it’s wonderful;
Doctor Who: ‘The Brigadier wants me to address the Cabinet, have lunch at Downing Street, dinner at the Palace, and write seventeen reports in triplicate. Well, I won’t do it. I won’t, I won’t, I won’t. Why should I?’
Sarah: ‘Doctor, you’re being childish.’
Doctor Who: ‘Well of course I am. There’s no point in being grown up if you can’t be childish sometimes. Are you coming?’
Of course we get the first appearance of the Fourth Doctor Who’s iconic Jelly Babies (which surprised me — I thought that was something which came along later and was wrongly thought to have been a constant), and I love that Sarah’s sign of accepting the new man is to snatch one of the sweets and eat it.
I’m so pleased to have discovered a real classic where I honestly wasn’t expecting one, and if Tom Baker’s era can keep this up, then the next three months are going to be a lot of fun indeed… another 8/10.
