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Notes On - Doctor Who: The Robot Revolution

 

Doctor Who The Robot Revolution notes

 

17 years ago

Ah, pretentious mansplaining boyfriend.  I wish he wasn’t quite so obviously douchey

I never know how anyone can ever tell which star they’re getting a certificate for

His insistence on using the title miss is a bit obvious as setup

Man, Alan is such a tool

17 years later

TARDIS arrives at hospital.  Very Smith and Jones

Belinda:  Who bit you?  Was it a dog?  Was it a man?  … Was it your wife?

***There’s a Doctor looking for you – Did he mean THE Doctor, or was that a cute line

Turning off all the power to a hospital would kill lots of people.  Not just an oopsie

Belinda’s roommates don’t even really know her name

With Alan ancient history, why has she kept the certificate?

The robots remind me of Smile

They shouldn’t have killed the cat.  Should have killed the roommate

Robot: The cat is irrelevant

Belinda: It wasn’t my cat.

Robot: The cat is still irrelevant

The fact that they understand that it’s ‘her’ star and recognize her as its ruler is pretty amusing

Mrs. Flood.

Belinda: Do you know Lucy at Number Seven?

Mrs. Flood: Yes.

Belinda:  Tell her her cat’s gone to live on a farm.  Apparently, I’m the queen of outer space if you could tell the police.

Mrs. Flood: You ain’t seen me.

So does Belinda live two doors down from Ruby’s building, or has Mrs. Flood moved?

The Doctor just missed getting to Belinda before she was abducted.

Love his kilt

Her telling them to go get Alan turns out to be significant.  Why does he owe her 50 quid

Hello Time going all shattered

Robot: Entering orbit of Missbelindachandra One

I love how 50s and 60s all the spaceship design.

Missbeliondachandrakind

I’m enjoying how they’re using her name

Sasha

55

The robots have taken over and there are rebels that are fighting back.  Got it.

Cute little polishing robot

Nice having the Doctor subtly standing in the line

So Belinda has been brought to be their queen, but doesn’t really have any power because the robots have taken over

A forced wedding.  This is so flash Gordon

Belinda:  Who am I marrying?  A spark plug?

The AI generator is controlling the robots

The AI generator looks very creepy

Oh, just like Superman III – That freaked me out

Belinda: Why is everything on this planet so stupid??

So how did the Doctor become the historian

The every ninth word thing is just the right amount of subtle and a very clever conceit

I love Belinda counting words on her fingers to do the trick

So all the humans are rebels then?

Very Doctor moment declaring the start of the rebellion

Certainly a lot of cannon fodder on hand.  Ooo, who’s the muscly one?

The Doctor has promised Sasha that he’ll take her as a companion.  That pretty much guarantees she’s about to die

Manny ( the muscly one) is pretty hostile to Belinda. Unfair.

I like that they’re acknowledging that Sasha was as close to The Doctor as Ruby was.  Although I’m sure people are complaining about him crying again.

Belinda:  I’m sorry about your friend

The Doctor: Sasha

Belinda:  Sasha 55.  She was nice to me.

The Doctor:  She was lovely.  She’s dead.

Simolin.

I love that Belinda sees where people need help and just gets down to changing IVs and whatnot.  

Her new shift on Monday so that the Doctor can recognize Mundy Flynn.  I didn’t expect them to highlight it quite so much

Belinda has the sense to check about the anatomy of the local lifeforms shoulder before relocating it.  That’s sensible

I was just wondering if the x-ray blankets caused a lot of cancer when the Doctor mentioned they were radiation free.

It’s nice to have the two hearts explanation visualized

Interesting discussion about the Missbelindachandrakinds’ internal organs

Belinda: Is that better or worse than humans?

The Doctor: If you start deciding which body is best, you’re going down a very dangerous path.

It’s a nice detail that a nurse would immediately want to hear what the pulse of two hearts sounds like

The Doctor was told about Belinda by someone, but has to be coy about it because the timelines are hosed up. Who?

So it was a he that told The Doctor and implied that Belinda would be important.  Pleas not another ‘specialest girl’ plotline

The certificate of Belinda owning the star exists twice over in this moment, so at some point it gets sent back in time.

Belinda: Timey-Wimey?  Am I six?

For Belinda it’s been two hours since she was abducted but for the Doctor it’s been 6 months

Schwupped

So when The Doctor landed the resistance took him in after the robots stole the TARDIS

They need to give Manny more character or less.

So at some point the cert goes back in time 5000 years.  The Doctor kind of says the robots did it, but when and how would that work?

Love all the 60s pulp sci-fi imagery

Is Manny supposed to be super strong?  They’re implying all sorts of stuff about him that never pays off

I guess his contempt is what makes Belinda turn the robot on to summon the other robots, but they really didn’t need Manny to make that happen.  Just seeing the devastation, along with a few dialogue echoes about them coming for her would have been much cleaner and left more screen time for other things

So now we get the info that The Doctor really wants to get to the memory bank to see why the robots stopped being super cuddly and friendly ten years earlier.  Thayt’s a bit of a goalpost shift that should have been introduced earlier or revealed more organically

If the robots had killed any of the rebels, it really would have been Belinda’s fault this time

The gritty rebel plot really doesn’t mesh with the cheesy pulp sci-fi stuff

The AI eyes are really upsetting

The polish robot, reminding us that it exists so we remember it later

Belinda thinks that if she sacrifices herself the robots will stop the war

And here’s the payoff for the are you married comment earlier

OK, that cyborg effect is REALLY good.

Not AI, but Al.  That’s kind of fun

Margate/Stargate

Belinda told them to go get Alan, and because of the time shatter he got there 10 years before they left

Alan thought the whole thing was basically a first person shooter game and fucked up all of their society

Man, Alan really switched gears to murder very quickly

Alan was a controlling dickhead

Alan’s takeover of the planet is an extended metaphor for toxic relationship nice guys

I don’t buy that Alan is using the 9 words to confess that he’s really in pain. They kind of half wave at it and then forget it.  Should have been cut

I wish they hadn’t hammered home the planet of the incels thing.  It totally underscores that the him communicating that he’s really in pain using the 9 words thing doesn’t work

Belinda has seen Mawdryn Undead, thankfully

And now Belinda and Alan are being tossed around in their own life cycle while The Doctor watches.  Not sure how that works

And the world is saved by sweeping up jizz.  I didn’t expect that to ever be a Doctor Who plot point

So, whoever it was that told the Doctor that Belinda was important is the big mystery of the year

Oh, now the robots are all nice again.  That’s convenient

I wish they didn’t look quite so much like the Smile robots

Yeah, we really didn’t need to pretend that the individual rebels were going to be important to the story

So how the robots get ahold of the cert is the big mystery of the system

*** You lot.  Forgive.  Rebuild.  Maybe change the name of the solar system.

24th of May, 2025.  I’m guessing that’s the day the finale airs

We’re acknowledging Mundy Flynn

Does Mundy being identical matter, or is it just a coincidence meeting a descendant?

Belinda has totally legit reasons to not want to trust The Doctor.  And good on her for calling him out on scanning her DNA without asking

They’re really trying to do a Moffat style mystery box intro

The Doctor closed the time fracture?  When did he do that?  That seems like kind of a big deal to not even bother addressing what caused it in the first place

I like that they’re going back to the ‘trying to get the companion home’ format

What’s with all the world monuments in space??

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