THE PLOT
The Doctor has just regenerated into his fourth persona, his most eccentric one yet. Gone is the brittle yet dignified, dandy. In his place is a large, curly-haired, grinning figure who seems to be not quite entirely sane. It's a bad time for the Doctor to be unstable. With the components of a top-secret disintegrator gun stolen by an unknown force, the Brigadier and UNIT need the Doctor's help more than ever. But can this new Doctor be trusted?
CHARACTERS
The Doctor: Tom Baker makes a strong debut. He's energetic and more than a little zany, but takes care in his performance to keep the Doctor at a certain remove. When UNIT is placing the final component of the ray gun (I know, I know, but that's more or less what it is) under guard, the Doctor just sits back and comments on the action, appearing to already know that this effort is a futile one. The Sherlock Holmes aspects of the character are stronger than ever in Baker's version. This is particularly true of scenes in which he appears to be distracted by irrelevancies while actually collecting important observations (i. e., the crushed dandelion moment in Episode One, or draping his scarf carefully around the Think Tank floor to collect evidence in Episode Two).
I should probably acknowledge up-front that I'm not generally a fan of Tom's Doctor. However, most of my problems with him come later. In his debut season, he was a breath of fresh air, and he is terrific here. In a story that may well have been specifically constructed to mirror a typical Pertwee effort, it is Tom's presence that lifts the story. He's every bit as dominant a screen personality as Pertwee, but in a different way - one which works every bit as well, and which keeps you on your toes wondering what he's going to do next.
Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart: I'm reviewing this story right after a run of Season Seven stories... and jumping straight from Inferno to here, it is striking how much the Brigadier's character has deteriorated. In Season Seven, he was brisk, efficient, and intelligent - a man born to lead. That he wasn't as smart as the Doctor came from the characterization of the Doctor's brilliance, not from any stupidity on the Brig's part.
Well... he's become a lot dumber in the interim. Season Seven Lethbridge-Stewart would have noted that two components of the same weapon had been stolen, and placed the final component under guard, without needing to be led by the nose to that conclusion. Here, the Doctor actually needs to prompt the Brigadier to recognize what the first two thefts have in common. A sad fall for an initially superb character.
Sarah Jane Smith: This is a very strong story for Sarah Jane. With Letts and Dicks still in charge, her background as both a journalist and an independent-minded woman is still a major driving force for the story. Her interest in Think Tank is initially an interest in a prospective article, which ends up propelling the plot.
For the first episode, and for much of the second, she is actually more proactive than the Doctor and the Brigadier are. Winningly played by Elisabeth Sladen - who is very beautiful, but in a naturalistic way that doesn't intefere with accepting her as her character - it's easy enough to see why she came to be seen as The Definitive Companion. There are companions I like better (out of ones I've reviewed so far, Barbara and Liz both rate higher on my personal scale). But Sladen's presence plus the broad strokes of the character make her a self-evidently strong figure for both audience identification and, yes, eye candy.
Harry Sullivan: Ian Marter's debut as Harry, the naval physician who starts out as the Doctor's doctor, under orders to keep watch over him, and ends up as a companion. Marter brings a relaxed and likable presence, and has an easy rapport with both Baker and Sladen. There isn't really very much for him to do in this story, but I certainly wasn't sorry to see him step into the TARDIS at the story's conclusion.
THOUGHTS
The beginning of the end of the UNIT era, and it honestly was about time for the show to move on. I noted how striking it was, skipping from Season Seven to here, how far the Brigadier's character had fallen. It's equally striking how much more artificial the entire show seems to be. It's still eminently watchable, but it's suddenly a live-action comic book, complete with inept soldiers and a league of mad scientists plotting to take over the world with a giant robot and a top secret Ray Gun. I question how some can complain about Doctor Who cartoons such as The Infinite Quest and Dreamland. Decades before, stories like this were basically cartoons already!
I should back up here and state that I rather like Robot. Some of that is down to nostalgia. It was not the first Who story I ever saw, but it was the one that made me a regular viewer back in the mid-1980's. From here, I watched every story during PBS' mid-1980's omnibus reruns of the series, going all the way through to Trial of a Time Lord (which, for a long time, I had thought to be the series' finale).
Even pushing nostalgia aside, there is much to like. Robot may be a standard runaround, but it's an amiable one. Terrance Dicks isn't the writer you go to for brilliance, but he does understand the importance of story construction and pace. Robot moves along briskly, effectively introducing the situation and the guest characters, establishing the threats, and finally bringing them all together for the final episode. While the plot may be a touch thin and cartoonish, there are enough strands to give the Doctor and the Brigadier elements to investigate, and Sarah Jane other elements to investigate. In this way, all of the regulars are kept occupied and the viewer is given bits of new information at a steady pace, until the full picture emerges. There is even some rather nicely-done misdirection, involving the character of Kettelwell.
Taken on its own silly and cartoonish terms, the story works a treat for about 3-and-a-half episodes. Unfortunately, it falls badly apart at the climax, starting when the Robot is shot with the disintegrator gun and grows to a massive height. I guess Dicks wanted to really hammer home the King Kong riffs in his script.
Whatever the case, the small measure of internal credibility the story had held up to that point disappears, and the next several minutes of the robot rampaging around toy cars, paper houses, and plastic soldiers (some of it while carrying an unconvincing Elisabeth Sladen rag doll) is both ludicrously realized and, frankly, dull. After five years of spearheading Who, Letts and Dicks had to know the giant robot bits could not be well-realized. Worse, the script doesn't do anything interesting with the giant robot. The giant robot bits actually mark the point at which the script stops doing interesting things. So why was this badly-botched climax there? Was it just a misguided attempt to provide some spectacle?
Fortunately, a thoroughly enjoyable tag scene manages to end the story on a fun note. In the end, while Robot was the weakest "new Doctor" story up to this point, it was a quite respectable worst. Unlike one or two botched debuts that would come along a bit later...
Rating: 6/10.
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