Spoilers for Doctor Who: The Robot Revolution ahead.
Talking about the first episode of the new season of Doctor Who and what it might mean for the rest of this brief, eight-episode run is going to involve discussion of the twist ending. As usual, here’s a bit of Doctor Who trivia before we dive in so you don’t feel like you’ve wasted the click.
When Jodie Whittaker filmed her regeneration scene at the end of “The Power of the Doctor,” she was pregnant. This means that Whittaker is the only actor to play The Doctor who technically had two hearts when she did so.
Right, then. Onto the spoilers.
My favorite thing about the second tenure of Russell T Davies as showrunner is his ability to totally commit to very silly bits. The show is still holding strong that “gravity” is now actually called “mavity,” but that is adult’s play next to the silliness happening in “The Robot Revolution.”
It opens with our new companion, Belinda Chandra, as a teenager on a very bad date with a boy named Alan. He, like many other very misguided dudes, gifts her a certificate that says she owns a star in the night sky. This is a real thing that you can do, and I am confident that the vast majority of women who have received this gift would rather have had literally anything else. It’s a weird, pointless cosplay of a present that costs barely anything and means less than those weird Scottish lordship scams that everyone was hawking on YouTube for awhile.
But Belinda, like so many women before her, tells Alan it’s the nicest thing she’s ever received because that’s what you do to a man that constantly corrects you. Seventeen years later, Belinda is an emergency room nurse with a hectic life and no time for nonsense like this. She’s captured by gloriously retro robots in a rocket that looks like it flew right out of a Duck Dodgers short and taken to the planet around her star. Turns out, her stupid certificate from an ex-boyfriend makes her queen of Missbelindchandra One.
Davies, who wrote this episode, never lets up on the gag. There is a robot revolution, naturally, where the robots are fighting Missbelindachandrakind and attacking them with Missbelindachandrabombs. Tiny bits of weirdness like this is what has always made Doctor Who stand out against its science fiction contemporaries. The show is ready to be cringe with a smile on its face and everyone involved playing it as serious as a car crash.
At first, it’s easy to play off the writing as another “Space Babies,” but Varada Sethu’s Belinda heralds something very different than the first season. It’s subtle at first, but by the end of the episode it’s clear change is afoot.
Surrounded by a fantastic planet, rebels right out of Flash Gordon, and an AI overlord, Belinda plays the straight man rather than the plucky assistant. At every point she reaffirms that most of this is ridiculous, including her being queen of a planet because a loser she dated half her life ago bought a crappy gift. When others are talking typical Doctor Who plot points about infiltrating the AI’s sanctum, she ignores them and starts helping wounded people.
This is actually the only moment that she and The Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) connect in. Faced with humanoid but still alien physiology, she gets the information she needs and gets to work. She accuses The Doctor of standing around while others actually carry out tasks (I heard every nurse on Earth cheer in my head at that moment). The Doctor takers her criticism to hearts, but still continues with his grand adventure trappings.
At the end of the episode, it’s revealed that the robot AI leader is actually a cybernetic version of Alan that has turned the whole planet into his personal control fantasy and video game before having Belinda brought to him for a coerced marriage. It’s a fun twist I didn’t see coming, but Belinda is only barely surprised. In the brief moments we see Alan in the beginning he tries to dictate basic facets of Belinda’s life and just exudes incel creepiness. As the overlord, he’s turned into a one-man GamerGate using his bot army (Davies is not a subtle writer).
Belinda doesn’t flinch, and it’s she that literally disposes of Alan like medical waste. Having timey-wimey shenanigans literally reduce him to sperm and egg that is sucked up by a space Roomba is the vengeance of a million marginalized harassment victims writ large and depicted with crazy Disney money, and Belinda handles it with grim determination.
That extends to her introduction to the Tardis. While obviously impressed with the ship, she insists The Doctor take her home. “I’m not one of your adventures,” she says, asserting that she has her own lives to save in the morning. When The Doctor tries to convince her to travel with him by showing her a descendant from a previous adventure (Sethu appeared as a different character in the future story “Boom” last season), she rebukes him from taking her DNA to test without consent.
This clearly rocks The Doctor. In this incarnation, he is already used to being the puckish savior despite the cost of fighting evil. That behavior often relies on adoration from his companion, who falls in to the role of helpmate and emotional supporter. This Doctor needs things to be fun and all right, even when the bodies pile up.
Belinda refuses that. She is a big block of normalcy right in the river of The Doctor’s quirky timeline. Last season was all about the power of belief. To quote “No Church in the Wild,” what’s a God to a non-believer? How can The Doctor continue to evade the crushing consequences of his long life if he’s saddled with a companion that is going to spend her time calling no-bullshit?
It will be interesting to see how it goes next week when the two of them are forced to fight a living cartoon character. I am willing to bet that Belinda’s role will remain to ground The Doctor and prove that no matter how outlandish the world might be, it’s still serious. Living as we are now, in the age of unreason, that’s a lesson we will probably need to learn ourselves.
Doctor Who airs Saturdays on Disney+.
