“I’m saying no.”
“With regret, your powers are only nominal.”
“Why is it all so mad? Why is everything on this planet so stupid?”
One of the interesting consequences of the relatively compressed modern season of Doctor Who is the way that it collides episodes into one another.
With only eight episodes in a given season, there isn’t room for the sort of structure that Davies brought to his first four years overseeing Doctor Who, when he would reintroduce the show to audiences each year with a triptych that opened in the present and followed with a celebrity historical and a futuristic science-fiction episode. Rose gave way to The End of the World and The Unquiet Dead. Smith and Jones led into The Shakespeare Code and Gridlock. Partners in Crime fed into The Fires of Pompeii and Planet of the Ood. Davies’ second season was the exception, opening with New Earth and Tooth and Claw, but that was notably the only one of Davies’ four seasons that didn’t have to open with the introduction of a new companion, with The Christmas Invasion having introduced the Tenth Doctor.
Extending its reach.
The Robot Revolution is put in the awkward position of having to combine the typical Davies season opener that introduces Belinda Chandra as a companion but also being Davies’ big high-concept pseudo-political idiosyncratic science-fiction story like Gridlock or Planet of the Ood. The result is a strange cocktail, that doesn’t quite cohere but is nevertheless compelling. For all the criticism of Davies’ return as showrunner, his second tenure does not lack for ambition and ideas. The Robot Revolution is bursting with concepts and thoughts, with Davies eager to scream his ideas at the loudest possible volume. The Robot Revolution is, in typical Davies style, incredibly maximalist in its storytelling. It brushes past plot points and ideas with reckless abandon and breathless enthusiasm.
Whatever the episode’s flaws, it’s certainly not the product of assembly line production.
The march of progress…
Filed under: Television | Tagged: ai, American Century, Artificial Intelligence, doctor who, gamergate, ncuti gatwa, planet of the incels, reactionary, retrofuturism, russell t. davies, steven moffat, the doctor, the robot revolution, trump | 2 Comments »
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