This is a hard SF story. Take Asimov's Laws of Robotics * and break it and you have drama. This is an object lesson for anyone struggling with story telling. Boucher makes himself look like a genius.
Again (as in Face of Evil) the one liners are great:
- TOOS: I don't understand what's happening. Robots can't harm humans. It's the first principle.
- LEELA: The second principle is that humans can't harm robots. I know, I've tried, and they don't bleed.
There is some weak acting from the support cast (Zilda, Borg, the others are too boring.) There's some average acting from some of the main roles (Pamela (Toos) and Russell (Uvanov)). David Collings (as Poul) is legendary of course.
The nobodies playing the robots are pretty good for what are essentially voice acting roles. (Miles Fothergill as SV7 and Gregory De Polnay as D84)
Some of Leela's lines sound like they were written for a generic 'companion'. Others sound like her... Script editor must have been busy writing the other two stories before and after this (or something).
This is Michael E Briant's farewell to the series. He's off to Blakes 7 and other stuff. Not a great director's story this but he knows where the buttons are and does a well trodden effort. Biggest thing here is he successfully avoided any comparisons to Cybermen. Michael's 6 DW stories feature 5 iconic appearances of DW monsters Sea Devils, the maggots in Green Death, Daleks in Death..., Cybers in Revenge and Robots in this....
It's convincing and entertaining. The monsters are credible and the performances are good enough. It's a good DW story.
What might Season 15 with David Maloney as Producer and Chris Boucher as Script Editor been like? (A Doctor, 5 companions and a talking spaceship computer? Or like these last 2 stories...) This and Face do have lots of extras from early Blakes 7 episodes as well as half the crew...
The story is very well known in this house 'cause we've seen it plenty of times and there was that one time we tried to do it as a play..... Part 2 of this was on ABCtv on Tuesday 13 December 1983 at 6.30pm (and The Five Doctors was on at 7.30pm). DW had been on TV twice in the one day before this but not both at night and so close together.
* Asimov's Laws of Robotics were never 'laws' and were always meant to be broken.. has anyone read I, Robot lately?
ABM Rating 3.64/4.00
LJM Rating 4.00/5.00
SPJ Rating 9.05/10
No. 17 (out of 90)
Link to Cumulative Rankings
Rankings Scoreboard
No comments:
Post a Comment