Robophobia

Main Range #149

Released: 15 July 2011

Listened: 1/2/21

This trilogy follows directly after the previous, except that Ace and Hex aren’t around. The Doctor seems to be traveling alone, and the TARDIS is black, instead of white as in the previous trilogy, but that won’t be explained for a while. This story, though, features the introduction of Liv Chenka, who’ll eventually become a companion to the Eighth Doctor, but for the moment, she’s a med-tech from Kaldor City, working on a spaceship transporting a cargo of robots to a colony. This is the same society from “The Robots of Death,” and the sandminer incident from that story is recent, although it’s been covered up. Without any companions to call him on his behavior, the Doctor turns his “enigmatic” up to 11, and never gives anybody full details, which irritates Liv quite a bit. The humans in this story all seem easily flustered, to the point where few of them can get through a complete sentence without stammering or getting confused. That’s not out of line with what we’ve seen of this society before -- the people are very pampered, and not used to doing things on their own -- but in an audio drama the vocal uncertainty is a directorial choice, and it piles up after a while. The Doctor is unswervingly pro-robot here, which is consistent with his behavior in “Robots of Death,” but a complete reversal to his attitude toward the robots in “Nocturne.” Maybe he just likes art-deco robots better? The story is a murder mystery, and although it flips the story of "Robots of Death," it’s not too hard to see coming. Because the Doctor seems to have all the answers all the time, the solution seems to come a bit too easily.