Doctor Who: The Robot Revolution (15x01)

We're back! And we've met Belinda!

Cons:

I kind of wish there had been a tiny bit more space in the episode before Belinda decided to turn herself over to the robots. She has this moment where she's like, "my name is Belinda Chandra, and it's time I owned it" where she's like... nobly giving herself over to save the world, and it felt like it didn't have enough time to breathe as a moment because they'd literally just gotten to a place of relative safety. Like, take two minutes to show some time passing, maybe, Belinda learning a bit more about these people, so her sacrifice feels more earned? It was a small pacing issue for me.

I also felt like, culturally, we didn't get to learn much about what this planet was like before the timey-wimey stuff happened to it and rewrote the history of this world. This show can have a real gift of creating an atmosphere and world that feels real and deep and lived in very quickly, whereas in this episode it felt pretty shallow and surface-level. 

Pros:

Overall, even if there was a certain thinness to this episode in some ways, I still really liked it! There are some mysteries brewing, about who told the Doctor about Belinda in the first place, and why the Doctor has encountered her descendant so many years in the future, but mostly it just seems like a wrong place wrong time thing that's got her pulled into the story, which is kind of fun.

Is it... a thing Russel T. Davies is doing on purpose to go from Ruby Sunday, a very young working-class blonde woman like Rose Tyler as companion one, to Belinda Chandra, a nurse with a bit more of her guard up against the Doctor's charms like Martha Jones as companion two, to this particular Doctor? This episode had a lot of similarities to Martha's introduction, too, what with it being focused on robot bad guys! I'm putting this down just because I wonder if the parallels are intentional at all!

I don't usually care much about the time travel "logic" in this show, but I actually thought the way it played out here was really cool! It was this cause and effect tangle, where Belinda caused this alternative history to develop by saying the name of her ex boyfriend, and then she became part of the founding myth of a place but her incel ex became the undoing of that place! Very cool and interesting.

I love when episodes are from another character's point of view and we get to see the Doctor from an outside perspective a bit: here, the Doctor first emerges as a "historian" who manages to get a message to Belinda to warn her of incoming chaos. We also see the outside perspective of the Doctor having a close friendship with someone... the tragedy of knowing this woman wanted to travel with the Doctor and then died before getting a chance go to go? Oof. It's a chilling reminder of all the loss the Doctor lives with, given the way he lives his life, and that life's longevity...

So far, Belinda and the Doctor haven't had a ton of bonding time but we see them work pretty well together under pressure, and then we also see the way she can see through some of his shit and call him on it. I loved that moment at the end in the TARDIS, where she clocked him as dangerous and he apologized for the violation of running tests on her without her permission. There's a mystery with Belinda, and of course the Doctor always wants to solve a mystery. But Belinda, she wants to go home! The episode ends with the Doctor making the disturbing discovery that he cannot return Belinda to the day she was taken by the robots, May 24, 2025. Incidentally, this is the date of this season's penultimate episode, so that's going to be fun when we get there!

8/10