Doctor Who’s New Season Makes Exciting Promises; Will It Keep Them?
Photo by Alistair Heap, courtesy of BBC Studios / Disney
Doctor Who is in a weird place.
On the one hand, the show is leagues better than what fans were used to in the dark days of showrunner Chris Chibnall and 13th Doctor Jodie Whittaker. Even as a defender of many of their episodes, I can’t deny that starting with the 2023 60th anniversary specials and the return of showrunner Russell T. Davies, the show instantly saw a dramatic increase in quality.
On the other hand, opinions have begun to sour on that same showrunner whose return to the show we all celebrated. What appeared to be a compelling mystery at the beginning of last year’s season turned out to be a stupid non-answer, and interviews with Davies have frustrated fans for his insistence that “no, you just don’t get it, it’s actually genius!”
It’s with that context that we enter the first episode of Doctor Who’s 41st, 15th, or second season, depending on how you decide to count them. “The Robot Revolution” is funny and exciting and entices audiences to care about the new and ongoing mysteries introduced and carried forward.
Will they pay off? That remains to be seen.
The episode kicks off by following Belinda Chandra, whose actor, Varada Sethu (Andor, Jurassic World Dominion), made an appearance as a relatively minor character in the previous season’s episode titled “Boom.” It’s been confirmed that the main companion of that season, Millie Gibson’s Ruby Sunday, will return sometime later on, but she makes no appearance during the season premiere.
After a quick flashback, we follow Belinda’s shift as a nurse while the Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) follows her in a not-so-sneaky manner. Quickly enough, however, she gets whisked away not by the Doctor, but by a spaceship manned entirely by robots, who claim she is queen of a star system because her boyfriend at the time bought her one of those scammy “own a star” certificates a number of years ago. It’s a very funny reveal, and it only gets sillier from there.