This was a decent episode. There are a couple of things about it that I found very irritating, but mostly it was good. For a kids' show, anyway. The "twists" (such as they are) aren't going to surprise any adult viewers, but I doubt the target audience found it quite so easy to predict. My only major criticism is that it seemed like it was heading toward a particular message only to back off at the last moment, which made the point of the episode a little unclear.
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| For me, the robots aren't creepy or endearing, they're just sort of... unremarkable? Seems like a missed opportunity. |
The episode begins with a robot teleporting into the TARDIS to deliver a package. Leaving aside the issues of how it found them and how it got in, if you can teleport packages around why do you need to send a robot with them? The whole episode actually has this retro-futuristic vibe to it but only in a sort of half-arsed way and not for any apparent purpose. It's fine, I suppose, it just made me wonder why.
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| I wonder if there's any reason the company's called "Kerblam"? |
The package contains a silly hat and a note asking for help. It could be nothing, but seems worth checking out so they head on down to the distribution centre where they sneak in under cover as new workers. And I've got to complain about the psychic paper and magic wand again, because they're just so lazy. It would take ten minutes to swap out every instance of their use with a more situationally-appropriate solution. It doesn't even have to be a good solution, it's just really dumb to give your protagonist a get-out-of-literally-any-problem-free card.
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| Judy's a pretty big wheel down at the Kerblam factory. She also works the front desk. |
Anyway, they get given a tour of the facility by Judy, the head of HR, and meet this episodes four other characters; Lee Mack, Jarva, Kira and Charlie. Kira is nice and friendly. Lee Mack is that plus a certain Lee-Mackinshness. Charlie's helpful and willing to bend the rules, and Jarva is so suspicious that it would actually have been shocking if he'd turned out to be the bad guy. But like I said, kids probably aren't going to pick up on that.
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| There is not a single scene where he doesn't look exactly this suspicious. |
The crew each get assigned their jobs and are told that a few people have disappeared lately, and then Lee Mack disappears. We see that it was a robot that did it, and then some robots menace Yas when she goes to investigate. Meanwhile there have been a number of power outages, which the crew are told are unusual but have been happening a lot lately. An extended outage provides the opportunity for an unscheduled break, which the crew use to meet up and compare notes.
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| I wonder if he got to keep the poster? |
They decide to bring their concerns straight to the top. That is, to Judy in HR because I guess she's the highest authority actually present. Judy and Jarva say they'll look into it, but just in case they're actually involved or covering for someone the Doctor sneaks back into Jarva's office after they leave and finds a bunch of files on the missing people. Obviously it's because he's already investigating the disappearances, but you can see why it would look pretty bad for him from the Doctor's perspective.
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| Irsa Moyner? |
The misunderstanding gets sorted out pretty quickly though and Judy and Jarva join the team to help find out what's going on. This involves some hacking and other nonsense. Not a complaint, it works when you're watching it, it's just that there;s no real substance to describe. Anyway, they figure out that they need to get down to the lowest floor, where no humans are supposed to be, because Kira's down there and also everything else points that way.
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| If some creepy robots tell you you've won a prize you've never even heard of and ask you to follow them, don't go. |
Kira, meanwhile, has been taken to what looks like a police interrogation room and locked in there. So Ryan, Yas and Charlie jump down the package chute to rescue her. They almost get killed by falling off a conveyor belt and then again by being shot with lasers, but it all felt a bit like killing time. Also Ryan mentions his dyspraxia again, but it doesn't actually negatively affect him at all.
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| This seems impractical. |
Eventually everyone gets down there where they find a giant army of robots carrying bombs. And Kira gets killed by one. A bomb, that is, not a robot. Around this point the Doctor figures out that the message she got back at the start came from the factory's AI, not a human, and it was trying to get her to stop the real culprit, which is Charlie.
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| They're still just not all that creepy to me. I assume they're supposed to be? They just look like big toys. |
This is where the message gets a bit mixed up. Charlie's basically a luddite; he wants to frame the AI for killing a bunch of people so that people will stop trusting the machines and humans will be able to get their jobs back, because currently unemployment is at, like, 90%. But we've got no real sense of what life is like for those unemployed. Presumably there are enough people buying stuff for this company to make money. Lee Mack said he was sending money home so his daughter could have a better life, but we've no idea what that really means. How does this society work?
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| OK, now it's creepy. |
And then after they stop him, Judy says she's going to make sure the company hires more people. So the terrorist kind of won? We're not getting a "let's reform this capitalist dystopia" ending, just, what, an unemployment rate of 80%? It really seems like the whole episode was written to have an anti-capitalist message and then just had the ending changed at the last minute.
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| The bombs were in the bubble wrap, because no one can resist popping it. |
I'm not expecting a kids show to advocate a communist revolution or anything, but I feel like the author wanted to write that and wasn't allowed. Or did write that, and then a second author came along and did a quick job of stripping the message out and replacing it with some mediocre action scenes. But why? Why do the whole capitalist dystopia thing if you're not going to address it at all? I mean, it was an OK episode, I just don't understand the decisions that must have gone into making it.
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| He'll never look at bubble wrap the same way again. |
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