When Millie Gibson’s Ruby Sunday made her debut proper as Doctor Who’s latest companion in last year’s ‘Space Babies’, we were met with a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed northern lass in awe of her two-hearted, Ncuti-Gatwa-shaped time-travelling BFF: a veritable Rose Tyler for the TikTok generation, ready for adventure. The TARDIS’ newest passenger, however, Belinda Chandra (played by Andor’s Varada Sethu), is decidedly not another Ruby Sunday. Instead, she’s an overworked, underappreciated, fiercely autonomous NHS nurse who’s over the Doctor’s “How clever am I?” shtick before he’s even started it — and all the more brilliant as a result. And in this series’ premiere, ‘The Robot Revolution’, she brings a healthy shot of cynicism to Who that helps make an otherwise classically daffy Russell T Davies season opener something more than the sum of its parts.
We first meet Sethu’s Belinda beneath a starry sky in 2008, where her casually sexist drip of a boyfriend Alan (Jonny Green) presents her with a star certificate and proceeds to mansplain its significance to her. Flash-forward 17 years and we rejoin Bel as a key worker living in an Alan-free house share, but before you can so much as say, “Huh, funny how Ruby was kind of like Rose and now Belinda is giving big Martha Jones energy,” a big, red RoboSapien-looking robot arrives and whisks our reluctant heroine off to its homeworld, ‘Miss Belinda Chandra’. Yes, not only was Alan’s present a bit shit, but it also transpires that it's made Bel the unwitting monarch of an alien world in thrall to the villainous ‘AI Generator’ — a ChatGPT analogue with the visage of Darth Vader in early ’00s 3D glasses. As we said, classically daffy.
For those who stick with it, there is meat to be found on the bones of this silly space caper...
Now, we can’t disclose how exactly Davies manages to turn his intergalactic robot war into a treatise on AI, toxic masculinity, and the rise of incels (Sethu’s Bel declaring ‘Miss Belinda Chandra’ ‘Planet Of The Incels’ is a brilliantly delivered swing-and-a-hit). Suffice it to say that those concerned for the woke-ification of a sci-fi programme in which a time-travelling, two-hearted alien fights systemic, social and militant injustice with little more than words, a screwdriver, and an at-times catastrophic tendency towards extreme empathy aren’t likely to be won over here. Even if the visual effects are super shiny, and even if that one little Roomba bot that goes around saying, “Polish! Polish!” is the cutest Who droid this side of K9.
For those who stick around, though, there is meat to be found on the bones of this silly space caper as the Doctor tries to find a way to free his impounded TARDIS and get Bel back to Earth. That Belinda explicitly doesn’t want to be the Doctor’s companion (“I am not your adventure,” she firmly states, having just had her DNA non-consensually scanned by Gatwa’s Time Lord and called him out on it) creates a dynamic we’ve not really seen since Catherine Tate’s early Donna Noble days. That she’s just as likely to be seen rolling up her sleeves and trying to provide medical assistance to rebels while the Doctor’s off monologuing as involuntarily marvelling at the biological impossibility of the Time Lord’s two ‘padam-padam-’ing hearts and bigger-on-the-inside spaceship generates a welcome sense of friction. A friction, mind you, that deftly manages to swerve outright hostility just enough to hint that these two differently brilliant but equally driven beings may in time become pals — just not yet, and not likely any time soon.
But that tension, running straight through the heart of this episode, is a good thing. With all of time and space as its playground, Who can sometimes feel a little weightless and whimsical, inconsequential even. Just look at how fast we’ve gone from Sutekh and his Thanos-dwarfing dust of death to AI Generator and his angry-face-emoji robots; or how often we see the Doctor witness tragedy only to be back running about and cracking wise just moments later. As such, seeing Belinda identify the Doctor as “dangerous” first and foremost, refusing to be swept up in Fifteen’s nuclear charisma (Gatwa simply is the Doctor at this point and clearly loving every second) despite being fully aware and capable of matching it… now that’s interesting. That brings some gravity (well, mavity) to the situation, and it bodes well for the next seven weeks we’ll be spending on the Doctor’s latest cosmic joyride.
And if you thought RTD had just about emptied his mystery box with Sutekh, Susan Triad, and the parentage of Ruby Sunday last series, then it’s well worth mentioning that despite the overriding slightness of ‘Robot Revolution’, you’ll find yourself sorely mistaken here. Anita Dobson’s wonderfully menacing Mrs Flood is back and breaking the fourth wall once again; there’s some trippy, cosmic horror-inflected, wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey shenanigans at play that certainly don’t discourage ongoing suspicions that there may be some meta show-within-a-show shenanigans afoot in Davies’ Whoniverse; there’s still a big ol’ question mark hanging over the significance of Belinda’s connection to Sethu’s former character in 2024 episode ‘Boom’, Mundy Flynn; and, most pressingly for the Doctor and Bel, something — or someone — seriously doesn’t want the duo to make it back to Earth.
Still, there’s world enough and time for all that — and presumably a nice little recurrence of the Pantheon of Gods that were introduced last year — in the weeks to come. For now, though, much as Belinda Chandra would roll her eyes to hear it, this first episode of the new series proves that our friendly neighbourhood Time Lord is right about at least one thing: “Doctor and nurse — good team.” Roll on next week and the arrival of Mr Ring-a-Ding.
