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[[WMG:[[center:[-''[[Series/DoctorWho Doctor Who]]'' [[Recap/DoctorWho recap index]]\\
'''Fourth Doctor Era'''\\
'''Season 14:''' [[Recap/DoctorWhoS14E1TheMasqueOfMandragora 1]] | [[Recap/DoctorWhoS14E2TheHandOfFear 2]] | [[Recap/DoctorWhoS14E3TheDeadlyAssassin 3]] | [[Recap/DoctorWhoS14E4TheFaceOfEvil 4]] | '''5''' | [[Recap/DoctorWhoS14E6TheTalonsOfWengChiang 6]]\\
'''[[Recap/DoctorWhoS13E1TerrorOfTheZygons <<< Season 13]]''' | '''[[Recap/DoctorWhoS15E1HorrorOfFangRock Season 15 >>>]]''']]-]]]
!The Robots of Death
[[quoteright:300:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/robotswheee.png]]
[[caption-width-right:300: Huh... where's [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcH-3d-BZn4 Ben Stein]] when you need him?[[note]][[Recap/DoctorWhoS13E2PlanetOfEvil We already made that joke!]][[/note]]]]
->Written by Creator/ChrisBoucher\\
Directed by Michael E. Briant\\
'''Production code:''' 4R\\
'''Air dates:''' 29 January - 19 February 1977\\
'''Number of episodes:''' 4

->'''Leela:''' Doctor, what is "robophobia"?\\
'''Doctor:''' It's an unreasoning dread of robots. You see, most living creatures use non-verbal signals. Body movement, eye contact, facial expressions, that sort of thing.\\
'''Leela:''' Body language!\\
'''Doctor:''' Exactly. But while these robots are humanoid, presumably for aesthetic reasons, they give no signals. It's rather like being surrounded by walking, talking dead men.

JustForFun/{{The one w|ith}}here a man slaps some Jelly Babies.
----

This serial begins in the recreation room of a giant sandminer ship belonging to a civilization utterly dependent on robots. The workers discuss the urban legend of a guy whose arm was ripped off by a robot massaging him. But of course, they all know the robots have tons of safety systems in place and that they could ''never'' kill a human, [[TemptingFate right?]] Just then, the robots announce that they've detected a sandstorm, which stirs up ores in the sand that are worth a fortune. One poor RedShirt, Chub, goes into the storage room to collect instruments for a weather balloon when he's strangled by... go ahead, guess. Thus begins a round of Creator/AgathaChristie-style paranoid accusations.

Enter the Fourth Doctor and Leela, who materialize in one of the sandminer's scoops. They're brought out by two robots and locked in a room, as the workers of course suspect that the two killed Chub. It doesn't help that after they escape, the two are separately caught in the same rooms as dead bodies #2 and #3. So, the blame game enters Round Two; the crew cannot decide whether the Doctor and Leela did it or one of their own. At any rate, they're locked up in iron shackles in the robot storage room. When a rather nervous man named Poul frees the two out of belief in their innocence, the Doctor points out that they all completely overlooked a possible suspect: the robots. Poul laughs; the robots couldn't possibly kill a human!

While the Doctor tries to convince Poul otherwise, a woman named Zilda goes into Commander (and LargeHam) Uvanov's room and announces over a loudspeaker that she knows he's the murderer, but before she can explain how or why she gets strangled. For those watching at home, the body count is now up to 4. Suddenly, the ship shakes! Turns out, the ship has been sabotaged, and RedShirt repairman Borg (no, not [[Franchise/StarTrek that Borg]]) has become dead body #5. The ship can't handle the stress and is about to blow up, but the Doctor cuts out the power and gets a man named Dask to repair the motors so the ship won't sink into the sand. Leela bandages up the hand of acting commander Toos, who heads to her quarters.

Suddenly, a robot named D84 reveals that it and Poul are undercover agents for the mining company. They were placed on board the miner due to threats of a robot revolution by MadScientist Taren Capel, who was RaisedByRobots and therefore a bit funny in the head. The Doctor and detective D84 search the miner for proof that Taren Capel is on board and find a secret workshop where the robots' programming has been changed to enable them to kill humans. He tells Toos over the communications system to get the others and head for the command deck, but as soon as she can get to the door, she's blocked by a strangle-happy robot and just barely gets away by making the door slam onto its hand. Leela manages to find Poul, but he's too busy lying on the ground in the fetal position while he screams about how the robots have always controlled him. Meanwhile, it dawns on the Doctor and D84 that "Dask" is really Taren Capel, and he wants to liberate robots by giving them the ambition to take over civilization. (Meanwhile, Leela makes her way to Toos's bedchambers and the two engage in some rather sweet LesYay for a bit.) Taren Capel -- now wearing the robots' clothes and metallic face paint to mimic them -- gives his order to the robots: destroy all remaining humans on board. The Doctor realizes that this is the end of this civilization, as the robots they so depend on will become a source of overwhelming fear.

The Doctor comes up with a plan to destroy the robots. They're all being controlled by one particular robot: [=SV7=]. If it dies, the others will stop killing. He uses parts from a broken robot to create a final deactivator -- a device that will destroy any still-functioning robots at close range. At the same time, Uvanov and Toos have arrived at the command deck and built makeshift anti-robot bombs, which they proceed to kick robo-ass with.

The Doctor hides Leela in Taren's workshop with a canister of helium gas, telling her to release it slowly when Taren comes in. The Doctor hopes that this will change Taren's voice, so his robots -- unable to recognize him -- won't obey his orders.

Taren arrives and damages D84, but the robot is able to activate the Doctor's device to destroy a killer robot, knowingly sacrificing itself in the process (Dead Body #6...[[WhatMeasureIsANonHuman ish?]]). Leela releases the helium gas, causing Taren's voice to become high-pitched and squeaky, and Taren is killed by [=SV7=] when it fails to identify his voice. The Doctor then destroys [=SV7=] with a laser probe.

The Doctor explains that he used his own [[ContinuityNod respiratory bypass system]] to keep his CompellingVoice intact and ponders a bit about how this society might now crash in on itself. He and Leela vworp off.

-----

Creator/ChrisBoucher wrote a sequel novel, ''Corpse Marker'', and an audio spinoff series based on this story, ''[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaldor_City Kaldor City]]''. It was produced by Magic Bullet Productions and stars many of the original actors. Another direct sequel, "Robophobia", was written by Creator/NicholasBriggs, and another Kaldor audio spinoff series, ''The Robots'', produced as AudioPlay/BigFinishDoctorWho audio plays. Boucher's novel and audio works feature some characters from ''Series/BlakesSeven'', and he has said he considers the two series to take place [[CanonWelding roughly contemporaneously]].

David Collings, who appeared here as Poul, went on to play an alternate version of the Doctor in the AudioPlay/BigFinishDoctorWho episode Full Fathom Five.

!!Tropes
* AlternateCharacterInterpretation (InUniverse): It's stated by Poul that Uvanov left Zilda's brother out to die ten years before because he didn't want to waste time and money. Later, Uvanov reveals that he in fact tried to save him when he came down with robophobia and panicked. The boy's father didn't want the boy thought of as a coward and had the records altered.
* AndroidsAndDetectives: D84 and Poul turn out to be a buddy cop team sent to the sand miner to identify which member of the crew is secretly a terrorist. Unfortunately, Poul's UncannyValley phobia causes him to have a meltdown and D84 dies in a HeroicSacrifice to protect the Doctor. In fact, until the second half of Episode 4 (in which D84 carries an unconscious Poul), the two of them never actually interact with each other throughout the serial.
* ArtDeco: The design team admitted to basing the sandminer sets on Art Deco.
* BaseOnWheels: The Sand Miner functions as this.
* BigBad: Taren Capel is the one reprogramming the robots to kill the humans.
* BigShutUp: Caught in the middle of a murder plot that he (incorrectly) suspects the Doctor of being responsible for, Borg turns down the Doctor's offer of a jelly baby with all the politeness and tranquility of a bulldozer smashing through an occupied home (and slaps the jelly babies out of the Doctor's hand, to boot).
-->''"Well, a simple 'No, thank you' would've been sufficient."''
* BizarreAlienBiology: The reason the Doctor's voice didn't go all squeaky, building on the reveal of Time Lords' respiratory bypass systems in "[[Recap/DoctorWhoS13E3PyramidsOfMars Pyramids of Mars]]".
* BreakTheBadass: While the Doctor comfortably confronts the robots and murderers, the thought of what may result from robot terrorism seems to genuinely scare him.
* CastingGag: David Collings had previously played R. Daneel Olivaw in an adaptation of ''Literature/TheNakedSun''.
* CategorismAsAPhobia: Robophobia is a clinical condition caused by the UncannyValley of androids. A character suffers such a breakdown when he realises the robots have been programmed to KillAllHumans.
* ContinuityNod: The Doctor [[Recap/DoctorWhoS8E5TheDaemons again]] (incorrectly) cites that it's technically impossible for a bumblebee to fly.
* CranialProcessingUnit: The robots have their 'brains' in their heads, as more than one is 'killed' by having a laser probe plunged into its brain through its head. This makes sense given what we know of the society that created them, with the robots having been made in human form for aesthetic reasons.
* DeadpanSnarker: [=SV7=] gets in a surprising (for a robot) amount of snark, notably when the Doctor escapes by throwing his hat and scarf onto V5, and V4 promptly starts strangling his fellow robot.
-->'''V4:''' Kill. Kill. Kill.\\
'''V5:''' Do not kill me.\\
'''[=SV7=]:''' V4, that is not the Doctor.
* DeconstructorFleet: The story explores the real effects of living in a society with robots as a work force. Wouldn't, for example, UncannyValley rear its head?
* DepthDeception: The Doctor's explanation for the whole "bigger on the inside" thing. One box is actually larger than another but appears smaller because it's far away. The TARDIS uses transdimensional engineering to put two similar spaces in the same place, while keeping those relative sizes.
* DoesntLikeGuns: The Doctor tells Leela that he never carries weapons because "If people see you mean them no harm, they never hurt you... nine times out of ten."
* EasilyDetachableRobotParts: When Soos prevents a robot from strangling her by slamming her door on its hand, the robot merely detaches the pinned hand from its arm.
* EliteMooks: [=SV7=] is designated a Super Voc.
* EveryoneIsASuspect: In a twist, the viewers already know that the killers are robots, but the crewmembers initially dismiss this as impossible and focus on the Doctor and Leela as the likeliest suspects. However, after it becomes clear that the robots have become homicidal, the question remains of who among the crew has been reprogramming them.
* EvilGloating: Dask declines to do this, instead deciding to burn out the Doctor’s brain.
* FreakOut: Poul suffers a really horrible one when he finds a deactivated robot with fresh human blood on its fingers.
* FriendlessnessInsult: When [[{{Jerkass}} Borg]] -- who is pointlessly nasty and spiteful to the point no one likes him -- takes offense at being accused of murdering his "friends", Zilda retorts, "you don't have any friends!".
* FunnyBackgroundEvent: When Uvanov invokes Poul's "double bluff" idea in some HypocriticalHumour, Poul can be seen having a good chuckle to himself in the background.
* GoryDiscretionShot: We are kept from seeing any gore thanks to ShakyPOVCam and cutting away... until Poul comes across a robot hand ''covered in bits of his friend's brain''. [[FreakOut This does not have very good consequences for his mental health]].
* HeliumSpeech: After Taren Capel orders the robots to kill the humans (except himself), the Doctor gets Leela to open a cylinder of helium so that robots won't recognize the villain's voice and kill him. The Doctor is unaffected by the helium though, due to his BizarreAlienBiology.
* HeroicSacrifice: D84 destroys a killer robot via the Doctor's "final deactivator", a device that will destroy any still-functioning robots at close range -- including D84.
* HoistByHisOwnPetard: Taren Capel is killed by his own robot revolutionaries when Leela uses helium to change his voice.
* HollywoodScience: The Doctor's explanation to Poul that bumblebees fly even though that's "impossible" is an urban legend which has been traced back [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bumblebee#Flight to at least 1934]] if not earlier and is based on applying equations to bumblebee flight that were known to be the wrong ones even back then.
* {{Jerkass}}:
** Every crew member is a jerk, but Borg appears to be a rather abrasive person, thriving on arguments and being the only crew member who gets in this setting's swear word "give it to a robot". (He may mean it literally, since he's responding to Uvanov saying he's given an order.) He slaps Jelly Babies out of the Doctor's hand and starts choking him in response to a sarcastic joke the Doctor makes at his expense. At one point, he becomes affronted that people are accusing him of murdering his friends, causing Zilda to retort, "you don't have any friends!"
** At first, Uvanov seems to care about little more than getting as much sand (read: money) as possible. Of course, this is before he realizes how truly screwed he is.
* JerkWithAHeartOfGold: Despite Uvanov's apparent greediness and acerbicity, when he tells the story of what happened to Zilda's brother, it's clear that he's haunted by the memory. He also tries to keep Poul calm when the latter suffers a FreakOut.
* JustBetweenYouAndMe: {{Subverted|Trope}}. When the Doctor pegs Capel as "one of those boring maniacs who's going to gloat" and asks him if he's going to describe his "plan for running the universe", Capel replies that he'd rather burn out the Doctor's brain, "very, very slowly".
* KickTheDog: The Doctor offers Borg a jelly baby and Borg smacks the bag out of his hand. The Doctor is quite perturbed.
* KilledOffscreen: Borg. We don't even see his body.
* KillerRobot: The clue's in the title.
* MachineMonotone: Much less severe than usual for the show. The result is somewhat sing-song-y, which just makes it that much creepier.
* MadScientist: Due to being RaisedByRobots, Taren Capel suffers from the delusion that he is himself a robot and wants to start a [[TurnedAgainstTheirMasters robot revolution]]. He's also a genius roboticist able to completely overhaul the systemic programming which prevents the robots from harming people.
* MobileFactory: The Sand Miner moves across the planet for its job.
* {{Mooks}}: The Voc and Dum robots are reprogrammed to do this.
* MyGreatestFailure: Uvanov sees his failure to save Zilda's brother, who fled into a storm after being afflicted with robophobia, as this
* MySpeciesDothProtestTooMuch: D84 is the only good robot in this serial -- though to be fair, the others didn't start out evil, and the one having its "good" programming rewritten on the operating table is ''very'' distressed throughout the process.
* NightmareFace: The robots are an in-universe example. Some people in the story are fine with them or even relate to them, but others subconsciously equate their weird, distorted faces with disfigured people or animated corpses, a recognized psychological disorder in the setting.
* OffTheShelfFX: The robot deactivation discs look to be out-of-the-box bicycle reflectors.
* OohMeAccentsSlipping: For one line in Episode Four, Uvanov suddenly becomes Irish. His actor was actually Glaswegian.
* PerspectiveMagic: The Doctor tells Leela that that this is the principle that enables the TARDIS to be much bigger on the inside than on the outside. She's understandably sceptical.
* PhlebotinumAnalogy: The Doctor attempts to explain the transdimensional TARDIS to Leela by showing her two boxes and explaining that if the bigger box (which has been placed farther away and looks smaller than the actual smaller box) could be kept where it was and yet located where the small box is, it would fit inside the small box.
* ThePlotReaper: The Doctor had become quite fond of D84 and D84 had no reason to want to stay in its world (it was disguised as an undesirable social class even by robot standards, its only friend hated it, and it was at risk of getting implicated for murder). Chances are the Doctor would have wanted to give D84 a trip in the TARDIS, but a creepy robot companion probably wouldn't work and so D84 sacrifices itself to save the Doctor from V5.
* RaisedByRobots: Taren Capel was raised by robots. Having more empathy for them than his fellow humans, he decides to start a [[TurnedAgainstTheirMasters robot uprising]].
* RedEyesTakeWarning: An effect of the manner in which the robots are reprogrammed.
* RemovingTheHeadOrDestroyingTheBrain: An absurdly high number of robots take laser probes to the head.
* RidiculouslyHumanRobots: {{Subverted|Trope}}. Taren Capal, who thinks that robots should be free of human rule, is a maniac and the villain of the story, and is pursued by a secret agent robot. It's a dangerous step to go from "Robots should be free" to "I must kill all my fellow humans to free the robots", but Capal takes it. The robot society is also portrayed as having three classes of robot -- Dums, which are basic machines with human form but no intelligence, Vocs, which can speak, and Supervocs (like the previously mentioned secret agent detective robot), which are intelligent and can make reasoned decisions, possessing something close to free will other than being programmed ThreeLawsCompliant and still being much less perceptive than even a below average human. The Supervocs struggle with certain modes of perception (as they can't recognize humans, they have a kludge based on voice patterns, which the villain [[CompellingVoice was able to exploit]]) and D84, the most intelligent robot in the story and possibly in the whole setting, still makes blatantly obvious logic mistakes in its reasoning that the Doctor points out as being typical robot psychology mistakes.
* RippedFromTheHeadlines: The plot involves robots that instinctively creep people out -- basically, the UncannyValley effect, which had been newly described at the time.
* RobotBuddy: D84, the one robot who never gets reprogrammed.
* RoboticPsychopath: The eponymous automatons, because they were reprogrammed by a psychopath.
* SanitySlippage: A visible sign of Grimwade’s Syndrome. See FreakOut.
* ShoutOut:
** Poul's name is a homage to SF writer Creator/PoulAnderson. Likewise, Taren Capel recalls [[Theatre/{{RUR}} Karel Capek]], inventor of the word "robot", and Uvanov is reminiscent of [[Creator/IsaacAsimov Asimov]].
** The Sandminer was inspired by ''Literature/{{Dune}}''.
* ShoutOutToShakespeare: The Doctor quotes ''Theatre/{{Macbeth}}'':
-->''"By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes."''
* TheSpeechless: The robots are divided between "Dums" that cannot speak and "Vocs" that can, a trope originated by Creator/IsaacAsimov. In addition, "Super Vocs" like [=SV7=] have advanced intelligence and command the lesser 'bots. D84 is a Super Voc disguised as a Dum, allowing him to operate BeneathNotice.
-->'''D84:''' This is a communicator. It can function on either human or robot command circuits. Would you like to use it? ''I'' cannot speak...
* ShownTheirWork: The buoyancy physics of the Storm Mine and the Doctor explains to Leela how HeliumSpeech works.
* SpaceClothes: The robot-chic fashions are inspired by the ArtDeco movement.
* SpinOff: [[http://www.kaldorcity.com/ Magic Bullet Productions]] have produced plays centered around this civilization and their robots. Russell Hunter reprised his role of Uvanov for them, with David Collings and David Bailie making guest appearances as Poul and Capel.
* SpoilerTitle: The robots did it. (Although the actual mystery of the story quickly turns into which of the human characters is reprogramming the robots to kill).
* StandardFemaleGrabArea: Used on [[ActionGirl Leela]] and immediately {{subverted|Trope}} when she [[GroinAttack kicks Uvanov in the goolies]] and threatens to cripple him.
* StarshipLuxurious: The mining ship is quite luxurious, despite being crewed by people desperately hoping for a good strike.
* StrappedToAnOperatingTable: One robot is seen immobilized on a table in Taren Capel's workshop with its face removed while Capel sticks a laser probe into its CPU. The robot is clearly aware of the whole process, and being ThreeLawsCompliant, it loudly protests against being reprogrammed into a killer.
* TenLittleMurderVictims: The twist being that the killer is obvious, hence the titles; likewise, the mastermind behind reprograming them is revealed early on. The mystery is trying to figure out which of the crew is Capel in disguise.
* ThreeLawsCompliant: The robots are more or less presumed to be, before Taren Capel starts messing with them.
* TookALevelInBadass: Once Uvanov and Toos get the supply of blasting packs out, much [[WesternAnimation/{{Futurama}} shiny metal ass]] is kicked.
* {{Tuckerization}}: Robophobia is officially known as "Grimwade's Syndrome", an in-joke regarding production assistant (later to be a director and writer) Peter Grimwade, who had complained that all the stories he worked on seemed to involve evil robots.
* UncannyValley: The Doctor describes how, in a society rife with humanlike servant robots, the total lack of body language from them results in some people developing a chronic form of this trope called "robophobia" or "Grimwade's Syndrome", where the robots come off as "walking, talking dead men". Poul suffers from robophobia and slowly grows increasingly unstable as a result of the murders of his crewmen by modified robots. Taren Capel, meanwhile, was RaisedByRobots and accordingly finds humans to be the uncanny ones.
* UndercoverCopReveal: Poul is revealed to be an undercover agent -- and so is one of the robot drones, which is actually a highly advanced robot disguised as the most primitive and stupid model in use on the Sandminer.
* WholePlotReference: The story is a mashup of Creator/IsaacAsimov's work, particularly his Baley/Olivaw books (especially in the subplot concerning the human and robot detective team). Only the plot structure itself is TenLittleMurderVictims. And certain aesthetic elements are taken from ''Film/{{Metropolis}}''.
* WoundedGazelleGambit: Dask/Taren Capel tries this in order to trick the remaining human survivors into letting him in their control room. Fortunately for them, they listen to the Doctor and refuse to let anyone in -- sure enough, the camera cuts to 'Dask' wearing the robots' silvery clothing and metallic face paint, surrounded by a band of robots waiting to storm the control room.
* WhyDidItHaveToBeSnakes: "Robophobia" or "Grimwade's Syndrome" is a reasonably common psychological condition in the setting, apparently caused by people with particularly keen body language skills [[UncannyValley subconsciously associating the stiff, humanoid robots with walking corpses]]. Poul suffers from this condition, and in the sequel ExpandedUniverse material it is revealed that both Toos and Uvanov have developed cases of it as a result of the trauma they suffered at the hands of the robots, while Poul's has worsened to the point of being barely functional.
* TheXOfY
* YourHeadASplode: The "final deactivator" causes nearby robots' heads to explode.
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