DOCTOR WHO

I just saw the DVD of the DOCTOR WHO story "The Robot."  I've been watching quite a few episodes of that long-running BBC scifi series on video.  Of course, it's about the Doctor, a super-intelligent but witty being who travels with various sidekicks into different planets and eras in the Tardis (Time And Relative Dimension In Space), which looks like a normal police phone booth from the outside.  I especially like the early stories from the 1960s with William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton and wish more of them were available. (My favorite sidekick is Frazier Hines as the Troughton-era Scot Jamie.)

"The Robot" is a 1974 story, the first one with Tom Baker as the Doctor.  He brought a special quirkiness to the role that brought the show to its peak of fame. (Catch him as Rasputin in NICHOLAS & ALEXANDRA or as the sorcerer in THE GOLDEN VOYAGE OF SINBAD.) The show back then had relatively low budgets, but it didn't need much money:  the appeal was in the clever writing.

This story involves strange goings-on at a government think-tank and a morally conflicted robot that goes around stealing top-secret information and material to build a disintegrator ray. (It's the last several stories that had the Doctor earthbound in the 20th century, working with a British general:  after this he returned to roving.) There's also a quasi-fascist group intent on nuclear blackmail.  It got a bit goofy at the end when the general turned the disintegrator on the robot, only to have it grow into a King Kong-sized threat.

There's some good dialogue, as usual for the series: "I don't like the word 'impregnable.' It sounds too much like 'unsinkable.'" "What's wrong with 'unsinkable'?" "Nothing, said the iceberg to the TITANIC."