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| Robots of Death |
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 Name: Robots of Death
Format:
Television show, Book and Audio
Time of Origin: Unspecified date in
the far future.
Appearances: "The
Robots of Death", "Corpse
Marker", "The Sons of Kaldor", "Robophobia", "Ravenous 2 - Escape from Kaldor".
Doctors: Fourth
Doctor, Seventh
Doctor and Eighth
Doctor
Companions: Leela, Liv Chenka and Helen Sinclair
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| Robot SV7 |
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History: Although they started out as servants,
the Robots that would come to be known as the Robots of Death quickly
developed into a significant threat on their own merits, primarily
because the society that created them were so dependent on robots
that it was hard for them to even conceive of the possibility that
the robots could turn against them due to the robots having been
designed with over one million circuit constrainers to prevent them
from harming humans. However, The Doctor has encountered at least
two separate occasions where the robots were programmed to act contrary
to their design parameters, allowing the robots to be legitimately
regarded as an enemy rather than simple tools (Although on the third
occasion they were merely framed for the crimes).
In
social terms, the robots had a clear defined ‘structure’ that
generally seemed to allow them to efficiently do their work. There
were at least three classes of robot in this society, consisting
of black ‘Dums’, which were incapable of speech and were
used as a general workforce, the more intelligent pale green ‘Vocs’,
and a silver ‘Super Voc’ (SV7) which controlled all the ‘Dums’ and ‘Vocs’ of
their particular assignment. Deactivated robots are returned to construction
centres bearing deactivation disks, nicknamed ‘corpse markers’,
but were otherwise accepted as simple tools. Despite this, some people
were known to suffer from ‘Grimwade’s Syndrome’ where
the sight of robots - beings who walked like men without giving any
of the subtle body-language signals humans depended on - could send
them into a panic in the belief that they were dealing with walking
dead men.
The
Doctor first encountered the Robots on Storm Mine 4, a Sandminer
that searched near-barren planets for valuable minerals such as Zelanite,
Keefan and Lucanol, the skeleton crew living in relative luxury while
only doing the occasional specialised mining work, with their robots
doing most of the hard labour ("The
Robots of Death").
After one of the crew of the Sandminer - Chub the mineralogist -
was murdered shortly before the Fourth
Doctor and Leela arrived,
mission commander Uvanov assumed that The Doctor and Leela were the
killers as all of the human crew had been accounted for at the time
of the murder. Although they were locked up, The Doctor and Leela
were able to escape via The Doctor’s use of the sonic screwdriver,
but were subsequently separated as they tried to find the TARDIS,
Leela witnessing robots taking a dead body away - as well as encountering
D84, a ‘Dum’ that could speak -, while The Doctor was
nearly killed after someone trapped him in an ore scooper before
he was rescued by SV7. Although Uvanov still believed that The Doctor
and Leela were the killers, Chief Mover Poul was convinced to give
them a chance to investigate the deaths, his suspicion being confirmed
when Zilda, another member of the crew, was murdered while he was
with The Doctor and Leela, although he still refused to believe The
Doctor’s theory that a robot was committing the murders.
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| Leela and Robot D84 |
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After The Doctor narrowly averted an attempt
to send the Sandminer hurtling out of control, he tracked down D84 and
learned that it was a disguised Super-Voc, working with Poul - really
an undercover agent - to investigate a reported robot revolution being
allegedly organised by a scientist called Taren Capel, Capel having been
raised by robots and left convinced of their superiority to humans. Although
The Doctor discovered Capel’s lab, he wasn’t in time to stop
Capel - who had been working undercover in the Sandminer as Chief Fixer
Dask - from activating his own reprogrammed robots and sending them out
to kill all humans. Using a previously dismantled robot, The Doctor was
able to devise a weapon that could shut down all robots within its range,
subsequently arranging for Leela to release helium gas in Capel’s
lab. Although D84 sacrificed itself to save The Doctor by activating
his device itself, The Doctor was able to stop Capel by using the helium
to alter Capel’s voice, resulting in Capel being killed by SV7
- who no longer recognised its ‘master’ - before The Doctor
could destroy it with a laser probe.
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| Taren Capel |
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When
The Doctor and Leela later arrived in Kaldor City, the centre of
the civilisation that had developed the Robots, several years had
passed since the Sandminer incident ("Corpse
Marker"),
and the three surviving crewmembers of the Sandminer were showing
varying degrees of mental damage after the Sandminer massacre had
been covered up by top Company executives. While Poul was mostly
recovered from his mental breakdown, he still suffered from panic
attacks when he saw robots and couldn’t remember the full details
of the incident, Toos’s skill in finding ore streams allowed
her superiors to tolerate her refusal to rely on robots, and Uvanov
was now in charge of a top-secret project despite the concerns of
the ruling council that he had ambitions to rise up against them,
to the point that the Council had contacted noted psychostrategist
Carnell to come up with a plan to stop Uvanov’s potential threat.
However, The Doctor and Leela’s presence had been dismissed
as a group hallucination brought on by stress, resulting in their
situation becoming complicated when they materialised in an experimental
facility and Leela was forced to flee with a group of terrorists
after she killed a sadistic guard, learning too late that the group
believed that Tarn Capel was still alive and driving them to free
society from its dependence on robots. Meeting Uvanov, The Doctor
learned that the facility was responsible for creating a new cyborg
class of robot that could mimic body language, agreeing to help Uvanov
expose the conspiracy against him in exchange for help finding Leela,
while Toos and Poul were nearly attacked by robots in human form,
Toos only escaping because the robot decided to kill the rest of
the people at her retirement party when it couldn’t get her
alone to eliminate witnesses.
While trying to visit a sandminer to refresh his memory,
The Doctor ran into Poul once again, Poul briefly believing that
The Doctor was Capel before they were trapped in a burning building
after their flier crashed, only to be saved by Leela, who had already
met up with Toos again when the terrorist cell rescued her. Although
hampered by the cell leader’s belief that he was Capel, The
Doctor discovered that the Sewerpits where they were hiding were
equipped with force fields designed to contain killer robots, suggesting
that the malfunctions had happened before. At the same time, The
Doctor and his allies faced another threat in the form of SASV1,
a new class of Super-Voc using Taren Capel’s blueprints that
could deactivate the protocols preventing it harming humans whose
self-developed ability to dream had left it convinced that it was
Taren Capel, creator of both robots and inferior humans. As it began
to kill humans as part of its attempts to learn the truth, SASV1’s
murders resulted in the creation of more security robots, these robots
thus falling under its control until it was ready to enter the sewers
to find ‘Taren Capel’ and kill him. Fortunately, since
the security robots SASV1 was using had ‘imprinted’ on
The Doctor when they were activated in Uvanov’s factory, he
was able to give them orders, allowing him to track down SASV1 and
destroy it. With Carnell’s strategy to ‘expose’ Uvanov
having failed due to The Doctor and Leela’s presence - the
plan was to frame Poul for Uvanov and Toos’s murders and reveal
the Sandminer incident so that new robots could be phased into society
while encouraging the comfort of the current status quo -, he provided
Uvanov with the information necessary to blackmail the Council into
letting him create his own society.
Later in their travels, while seeking replacement parts for the damaged K9, The Doctor and Leela arrived on a stealth plane on Kaldor itself, which they soon learned was populated solely by a few robots, including a damaged Super-Voc known as SV-9. Although they found the mission’s official commander, Lind, in suspended animation in the medical bay, when talking with the robots The Doctor quickly realised that the robots deferred to V-26 when receiving orders. After the robots were ordered to revive Lind, it was revealed that she had been in suspended animation for around two years when she was injured in an ambush as part of a civil war with the Sons of Kaldor, descendants of the founders of Kaldor who resented their perceived lower-class status in the new society. Lind was horrified when she learned that the Sons of Kaldor had actually won the civil war while she was in suspended animation, declaring robots illegal and ordering them destroyed in favour of a return to the enslavement of Kaldor’s native species, the Feralins. The ship was then discovered by Rebben Tace, one of the Sons who had come to power after the civil war, who had been tracking a signal that was drawing the remaining robots to that area as part of their campaign against the remaining dissident forces. Talking with SV-9, The Doctor confirmed that SV-9 was the first robot to achieve sentience after certain circuits were damaged during the ambush that left Lind injured and in suspended animation; SV-9 kept Lind out of the picture by adjusting her anaesthetic dose to leave her comatose so that she wouldn’t wake up and leave the robots ‘obligated’ to obey her, advising V-26 on how to perform similar ‘operations’ on other robots as he was too damaged to do it himself. Although Tace’s forces tried to destroy the robots, Leela and the robots were able to turn the tables on Tace’s men and Feralins while SV-9 knocked out Tace after The Doctor adjusted his circuits to trigger an electric shock when Tace tried to physically attack SV-9. With Tace’s men unable to shut down the robots as SV-9 had disabled that control on the ship, they were left trapped on their ship while Lind joined the robots in seeking out the dissidents and any other surviving robots, The Doctor and Leela each hoping that these robots would survive and thrive as a species.
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| A Possessed Robot |
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The Seventh
Doctor faced the Robots once again when he
arrived on the spaceship Loreli, transporting 157,000 deactivated
Robots to the planet Ventalis, just as Tech Support team member Tal
Karus was murdered, forcing the anxious captain to delay his attempts
to deliver the Robots. Masquerading as a member of the engineering
staff, The Doctor assisted Medical Officer Liv Chenka in investigating
the death, and discovered a video of both Tal Karus’s murder
and The Doctor’s own apparent murder (Although he had survived
thanks to his respiratory bypass system), both being committed by
a robot despite the fact that the Robots were meant to be deactivated.
After a bomb destroyed some of the cargo, The Doctor was forced to
reactivate some of the robots, including Super-Voc SV10, who all
recognised him as Tal Kaus. With rumours of the Sandminer incident
spreading, the pilot was attacked and killed, with a blood-covered
Robot hand and faceplate discovered alongside his body and the communication
system sabotaged to prevent the crew calling for help. Although The
Doctor was arrested, he was initially more concerned about the mass
robotic destruction in the hold rather than the crew’s concerns
about the robots’ individual murder of the humans.
Seemingly losing control of the ship, the commander had SV10
disabled by removing its head and hands, with another Robot apparently
issuing orders to send the other Robots back to the hold, only for
The Doctor to reveal that the Robots were actually the victims in
the current situation, as crew member Security Officer Farel was
suffering from an acute form of Robophobia after his wife died in
a sandminer accident that the Robots failed to prevent. As a result,
Farel was not only trying to destroy all the Robots with the previously-used
bomb - to the point that it was implied he had issued the order to
send the Robots back to the hold so that he could more easily destroy
them -, but was simultaneously attacking crewmembers disguised as
a robot to give the impression that they were attacking people, even
sending a fake transmission that the Robots had gone rogue so that
they would be blamed for the deaths that would result when the ship
crashed into Ventalis. Aided by Liv Chenka, The Doctor tried to find
Farel, but matters were further complicated when it was discovered
that the ship’s velocity controls had been fused, with the
result that the ship was stuck on its present speed even after the
crew regained directional control. With the rest of the crew evacuating,
The Doctor learned that SV10 was piloting the ship into a slingshot
manoeuvre that would send them into Ventalis’s sun, SV10 even
refusing The Doctor's offer to take the robots off the ship on the
grounds that there was no time for them to all retreat into the TARDIS.
With no other way to stop the crash, The Doctor helped SV10 send
a transmission to Ventalis to inform them of the truth of Farel’s
plans before he departed, leaving the Robots to sacrifice themselves
and prove their worth despite the occasional programming glitch.
Some time later, after The Doctor had regenerated and begun travelling with Liv Chenka after meeting her during another crisis, the Eighth
Doctor decided to give Liv and new companion Helen Sinclair a holiday by travelling to Kaldor to attend the opening of the Complex, an expensive new leisure centre. While Liv and Helen visited the Complex, The Doctor paid a visit to Tula Chenka, Liv’s sister and a CEO in the company that had created a new wave of robots, but the visit was interrupted when Kit Laver, an acquaintance of Liv’s from basic training, reset the Complex robots to factory settings with the goal of providing a distraction while he and some of his associates robbed the Complex’s jewelry stores. Unfortunately for Kit, the robots in the Complex had been used to dispose of sandrats before it was officially open to the public, with the result that resetting them to factory settings reverted them to a programming setting where they would kill all life forms in the Complex. Although Galla Posca, the head of the company that made the robots, attempted to program the robots to self-destruct to prevent the truth about the reprogramming coming to light, The Doctor was able to adjust the robots’ programming enough to convince the current Super Voc not to self destruct, allowing The Doctor and his allies to escape the Complex with all robots returned to normal. |
