The Robot Revolution saw the start of Ncuti Gatwa’s second (and as it turned out, final) season as the Doctor. It introduced new companion, Belinda Chandra (played by the reader here, Varada Sethu), re-introduced the enigmatic Mrs Flood (Anita Dobson) and kicked off the season with something that initially seemed fun and bright and a bit silly, but which developed some socio-satirical purpose along the way.

And while for the most part on broadcast, it was hailed as a great new boost of energy after the landing-failure of The Empire of Death and the sort-of-okayness of Joy To The World, as the season progressed and plenty of fans developed other favourites, several niggles arose with it that marred it and stopped it staying at the top of fans’ lists.

Una McCormack, in writing the novelisation of the story, has addressed most if not all of those niggles, giving the whole thing more depth, more emotional weight, a good deal more sense, a more easily digested sense of high stakes, and a sharper illustration of incel Alan’s mindset.

The Tweaks That Change Everything

Sometimes, the tweaks are small but important. For instance, in McCormack’s version of the story, we learn the names, backgrounds and interactions of Belinda’s flatmates in modern London. We learn the origin of the cat that gets so singularly vapourised (and, incidentally, its owner is going to be as heartbroken by that vapourisation as much of the watching audience was). 

While this might seem like a small thing, many fans in the wake of broadcast felt short-changed by the existence of these people and the almost absolute lack of any information about them, claiming we should have got to know them before the robots arrived.

As it turned out across the course of the season, there would have been little incentive to learn more about them, as they never appeared again – but here, McCormack populates Belinda’s flat with real people and their real, slightly greasy London house-share lives, adding dimensions of reality that we were asked to simply assume and pass by during the on-screen version.

Similarly, many fans felt a kind of damp outrage at the Doctor’s use of the sonic while in the hospital, shorting out the electrics on which many patients’ lives were depending, seemingly without a second thought. McCormack comes to the rescue of the story again, explaining that the reason the Doctor arrives late at Belinda’s house, just in time to see her marched off into space by some primary-coloured robots, is that after his sonic shenanigans, he had to stay behind and repair the shorted-out systems “before any patients’ heart monitors started playing up.”

These moments are frankly genius – they fit perfectly with what we saw on-screen, but explicitly give the context which the episode lacked, to the annoyance of many fans.

The crucial scene of a young Belinda and the controlling Alan kissing on a bench is given a lot more detail – we get to understand their first meeting, the progress of their relationship, and while this may be just a personal thing, we get to like Belinda a lot more on first meeting her when she quotes Douglas Adams’ Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy at a mirthless Alan. It’s instantly clear that she’s cool and lovely, and that he’s an out-and-out wrong ’un.

We also get a lot more of Belinda’s youth, and while there’s some danger in encapsulating a companion within a catchy title – The Girl Who Waited, The Impossible Girl, etc – in a sense, McCormack rewrites Belinda as The Girl Who Will Travel when we learn that her horoscope at birth predicted that single simple line about her fate: She will travel.

It helps set her character in place, as she singularly doesn’t travel, except for the tube ride to work and back every day. It also helps solidify an initial difference between the controlling Alan, who scoffs at even the idea of horoscopes, and the Doctor, who when she first meets him, tells her he’ll believe in anything – which is quite a valuable admission in itself, given the timey-wimey (“Am I 6?”) nature of events on MissBelindaChandra 1.

Rebalancing The Tonal Weight

But by far the biggest shift of tone and focus in the novelisation is the rebalancing of the story of the people of MissBelindaChandra 1. 

The what-now?

When the episode aired, a pal of mine commented that it needed to be a two-parter, and I scoffed. Oh, how I scoffed. What, I asked, would you possibly fill a second episode with?

Well, it turns out my pal was right – The Robot Revolution absolutely should have been a two-part story, and Una McCormack has made it one. And frankly made it chef’s-kiss perfect to boot.

Here’s the thing. When we’re introduced to revolutionaries Sasha 55 and Manny on MissBelindaChandra 1 in the on-screen version, we’re introduced to them and to the Doctor through Belinda’s eyes, people she’s meeting for the very first time on the day when one of them is vapourised.

It’s told to us that the Doctor has been working with the rebels for a while, and that Sasha in particular is keen to step on board the Tardis and explore the universe. She’s “that” sort of brilliant, that engaged with the universe. 

All very fine and dandy, but The Robot Revolution on-screen began a trend that would recur throughout Series 15 (or Season 2 if you prefer). The trend of demanding we care about the deaths of characters where the work had not been done to make us invest in them. See also, the Doctor Who fans in Lux and more particularly, the numbered troopers in The Well, about whom it’s intensely difficult to give a solitary…hoot when they encounter their mass-slaughter moment, because even the script barely sees fit to give them names, let alone backstories.

Show, Don’t Tell

In The Robot Revolution, on-screen, Sasha’s brilliance is told to us, but barely gets a chance to be shown before she’s atomised by robot gunfire. She serves the purpose of the script’s point, that trusting the Doctor’s charm can get people killed, but she’s there and gone in a handful of heartbeats, and the script just moves on around her.

In McCormack’s version, we’re taken to the pre-robot revolution period in the history of MissBelindaChandra 1, to the schooldays and friendship of Many and Sasha. We learn of her excellent grades, and siphoning into the leadership programme of her political region, and of Manny’s restlessness and boredom. We experience the day of the actual robot revolution (rather than the human revolution, which is actually the focus of The Robot Revolution on-screen), including a “storming of the capitol” and a robotic power grab.

We experience the hardening of robot “attitudes” – as their new leader, the AI Generator, demands that the name of the sun and the name of the planet (which had fallen out of use because they were, in all fairness, “a bit silly”) are reinstated and used regularly, because they’re important, even if no one remembers what they mean or where they came from. 

We see the Doctor arrive, cocky and determined he can overturn the robot revolution within six months. We see him fail, and have to win back the support of the rebels. We actually get to understand his connection with Sasha, see her trust in him grow despite his failure, and so, when the moment of her death finally comes, it hits with all the pain that it’s supposed to, but which the on-screen version delivered with minimal backstory, robbing us of chance to feel its impact.

The Two-Part Version

Arguably, the necessary weight and depth of all of this would only have been possible had the on-screen Robot Revolution been a misleading two-part introduction to the second Gatwa series. 

With some initial mention of Belinda and the star certificate, perhaps, it could have been teased that Sasha (played on-screen by Evelyn Miller) was to be the Doctor’s new companion, and Episode 1 could have taken us up to the point of Belinda’s arrival. 

That would have been bold, potentially terrifying, and intensely risky for a somewhat joyous Doctor Who era, but it would at least have been a way to give Sasha’s death the impact it required, and sadly never got in the breakneck single-episode version.

Here, McCormack’s treatment of Sasha as a perfectly impressive individual who could well have been a Tardis crewmember helps radically rebalance a story that on-screen often seemed in too much of a hurry to get from A-B. 

It also helps to rebalance the tendency of the design choices in the on-screen version to make the story look a touch Flash Gordon, and reasserts the danger and the devastation of a civilisation upended and oppressed by an implacable reign of techno-militarism. 

It makes it serious, not to the point of being po-faced, but to just the right point where we actually care about the people of MissBelindaChandra 1, rather than viewing them simply as avatars of resistance that help the story along.

Read By Belinda Chandra

Varada Sethu, who played Belinda Chandra, is on reading duties here, and, as with Millie Gibson’s first novel reading, there’s a sense of some uncertainty to the performance. Where Sethu falls into flatness sometimes during the narrative parts though, in dialogue, and in the written thoughts of the characters, she absolutely delivers enough life to carry you into and through the story. 

That means that the audio novelisation of The Robot Revolution is not only better than the broadcast version as a result of McCormack’s serious additions to the story, it’s also lively enough to feel like an absorbing listen all the way through.

McCormack’s reworking of The Robot Revolution not only fixes the small niggling issues you had with the TV version, but also addresses the character weighting of the piece so that it works exquisitely well, while still hitting all the beats of the original. 

Oh, and with apologies to the ever-valuable Nicholas Briggs, even the robot voices here feel like a more interesting version of what made it into the broadcast episode.

All of which means you should absolutely and without hesitation check out the audiobook version of The Robot Revolution, because whatever you thought of the story on-screen, and the season that followed it, the audiobook version is better by a factor of at least three. 

This is The Robot Revolution that’s been to therapy, learned from the mistakes of its former life, been through a 12-step recovery programme, and decided to make amends. 

It may not have been worthy of your lugholes before.

It is now. Tony Fyler