Doctor Who: The Robots of Death

The Doctor Who episode The Robots of Death explores a perennial theme in science fiction: the great potential for robots to make our lives easier and safer, the potential for them to do us great harm if they are misused, and the fear that any safeguards we put in place to avoid the second possibility may not be enough.

While many explorations of robots focus on artificial intelligence, in this episode, most of the robots have not been made so as to have personhood, creativity, and self-awareness. And so the focus is left on other ethical questions – whether robots are inherently superior to humans just because they can potentially be stronger and more durable, and what the potential consequences are of using automatons to take care of menial and dangerous tasks, given that the strength or robots could harm humans in ways that other humans cannot, at least not without mechanical help.

One of the impressive things about the episode is that it discusses precisely what it is that makes robots creepy, even discussing robophobia as an exaggerated response to those things, and yet even having given us that glimpse behind the curtain, the robots are still unsettling.

On familiar themes in Doctor Who, the Doctor had already told Leela previously that there is no such thing as magic. And in this episode, he says that, “To the rational mind, nothing is inexplicable, only unexplained.”