Season 15 of Doctor Who launches with The Robot Revolution, a surreal and swaggering episode that feels like Russell T Davies cracking his knuckles and saying, “Right then, let’s get weird.” This is classic Who turned up to eleven—a space opera full of time fractures, robot insurrections, and emotional reckonings, all anchored by the electric presence of Ncuti Gatwa as the Doctor and the terrific debut of Varada Sethu as Belinda Chandra.
Directed with cinematic flourish by Peter Hoar (It’s a Sin, The Last of Us), The Robot Revolution throws us straight into the madness. One minute, Belinda Chandra is a successful woman on Earth with a bittersweet teenage memory of a star named in her honour; the next, she’s being snatched by robots and whisked off to a planet named after her, caught in a civil war between humanoids and artificial intelligences. It’s the kind of setup that only Doctor Who can deliver with a straight face and have you completely on board within five minutes.
Belinda isn’t just a new companion—she’s the episode’s emotional core. Sethu plays her with steel and warmth, immediately marking her out as someone who won’t be sidelined by technobabble or timey-wimey nonsense. Her backstory is laced with bittersweet tension. As a teen, her then-boyfriend Alan named a star after her and proposed. She turned him down. Seventeen years later, that star becomes a planet. That planet becomes a battleground. And her ex-boyfriend becomes a god.
When the Doctor arrives—chasing the ship through a temporal fracture—he's knocked six months backwards and uses the time to settle in as a historian. It’s such a cheeky Davies move: turning the Doctor into a librarian-slash-resistance-mole, casually rewriting his own origin in the conflict. Gatwa's performance, as ever, is all charm, grief, and razor-sharp momentum. His Doctor is a dazzling trickster, but one who aches when no one's watching.
There are shades of The End of the World and The Girl in the Fireplace here—stories where sentimentality and sci-fi intertwine in wildly unpredictable ways. Davies writes with his usual flourish: robots who can’t hear every ninth word, a villain named the Great AI Generator, and a narrative that dares to make a star-naming certificate the linchpin of an entire planetary crisis.
And then there’s Alan. What a twist. Not just a jilted ex, but a traumatised, time-lost man who was pulled through the fracture ten years prior, turned into a machine, and crowned himself ruler of Missbelindachandra One. It’s Doctor Who at its operatic best—a broken love story reimagined as cosmic horror.
Gatwa and Sethu shine in the climax, confronting Alan in his final form. The Doctor uses the robots’ ninth-word vulnerability to communicate. Belinda, in a moment that feels both ridiculous and profound, presses her version of the certificate against Alan's, triggering a transcendental vision of all time at once. Davies doesn’t just lean into the metaphysics—he pours glitter on them.
The resolution is peak RTD: Alan is returned to a sperm and egg (only Doctor Who could make that line work), and a polite robot mops up the biological debris. With the war ended, society begins to rebuild, and Belinda faces the classic companion proposition: step into the TARDIS and join the Doctor. But here, Doctor Who zigs instead of zags.
Belinda refuses. Not because she’s afraid, but because she sees through the romanticism. She doesn’t want to be another page in the Doctor’s scrapbook. She demands more. And yet, the universe has other plans. The TARDIS, trying to return her home, bounces off 24 May 2025 like a skipped record. That date, it seems, is fixed. Or broken. Or both.
And so they’ll take the long way around.
As the TARDIS disappears, space is littered with fragments of Earth: Big Ben, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Sydney Opera House. And right in the centre, that damn certificate.
The Robot Revolution is a wild, silly, devastatingly clever piece of television. It balances the absurd and the profound with a confidence that only Russell T Davies can summon. Gatwa is radiant, anchoring the chaos with a performance that glows in every frame. And Sethu is a revelation, adding grounded depth and defiant energy to a character who refuses to be swept away by the Doctor's orbit.
If this is the beginning of the Doctor and Belinda’s journey, we’re in for something special. If this is the start of whatever catastrophe 24 May 2025 is hiding, then Davies has planted a time bomb we’ll be racing toward all season.
Let the revolution begin.
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