I’m finally catching up with my reviews of the most recent Doctor Who series in preparation for the New Year’s Day episode!
The Doctor and friends go undercover at the distribution centre for the Kerblam! company, which is a brilliant takeoff of Amazon. They discover that the employees are disappearing, and at first it appears to be the work of the creepy company robots that are everywhere, but it turns out to be a plot for an attempted terrorist attack to protest against robots taking over human jobs by a disgruntled employee who has faked his way into the workforce.
There’s a lot of really cute touches in this episode:
- The Doctor tells her companions not to be ‘robophobic’ when they point out that the robots are creepy.
- The last time Ryan had an employee leg tag was when he used to work at ‘Sportstack’, which is a nice sly dig at Sports Direct.
- Humans are only employed at all because the company has to meet a 10% quota of ‘organic’ workers!
- It’s explained that humans were too busy staring at their phones to notice the robots gradually taking over their jobs.
- The deadly gas that’s going to kill everyone is contained in the bubble wrap within the Kerblam! packages…’cause nobody can resist popping bubble wrap, right?
It’s another episode that’s fairly light on characterisation. Graham and Yasmin get some nice moments where they bond with the human employees at Kerblam!, but on the whole, there’s not many opportunities for the companions to shine here – it’s the Doctor’s episode, really.
A historical episode next time!