Hello everyone and welcome to the latest Doctor Who discussion post with episode 7 of season 11, Kerblam. Now I had high hopes for this episode and up until the end I found myself more in the positive than the negative. I was unnerved by the robots and the episode was doing a good job of building up the suspense, but it just felt like hard work getting there. It felt like the episode was dragging its feet a little but it still had all the right components.

Julie Hesmondhalgh and Lee Mack both appeared and I enjoyed both of their roles. Lee Mack was exactly what you expect from him and he had a nice scene with Yaz. He represented the regular worker well and was generally likeable. Hesmondhalgh was engaging also, with an air of uncertainty around her character you weren’t sure if she was good or aligned with a larger villain…and that was where the problem lay for me. There was no robot leader, the robots didn’t want to rebel, the villain fell flat yet again. It turned out to be the cleaner who was actually a “hacktavist” wanting to blow people up to rebel against robots taking human jobs. For some reason that seemed like a logical plan after he was caught, therefore it would surely have been revealed that it was him and not the robots. Unless it would have proved that robots were hackable and could therefore be used for terrorist attacks? Either way I don’t really care and it wasn’t really the ending you want in Doctor Who. The build to a villain was once again revealed to be one whiny man, and this one wasn’t effective as the last one (and I didn’t like him either).

The message about worker’s rights felt incredibly forced and tagged on and I was just left thinking “please, just do Doctor Who!” This was liked they had took one of the sub-plots from Humans (a wonderful show if you haven’t seen it) and rushed through it with little impact. Rather than dumbing that plot down, just have a killer robot romp which would have been much more fun. That is what this episode could and should have been: the fun episode. Lee Mack was fun, the whole Toy Story 2 like conveyor belt sequence was filled with potential but never really got going, and the robots would have fit the mood. Alternatively, even if you compare it to the Matt Smith episode with the Smiler robots, they did a sinister story with robots that had much more of an emotional impact. I loved the fez part though at the beginning; that really did make me smile.

By the end I was left disappointed even though I was really willing the episode on to do well. It was full of potential and I loved the setting of the warehouse moon. It was let down by a naff villain but definitely felt more like Doctor Who.

DD Rating: 7/10