Doctor Who is taking on dangerous AI because ‘this is what’s happening’

The newest season of Doctor Who opens as the series often does — with an unsuspecting human stumbling into some alien strangeness that doesn’t make any sense until an odd yet charming Time Lord shows up in a police box ready to save the day. The premiere episode, “The Robot Revolution,” feels like classic Doctor Who as it pits the Doctor and his new companion against an army of killer machines from another planet.

Of course, the Doctor has fought squads of goofy-looking automatons countless times during Doctor Who’s 61-yearlong run. But what makes “The Robot Revolution” feel somewhat distinct is what it has to say about where these particular robots and their twisted ideology come from. When I recently sat down with showrunner Russell T. Davies, he told me that, in 2025, machines powered by artificial intelligence are exactly the kind of villains the Doctor should be tackling because Doctor Who has always been a show that uses fiction to say things about the state of our reality.

“Doctor Who always speaks of the modern world, and if I simply look out of my window at the city below me, this is what’s happening,” Davies says of AI’s increasing prevalence. ”The Doctor has always fought robots, but now, if you’re putting a robot into the show now, you can’t not use the words ‘artificial intelligence.’ It’s absolutely impossible.”

When we’re first introduced to them, the robots chasing after Belinda Chandra (Varada Sethu) don’t seem all that different from other buckets of bolts the Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) has encountered during his previous adventures. Similar to the Daleks and the Cybermen, the machines featured in “The Robot Revolution” are singleminded about achieving their goals and think nothing of murdering any humans who stand in their way. Their focus is what made it possible for them to enslave an entire planet of organic beings — a planet that just so happens to be called “Missbelindachandra-1” thanks to a bit of timey-wimey madness involving her ex-boyfriend Al (Jonny Green) buying the rights to name a distant star.

For most of the episode, you’re led to believe that Belinda’s robot captors are just hunks of metal hoping to use her presence as a way to quell a pesky, human-ish rebellion. But in its closing scenes, “The Robot Revolution” flips the script by revealing that Missbelindachandra-1’s machine overlords are actually acting on orders from Al, who has turned himself into a human-machine hybrid hellbent on merging with Belinda because he thinks he’s entitled to do so.

Between the episode’s twist involving Al’s name being mistaken for an abbreviation and the way he is framed as a man who thinks less of women, it’s obvious that “The Robot Revolution” is, on one level, a story that’s explicitly criticizing both artificial intelligence as it currently exists in our world and incel culture. As if to emphasize the episode’s point, Belinda flat-out calls Missbelindachandra-1 “the planet of the incels” after she realizes what’s really going on.

AI and incels have both been the subjects of fierce debates over how society is changing and the role technology plays in radicalizing people. But rather than just treating AI as being innately malevolent, Davies felt that it was important for “The Robot Revolution” to dig into the ugly facets of society that are coded into AI by dint of it being a human creation.

It’s not just that the robots of Missbelindachandra-1 are evil — Al’s long-standing resentment of and desire for Belinda are foundational parts of them. And Davies wanted the episode to feel like an examination of how easy it can be to lose sight of the way a technology’s harms are connected to the way people relate to the world around them.

“Everything I write has to have some of the modern world in it, because that’s the entire reason and purpose of science fiction,” Davies explained. “If you look at those who are programming AI and wonder about their nature, that leads you very swiftly through the stages of what Belinda discovers on the planet Missbelindachandra-1.”

Though the Doctor and Belinda emerge victorious by the end of “The Robot Revolution,” Davies told me that he didn’t want to limit sharp social commentary to a single episode focused on contemporary topics. The duo are travelling through time to Miami circa 1952 in an upcoming episode, and while Belinda’s “absolutely wide-eyed at that,” for obvious reasons, the journey forces her to confront the era’s racism.

“What Belinda hasn’t thought about, especially because she’s a British woman, are the segregation laws of the time,” Davies said. “Brittain’s not without our problems in this country, but we never had segregation laws like the US did in 1952, and that becomes a very interesting story that’s also very classic Doctor Who in that there’s a monstrous being on the loose.”