Day 445: The Robots of Death Part 2

The basic plot of the story is quite simple. People are dying on a mining ship and the Doctor, along with Leela, begin to investigate. What makes this different from other plots, however, is the way in which it is constructed. The antagonist who is performing the murders is on the ship, but their identity is concealed, meaning that it is one of the crew members, thus making it into an Agatha Christie style murder mystery. This decision to 'steal from the classics' from the writer, Chris Boucher, is a sane one, as the genre has been shown time and time again to work. The sense of mystery in turn creates suspense, as each crew member suspects the others of doing the murders. The constant stream of killings also creates suspense, particularly when there have been strong indications of the next character to die. This can be seen in the death of Zilda where we see her 'execution order', for want of a better term, and then watch the rest of her scenes with a greater deal of attention as we know that she is living on borrowed time. Overall then, The Robots of Death uses the genre to great advantage creating a nice mystery story for the audience to get their teeth into.