Doctor Who Series 11: 10 Huge Questions After Kerblam!
3. Should the Doctor Have Saved Charlie?
We were left with the same question regarding Prem’s death in last week’s Demons of the Punjab. The excuse then was that history cannot be changed, but it felt like a cop out at the time, a downer to an otherwise tremendous episode. This week, history’s integrity is not at stake. It’s your standard one versus the many choice.
The Doctor can hardly allow the robots to be teleported to the unsuspecting customers, so she comes up with what amounts to a robogenocide plan through tricking them into committing mass suicide. The Doctor then, seems to have her own hierarchy when it comes to which robots she sees as worth saving and befriending.
If the Doctor was able to change the robots’ orders there had to be another way of getting rid of the bubble wrap – remote delivery to an unoccupied planet, or to the heart of an exploding star, or locking them inside some kind of containment field, never to be opened. Perhaps they could even have been delivered to the TARDIS and rendered useless thanks to its temporal grace.
The Doctor’s failure to persuade Charlie to back down is part of a running theme that is hopefully a temporary state of affairs. She has been surprisingly ineffectual in a number of situations throughout series eleven, slow to make the right connections and often missing the obvious. It’s something that has frustrated the Doctor, suggesting she is either still finding her feet, post-regeneration, or something else is affecting her mind.