Robots of Death - Part 4
Commander Uvanov saves the doctor by stabbing the robot that's strangling him with a laser probe. The robot isn't destroyed but it is seriously impaired and they escape to the bridge.
Leela finds Toos, who was strangled by a robot. She survived only because the robot thought she was dead and left after receiving ordered from SV7. Leela and Toos make their way to the bridge.
D84 finds Poul and takes him to bridge.
Commander Uvanov and the Doctor talk about Poul's condition and what to do about the killer robots. Uvanov and Toos makes some bombs using blasting powder found on the bridge. The Doctor, Leela, and D84 head to Taran Cappell's command center. They pickup some supplies along the way. The Doctor makes a device which will deactivate all the robots in close proximity to the device. He warns D84 about the device but D84 still wants to help.
The robots try to break in to the bridge. Dask shows up and tries to get in but it quickly becomes clear that he is Taran Cappell. Uvanov and Toos blast their way out of the bridge and go looking for the Doctor and Leela.
The Doctor hides Leela in a storage space with a canister of helium. She follows the instructions he gives her and opens the valve on the canister when Taran Cappell shows up. Cappell tries to kill the Doctor but he is killed by one of his own robots when they fail to recognize his voice. The other robots are destroyed when D84 uses the device that the doctor made.
Thoughts
The show seemed to do an about face on the culpability of Uvanov's role in the death of Zilda's brother. Poul was adamant in Part 3, Uvanov killed her brother. There is vulnerability in the way Uvanov talks about the incident but I thought the whole matter was written off a little too easily. Uvanov acknowledges that Zilda's brother was mentally challenged but Uvanov seems to focus on that and says nothing about what he could have done to prevent her brother's death.
What happened to Poul? He isn't present at the end of the episode and there is no mention of him as the Doctor and Leela depart. Presumably he is still alive.
The pairing of Poul and D84, along with some of the other elements in this story such as the three laws of robotics, seems to be pulled from or at least influenced by Isaac Asimov's robot novels, The Caves of Steel (1954) and The Naked Sun (1957).
This wasn't quite as sophisticated as I remembered it being. I still enjoyed it.
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