Love Me Not

"He's making the robot into his wife."

Writer: John Dorney

Format: Audio

Released: December 2019

Series: The Robots 1.03

Featuring: Liv, Tula

Synopsis

A widower goes to extreme lengths to keep the memories of his dead wife alive.

Verdict

Love Me Not was a great episode to conclude the first series of The Robots! This has been a stellar introduction to the spinoff series set on Kaldor with Liv Chenka at the helm on her break from the TARDIS during the events of Ravenous, and I really like that there's a wider arc going on with the story set to continue. I thought the use of robots here was fascinating and pretty sad actually when it came to Volar. He was obviously grieving of the death of his wife as we'd seen depicted in The Robots of Life but things got very crazy quite quickly. The idea of a Robot that was a specialist in bereavement was always going to end one way when it came to dealign with the death of a wife, and it got disturbing quickly. It was also just sad and the line at the end about having to lose the one you love all over again was so true. Volar was accessing the systems of the memories from the sea remotely and working on SV39 so much that she wasn't even a Robot anymore. She was basically his wife reborn and that was freaky stuff! Tula realising that her voice wasn't the one being used for the bereavement specialist was good stuff and I enjoyed that things seemed to quickly spiral. Skellen not quite believing Liv and Tula at the start was fun because when he saw what Volar was like in person, he thought it was stupid. That was probably a bit unfair because grief affects everyone in different ways, but he clearly needed help. I liked the use of the Robot nature in being what they are in having the bereavement specialist interpret code in a very unique way. She just simply became his wife in everything but physical form. I thought the revelation that Skellen was actually having an affair with Jasdar before her death was unexpected but it added some more emotional depth to an already heavy episode. That was tough to hear but I liked that Volar refused to accept that things were bad between he and his wife before her passing. What SV39 was acting like now wasn't how they were at the end. Skellen blurting that out before the truth was revealed was a big moment, and you could hear the impact it had on Volar. He was slowly accepting that he was living a fabrication and his grief must have been incredible for him to get to the stage where he didn't even acknowledge that his version of Jasdar now was a Robot. Especially when he had programmed and worked on it to become a version of his dead wife! It was really strong stuff and almost a little uncomfortable at times because of how much he was impacted by the loss. And that's completely understandable! It was just hard to listen to at times and that is firmly the point which really put things into perspective. The way SV39 even had to be convinced of realising the inner programming to explain what it was and the code it had interpreted was fascinating. There's a lot going on with the use of the Robots in these three episodes and I really like how Liv is putting that together. She knows there's something afoot and I quite enjoy that this comes from her experience with the Doctor. I'm really excited to explore what's to come and getting that link back to The Robots of Death with the emergence of Toos was good, although it wasn't much of a surprise after the mention at the end of the first episode! But I'm very intrigued to hear where things move forward now and I'm well on board with more exploration of Robots and their nature. Overall, a fine finale to a really strong series! 

Rating: 8/10