The Robots of Death is the fifth serial of the 14th season of the British science fiction television series Doctor Who, which was first broadcast in four weekly parts on BBC1 from 29 January to 19 February 1977.
In the serial, the Fourth Doctor (Tom Baker) and Leela (Louise Jameson) arrive on a sandminer whose crew, from a robot-dependent civilisation, are being murdered.
The Doctor and Leela arrived shortly after the discovery of the corpse of one of the human crew, meteorologist Chub, recently murdered.
The investigation is cut short when two more of the crew, Kerrill and Cass, are found killed, and the Doctor and Leela are secured in the robot repair section.
However, Dask refuses, and reveals himself as Taren; he shuts down all of the robots except those he had reprogrammed (excluding D84), and orders SV7 to start hunting down the remaining humans.
The Doctor uses the spare parts to construct a deactivator that will shut down all robots in close range, and then instructs Leela to hide with a canister of helium gas to use when Taren returns.
The villain of the story is named Taren Capel, which is a reference to Karel Čapek,[3] who is credited with first coining the word "robot".
[5] Russell Hunter was allegedly cast against the intention of the script, which implied that Commander Uvanov should be a physically imposing man, much in the mould of an eighteenth-century sailing master.
Pamela Salem, who plays Toos, had provided voice work in the preceding story The Face of Evil and would later appear as Professor Rachel Jensen in Remembrance of the Daleks.
[11] Paul Cornell, Martin Day, and Keith Topping, in The Discontinuity Guide (1995), called the script "one of the best ever" and praised how it was enhanced by the design, acting, and direction.
[12] In 2010, Mark Braxton of Radio Times observed a few production errors but overall praised the design and voices of the robots and the score.