SV66 is on trial for its life but Liv believes she can help it survive.

And this is where The Robots kicks into the next gear. It’s been fascinating – and very entertaining – listening up to now, particularly with the return of Toos and Poul in the previous episode, but there appear to have been pinpricks of robot problems, rather than a full scale rebellion. We have an idea of where things are going to end up from the scenes when Liv returned to the TARDIS, and this story sets us firmly on that path.

Sarah Grochala’s script leans into the Perry Mason school of legal battle where a surprise witness can turn the tables on the prosecution – for those who watched it, there’s even more of a link, given Perry/Liv’s legal standing and knowledge at the start of the trial! It’s based around a very familiar moral dilemma, which boils down to the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few – and how a robot, whose overriding instruction is, as the title says, to do no harm to humans would interpret that.

Nicola Walker is impassioned as Liv, and the final scenes promise that things are going to ramp up considerably – and I’m wondering which side some of our characters are going to end up on in the battle that’s coming.

Verdict: A tense finale for this set, and an episode I suspect many will relisten to once we know how things play out. 9/10

Paul Simpson

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