By Naomi Jacobs and Thomas L Rodebaugh

Obverse Books, out now

Obverse Books’ ongoing series of monographs focusing on a Doctor Who serial or story hits 2018’s Series 11 story, Kerblam!

Not even a year after its original transmission date, Pete McTighe’s ‘Amazon in Space’ satire comes under the microscope as Naomi Jacobs and Thomas L Rodebaugh dissect its constituent parts, identifying and expanding on the themes they’ve identified from their viewing.

As is the case with this ongoing series of books, the authors are given the opportunity to decide which aspects to concentrate on, and in this case it’s all about the episode as aired. There’s no recognition of the production process, from scripting to filming to editing, just that this episode was aired and now we’re look at it detail. I mention this, because some readers have a wider interest in how the script changed from draft to screen, who the guest stars and director were and what the general critical reception was. Jacobs and Rodebaugh do reference the concerns that some fans had about the episode’s politics, but there’s no wider context as to whether people generally like it otherwise.

What we do get is an in-depth look at the politics of the show, both this episode and reference to previous serials. Is the Doctor’s political framing at odds with her/his previously established stance and where exactly does she sit in the Left to Right spectrum, recognising that the definition differs depending on your home country’s political structure. And more than that, the authors postulate on whether the Doctor’s approach is generally progressive and where she falls on authoritarianism vs aggression.

The Robots of Death is used as a case study as an example of the closest match of politics and use of robots to Kerblam! and it’s a fair companion piece. We also get to consider how the Kerblam system operates, and whether its operatives are autonomous or intelligent, with Westworld or Battlestar Galactica cited as recent examples where sentience of artificial humans has undesirable consequences. The authors also make the distinction between robots and AI, and there’s well-considered section on how the concern of losing one’s job to a robot can be a real fear… and just how bubble wrap is used in the story.

Verdict: Kerblam! benefits from some understandable modern fears about where contemporary technology is going, and authors Jacobs and Rodebaugh dig deep into these concerns. There’s every chance that you never previously gave the politics of this episode a second thought, or even picked up on some of the themes below the surface of the script, but now they’ve been beaten out into the open, these angles are there to be chewed over. 7/10

Nick Joy