Read Doctor Who Sick Building….does anyone remember the movie Smart House?
For those that don’t remember or never saw it, it’s a movie of a family moving into a fully electronic house where the main computer believes itself to becoming the wife/mother of the family and eventually loosing itself into trying to ‘protect’ the family that it becomes a danger to them.
Anyway…yeah. So the Doctor has learned about a giant tapeworm creature that essentially eats whole planets and he is going to a nearby planet with Martha to warn the people there. Only there isn’t a big human settlement like he thought but simply a family of three. A man, his wife, and their teenage son.
The family is odd and stiff, the house filled with robots. The father lets the Doctor and Martha stay with them for the night as they prepare to evacuate the planet the next day to avoid being eaten. However there is a force field around the house and when the Doctor tries to slip out so he can go get the TARDIS ai he and Martha won’t die after ensuring the family is safe, the father accuses him of sabotage and has the Doctor locked up in the basement, intending to leave him in the house to die while his family (and he agrees to take Martha) escape.
The Doctor fortunately makes friends with discarded robots and they convince the robotic brain that controls the house to let them out of the basement. There’s a few issues though. The father, Ernest, has completely gone mad as he’s watching his entire life’s work about to be destroyed. And the ‘house’, who he and the house have practically convinced each other they are married to each other (sorry Amanda, the ACTUAL wife) has gone insane as well as it realizes he intends to abandon all machines in his departure.
So the house is locked down with all machines (except the Doctor’s new friends) trying to kill them or confine them to the inside of the house while they await their doom. Kinda like Smart House.
I admit I was hesitant to read this book as I heard not good things. But overall, it wasn’t horrible. I liked Martha being a badass, standing up for herself even after she knows what their host is capable of. She didn’t give up believing in The Doctor for even a moment and she stood her ground.
I also loved the Doctor’s sympathy for the robots. Because we know the Doctor cares about life in general, and some of the Doctor’s dear friends are robots. Like K9, like Handles (although that’s later). He knows robots can also be just as human as humans and he doesn’t agree to abandon life where there is life he can help.