4A3 - Robot 3

There's the odd dodgy moment in Robot, as a whole, to be sure. One moment that has always stood out for me is the scene where Winters, Kettlewell, and Jellicoe, holding Sarah as a hostage, very slowly move both Sarah and the Robot from their meeting place to the safety of their truck. All the while, the UNIT soldiers are firing non-stop at the Robot, which is being carefully led by Jellicoe.

Okay, how accurate are the UNIT soldiers with their shots when they're unloading round after round at the giant metal beast? Since none of the bullets are penetrating the Robot's armour, surely there's the possibility of at least one of those bullets ricocheting off the Robot and striking Jellicoe, no? But Jellicoe's reaction to what must be his sure death is to duck slightly on repeated occasions, as if he was trying to avoid a swarm of fruit flies. What kind of a shoot-to-kill policy does UNIT have, exactly? Or is it just that all the soldiers are horrible shots and are completely missing both the Robot and Jellicoe, to say nothing of their fellow cohorts directly opposite of them?

I spoke earlier about how videotaped location scenes have a warm charm to them, but there are limits. Robot features a lot of scenes that are set on sunny afternoons in unpopulated places. These scenes would look stark and atmospherically bleak on film, but they end up looking a bit flat here. However, I can't imagine how the best quality film could make the Action Man tank sequence look any better than it already does...

Overall, not the strongest episode of the story, to be sure.