Doctor Who: The Kamelion Empire

The Kamelion trilogy concludes with the eponymous robot returning to his home planet and discovering that it has been destroyed in a civil war. So if you ever wanted to know what Kamelion's background is and why anyone ever thought that building a robot like him was a good idea, this provides some answers. (Although whether you consider them canonical or not is another matter). However, the story does lampshade one of the main problems with Kamelion - he doesn't have a personality and there isn't really any room to build one. As the focus of a story, he just isn't very interesting.

Indeed, as we've seen in the previous stories of the trilogy, the only interesting thing that Kamelion can do is get taken over and turn evil. This happens yet again here, accompanied by rather a lot of the robot lying about his origin and function, with the truth not coming out until past the halfway mark. In fairness, it's quite a good mind control story, with the scenery shifting from the ruined planet with its gangs of motorcycling gorillas to a consensual virtual reality to a final episode set largely inside the TARDIS. The villain is cliched and only thinly developed, but he does at least come across as a worthy opponent and there are some dramatic twists in the story as a consequence.

The misfortune of this, perhaps, is that it's the concluding part of a trilogy (four stories, actually) all of which revolve around the same thing happening to the title character, albeit for different reasons. Had it been a standalone I might have had a more positive reaction to it, but repeating the same plot device will only carry you so far and merely highlights the limitations of Kamelion as a character. This one does, of course, end with an explanation of why he's not mentioned for the next five TV stories but it's largely what you'll have thought, if a little heavy-handed with the “and let us never speak of this again” trope.