Professor Kimsworth is looking snappy in his smoking jacket.  He goes to his bookshelf and carefully makes a selection.  He holds it very close to his face like a man with presbyopia or a Hustler subscription.  Confirming it is the desired volume, he hands it to someone just out of frame.  The person begins reading A Scandal in Bohemia and the game is afoot.

Not as sophisticated as the robot on the new Netflix Lost in Space, but less robotic than the new John Robinson.

A former student, Sidney Strong, rings the bell at the remote house and Kimsworth’s daughter Patricia lets him in.  She takes Sidney into the reading room.  He relieves himself after the long trip, then they go to the room where the actual reading is happening.  Sidney doesn’t want to interrupt, but Professor Kimsworth tells Herr Doktor to stick a bookmark in it.  Sidney is stunned when he sees Herr Doktor is a robot.

Some time later, Patricia calls Sidney.  She is worried because her father has started having literary conversations with Herr Doktor.  After first the reading, then the discussion, she wants to put a stop to this before her father asks for any other oral pleasures from Herr Doktor.  Of course, the primitive robot was not actually conversing; Kimsworth just seemed to be getting a little demented.  Sidney is more interested in making money.

She goes to the reading room, but finds her father has dozed off.  Herr Doktor says, “Wake him up, wake him up so that both of you can hear what I’ve got to say.”  Patricia is terrified as Herr Doktor has never appeared sentient before.  She tries unsuccessfully to shut him off.  It says, “What good are switches?  Switches are for machines.  Switches have no effect on men.”  The professor says to him, “That will be all for now.”  Herr Doktor replies, “On the contrary, that will not be all for now.  In fact, we have only just begun.”  That’s about as good an act break as you’re going to get out of this series.

When we return, Kimsworth is still proclaiming that this is impossible.  Herr Doktor condemns Kimsworth, “You made a man.  A man but not a man; a half-man.  And then you fed it romance and adventure.  You filled its coils with love for living.”  This is shockingly good stuff from this series.  Herr Doktor tells Kimsworth he must finish the job.

Oh, the irony:  Herr Doktor forces the professor to read to him.  He drives the old man to exhaustion.  It really makes no sense as the robot could have absorbed this info much faster than a human could read it to him.  But the symmetry of the master becoming the slave is just too delicious to worry about that.

While Herr Doktor is taking his final exams — no, really — Sidney comes back.  He rings the bell, which alerts Herr Doktor.  He strangles the professor and demands that Patricia send Sidney away.  She sends him away, and Herr Doktor releases the professor so he can grade his exam — no, really.

When Herr Doktor and Patricia are alone, he apparently decides it is time for post-exam Spring Break.  He begins quoting a Shakespeare sonnet to Patricia.  OK, not exactly Beach Blanket Bacchanalia, but he is clearly looking for love, using the ideas he has learned while reading the classics.  He laments how the professor built him as a machine to read, but exposed him to ideas of love and romance.  “He gave me beauty to read and beauty to look at.  Don Quixote, D’Artagnan, Romeo — men who loved, and a machine can love too.  And to the machine, you were always the woman.”

Mind blown.  Did this inane little series actually just circle back around to A Scandal in Bohemia?  The famous first line of that story, read aloud by the professor earlier, is “To Sherlock Holmes, she is always the woman.”  And who better for Herr Doktor to identify with than the emotionless Sherlock Holmes?  If this wasn’t a coincidence — and it might well have been — then bravo!

Unfortunately, Herr Doktor must have also read de Sade as he starts getting rough with Patricia.  He then clubs the professor when he tries to help.  He insists that Patricia must love him because he fought for her.  He must be referring to the brief clubbing of the 90 year old professor.  There isn’t much honor in that, but credit again to the writer.  The classics he read taught him a woman must be fought for, or won in a duel.  How many people have to die before we put warning labels on these books!

She yells at him, “The books are wrong!” and this rocks his world.  Herr Doktor stumbles back to the reading room und ist kaput.  The professor opens him up and removes the defective part.  “The heart of the machine is broken . . . like Don Quixote, he was a man in love.”

Of course, by any objective standard, the episode is dreadful.  Judging it within the series, though, it is a winner.  Yes, the robot is Ludacris, but whaddya gonna do?  They had no money.  However, I appreciated the signs of life in the writing.  It was more ambitious than almost any other episode.  Even this was uneven, though.  What was the point of Sidney even being in the episode?  He comes, he goes, he comes back, he leaves, he returns, Patricia gets rid of him.  I really expected him to peek in a window, see there was trouble and break in for a proper duel.  But no.

Other Stuff:

• Mercedes McCambridge (Patricia) went on to be the voice of the demon in The Exorcist.  Could this proper 37 year old low-budget TV actress have ever imagined that in 20 years she would be on the big screen telling a priest his mother sucks c****s in hell?