Circuit-Chaps

The creepily cheerful Circuit-Chaps are determined to foment the Second Industrial Revolution by modifying machinery everywhere. They view the destruction of organic life as merely a means to an end for the great mechanical uprising.

A 2005 model Circuit-Chap

Background

"You will be modified," the Circuit-Chaps reassure ordinary appliances and everyday gadgets before turning them into murderously jolly conscripts of their Digifleet. They can subvert virtually any machine, from Isambard Kingdom Brunel's first propeller-driven transatlantic steamship (in "Bronze Friends") to amusement park "robotronics" (Blackbeard's "Voodoo-reanimated pirate crew" in "The Zombie Navy").

They also marched into battle chanting "Defeat! Defeat!", which was perhaps a prediction of the fate they would always suffer at the end of every episode.

The Circuit-Chaps are always in infamously high spirits, no matter how monstrous their schemes or how clunky their mechanical designs. In their first appearance in "The Lost Asteroid", the Inspector initially attempts to communicate with the Digifleet in an imitation robotic accent, and the Circuit-Chaps counter with a characteristically chipper comeback. The eerie question surrounding them is whether they actually possess the mechanical equivalent of emotions or are merely simulating them to put their opponents off balance.

In early serials the Circuit-Chaps were completely invulnerable to everything except lead particles, which clogged up their condensers and caused them to overheat. This worked well for a while, but as the series wore on the weakness was exaggerated to the point where anything even related to lead—lead bullets, lead plumbing, lead paint, lead pencils, etc.—would make them explode. In 1976's "Blood and Servos", the Inspector is able to rout the Circuit-Chaps merely by reading the Encyclopaedia Cosmosica entry for "lead" to them. The new series discarded this when they were reintroduced in 2005's "'Rise of the Circuits", and it was not used again until 2013. The 2013 episode "'Daydream in Bronze ", featured a platoon of Circuit Chaps which exploded in sparks when the Inspector got his Optic Pocketknife to play the song Stairway to Heaven by Led Zeppelin, showing that the new Circuit-Chaps were not merely defeated by the metal lead or pencil-graphite mislabelled as lead, they could also be defeated by the hint of a mention of lead... even mispelled.

Second Inspector-era Serials

The Second Inspector considered them his classic nemesis rather than the Blorgons, beginning with "The Solar HQ" (1966). He would go on to investigate their involvement in the Paris techno-riots of "The Revolution" and the murders of the chrono-scientists in "The Cube in Time" (technically perpetrated by the base's high-tech laboratory equipment and kitchen appliances, which the Circuit-Chaps had conscripted into the Digifleet). Probably his most popular adventure against them is "The Retirement Home of the Circuit-Chaps" (1966), in which the Inspector learns about the Second Industrial Revolution on their home planet that led to their ascendance. His probe of the abandonned but unbelievably hazardous scrapyard there reveals a booby-trapped factory the Digifleet constructed to prototype their successors. The last words of the Circuit-Chap Commander 0LD-BN at the serial's climax—"We will update! We will update!!"—still chill fans.