Nothing like a good death crawl

There's something inherently dramatic about somebody crawling for their lives, especially when they're in a death battle with a failing robot that absolutely wants to murder them. When they can't even walk, and have to drag themselves forward, in a battle against death, because if they stop moving it's all over, so all they can do in crawl on their hands and knees.

It's the utter desperation, the feeling that this is all you can do - it always resonates.

The end of the first Terminator has a great death crawl, as Sarah Conner - all on her own for the first time - drags her injured legs through an industrial nightmare, always just out of reach of the metallic hands of doom. 

There's another terrific one early on in the Judge Dredd comic, at the climax of the Cursed Earth mega-epic, where after traveling thousands of miles through an irradiated wasteland with his killdozer, Dredd is forced to crawl the last few miles to the city he has to save, as broken down robots from his last battle drag their destroyed carcasses forward towards him. All the technological advances of Dredd's world, and it still comes down to the big man's indominable will. 

You can even see it in something like late seventies Doctor Who - Destiny of the Daleks is exactly nobody's favourite dalek story, with grey quarry locations and hyper-disco android aliens, but it also ends with the magnificent Romana dragging herself through the dust of Skaro, pulling out all the stop to prevent a Movellan from destroying everything.

That particular Dr Who story is literally the first one I ever remember seeing, and I've watched it a dozen times since then, and every time I see it, I'm still not sure Romana is going to get there, and that's the whole point. In all that desperation, there has got to be hope that the most basic of human movements, the crawl we learn as infants, will be enough to get us where we need to be.