Doctor Who (2023) 1-05: Dot and Bubble (Quick Review)

Episode:

880

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Serial:

309

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Writer:

Russell T Davies

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Director:

Dylan Holmes Williams

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Air Date:

01-Jun-2024

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This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I've reached the second half of Doctor Who's new season 1, with Dot and Bubble. The title isn't really filling me with optimism to be honest, but that's mostly because it reminds me of Short Treks' Tom and Jerry homage Ephraim and Dot. I really hated Ephraim and Dot.

I'm sure this is going to be something very different though, because Doctor Who episodes are always something different. The show keeps switching genre and tone, rarely giving you the same thing twice. Anyway, Dot and Bubble was written by Russell T Davies, same as the last episode, and it was directed by Dylan Holmes Williams, the same as the last episode. I thought 73 Yards looked fantastic, so I'm expecting some pretty visuals at least.

There will be Doctor Who SPOILERS below, but I won't spoil anything that happens later.

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RECAP

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Lindy Pepper-Bean's daily routine is rudely interrupted by Ruby Sunday, who just called to ask her to look past the holographic social media bubble projected by her Dot device and check if her co-workers are alive. It turns out that her utopian city of Finetime is under attack by slow-moving slug monsters and she's too sheltered to be able to walk away from them without GPS instructions. Fortunately YouTube star Ricky September finds her and guides her to the tunnels underground, where the survivors will be waiting.

The Doctor contacts her on her bubble and gives her some bad news: the Dots are the ones that want them dead, they're being killed in alphabetical order, and she's next. Ricky bravely keeps Lindy's homicidal Dot at bay while she finishes typing in the code that will open the door to safety, but he's knocked down for a moment. Lindy tells the Dot Ricky's real name to make him the priority target and slips away as it shoots through his skull like a bullet.

Lindy finds the Doctor waiting with the other survivors at the city's exit. They're all pretty confident that they can make a go at conquering nature, even though they can barely walk in a straight line and no one from their homeworld has survived to rescue them. The Doctor offers to give them all a lift, but they turn him down. He's not one of them, they don't even want to be near him. And the extremely rich, extremely Caucasian survivors head off on their boat to pretty much certain death.


REVIEW

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The episode wasted no time explaining its title and I appreciated that. It's the very first spoken line of dialogue, and we're shown exactly what it means.

I hadn't seen any trailers and I'd deliberately allocated zero brain cells to speculating what the title meant, but I probably would've guessed that it referred to a person and their fun robot sidekick. I suppose I would've been half right.

All I knew going in was that this was the Black Mirror episode, and most of what I know about that show comes from Wikipedia. Though I once heard someone boil the series down to "What if phones, but too much?" and yeah, that's this episode!

I'm thinking that this was probably one of the cheaper episodes to film, with most of it being people sitting in front of a plain background, talking to the camera. It's like one of those indie movies filmed when Covid was keeping people indoors. They didn't even bother to give the influencers nice backgrounds of bookshelves covered in LED lighting and merchandise, though I suppose there was no need. These people never see the fairly utopian world they live in. Only the bubble.

I was willing to go along with this premise, but the episode didn't always make it easy for me. The biggest issue I had is that people need a GPS just to walk around their own house, and when the bubble's shut down they can't walk in a straight line anymore. Poor Lindy goes stumbling into the furniture, walks right into a lamp post... twice, and has no idea what to do when she steps toward a monster.

I get the metaphor, I can absolutely understand how someone who's lived an utterly sheltered life would struggle doing things other people take for granted. But the way it's executed came off as kind of ridiculous to me. The only instructions she got from the bubble were things like "forward" and "turn left", so she was already doing most of the hard work of walking around. She can't be completely unaware of the concept of 3D space! Callie Cooke did her best to sell Lindy's clumsiness but it didn't really work for me.

The rest of her performance definitely worked though and that's good because Lindy's the unambiguous star of this one. She's the Sally Sparrow of the episode and I was rooting for her! Sure she's horrible to the Doctor and Ruby from the start, but she's a victim of a society that's infantilised her, so that's not a surprise.

The episode does a fair job of giving you what you'd expect... at first. Of course Lindy would ignore the very real problems in her life, find a distraction, and stick her head in the sand instead. That's what social media is great for... when it's not telling you about all the other things you should be worrying about as well.

Though honestly, the idea that Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini has survived into the distant future is more horrifying to me than any Venus man trap slug creature. Especially when the creatures look kind of goofy.

They're not the most terrifying creatures in Doctor Who history. Then again, there's something creepy about how wrong they are. They don't chase their victims, they actually ignore half the people they see, and the only reason that they're a threat at all is because everyone's walking around in a bubble that sometimes leads them to walk right down their throat.

The twist is that they were actually created by the computer, like the snot monster in Space Babies. Except this time they're not based on any kind of myth, so I guess the episode's departing a bit from the fantasy themes that have been around since the Doctor spilt that salt in Wild Blue Yonder. Speaking of recurring themes, I don't remember the Doctor or Ruby singing or playing a song this time either. The occupants of Finetime kind of count as abandoned children though, so I can cross that one off the list.

Oh, plus we got the cameo by Susan Twist as Lindy mother, and this time the heroes are both aware that something weird is going on. It's just like the moment in Boom Town where the 9th Doctor realises that he keeps encountering the words "Bad Wolf"... and then immediately disregards it. A problem for another episode!

Speaking of the Doctor, he is technically in this episode. See, there he is in that tiny window on the right. This episode is borderline Doctor-lite though, which is a strange choice right after he was absent for 73 Yards. We've only got 8 episodes this year, it'd be nice if the Doctor appeared in some of them. I wouldn't mind him saving the day occasionally as well.

He definitely failed to save Homeworld, which has been utterly devastated by the slugs. Well, them plus the Dots themselves, which we later learn can fire themselves at people like a bullet. In fact, it's kind of strange that they even needed to create the slugs when they're so effective on their own. Even the Dots are too reliant on technology to do things for them!

But this isn't really a cautionary tale about becoming over-reliant on technology or getting too addicted to phones. Well I mean it is, but that's just an aspect of what's going on here. These people aren't reliant on instant access to Wikipedia or Reddit, they're not addicted to watching YouTube documentaries or tutorials. I'd say that all they do is check sci-fi TikTok, but even that tells you something about the reality around you, even if it's just what it looks like. They have no interest in learning about anything.

At least that's the impression I got from Lindy's reaction when Ricky tells her that he likes to turn his bubble off and read. And he's far more capable and educated than anyone else we see. In the Kingdom of the Bubble, it's the guy who only uses it occasionally who's king.

In fact, Ricky September takes over the hero role in the Doctor's absence and the guy's so perfect that I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. He's the ultimate celebrity with literally everyone subscribed to him, he knows a suspicious amount about the workings of the city, and he's in the right place to save people from danger. Obviously he's the one responsible for everything.

But in the end we learn that he was exactly who he appeared to be: just a nice guy trying to do the right thing. Of course a regular person like Ricky would seem too good to be true on a planet where everyone else sucks!

Also Ricky being a Doctor analogue works both ways. The Doctor grew up on a planet of stuffy isolated Time Lords and he became the person he is by escaping that bubble, travelling, and meeting his alien companions. The moral of the story is to broaden your horizons, maybe even become a bunch of different people and walk a mile in their shoes if regeneration is an option. Unfortunately Ricky couldn't regenerate, which turned out to a problem.

Honestly, my jaw dropped when Lindy straight up sacrificed him to save herself, I didn't see it coming at all. But maybe I shouldn't have been so surprised. She used him in the exact same way she'd always used him whenever the problems in her life got too real: as a distraction.

Lindy, it turns out, is a terrible person, and seeing as she's our representative of the average inhabitant, that's not a good sign for Finetime! But we don't actually know what her friends would've done in her place, maybe they're not all the same. In fact, the Doctor raises the question of what they have in common and then leaves us to think about that.

The episode definitely focuses on the premise of people who are too sheltered due to living life in a bubble, but it throws in extra details to give more context to their behaviour as it goes on. They're all young. They're all rich. They were all left here by their parents. Plus there's something else they have in common, and the episode certainly puts enough faces on screen for you to work it out for yourself before the twist. (Though some of them in the background are fuzzy enough to be ambiguous.)

Doctor Who is filmed in Wales, where 94% of the population is white, so a screen full of white faces doesn't necessarily mean anything. But this the show that cast Nathaniel Curtis as Sir Isaac Newton and there's no bloody way that what we're seeing here wasn't deliberate.

Personally, I initially assumed that Lindy and friends declined the Doctor's offer because they were too proud to accept help from outsiders and looked down on the lower classes, and that's probably also true. I'm sure most of us would be unwelcome in a society like this. But a second after they turned the Doctor down it clicked how homogenous the survivors were. The production team even colour-coded the costumes to make it obvious for me, with all the white characters (including Ruby) in blue, and the Doctor wearing the brightest orange imaginable under his brown coat. I've never been keen on flesh-toned clothing, but here in this scene the jacket definitely makes its point.

These people aren't just in a bubble away from the real world, they're in a bubble away from people who aren't like them. I guess I was wrong when I said there was no legends or superstitions or so on in this episode, as this week the myth is that there's a white race with inherent superiority over everyone else.

The twist loses a bit of its sting maybe coming right after the shocking moment where Lindy deliberately sacrifices the other Doctor figure in the episode in order to save herself. We already know she's not a great person and to be honest I was worried she'd accept the Doctor's offer because I don't want her in the TARDIS. But the racism does add another layer of meaning to the story.

I'm sure some people thought it was a bit jarring for the episode to go from 'kids use their phones too much,' to 'hah, you didn't notice that Lindy was a racist because you're so privileged!', but that's not how it came across to me.

For one thing, the script is careful to make sure there's always an alternate reading of any scene where Lindy shows her racism. Like maybe she closed the unsolicited request because it was an unsolicited request! She's a childlike rich kid who's lived her whole life with a phone over her eyes, so when she lashes out at the Doctor, you can assume it's because he's the one telling her to leave her comfort zone and face the scary slugs.

But I think the smart thing about the episode is that even as we learn more about Lindy, it doesn't necessarily invalidate all our previous assumptions. Lindy is certainly racist, but I'm sure she was also looking down on Ruby because of her class. We know why she closed the message from the Doctor at the start, but if it'd been Jodie Whittaker on the line I bet it would've only taken her a second longer to make that same choice. Because the Doctor wasn't in her friend group and wasn't telling her what she wanted to hear.

My read on the episode is that it's about isolation, segregation, and closed-mindedness, and what that does to people. Lindy's society is bubbles all the way down, from the dome above their heads to the echo chambers of social media, protecting them from anything that would spoil the vibes. Anything that would make them develop empathy for others. They've never had any reason to question the racism they were taught because they've never met anyone that didn't look like them.

So there's a bit of social commentary for you there.

The moral of the story: group chats will be the downfall of humanity and we need to get outside our walls and touch grass! Or maybe not...

Doctor Who (2005) 4-12: The Stolen Earth

I mean being able to remotely chat to people has been useful in the past. In fact, this entire episode is about the Doctor and Ruby using the Dot's video chat to save lives. In real life the internet has made it normal to have friends in countries all over the world, people are being exposed to more cultures and perspectives than ever before in human history. The trouble with Lindy's bubble... is that's it's a bubble, closed off. And also that it has a guy that tells you when it's time to go the bathroom; that was kind of weird.

Plus the episode isn't entirely in support of putting phones down and getting out there into the harsh reality either, as the Doctor's convinced that if they try to live in the wild, they're going to die. Their choice to leave their technology and walls behind to make a new start outside is treated like another example of their ignorance and their arrogance. They don't even understand how screwed they are. They won't even know when to pee!

This might not have been the most sympathetic group of survivors I've seen in Doctor Who, but I could really sympathise with the Doctor's emotional outburst as they sailed off in their boat. The Doctor and Ruby are in full emergency service mode all episode, showing immense patience as they deal with some very difficult people, and they manage to get them right up to the finish line only to be hit a brick wall of prejudice before they can finish the job.

I knew this had to be coming for Ncuti Gatwa's incarnation of the Doctor eventually, but I just assumed it would happen during a trip to the past, not the future and I'm well aware that RTD was well aware of those assumptions. By doing it this way, he's made it so we all had our guard down. Everyone expected the racism in Rosa, it's about a civil rights activist, but this is a last-minute gut punch you don't see coming. And I think it was clever to make it so that the Doctor isn't suffering from their racism directly, THEY are, and that's what's tearing him up.

I've seen some people saying that the Doctor or Ruby should've given them a proper Peter Capaldi lecture about their bigotry, but their priority at the moment was to stop them from walking blindly into the jaws of certain death... again. He had them to get to turn around first before he could get them to change their views. But that wasn't going to happen as there was no way for this Doctor to get through to them, and Gatwa does a fantastic job of expressing the frustration of being stopped by something so absurd, something he's never had to struggle with before. Well, except for that time he failed to convince Davros to come with him instead of blowing up with his ship. These folks have a lot in common with Davros I guess.

Of course, the Doctor could just time travel forward a bit and see if anyone's changed their mind after a week with no toilet paper, he's the smartest man in the universe and he has a time machine, there are a million things he could do. But this is the ending that's right for this episode, and it works.


RATING

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Yay, it's an episode without any magic, ghosts or goblins! Dot and Bubble is a proper sci-fi short story about human nature, and despite the cute title and bright colours it's ultimately as dark as Midnight, back in series 4. So I was actually right in my 73 Yards review when I predicted the series was going to carrying on getting bleaker!

There are a lot of people talking directly to camera though, which helps give it a different feel. 73 Yards was gripping and cinematic, while this is a bit more absurd and comedic. In fact, it's a bit a departure for Doctor Who in general, so now I'm wondering what I could compare it against to figure out its score.

Gridlock has a dead city where the population was killed by the same drugs that the survivors are using as an escape, so there are some parallels there. Or I could go with Blink, as it has the Doctor off-screen for most of the episode, trying to save the guest star protagonist remotely. Maybe Smile would be a better choice, as it's about the technology a futuristic city is built upon becoming self-aware and turning against its users. You know, if those are the first three episodes that jump to mind, this must be doing something right. It certainly manages to get a surprising amount of tension out of a story about people blindly walking into slugs and sometimes lamp posts.

I don't think Dot and Bubble is quite as good as anything I've mentioned, even 73 Yards. But it doesn't have a single fairy circle, so I'm going to have to call it my new favourite episode of the season so far.

8/10

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COMING SOON

Doctor Who will return with Rogue, one of two episode not written by Russell T Davies this season. But next time on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm reviewing Star Trek: Discovery's final season and maybe writing a bit about the series overall if I remember.

You can leave your own opinions about Dot and Bubble if you've got any. Did it work as well for you or do you wish you'd blocked it?