What’s the Episode? Dot and Bubble
What’s It All About, JG? Lindy Pepper-Bean, an insufferable rich brat, is a resident of the town (?) of Finetime, a chintzy, dayglo residence where she lives within a literal bubble of social media and friends, projected round her by a floating “dot”. First Ruby, then the Doctor, try to break into her feed because the residents are slowly (very slowly, actually) being eaten by slug-like creatures. Lindy, unable to even walk in a straight line without guidance from her dot, manages to escape her place of work with the Doctor and Ruby’s help and encounters Ricky, a vacuous singer who turns out to actually be fairly smart underneath it all. They’re directed to the basement by the Doctor to try and escape. While trying to open a door to let them out into the Wild Woods beyond, the Doctor realises the dot is responsible for all the deaths and it turns violent and tries to kill Lindy. She sacrifices Ricky so she can escape, then finally meets the Doctor and Ruby in real life, where other members of the Finetime community are waiting. But rather than allow the Doctor to rescue them, they sail off into the Wild Woods, presumably to die terrible deaths, while the Doctor rages against his inability to save them.
Is It Any Good? Well, it’s trying, in both sense of the word. There’s a definite effort to engage with the real world through allegory here, though “allegory” might be a bit generous, given that Lindy and her vapid friends live in a literal social media bubble. It’s not so much an allegory as just making something visually literal. It’s a neat idea that’s well handled with the visuals though and if the episode bears more than a passing resemblance to the Black Mirror episode “Nosedive” – which it does – then that’s not a bad source to be pulling from at all.
It’s also another episode in the season that had an unusual narrative stance, which is something to be appreciated about it. For almost the entire run-time of the episode, the Doctor and Ruby are only shown via screens within Lindy’s bubble and only put in an IRL appearance at the end of the episode. If you didn’t know better you’d think this episode was the cheapie or the Doctor-light episode, except we had that last week. It’s effective though – by keeping the Doctor’s importance in the narrative but denying him the opportunity to take direct action, we see how he reacts when he can’t just fall back on his usual bag of tricks to save the day. Instead of waving the psychic paper or sonic screwdriver around, he is instead forced to be patient and persuade someone to understand what he understands. Indeed, he can’t even do that initially, using Ruby as the first point of contact because she’s young, blonde, and looks like she’d fit right in with Finetime residents. It’s extremely welcome to have the Doctor take the time to persuade in this way – something often lost in 21st century Doctor Who – and it makes his eventual frustration, having expended all that effort for naught, carry more weight.
Effective too is the way Ruby is used in the narrative. So far, beyond vague hints at her Big Mysterious Background, Ruby hasn’t really had a lot to… well, I was going to say contribute, but that’s not fair. She has contributed but it’s all been fairly generic. Last week tried to flesh her out, with various levels of success, but she’s still not all that distinctive, really. Here, the script writes her in a way that allows her to serve a function in the plot that the Doctor initially can’t and it’s a good way to use the character. Her faltering attempts to forge an initial contact with Lindy work well, both allowing the slight desperation of the situation to come through while also allowing a bit of humour. That’s as well, since there’s otherwise a fairly limited amount of humour in this episode, beyond broad swipes at the media-obsessed.
So if all that is positive, and it is, why does this sound like a set-up for a great big “but…”. And there is a “but” coming because there’s also a few things this episode gets wrong. For one, the sourness that’s permeated pretty much every RTD episode this season is not only back but in full swing. While the residents of Finetime are being set up as deliberately awful, it’s also easy to read the swipes at social media bubbles and never interacting with anyone in real life as “old man yells at clouds”. These dang kids with their feeds and friendship lists and never looking up from their phones and stick and hoop! You can practically see a walking stick being shaken at them. There’s plenty to criticise about the media-obsessed but there are ways to do it and this isn’t a massively effective one. It’s very blunt, but not in an effective way. They’re all awful, the single character with any redeeming feature at all (Ricky) is betrayed by Lindy then killed, and in the end they’re all racists anyway. Apparently.
Ah yes. The racism thing. So this is apparently the Big Thing the episode is about. Though… is it? Russel T Davies seems to think so, since he said it in the episode of Doctor Who Unleashed that followed the episode but honestly…? I’m not that convinced. There’s just very little in the text to support this reading and the interpretation of racism should be supported within the text rather than depending on RTD just telling us that’s the case.
It hinges on Lindy’s assessment at the end of the episode that she doesn’t want to be polluted by the Doctor, and that being in his presence is completely unacceptable. And the Doctor is, of course, a black man. And all the residents of Finetime are white. This is true but it’s not wholly convincing. For one, it’s not that uncommon to have all-white casts even in this day and age. Indeed, the first episode of Doctor Who to have an entirely non-white cast other than the Doctor and companions is, of all things, “Legend of the Sea Devils“. That was broadcast in 2022. And there aren’t really any other signifiers that, beyond just being generally awful people, the Finetimers are racist, nor any real hints prior to The Big Twist. I mean, they probably are, but they’re also just horrid in so many ways it’s tough to narrow it down to just that.
However, there is a prejudice that is supported within the text – ageism. There’s a few references earlier in the episode to the fact that, for example, only people between 17-27 are allowed in Finetime (also a possible Club 18-30 swipe from RTD), and that the horrible older people aren’t permitted. This explains why Lindy can manage to interact, just about, with Ruby, who looks like she’d fit into both the style and age range of Finetime, but not the Doctor. Because Ncuti Gatwa is visibly much older than anyone else we see on screen throughout this episode and dresses much older than anyone else we see in the episode. The little offhand comments during the episode about ages work as a way of clueing the audience in to what prejudice will be addressed without being clunky and overbearing. It’s exactly the approach that’s needed for the racism angle to land but noticeably isn’t there. But the ageism reading is supported within the text, doesn’t need RTD to lecture us about what the episode is meant to be about, and still manages to land the prejudice angle.
The other issue with the racism angle is that, even if you accept that this is what the episode is about, it simply comes too late for it carry the impact RTD wants it to have. By reducing racism from what it is – horrific prejudice – to Just Another Twist, he’s actually damaging what he’s ostensibly trying to get across. Nobody’s really going to argue that racism shouldn’t be confronted or that Doctor Who shouldn’t address it (though interestingly, it didn’t come up when Ruby and the Doctor were in 1963 in “The Devil’s Chord”, where you might have expected at least a passing reference) but there’s something rather crass about reducing it to what amounts to little more than a plot point. It’s also so late in the episode there’s just no time left to do anything with that. All the episode can do at that point is say, “racism? Bad.” Which, yes, obviously. And…? But there’s no “and” because the episode’s over.
So it’s a frustrating episode, overall. There’s a huge amount of good here, and it’s the best episode RTD has managed to write all season. If that’s a low bar – and it is – it’s still one he’s easily cleared and for all that the episode fumbles its main theme, there’s still a huge amount to commend here. If nothing else, at least this episode manages to be interesting and it’s sparked plenty of debate, which is never a bad thing. But it could have been an absolute killer and instead it’s barely even attempted murder. That gap really hurts the episode.
Would You Recommend It? Yes I would, though it again shows off some of RTD’s best and worst instincts as a writer. At his best, he’s able to sketch in worlds with a tiny handful of line. Here, Finetime feels weirdly incomplete though. There’s so much sketching going on we never get a whole picture.
Take, as Exhibit A, the slugs eating people. OK, so it’s a monster invasion. This is Doctor Who, we don’t need the fundamentals of an alien invasion explained to us. Monsters are eating people, the Doctor wants to stop them. Got it. But this must be one of the least well-realised monster invasions ever. I mean, for one, it’s astoundingly slow. It’s one thing for the idiot residents of Finetime to not realise what’s happening to them, since they never take down their bubble, but when Ricky contacts the Homeworld, we’re told the population is zero and one of the slugs is in full shot. Nobody there could do anything about monsters you could escape at a slow amble?
We’re also told, in the Big Revelatory Moment, that the reason the creatures are ignoring certain residents in favour of others is because they’re being eaten in alphabetical order. Ok, that’s an interesting idea but absolutely nothing is done with it. Why are they being eaten in alphabetical order? Well, so the Doctor can work it out and realise the dots are controlling things. In other words, it makes no sense within the story, isn’t explained within the story, and is in fact just a writerly conceit. What difference does it make? None. And at the exact moment the Doctor does work it out, the dot suddenly glows red, starts attacking and eventually kills Ricky. But if the dots can just kill, why do they need the Invasion Of The Absurdly Slow Monsters in the first place? Well, they don’t. Exactly.
Now, you could argue that the message the episode is trying to get across is more important than the structural logic of the plot. And sure, if you want to prioritise “the feels” over story, that’s fine. But story cohesion, point making, and emotional content aren’t implacable binary oppositions. You can have them in the same episode. And the logic of this world, this invasion, this system, just doesn’t stand up to even the slightest bit of scrutiny. It wouldn’t be hard to hand-wave away. Give the Doctor a line about, “because of their programming, the dots can’t kill directly, so they learned to use the slugs” and just have Lindy brain Ricky with a handy nearby pipe or something as a slug approached. That would do it, give some internal logic to what’s going on, and still land the same points.
Indeed, what even are the slugs? I’m not someone that generally thinks every episode of the classic show should be mined for the new one but the Tractators are sitting right there. They’re insectoid slug things with a history of being taken over by a more powerful intelligence, we known they can do real damage, and honestly the visual similarities between them already made me wonder if it was the Tractators, just with wonky CGI rather than wonky costumes. Indeed, this would actually add to, or at the very least use, the internal logic of Doctor Who. Sure, it would just be just “The Macra Terror” -> “Gridlock” as “Frontios” -> “Dot and Bubble” but, well, RTD has form there and it’s been a long time since “Gridlock”.
And the logistical problems with this episode aren’t just nitpicking. If the purpose of the episode is the point it’s (apparently?) trying to make, and if it is to do that effectively, it needs a world that makes some kind of sense to work in. It’s so fucking frustrating – all the ideas here are right, they never just quite come together in the way they should. Ncuti Gatwa gets a fantastic moment of acting at the end of the episode as the people of Finetime reject his offer to save them and it’s very powerful – but because the episode has made it incredibly easy to miss its own point, it’s not really in service of much other than showing off how good Gatwa is.
And yet, this is still a fairly easy episode to recommend. It gets right more than it gets wrong, it’s got a point of view, and it’s got an interesting approach to narrative. RTD desperately needs someone to say to him, “no love, not that” from time to time because his good instincts are fighting with his worst ones and at the moment his worst ones seem to be winning out. But this is still a worthwhile episode and if it falls apart at the end – and it absolutely does – almost everything in the run-up has at least something to recommend it.
Good try, at least, and let’s hope the improvements keep coming because this season needs them.
Scores on the Doors? 7/10
JG Judgementally Comments... 