Doctor Who: Dot and Bubble (14x05)

Wow, holy shit. This season keeps getting better and better.

Cons:

I really only have one tiny complaint, and it's that I wish the walking thing had been done a little differently? I think, allegorically, the idea that they all need arrows and instruction to be able to walk around when they have their bubbles up all the time is a good idea. Like, often when I'm driving somewhere I should know how to get to on my own, I still pull up the map on my phone just as an extra sense of security, or because I never bothered to fully memorize which side street to turn down or what have you. So it makes sense on that level. But the part where Lindy is literally running into poles and desks and stuff read as a little too ridiculous. I wish it had been a little less literal? Like what if instead of running into stuff, it's that Lindy is overwhelmed by the variety of things she's looking at around her, constantly distracted and overwhelmed, and she needs to mutter instructions to herself in order to force herself to walk, and she still takes the sharp 90 degree turns everywhere because that's what she's used to. And then when faced with a monster right in front of her that's blocking her most natural path towards the exit, she freezes up and can't figure out how to make herself find an alternative route right away. That would work better than the scene where she's literally just running into a pole multiple times.

 Pros:

But honestly! What a fucking stunning episode, with one of the best... I guess you could say, "twists", of any Doctor Who episode I can ever remember seeing. I'm not talking about the computers turning on the citizens of Finetime, I'm not talking about the home-world being taken over and not coming back to save everyone. I'm talking about Lindy and the others rejecting the Doctor's help at the end of the episode. That scene is an all time classic, instantly, I just know it.

But first let's back up and talk about Lindy as a character. I think this episode hinges on the way she toes the line the whole episode - you don't understand at first if Lindy is an example of her society, the same as everyone else, or if there's something special about her. Is she an exception to some rule, or just a coincidental POV character? She's terrified, but she tries her best - I was moved by the moments when she realizes how truly helpless she is without the bubble and cries out "I'm so stupid!" You feel a certain sense of connection with her utter helplessness and fear. She's so coddled, so trapped in her bubble, literally, that everything new and scary seems hostile to her.

So... she can be forgiven for not instantly trusting the Doctor and Ruby, right? Right? I mean, they're strangers who came out of nowhere, and she has no idea what's going on. She's just a girl in a socially dystopian scenario where everyone's so addicted to their phones that they've shut out the rest of the world, and she needs help!

That's layer one to what's going on here.

But underneath that layer, you start to notice other things pretty early on. We learn about Finetime, we learn that it's a place that only the most elite people send their children to work. We learn eventually that the very computer program running their lives has started to get sick of them and has decided to exterminate them due to the... inanity, the intolerable repetitiveness, of their pointless, vapid lives. This isn't a situation where everyone in the world is like these people. This is a situation where the wealthiest and most privileged have literally cut themselves off from experiencing anything outside of what they know, and it's a look at the reinforcement of certain beliefs that exist in that society, due to the extreme level of shelter these people are subjected to.

The way that privilege operates within the episode is also subtly and effectively condemnatory to the viewer, or at least to this viewer, in a way that really worked. I did note the whiteness of this world, specifically the white, blonde, stereotypically attractive, thin, able-bodied woman serving as our protagonist. She seemed to represent a type of person; she stands in for a type of ignorance and privilege that we recognize in our own world. But when that moment came at the end where Lindy and the other survivors reject the Doctor's help? You bet your ass I was scouring the background of the scene, searching for any people of color in the shot. I didn't find any. And yeah, it hadn't occurred to me that all the faces we see in Lindy's friend group, all the people we see in this whole world, were white - a white majority is burned into our brains as a default, it's what I, a white person myself, am accustomed to seeing on the screen.

I think the reason the scene at the end is going to stick in people's heads is because it's not a metaphorical bigotry the Doctor suffers in this moment. It's actual, it's in your face. These people aren't "symbolically" bigoted of the Doctor's otherness, they're literally just racists. They're fucking racists. And Lindy never was special - she only lasted as long as she did because her last name starts with a letter later on in the alphabet. She is utterly typical of the people in this world, and this world is a world of white supremacy, and that's all there is to it.

Ncuti Gatwa's performance of outrage and grief was absolutely stunning. I saw one reviewer talk about how it makes sense that the Doctor being Black hasn't been addressed on screen yet, as it would be a pretty wretched look for the show to cast this actor in the role and then have the character immediately suffer racism because of it. But at the same time, it should be addressed in some way, and here's the way in which it finally is. I was also moved by Ruby's silent grief. For the treatment of her friend, but also for the way in which something so evil and stupid and pointless is going to result in all these young people probably dying in the forest, all because they couldn't look past their ingrained prejudices to accept help from someone they deemed their inferior. Gatwa screams and laughs and it's clear that he's feeling so many things, such helplessness and bewilderment and frustration. I don't know how much the show will go into this, but it would be so interesting to have the character reflect on this moment where he realizes something completely arbitrary and out of his control actually has an impact on his ability to do his job well. The character has been a white man a bunch of times in a row, then a white woman, and now a Black man. The mind fuck of having direct evidence of how the world's prejudices work in all ways big and small... what an interesting avenue for the show to explore.

I should also bring up Ricky September, legend, gone too soon from this world, shoulda joined the Doctor and Ruby in the TARDIS and had a threesome with them, tbh. I love what this character represents. At first, he seems like the ultimate symbol of this vapid, image-obsessed, bubbled society, as he's shown mugging the camera singing twinkly little songs and being a sex object for his followers. But then we meet him, and he's a genuinely nice, thoughtful person who does his best to help Lindy. We learn that it's possible to live a life using the bubble for work and then logging off, learning more about the world through history instead of constantly partying and getting caught up in the moment. This story isn't really one about "kids these days on their phones with the TikToks and the blah blah blah." It's more about being entrenched in a loop, stuck with your head in the sand. And Ricky is someone who proves that there is a way to operate outside of that system. He's not necessarily a paragon of anti-racist virtue, but he's a dude who at least has taken some steps to push back against that automatic entrenchment, proving that such a thing can be done, even given the social pressures to sink into the reinforced bubble of prejudice. I also loved Ruby and the Doctor both having a crush on him.

And I love how his character winds up, a turning point where we're starting to realize that Lindy might not actually be redeemable as someone we need to be rooting for. Her sacrifice of her celebrity crush to the killer Dot was brutal, and it feels like such a good appetizer for the final scene of the episode, as the twist comes fully into play.

I think that without that final reveal at the end, this would still have been a good episode of Doctor Who. But with it, it's an all-time great episode. God, I already feel like I want to do a re-watch just to catch more of the build to that moment. I hope that next week we get more time with the Doctor, as we've had two Doctor-lite episodes in a row. But seriously - this season just keeps getting better and better as it goes.

10/10