Sunday, 23 June 2024

The Legend Of Ruby Sunday/Empire Of Death: Ranking - N/A (but #130ish)

 

“The Legend Of Ruby Sunday/The Empire Of Death”(15th Dr, 2024)

(Series 14/1A episode 7, Dr 15 with Ruby and Mel, 15-22/6/2024, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writer: Russell T Davies, executive producers: Julie Gardner, Jane Trantor, Joel Collins and Phil Collinson, director: Jamie Donoughhue)

Ranking: N/A (but #130ish) reviewed 23/6/2024



‘Hey Sutekh, you made it! Welcome to the 21st century Dr Who party. I know it’s difficult to find your way round here at first, what with all the CGI and orange sparkly pixie-dust going on, but it’s a nice place when you get to know it and loads of your friends from the 20th century are here – even the giant crab in the corner! And if you get in trouble, just give me a shout –this Silurian will be right over’

‘Yesssss Ssssssutekh, come and have a drink and tell usssssssss all about how you got here’

‘Oh but I’ve been here all along, waiting for my chance to get out. I’ve been all over the universe in part of that infernal blue box over there, hitching a ride through the time vortex. I’ve been on more adventures and journeys in timer and space than any of you – even that bunch of Daleks singing noisily over there in the corner’

‘That’s a dear, you don’t know what you’re saying, we’re all a bit disorientated when we get here, not ourselves – and believe me I know all about that being a Zygon! But why did you suddenly decide to wake up now?’

‘Erm…erm…erm…Is that a buffet table I see before me? I hope they do doggy bags’

‘Yes it’s right over there weakling God scum, right by my Sontaron flag and on top of the Auton is pretending to be a table with the presents on top of it. Tell me, what gift did you bring to the party?’

‘Well I went to the chemists and they were all out of death so I bring you…Sutekh’s gift of Pringles and cheesy nibbles’





Well, here we are, at the end of the shortest season that was planned that way for thirty-six years (poor ‘Flux’ got the short straw thanks to covid) and yet a season that still raised so many mysteries and so many points of continuity that needed clearing. Does the two-part finale clear them all up?  Hell no: after years of seeing Steven Moffat and Chris Chibnall invent finales out of thin air it feels as if Russell T Davies wanted a piece of the same and made everything up as he went along. Does that make this story the disappointing monstrosity the rest of the fanbase seem to think it is though? Actually no, for all its many faults I really enjoyed ‘Legend/Empire’ (despite the fact that both names make absolutely no sense in context) and felt caught up in it in a way that I haven’t been for a god half of this year’s stories. Given the extra space of two episodes it felt as if Russell had more time to  play to his strengths, of characterisation and big emotional set pieces, giving us time to properly know the two main characters we’ve been rattling round space and time in. The stakes were higher, the tension bigger and it felt more like Dr Who than a lot of the other more adventurous stories have been this year, the one episode in 2024 that feels recognisable if you come to it straight from classic Who (as many did after watching the ‘Tales From The Tardis’ version of ‘Pyramids Of Mars’). Whisper it quietly but I actually preferred this story to that garbled mess, a story that everyone always hails as a classic but for me is an even bigger case of making it up as you go along.

Everything here has only added to my opinion that Russell T Davies spent lockdown - the single biggest exterminator of humans in a century and easily the biggest thing to happen to the world since he was in charge of Dr Who - in isolation with his classic Who DVDs, looking for inspiration for the series of Youtube shorts and Dr Who tweetalongs organised by Dr Who magazine that united fans all over the world – quite possibly with a Marvels superhero film on in the background as inspiration. Before the world suddenly and confusingly decided to move on even though the pandemic hadn’t. There’s that same sense of scale and panic that the world is going wrong and needs to be put right that came from the youtube lockdown videos in 2020 along with a sense of comfort that if we listen to the science and listen to the Doctors, including our Doctor, we will all get through this (Just check out the ‘kind woman’ commenting on the shops being out of stuff and that she hasn’t seen anyone for days). Sutekh bringing his gift of death to the whole world is so close to the maps of the early pandemic showing the stats and figures of every country and the way it spreads from children to parents (because they left the sodding schools open as a mass super spreader!) is uncomfortably like the real thing. The idea that Sutekh’s ‘death’ is a ‘gift’, because the people who’ve died don’t have to grieve and carry on like the survivors, We know that lockdown was the moment when Russell re-connected to the series he thought he’d left behind and started thinking about becoming showrunner again, after hearing that Chibnall was thinking of stepping down and there was no obvious replacement in line, with tweetalongs to Russell’s stories ‘Rose’ ‘New Earth’ and ‘Gridlock’, as well as his enthusiastic participation in stories written by other writers under his watch, getting a bigger and more immediate response than anything he’d written in years. Was the original plan, perhaps to start tweeting along to older stories with modern showrunners writing prequels and sequels to those too? In which case ‘Pyramids Of Mars’ was an obvious place to start: we know from interviews that it was one of the first Dr Who stories that really gripped the mind of a then-eleven-year-old Russell and opened his eyes up to what Dr Who could be. Even though Sutekh clearly dies in the original he was a God. Surely a God would have a backup plan and find a way to survive? Russell was always too much of fan to want his Who to replace or reboot the old series: one of his big things he wanted to do as showrunner was make fans look to the episodes that he’d loved growing up and now here was his chance again. What’s more Gabriel Woolfe, the voice artist who’d done so much to make Sutekh come alive in 1975, was still alive and still acting, even at the age of 91. Russell had adored his voice, leaving instructions for casting director Andy Prior in many of his scripts that he wanted a voice ‘like Sutekh’s’ and being most amazed when Prior finally tracked him down to be the beast in ‘The Impossible Planet’. Had he had longer as showrunner the first time round, had Russell not been rushed off his feet and distracted by the terminal illness of his husband Andrew, then Russell might well have brought Sutekh back then. In other words having Sutekh, one of his favourites, return was high on Russell’s bucketlist – and after the world kicked the bucket in such a mass way the time seemed right.

I do wonder, though, about having demi-Gods in Dr Who. This is a series that puts so much emphasis on ‘science’ and how it can be ‘potentially real’ that when it starts sticking Gods with magical powers in there it all gets a bit silly. It’s a big and unlikely universe though and Sutekh’s back story (largely ignored here as ‘cultural appropriation’) as a God to Ancient Egypt gives him a better claim to being ‘real’ and believable compared to, well, The Beast actually plus The Toymaker and Fenric and The Gods of Ragnarok and the Fendahl and all those other beings who like to run around being immortal and all-powerful. The problem comes when they start messing around with the other planets. I mean, why bother? If I was a God I might enjoy being worshipped but human beings (not to mention Oods and Thals and Exxilons and all the other inhabitants of the planets mentioned during the course of this story) would seem like ants to me, hardly worth bothering with. Sure Sutekh is angry with the Doctor and wants to get his revenge on him and all the places he’s been to, but really why bother killing most of the universe in all timezones, just because you can? I mean, it’s going to get awfully boring with no one to gloat at or have worship you all day. Usually that’s explained away in Dr Who terms because a race like The Daleks or Cybermen believe in conquering the universe and making everyone like them – but Sutekh doesn’t want anyone to be like him. And of course the other trouble with a demi-God is how do you realistically fit them into a drama that’s partly about everyday life without the end looking a bit stupid? The fact is you can’t and Sutekh is being used here as an ‘insert bad guy here’ without any rationale as to why this would be Sutekh’s plan or indeed any of his characteristics in ‘Pyramids Of Mars’ (when he wants people to bow down and worship him, not die). The sight of Sutekh, a being with more power than perhaps anyone we’ve ever seen in this series, turned into a giant CGI dog and tethered on a rope dangled outside the Tardis like a dog out of a car, is one of the silliest the series has ever had, which is really saying something. The new-look Sutekh is impressively huge and Woolfe’s purring vocals are as deliciously dangerous as ever, miraculously undimmed by age, but turning him into a big dog is really not the way to go. It’s as if Russell spent lockdown watching old Dr Who DVDs, Marvel superhero films and Flux’ and saw the big Korvanista dog ands thought ‘what a swizz they made him friendly when they could have made him frightening – I could do better than that’. But for all the money and makeup and whizzbang technology Sutekh is still far scarier as a Human. I keep reading, over and over again on my timeline, how young children were scared by the Sutekh in ‘Tales Of the Tardis’ but weren’t scared of this one at all, even though he killed far more people in a far crueller way.


Even so, I still got wrapped up in the plot, which at 110 minutes in total didn’t feel as rushed or as diluted as a lot of Russell’s other scripts. He’s always been good at summing up characters and making them feel ‘real’ quickly and then seeing how they cope when the odds are against them and there are a lot of good examples of that this story. The second UNIT family are a bit odd at first glance (I mean, I know I’m getting older and all and the cast of UNIT look younger every time I see them but seriously: I know Rose Noble is the daughter of one of the Doctor’s most beloved companions and new scientific advisor Morris Gibbons is a genius, but they’re both teenagers who want to be at school – either UNIT is the height of UK technology and knowledge and full of danger, or it’s a place that does work experience for bright but inexperienced children; surely it can’t be both? And what happened to Shirley and Russell’s desire for inclusivity with the disabled?) but it’s nice seeing the Doctor have a base again full of people he trusts. Kate Stewart feels like an actual character  In Russell’s hands, rather than the Brigadier’s daughter the way she did with Moffat and Chibnall, struggling to stay strong in the face of ridiculous odds and skirting round the fact that UNIT have been messing around with time windows when they thought the Doctor wasn’t looking. Rose Noble got frustratingly little to do (I still want to see her a full time companion she’s got such potential) and Lenny Rush, who stole the show in ‘Dodger’ from Christopher Eccleston which isn’t easy to do, is one of Who’s best child stars so far, making the most of his few lines, though we badly need to see more of both to truly get to know them. When Russell kills everyone off it’s a big emotional moment – even when, yes, you know full well they’re not simply going to kill all life midway through an episode and leave it at that and they’ll all be brought back to life within about half an hour. Even the figure credited as simply ‘Kind Woman’, who doesn’t really need to be there at all for plot purposes, nicely sums up both the scale of the destruction and how, even when civilisation is crumbling, people can still be good and decent (she’s the person that gives the Doctor hope that the universe is worth fighting for and has the same sense of community spirit as people in early covid times, back when we were all in it together instead of leaving the elderly and vulnerable to cope at home alone). Mel, too, is a character with a long history with Russell T Davies: in case you missed the review for ‘The Giggle’ basically his first job in television, on children’s make-do-and-mend programme ‘Why Don’t You?’ shared a rehearsal room with the Dr Who of season 24 and Russell, already a huge fan, looked across at Bonnie Langford laughing and thought ‘these are my people – how do I join them?!’ It might be the fact fans have got used to her and the fact that Mel is now not so silly and squeaky as she was when she was young but she feels like a real person in Russell’s hands across three stories than she did in the 1980s across twenty weeks, with her weakness of gullibility and refusal to take no for an answers turned into strengths of never going up and believing that there is always a way out of anything. Her  comforting the Doctor when everything seems to be lost is a really nice moment and Bonnie makes for a great sparring partner with Ncuti. Ruby gets a lot of nice character touches too, from being the one to fool Sutekh at the end and discovering her birth mother, even if she weirdly says almost nothing for the first half of the second story (is she in shock?) We don’t quite get the huge emotional payoff Russell is clearly going for, if only because it doesn’t feel as if we know Ruby that well yet (she’s only been around for eight stories and nine weeks actually on screen, with her seven months as ‘the new companion’ the shortest since Sara Kingdom sort of was but really wasn’t in ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’. And one of those stories, ‘Boom’, knocked her out for most of it). I know a lot of fans are disappointed that Ruby turned out to be just ordinary too but actually I’m all here for that twist, that even the most ordinary person in the world can still be the most important by keeping her wits about her and fooling Sutekh even when the Doctor has effectively messed up.


What I don’t get is why this series went to such a big deal about the mystery of who she was, only to swerve the answer at the end. For as well as demonstrating the best of Russell T this series also features him trying to do a Steven Moffat and turn series fourteen/1A (we really need a better name!) and turn everything into a massive puzzle like the ones that ran across series five-seven, one of the biggest innovations since Davies had hung up his showrunning shoes. Moffat inherited and borrowed quite heavily from Davies’ ideas and they’re actually very similar as writers, so its natural Davies should want to have a bash at this in reverse. Only he’s not very good at it. Back when Moffat was in charge there was fevered speculation about various clues and endless chats online as to what on Gallifrey could be going and the answers, almost always, were wilder and more interesting than anything we could have got: all that stuff about River Song’s origins and who Clara really was, a story very like Ruby’s but with a really clever resolution. Moffat has the sort of brain that must make him a chess champion: he’s always fifty moves ahead of you. Russell sees writing plots as more like a crossword: he has lots of ideas he wants to fit together and slot in and he’s good at papering over the cracks for them – but he fits them in retrospectively where he can rather than seeing an entire series as an organic whole. He thinks he’s teased us by making us look in the wrong direction with the tease of Susan coming back (because there’s always a Susan Twist at the end), a brief moment when it’s hinted Ruby might be Mel’s daughter (which is dropped straight away) and the anagram of ‘S Triad’ technology being the ‘Tardis’ and then actually makes it a cliffhanger plot point that ha ha ha it was all a ruse and meant ‘Sue Tech’ all along. Only we guessed that in the first week. And it was in fact, a throwaway joke in a book Lawrence Miles once had rejected, but which the author liked enough to tweet (I know because I saw it. And if I could see it then Russell could too). So much of this story spends so long looking over its shoulder to check we’re getting all the clues that it forgets to actually get on with telling a decent story. And If you’re going to land conundrums like this then you have to have a solution that tops anything the whole mass Dr Who fanbase can come up with on their own – and this just wasn’t. I know a lot of fans adored the big scary cliffhanger but honestly, as someone who saw the twist coming and isn’t that big a fan of the original Sutekh, it was one of the most boring ones going. And this is a season that’s demanded we look for a twist at the end – only for the twist at the end to be that there isn’t one, that everything is ‘normal’. That’s not a twist, that’s sloppy writing.


What’s more Russell has huge problems trying to tie his two mysteries together, Sutekh and Ruby. They just don’t go at all. We’re led to believe that Sutekh, the most powerful being in the universe, is so caught up in the question of who Ruby’s mum is that he puts his killing spree on hold long enough for his nemesis and current best friend to get away. Why is he so obsessed? He has the arrogance to think he can defeat anyone, never mind some random someone’s mother (although I do like the idea that an Egyptian God is sort-of defeated by a ‘Mummy’, which is sort-of the plot of ‘Pyramids’ after all, the Doctor wrapping up in bandages and pretending to be a mummy who wasn’t). And why does Sutekh arrive now? He’s been waiting for 49 years (Earth time, not Tardis time – goodness knows how long that’s been!) to appear and we’re led to believe he’s been waiting for Ruby. Only it turns out that it’s all a complete coincidence. They could at least have tied in the fact that Sutekh seems to have woken up again within the Tardis after Donna poured her coffee onto the console - or if not how come the Tardis has been crash-landing every time it’s materialised since ‘Wild Blue Yonder’ and not ‘The Android Invasion’? (The next story after ‘Pyramids Of Mars’). While I’m glad that Ruby turns out to be, basically, a nobody born to Earth parents for a change (although the dad’s weird name and possible links to the crooked politician from ’73 Yards’ might be setting up another twist for next year) it leaves so many unanswered questions about her. I’m willing to buy that her fifteen year old mum left her on the steps of a church for safe-keeping in 2004, but how did she conceal her pregnancy in a toxic family that, it’s hinted, were sexually abusing her and so knew to look out for such signs? What fifteen year old in 2004 dressed in a cloak? Why does the mum point to a street-sign, in the pitch dark, in such a menacing way when there’s no one around to see her  (and it’s a whacking coincidence that the  Church that took her in and handed her over for foster care seems to have named her Ruby too). How come this was such a crazy point in time that time itself started going weird even when using Tardis technology (and how come poor soldier Sullivan – a relative of Harry perhaps? – snuffed it during a simulation when Sutekh in the Tardis was nowhere near?) How come, after all those years of searching for her daughter while working in the NHS, with easier access to a genetic database than anyone else, the mum never found Ruby? How come, if genetic records are compulsory in 2046, they have no record of Ruby or anyone in her family in the future in ‘Boom’? How come Maestro knew about Sutekh coming back – has he been on the phone to her or something? How come ‘The Devil’s Chord’ told us that Ruby was ‘not right’ when actually she’s normal? What happened to Dr 14 and indeed all the other bi-regenerational Doctors, a lot of whom must be wandering round planets the Doctor has been visiting since 1975 and thus are in trouble too? What happened in all the multi-Doctor stories since 1975: was Sutekh on board the Tardisi of Drs 1-5 (in ‘The Five Doctors’) plus War and 10-11 (‘Day Of The Doctor’) waving to himself rather than going ‘you know what? There’s a whole bunch of me  now, I’m bringing the plan forward!’ What happened to Sutekh during the events of (here goes) ‘Logopolis’ (in which he’d have been shrunk to a titchy size and ended up inside The Master’s Tardis), ‘Planet Of Fire’ (where the Tardis is set alight), ‘Frontios’ (when half the Tardis was jettisoned – I mean what was Sutekh clinging on to), all stories with Kamelion inside the Tardis (when they must surely have encountered each other) and ‘Journey To The Centre Of The Tardis’ (when people kept falling into the eye of harmony in alternate timelines and being set alight) just to name a few obvious ones? Even the episode titles are unnecessarily misleading: it turns out Ruby isn’t a legend in a legendary sense and there is no empire, just death. Above all, why does it snow so often round Ruby when that had no bearing on the plot whatsoever? A lot of fans felt cheated by the ending, not because it was bad (although a lot of people are saying it is) but because it raised so many big questions and then answered them in the simplest and most boring way, as if Russell worked out his solution late on and then tried to add clues backwards, rather than having a fully formed plan from the outset.


Well, aesthetically I can at least answer the last one: Ruby makes it snow because she ‘is’ Russell, the same way Rose, Martha and especially Donna were all extensions of himself (seriously: ‘Turn Left’ is Russell’s love song to Dr Who and what his life might have been like if he’d never ‘met’ the Doctor and ‘Journey’s End’ has him preparing to leave the show, his memory wiped, to become an ordinary mortal again). Russell made it snow in ‘The Christmas Invasion’ on a whim, because that felt more Christmassey to him, and then so many people commented on it that he had to do it every year – and a few stories in between. It’s a neat metaphor: as a writer with power he can change the weather and snow is a good fit: he’s too optimistic about the human race to make it rain, too pessimistic to make it all sunshiney (besides, where would the drama  be?) but covering his characters in a blanket of snow that makes them shiver and which changes everything they thought they knew about their cosy little world, leaving tiny footprints as they come and go, is too good a metaphor not to use in some story somewhere. Sutekh launching onto the back of the time vortex and never letting go is a neat metaphor for Russell’s jumping on point as a fan (once you cling to the Tardis you’re on it for life!) The fact he climbs back to life now, at a time of death and destruction that so reminds him of Sutekh’s power in his childhood, feels like a natural part of his own ‘character arc’. After all, his first ever professional links to the series were when his Russell stand-in character Vince in breakthrough series ‘Queer As Folk’ sat down to watch ‘Pyramids Of Mars’ on VHS. It’s where Russell sort-of ‘came in’ as a fan and the idea that Sutekh has been sleeping in his subconscious for all that time waiting to get out is a neat metaphor for the story itself.


There’s maybe another thought of fancy going on in this story too: Sutekh tears down whole worlds in Dr Who, basically wiping out everything that’s happened in the series since 1975 and only hangs around the show and keeps it alive to they can try and solve the ‘big mystery’ of the year (in this case Ruby’s parentage) without caring for the characters. Ever since its second ever episode (no seriously, it was a review of ‘An Unearthly Child’ episode two) people have been saying that Dr Who isn’t as good as it used to be. Russell, as showrunner, was more immune to this than most: his era on the show has come to be seen as a ‘golden age’ when without him we wouldn’t have had Dr Who back at all. Even so there’s been some, err, interesting revisionism going on about his time in charge, a combination of a backlash against the 10th Doctor (who some see as smug and arrogant, even though that was his entire character arc, for which he paid for dearly in ‘The Waters Of Mars’ and ‘The End Of Time’) and the revelations about Noel Clarke and John Barrowman and how uncomfortable Christopher Eccleston felt on set. To a sensitive soul like Russell it must have felt as if fandom was trying to burn down everything he’d ever created. It would be apt, for the writer who once described toxic fandom in ‘Love and Monsters’, to give us an update and to make fandom not just a rogue shape-shifting monster who absorbs everything but a God who can wipe out the entire show if they persuade enough people to stop watching en masse. ‘Legend/Empire’, then, is Russell as Ruby, an ordinary person standing alone in front of a sea of critical voices trying to kill his entire world and not being sure what to do about it. The shots of Sutekh’s ties to the Tardis, the biggest single symbol for the series, and being flung into the time vortex to die feel like the wish of a weary showrunner wondering why he ever bothered, one who still loves the show passionately but not all the surrounding noise that gives with it. This is, also, of course Dr Who being brought back from the absolute dead when all the lights were going out (as the BBC were seriously considering cancelling it when Chris Chibnall left), the only thing keeping it going being the ‘rope’ that still ties Russell to the series that’s not left his brain since childhood. I love the scene of all the planets turning back on (a sort of mirror of ‘Journey’s End’ turning them off) as if they’ve all started living again inside Russell’s head. Death might be a ‘gift’ to the critics and fans who want this series to die, but Russell loves it too much to let it go if he can help it.  


Russell might well have thought twice about coming back though: I’m not sure I’ve ever seen such a relentlessly critical backlash to a single episode as I have with ‘Empire Of Death’ and I’m not quite sure why. I mean it wasn’t a classic and it was oddly paced: the whole thing with the rope coming out of nowhere –something Moffat would have made a plot point six episodes ago and made us forget about particularly. It was quite unevenly put together for a two parter too: the first half was all boring setup and the ending was rushed, with the big cliffhanger (the first of the new era since Russell took charge a second time) came at the wrong time, as if he’d forgotten how to do it: had they used the moment, ten minutes into ‘Empire’, when the universe was being wiped out and the Doctor looked broken, it would have been a far more natural and devastating break. Mucking around with a sub-plot about a ‘time window’ that went nowhere and sucked all the drama out of the story was a bad idea, while it felt like the part with S Triad only just got going before we were rushing headlong into Sutekh’s reveal. Even in the vastly superior second part we didn’t spend nearly enough time in 2046 (how come everyone is DNA testing now and how come the world population has fallen from some 8 billion in 2024 to a mere 76 million in 22 year’s time? (Is Russell, always covid cautious like a lot of people In TV, as anxious as me about how many people the pandemic continues to kill off every day and all the rare illnesses it’s causing people to develop?) and the sub-plot of Mel being possessed is the sort of thing we’ve seen so many times before it’s got old (and it robs us of more time seeing Mel as Mel: honestly after all the publicity build up I thought she was going to spend the entire episode riding Dr 15 round on a motorbike rather than a single short chase scene). What s the significance of the kind woman and her gift of a spoon (is it symbolic of the 4th Doctor’s desire to travel ‘with a teaspoon and an open mind’, not a quote from ‘Pyramids’ but ‘The Creature From The Pit’?)  But re-watching the weird cut-down and CGI-treated ‘Pyramids Of Mars’ the other day (a lot better than the horrid colourised and re-edited ‘Daleks’ but not a patch on the original with its intrusive modern music and weird combination of shots) this story is no worse in terms of pacing than the so-called ‘classic’ that inspired it.


For there was a lot in this finale I liked: the mystery of Susan Triad and her lack of memory at who she was is a great idea that kept us on our toes: the Doctor desperately asking her about her dreams (‘have you ever been an ambulance?’ is a fan-favourite quote already!) when she hasn’t got a clue what’s going on, only to be a ‘trick’ to lure the Doctor in is a great idea and one we’ve legitimately never had before, not to the extent of building an entire character who keeps returning in stories. The ‘Kind Woman’ has confused many but she’s a very Russell style character, there to sum up how drastic a situation is rather than move on the plot – she’s at one with all his characters in times of stress who do the right thing and give him hope as individuals even when the massed public have got something badly wrong; it’s subtle but meeting here is the turning point that makes the Doctor think there is a chance of putting things right, somehow (although in the end his plan goes wrong and Ruby improvises her way to a solution instead, which is an even better ending). The fact that Sutekh, buried deep in the Tardis (and presumably sharing houseroom with the lost Sontaron from ‘The Invasion Of Time’), can only manipulate things using the Tardis’ perception filter at a distance of up to 73 Yards is a clever idea: it explains a little bit more about what happened in the story ’73 Yards’ too (well, sort of: presumably Sutekh was so angry at his grand masterplan being interrupted at the Doctor’s death he kept the Tardis ‘turned on’ and haunted Ruby for fun). The Doctor’s horror at the thought that his journeys since ‘Pyramids’ have put so many people in danger and caused such suffering through his recklessness is brilliant (and I‘m not just saying that because it was part of a story I submitted to the Big Finish writing competition in lockdown, which I lost: Russell made it into more of a story than me). The reprise from the one part of ‘Pyramids Of Mars’ I always found powerful, the sight of a destroyed world and what it would look like if Sutekh ‘wins’, is reprised here but not in some vague possible future but right here right now and the idea of stars going out (just like ‘Stolen Earth/.Journey’s End’), with references to lots of fan-favourite planets, is a really neat touch that sells the idea of just how big this threat is (only ‘Logopolis’ threatens this many planets and indeed destroys a lot of them: poor Traken, for instance, is destroyed by the Doctor’s carelessness twice now!) I love the Doctor’s subtle kiss of gratitude to the Tardis as he gets it back from Sutekh’s control, so under-stated (Ncuti has been getting better and better this year, although his latest scream of wild fury and defeat isn’t one of his best moments). I love the idea of the ‘Memory Tardis’ from ‘Tales Of The Tardis’ being turned into a continuity point, with a near-defeated Doctor, Ruby and Mel huddled together in the cold watching the universe die, utterly lost and helpless in the wake of the big bad. Most of all I love the fact that even a God as powerful as Sutekh can be tricked by Ruby smashing all evidence of who her mum is, just as he’s got the Doctor in a green-tinged death grip (go girl!)


Admittedly it could all have been put together in a better way – with a lot more Sutekh, given they’d gone to all that trouble to create him - and been surrounded by stories that didn’t keep promising us a four course banquet and then ending up serving up a plate of reasonably good sandwiches. I mean, they were nutritious and tasty enough and better than no sandwiches at all (a lot of fans forget just how much trouble Dr Who was in across 2021 before Russell got Disney involved and I’m the sort of fan who found things to like in ‘The Trial Of A Timelord’, I’ll totally take a sloppy and clumsy series over cancellation) but if you promise a brilliant mystery and then don’t deliver on it people are always going to be disappointed. I do think in time, though, that fans will come to appreciate this story more than they do now, when it leaves a slightly bitter aftertaste. After all, I for one enjoyed Russell going back to using his more detailed, subtle, complex and empathetic writing after a run of stories which I (mostly) really enjoyed but which did feel a little like cartoons, broad and big and colourful. And of course there’s still the chance that some mysteries might get solved at a later date: Mrs Flood, for one, looked furious at having her plans thwarted and being killed by Sutekh just as she was getting close to Ruby’s family so here’s betting she’s the big bad of next year (and my pet theory now so you can all laugh at how wrong I was in a year’s time: she’s a sort of Clara in ‘The Name Of The Doctor’ sent to keep an eye on the Doctor with elements of the people he most trusts: she’s dressed like Clara for most of the series but suddenly started wearing Romana’s costume from ‘The Ribos Operation’ during her fourth-wall break to camera at the very end). Plus…if all those destroyed worlds were brought back to life is this a sneaky backdoor way to getting Gallifrey to come back from the dead (again?!) As much as half the fanbase seem to be giving up on the show in droves this year there’s so much to look forward to with Who and I can’t wait to see you there, starting at Christmas…


+ POSITIVES The Tardis is possessed! Such a great idea that Who had never really done before and it looks like it too, with one of the best uses of CGI in the modern series as black swirling plumes of smoke intertwined it. As much as Sutekh just looked like an angry Scooby Doo who’d eaten too many Scooby snacks the sight of him twirling the Tardis round like a toy was really effective too. The sight of UNIT shooting bullets at it in desperation before finding it impervious and getting taken out one by one was very well handled too, making the most familiar sight in all of Who that’s been home across the past sixty-ish years somewhere scary and dangerous.   


- NEGATIVES That said, the plumes of sand overtaking the world were a CGI effect too far. They looked uncomfortably like the dust bowl from the twin towers on 9/11 and it’s always a bit dodgy when Dr Who starts copying real events that resulted I real deaths. Plus nobody reacts the way they should: yes we see one crashing car but there’s no panic, not much screaming, no real surprise. I mean, this is a tsunami of sand in a city street, you’d at least be surprised if nothing else. And why is Sutekh even messing round with sand? He seems to have given up on all his ‘Egyptian imagery’ for the rest of the story.


BEST QUOTE: ‘You made my life bigger and better Ruby Sunday and now – goodbye’


PREQUELS/SEQUELS: In case you hadn’t guessed by now, this story has quite a lot to do with 4th Doctor story ‘The Pyramids Of Mars’…

Previous ‘Rogue’ next ‘Joy To The World’


Sunday, 9 June 2024

Rogue: Ranking - N/A (but around #220ish)

 

"Rogue”(15th Dr, 2024)

(Series 14/1A episode 6, Dr 15 with Ruby, 8/6/2024, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writers: Kate Herron and Briony Redman, executive producers: Julie Gardner, Jane Trantor, Joel Collins and Phil Collinson, director: Ben Chessell)

Ranking: #N/A (#220-ish) reviewed 9/6/2024


How those other Doctors might have behaved at the ball: 1 - Hmm, all these young people, preposterous! I'm going to have a sit down on my stick and...unhand me sir! I have a grand-daughter!' 2 - Dance? In a straight line? Look smart? Oh no - I'm going to crimple my hair up and hang around the fringes lurking. A kiss? Oh no, I think you want my lovely assistant. The one in the skirt? He's Jamie. I can give you his number if you like... 3 - Right on, old chap, just let me have some cheese and biscuits first! A kiss? Hai! Learn to respect my boundaries young man, there's a good fellow. 4 - [trips over own scarf and knocks everyone around the room over] 5 - Well I say, it's the one occasion when I don't feel over-dressed. Does anyone have any good celery I can stick in my buttonhole? A Kiss? Me? Oh dear, brave heart Doctor... 6 - Of course you want to kiss me, I'm the best dancer in the rom. Watch my foxtrot. I invented it you know... 7- Hmm, I'm beginning to suspect all these dance moves are a secret game of chess by Fenric! A kiss? No, I never liked you, I have to break all respect you have for me just in case... 8 - [smooches in Gallifreyan] 9 - A dance? I do dancing! But a kiss? With these big ears? Who are you kidding? 10 - Sorry I only have eyes for the ladies. You're not a secret lady are you? 11 - Wowsers. I was only expecting a peck on the cheek. Oh well. Geronimo! 12 - Never mind whether I'm a good man or not, tell me...Am I a good dancer?  13 - Brilliant! You're quite dishy aren't you/ Just so you know, though, I'm quite socially awkward so here's a list of 150 reasons why you shouldn't go out with me. War Doctor: Bloody kids! Fugitive Dr: Bloody kids! Shalka Dr: Bloody kids!'






When I was little I got a secondhand copy of the 1985 Dr Who role-playing game for Christmas, when – despite the Doctor currently being played by Colin Baker – it had the 4th Doctor and Leela on the front. It looked very me: three thick manuals all of which were the biggest you’ve ever seen (one of which was a ‘field user’s manual’, whatever that means), crammed with tiny text full of endless rules for creating your own stories. I like to think that the three modern showrunners still have a copy under their desk for whenever they get stuck (especially Moffat, usually after writing himself a cliff-hanger he can’t get out of with logic). It was based on the popular Star Trek role-playing game manuals of the 1970s where you could create mostly variations of the same story: either Kirk, Spock or Bones would get into trouble on a ship/planet/Earth’s past in trouble full of gorgeous women/hideous men/revolting Romans. The Dr Who variation never sold that well though and after trying to play it I kind of worked out why: playing the game the way it was meant to be played was kind of boring. ‘Dr Who’ is a show that’s all about breaking rules, that comes with no templates, where the brilliance of it is that next week you’ll be doing something utterly different to what you did the week before. The only way I could ever make it work was to go against the rules and use it as the launchpad for something completely left-field that felt far more like Dr Who to me: A modern planet that suddenly has an archaic ballroom, The Master suddenly being turned into a Cyberman, a Cybermen suddenly turning into a Dalek, K9 in danger being saved by the world, instead of some drippy local villager its Leela getting the love interest on an alien planet (but a lot moe plausibly than the one she got in ‘The Invasion Of Time’), the Doctor marrying Leela, The Doctor marrying The Master, the local Humans from the past suddenly turning out not to be just aliens but alien wildlife.



I was reminded of that when I saw ‘Rogue’ yesterday: it’s the sort of story no other series could do. The legend (and even though it happened all of two years ago it already feels like a legend) is that shortly after announcing that he’d decided to run Dr Who again Russell T Davies talked in an interview about how Regency costume drama ‘Eastenders in Ballgowns’ ‘Bridgerton’ was the best thing on TV but joked how the only thing it was missing to make it perfect was the presence of blood-sucking aliens. When the interviewer followed Russell up by asking Russell if he ever watched anything from that year’s other surprise hit (the - almost literally - thousands of superhero films coming out of Marvel) said that ‘Loki’ was his favourite but he’d been disappointed by the representation of the LGBTQ community. Soon after Ncuti was cast in the role direct from the comedy ‘Sex Education’ – where he’d been working with Loki executive producer and director Kate Herron and said good things about her. Behind the scenes Herron and her co-writer Briony Redman got in touch: maybe they could have a go at putting things right for the Dr Whoniverse and perhaps take him up on that idea of Brigerton with aliens? Russell couldn’t exactly say no after that and so ‘Rogue’ was born, a rare story in the modern day by writers who aren’t necessarily fans of the series with a vast knowledge of the franchise who throw out all the rules and do something very different with the characters we know and love. It’s very like the games I used to play asking all the big questions: well why can’t it be the Doctor who falls in love - not with the usual drippy love interest with the character you think is going to be the baddy (and as close to ‘The Master’ as you can get in this game)? Why is it always the companion who has to be rescued – why can’t she fool the aliens by her own brilliance, without the Doctor knowing and thus spoiling his plan? And why does this regency ball have to be a real regency ball? Why can’t it be, say, a cosplay by aliens dressing up to be human? And why can’t those aliens look like birds?!?



‘Rogue’ is,, even for series 1A or fourteen or whatever we’re meant to be calling it now, absolutely bonkers. It felt like someone had been playing around with the set roleplays in the game and had somehow crossed ‘The Faceless Ones’ (aliens in disguise stealing human identities) with the setting of ‘The Girl In The Fireplace’ – and then ignored every single other Dr Who story there has ever been. It ends up as ‘Love and Monsters’ but with a different sort of love, a different sof monster and absolutely no in-jokes. Although what this series resembles most isn’t Dr Who at all but ‘Casanova’, the wickedly funny romp that Russell T wrote for David Tennant as his last job before doing Who, a world where everyone is bonking everyone else in ways that make even our modern heads spin but where for protocol nobody is allowed to talk about it out loud. I’m honestly not sure what I think about it: I mean it’s the sort of fan-fiction I was writing when I was nine, but is that the sort of thing I actually wanted to see on telly, as ‘canon’? I don’t know.  I mean on the one hand it was a lot of fun. So many of the worst Dr Who stories are so bad precisely because they give you the same tired old recycled plots without anything new to offer so that plodding through them seems like a waste of everybody’s time (especially yours for watching it – and even more me for reviewing it, stories like ‘Monsters Of Peladon’ ‘42’ ‘Voyage Of The Damned’ and far too many stories with ‘Time’ in the title): ‘Rogue’ definitely doesn’t do that. So many of the worst Dr Who stories imagine a future that they can’t possibly do justice to on screen with a script full of technical jargon and gobbledegook that’s taken so earnestly it seems like comedy (‘Arc Of Infinity’ ‘Orphan 55’ ‘Voyage Of The Damned’ again). Others are just plain wrong from the outset, with a message so alien to Dr Who and with such a fundamental misunderstanding of the series it feels as if it was written by somebody holding the role-playing game manual upside down  (‘The Timeless Child’  ‘The Dominators’ ‘The Rings Of Akhaten’, err ‘Voyage Of the Damned’). Others are sunk by terrible guest stars (‘Voyage Of The Damned’) or messed about with genres it knows nothing about (‘Voyage Of The Damned’ really did get the short straw didn’t it?!) ‘Rogue’ doesn’t do any of that. There was nothing in there I disliked, nothing that made me cringe and it was forty-five minutes that passed quicker and more enjoyably than some.



What ‘Rogue’ really lacked was a plot. I mean there was one, of aliens wanting to take over a ballroom and take over Human bodies, but beyond that the Chuldur’s motivations were sketchy throughout and it was a shame that we got the tacked-on ‘Android Invasion’ ending that it was all part of a ploy to take over the Earth: this story would have been more fun if it had stayed as aliens harmlessly cos-playing for fun. It felt as if everyone was running around for no good reason this week with lots of scenes that would normally be ‘additional filler’ to the main plot and that nobody really learned anything, except the Doctor and heartbreak (and he’s no stranger to that, despite what Russell T seemed to think about this pushing the character in ‘new directions’ in the ‘Unleashed’ documentary). It all felt a bit pointless by the time we got to the end. ‘Rogue’ wasn’t the sort of story you could ever take seriously, an oddball far odder than other acknowledged oddballs like ‘The Happiness Patrol’ or ‘The Greatest Show In The Galaxy’ (that actually had a point to make) or this series’ own ‘Space Babies’. It’s the sort of story you skip on re-runs and never ever show to non-fans who just wouldn’t understand why anyone would find this curious mixture of screwball comedy, farce and scifi entertaining. 



The Chuldur were disappointing too: some of the least scariest villains we’ve seen in the series they mostly seemed to want to use their powers to dance and looked ridiculous in their final reveal: the sort of thing I’d have rolled again for during my adapted role-playing game as being far too ridiculous: birds without many feathers but with sort of pipe-cleaners attached to their faces. We don’t get any real back story as to what they’re doing or why and no great sense of the threat they pose: what happens to the Humans they take over? Are their memories erased, as if you’ve wiped someone’s save on a virtual reality game? Can their memories ever be put back into their bodies? Are any of these real people anyway? Without any sense of jeopardy it’s hard to judge what a threat they are. Or take them seriously looking the way they do. And why do they look so bad? If you’ve got a room-mate you hate who still allows you to talk about Dr Who try showing them this story back to back with Peri’s bird-scene in ‘Vengeance on Varos’ sometime and ask them to guess which one was made on a BBC budget forty years ago and which was made with Disney big bucks. Truly, much as I worried about the Disney crossover, I thought we’d been spared ‘what the?’ monster moments like this forever. We’ve had some pretty peculiar aliens on Dr Who over the years but this is the episode that makes you think this series is becoming strictly for the birds.  



At the same time, though, at least if my time was wasted it was done for something fun and (largely) enjoyable. The writers look hard for a way to throw a romance into Dr Who without simply doing ‘The Time Traveller’s Wife’ again like Steven Moffat did so often and come up with a story about disguises. Love is a game that comes with a high cost, especially in the regency period when reputations and livelihoods were at stake. Everyone knew that the dumb rich boy was going to end up marrying the rich dumb girl because that’s how society worked back then but that didn’t mean they couldn’t have ‘fun’ with other people and cast long lingering looks over the ones their hearts cried out for. Minus the frocks and dowries (and wigs: the ultimate disguise of what hair really looked like and an early attempt to ‘cosplay’ at being a different person; rumours are it was taken up after a Queen’s hair fell out nd everyone wanted to copy her as well as to cover up nests of hairlice) it still happens today: that’s why people watch soap operas and why being the only sober student in a university halls of residence is so entertaining: every generation plays out the same games trying to work out who to fall in love with, then eventually settles down to fins stability away all the turbulence of their past, often without realising that everyone else is playing the same games with you. Everyone in this era is keeping their real feelings hidden behind a veneer of respectability and even though everyone gossips about what’s really going on not many people are direct about the ‘truth’. It’s the perfect place, then, for a group of aliens to hide out: practically it’s a raging nest of hormones and feelings that are highly entertaining when the Human is taken over (a sort of real version of ‘The Sims’ computer game pretending to be someone else for a time) and to keep their own secrets, because everyone else is so used to keeping theirs too. The revelation when it comes, that everyone in this world is an alien (bar Ruby of course) is a clever way of pushing that scenario even further. I just wish there was an actual episode of ‘Dr Who’ going on at the same time. 



That said, a lot of the things ‘Rogue’ did are long overdue: Ballrooms were such a focal point of older worlder life (at least in Europe and for a couple hundred years) that it seems amazing we’ve only ever had the one in ‘The Girl In The Fireplace’ before now, as a short scene in something else (the story that ‘Rogue’ resembles most, both in being a romance and in breaking all the rules we never even knew the series had). Weirdly enough ballrooms were only truly killed off by The Beatles and other rock and roll bands in the 1960s, so if ‘The Devil’s Chord’ ending hadn’t restored the timelines Ruby would have probably grown up dancing in one! Ever since ‘The Android Invasion’ in 1975 teased us that it was going to be a far more interesting story than it turned out to be I’ve been waiting for a world that as simply put together as a game by aliens pretending to be Human (as opposed to a mock-up invasion plan). ‘Rogue’ is kind of like ‘The Androids Of Tara’ too in that it fools you into thinking you’re genuinely back on earth’s past before you’re left going ‘eh? I don’t remember a Taran wood beast in the history books’ and realise you’ve been fooled; this story goes one better though by taking most of the episode to offer the grand reveal.  One of Ruby’s big character points is that she’s always being under-estimated by everyone around her, tied to her foster mum and Gran out of loyalty but with a soul that wants to explore the universe and a brain clearly capable of more than looking after foster babies. So far the Doctor trusts her enough to let her do her own thing but is always hovering to rush over and help her like an over-protective mother hen, even when he’s been more in danger and needs rescuing more than she does. We don’t know how long they’ve been travelling together but some stories at least hint that it’s been a while: he really should know to trust her by now and the moment she reveals that she’s in ‘disguise’ as part of her own trap for the Chulder aliens is a nice surprise. All these twists and turns feels nicely Dr Whoish, even though they’re all things the series has never quite done before.


The big thing that’s set the cat nurse amongst the Chulder pigeons though: that kiss. We’re now nineteen years on from the infamous ‘gay kiss’ scene between the 9th Doctor and Captain Jack in ‘Parting Of The Ways’ that caused so many tongues to wag and which seemed to put Russell T off from putting forward any more of the ‘gay agenda’ the newspapers all seemed to assume he’d brought to the series and here we are, with the Doctor (a bi-regenerational Doctor don’t forget, whose kind of gender fluid) falling in love with a bloke and getting a full-on snog. The great irony, of course, is that this is the one episode of the series Russell had no creative hand in(except a bit of editing): it was written by two girls best known for series that, by Russell’s own jokey accusations, are relentlessly heterosexual. It’s like a fresh pair of eyes came to the series, saw past all the hang-ups and challenges that come with trying to drag a series that’s sixty years old and its long-standing audience into the present day as if it had just been commissioned. And that’s great: one of Russell’s big reasons for wanting to come back to this show was to move representation on and make the most of the changes that have taken place in TV and society across the past two decades and make sure that every minority group knows that this series is for them, that a series about a time-travelling alien with two hearts really is for absolutely everyone. After all, if it’s happening out there in the world somewhere then it ought to be in the series somewhere too, while Dr Who traditionally became a refuge for gay kids in the 20th century who felt ‘alien’ amongst their peers and wanted a male figure to look up to that wasn’t a muscleman superhero.


Talking of which: that felt as if it was the sub-plot this week, almost as if the two writers took up Russell’s challenge and decided to write a story ‘about’ what it meant to be gay, especially in the past when it was illegal and you couldn’t declare your love openly. I mean talk about having secrets: at a time when you could be ex-communicated or executed if caught love was even more of a game of hide-and-seek for gay Humans, never quite sure who to put their trust in. I mean, it was an open secret that a lot of the Kings on the throne had ‘favourites’ they saw in their bedrooms more often than they saw their wives and they were the ones with money to cover it up: nobody ever wrote what the peasants were up to anyway. The boy you loved was probably married (to a girl, to keep up appearances) and you can forget your dowry or chance of income if word got out. Gay people felt like ‘aliens’ hiding, pretending to be ‘Human’ like everyone else, disguising who they truly were in fear of being caught and with a ‘secret’ world of their own that they could only share with fellow ‘aliens’. The rest of the world didn’t understand you, only your own ‘kind’ – but how did you ever find out who your ‘kind’ were? The stakes were so ridiculously high that it’s a surprise any homosexual relationships lasted at all – and yet many did, hidden away in history books under euphemisms and hints. It’s the perfect unexplored world for Dr Who to investigate, to tell the ‘truth’ of  what was really happening back in the past that you won’t learn from history books and to have the Doctor and his randy lover Rogue subvert every tradition through their love affair. Why are they birds? Erm, ahh, got me there. Birds of a feather that flock together perhaps? Or maybe they were just the sort of glamorous animals that would seem to like ballrooms?


 All great on paper, but since when was ‘Rogue’ the Doctor’s ‘type’?  He’s very much in the ‘Captain Jack’ mode (flirty, dirty, looks about thirty, and a bounty hunter to boot) – so much so that many fans who saw filming or rushes or simply the series trailer automatically assumed it was him back again - and those two rubbed each up the wrong way so much I got the impression the 9th Doctor would have preferred to share a Tardis with a Slitheen. While the Doctor isn’t immune to falling for ‘bad girls’ and ‘bad boys’ (I mean, River Song wasn’t all law-abiding was she?) he does very much have a type and that type is Rose: young, pure (ish), optimistic, brave, feisty, generally blonde, above all kind. Does that sound like ‘Rogue’? I mean, it would be an interesting idea that each successive Doctor felt drawn to a different set of people but just look at how quickly the 15th Doctor embraced Ruby, someone whose very much in the ‘Rose’ mould. What’s more what does Rogue do that’s appealing anyway? He sulks, banters insults with the Doctor (calling his beloved Tardis a ‘shed’ – some villains have been destroyed for less), plays ‘guess whose spaceship is bigger’ and is so used to being round dead bodies and has lost so much of his humanity he doesn’t flinch. That’s a natural crush for The Master perhaps but not The Doctor. Why this man, out of every man (or woman) in the universe? I’ll forgive ‘Rogue’ the series for playing round with all the traditions of Dr Who in an effort to tell a different series, but ‘Rogue’ the character plays with the tradition of the Doctor as a character and it all feels so wrong. The speed of this romance, too, is so un-natural: the Doctor has learned to be careful, to watch love unfold slowly. It wasn’t that long ago he spent billions of years grieving Clara. Even as a crush, a bright spark that catches his attention and makes the Doctor excited, this is way too fast to be believable. Where exactly is the point when he stops seeing Rogue as repellent and falls in love? I play this story back and I keep missing it: all of a sudden they go from genuine insults to flirting and that’s so out of character. It all seems very one-sided too: where is there the slightest sign, up until that kiss, that Rogue likes the Doctor and doesn’t just see him as a rival? I mean, when they first meet he’s convinced the Doctor is the criminal alien he’s after. What changes his mind? I know they only have 45 minutes to tell this story and The Rogue’s sacrifice and the Doctor’s shock then insistence to Ruby that he’s alright (when she knows him well enough to know he isn’t) are well handled, more palatable than all that moping that used to go on with Drs 10 and 11, but it feels like we’re watching a Richard Curtis rom-com at high speed rather than a properly unfolding bit of romance-drama. As big a coup as it is to get an actual Hollywood actor Jonathan Groff to play him (we’re a long way from the days when anyone wanted to do Who, Russell quipping on ‘Unleashed’ that he said ‘sure if you want to waste my time’ when the writers suggested calling his agent) he’s badly miscast: there’s nothing going on behind those eyes, no spark of anything extra. Instead he just looks like a bored extra that wandered out of ‘Downton Abbey’, nothing to suggest why a timelord with all that experience and knowledge would be interested in him. He clearly hasn’t got a clue what’s going on: confessing to Russell he’d never heard of Dr Who before the showrunner enthusiastically sent him five DVDs, but there are no signs here he ever watched them. Ncuti does well to invest us in the romance, acting like a giggly schoolboy until he reverts back to being impossibly ancient at the end, but there’s not enough spark between them to make this come alive. Heck, flipping Peter Davison and Matthew Waterhouse had more sexual chemistry than this.



It’s a tough story for Ruby. By which I don’t mean a shape-shifting alien nearly stole her identity. No: she gets in barely one dance with the Doctor (nice reference to the Tardis translation circuits giving them fancy footwork to blend in by the way, surely a Russellism if ever I heard one) before she’s called away to meet a scoundrel named Lord Barton who tries to chat her up. No sooner are you cheering on Ruby for putting him down so spectacularly (fulfilling the idea that Dr Who historicals should bring the past alive in ways that people from the present will understand) than the Doctor is falling for someone just like him across the balcony. And then he leaves, leaving her stranded. I mean, its not like she’s having a nice time particularly by then. It feels a little like ‘The End Of The World’ when the Doctor dumps Rose at the earliest opportunity so he can flirt with talking trees: yes there’s no romance going on between the two but the Doctor is her best friend, guardian and chauffeur rolled into one: he could at least tell her where he’s going (I mean, it’s not like he doesn’t have a tradition for getting into trouble). Typical: all those years of telling companions not wander off and then this Doctor forgets it all in a moment of passion and does exactly that. His reaction to her apparent death is to look slightly sad rather than horrified. The his reaction to the fact that Ruby is smart enough to work out what was going on and slide into the Chuldur’s body instead (how???), hiding in plain sight until the Doctor decides to turn the floorboards into a dimensional transporter (a sort of cross between ‘The Adventure Game’ and ‘Knightmare’, just to add to the virtual reality feel of the episode), is horror, rather than to tell her how brilliant she is (because she is at this point: what other companions would have been smart or savvy enough to do that?)  In ‘The Church On Ruby Road’ the companion was a drag, a Susan peril monkey without much going for, but they’ve really turned things around and shown how street smart if inexperienced Ruby is and how she’s the perfect plucky companion who just hadn’t been outside her comfort zone yet.  The Doctor clearly saw something in her to offer her a ride that no one else saw though (including Ruby), so why does he suddenly believe in her enough to abandon her, yet under-estimate her ability to get herself out of trouble minutes apart?  It’s as if Ruby changed character from first draft to last for some reason. Given the strong hand Russell had in all bar two of her episodes so far, did he simply not know himself and changed his mind whole writing for her?



Not much Susan Twist this week either, bucking a trend where she was getting more and more to do each week. Does this mean she was a bird-alien in all her other appearances too? Are these different people, perhaps clones, with nothing in common with each other? Or has she fallen through the Doctor’s timelines a la ‘Name Of The Doctor’? The ‘throw-forward’ trailer hints at some revelations to come next week. Suffice to say that, for now, having her face pop up again felt like the only bit of stability to tie ‘Rogue’ in with the rest of the series. Honestly after this episode she could turn out to be absolutely anything – including Rogue in another body. I hope they end up sticking rather than twisting next week though and properly tell us who she is because spot-the-cameo is getting monotonous. One last thought: they worked at some speed to add a tribute to William Russell, our own Ian Chesterton, who died this week at 99. It was a sweet gesture I wasn’t sure they’d do as not all actors get one (only Jon Pertwee and Nicholas Courtney off the top of my head). He deserved it though, helping to create a programme so long-lived it could go from where Who started in 1963 to a story that is still breaking so many rules now (and would absolutely positively be William Hartnell’s least favourite episode for multiple reasons, such is progress). Who at its most romantic, a love story between races, is actually very fitting to be the story that contains his tribute if you know his story (especially William’s second marriage late in life).  One moment from the past that does get an odd reprieve: the Doctor desperately tries to show Rogue who he is, thanks to a lot of familiar looking faces: Drs 1-14 plus John Hurt’s War Doctor, Jo Martin’s Fugitive Doctor…and what looks like Richard E Grant’s animated Doctor from ‘Scream Of The Shalka’. Is this website project from 2003, the one Russell’s comeback series effectively replaced  and which Russell himself was deeply sniffy about in interviews, proper canon now (despite not being on BBC iplayer along with the other stories?) Is it a clue from a showrunner known to keep us on our toes? Or a mistake caused by a CGI artists who didn’t quite know what the memo about ‘all the Doctors’ meant when he was asked to do this special effect?   



On every main point you’d care to make, then, ‘Rogue’ falls apart. It’s not a good romance, it’s not enough like any other Dr Who episode to rank highly there either, the drama is all over the place driven by twists and turns that come out of nowhere and jokes that fall too flat to be comedy. There are some truly awful moments, such as the Doctor’s psychic paper saying he’s ‘hot’, that suggest the new showrunner has turned into a teenage boy. There’s almost no action and what there is consist of dancing, while because of the nature of the plot nobody is giving anything away so most of the dialogue is deflection and  obfuscation rather than emotional speeches. By virtue of all that I ought to hate it and yet I don’t. Those twists and turns might come out of nowhere but they’re clever, little tricks that change what we think about this world that I for one didn’t see coming. It’s obvious that, little as they might know about Dr Who, we’re dealing with writers who are clever enough to juggle metaphors and bigger ideas. It’s rare these days to have a Dr Who historical set in a time and place we’ve never properly been to before (although ‘The Haunting Of Vila Diodati’ is a sort-of romance set three years later that tells a very different sort of story in a very different setting). It feels like exactly the sort of thing Dr Who ought to be doing, a Georgian romance with a twist at the end. It’s just that fans maybe wouldn’t have done it quite like this. Had there been a full plot to go with it instead of aliens hiding in plain sight, it could have been great Dr Who. Instead it’s a rogue story, one that doesn’t do anything the way any previous episode would have done it and as such is kind of hard to judge against the others because of that.  


 
POSITIVES + How it looks: as you’d expect with a Who historical its positively gorgeous. Tredgar House in Newport, a genuine 17th century mansion, was where the bulk of the inside was filmed and famous to Who fans as Madame De Pompadour’s sitting room and bedroom in ‘The Girl In The Fireplace’ (though, weirdly enough, not the ballroom scenes). The grounds, meanwhile, are actually Margam Country Park (once owned by ‘The Talbot Family’ and a possible inspiration for ‘Black Orchid’) . The costumes are perfect too: costumer Pam Downe had already worked on multiple series and films set in this era and clearly knows her stuff, while Ncuti and Millie both look more comfortable in their period costumes than they do in their modern clothes (the 15th Doctor looks very like the 3rd interestingly, similar velvet smoking jacket and all). The ballroom scene, choreographed by Brigerton’s own Jack Murphy, is impressive too: given the intricate camera shots the actors had to do it in one take.



NEGATIVES - How it sounds:  No one is having as much fun making this episode as Murray Gold and he simply goes too far. The Doctor feels a flickering hint of romance? Bering out the soppy violins? His lover seems to have betrayed him? Go dark and menacing with tubas. That moment of cruel heartbreak? It’s time to unleash the choir! It’s as if, faced with a Dr Who story that’s doing different things to normal all the way through, he decides to write the most obvious Who score he’s ever written, hitting every cliché he’s ever hit in the space of 45 minutes.  



BEST QUOTE: ‘You stole my heart – now leave me my reputation!’



Previous ‘Dot and Bubble’ next ‘The Legend Of Ruby Sunday’













Sunday, 2 June 2024

Dot and Bubble: Ranking N/a (But around #60ish)

 

"Dot and Bubble” (15th Dr, 2024)

(Series 14/1A episode 5, Dr 15 with Ruby, 1/6/2024, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writer: Russell T Davies, executive producers: Julie Gardner, Jane Tranter, Joe Collins and Phil Collinson**, director:  Dylan Holmes Williams)

Ranking: #N/A (but #60ish) reviewed 2/6/2024


‘Here is the latest news brought to you by your local Daily Mail Bubble: today house prices went down, with more vacancies than ever before as lots of properties are suddenly empty! Gee, I wonder why that is? Probably something woke and leftwing ignore it- it’ll probably go away by itself. Coming up: why The King is wonderful and totally deserves his pricey coronation…Oh wait, apparently the Prince is taking over now. Only he’s been eaten…deposed! Long live King…Err…Slug. Gosh how regal he looks with that crown over his squidgy little head. He’s an eligible bachelor too, a  real catch ladies so make sure you get in now. Later…Lots of sport, lots of celebs and of course a ten  page discourse of today’s hit song ‘Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polkadot Bikini’. We ask: is this colourblind woke nonsense?...Soon: your page three pinup, a Miss Slug of Wales, her measurements 12 foot by 3foot. Likes: eating humans, feeding off their dead carcasses and taking over the world. Aww, how cute she looks!...Next issue: What Princess Diana would look like as a slug…Hmm something’s wrong with the news…No wait…aaagh…Don’t eat me…help…Everyone listen to me the office has been invaded by slugs and…[blocked]’ 







At last, after nine episodes back in charge of the new-look Disney Dr Who, Russell T Davies delivers his first true comeback classic (or at any rate one that wasn’t heavily borrowed from past comic strips). Now this, this is what the series is ‘for’ – a damning critique on modern society told through the lens of a possible future, which says things that would be too harsh if it was presented as a straightforward drama in the present day and yet is so plausibly undeniably where we’re heading, wrapped up as an action story about man-eating slugs. Not coincidentally ‘Dot and Bubble’ is the first of these new stories from the ‘RTD2’ era that Russell couldn’t possibly have written during his previous time as showrunner because the world wasn’t like that in 2010, a year that seems as if it was just the other day in so many ways yet was so different in so many others: politically Labour was still hanging on by its teeth with no sign of ‘Davros’ Cameron and his austerity policies, the credit crunch hadn’t fully hit yet, Donald Trump was just another corrupt inherited millionaire has-been rather than a right-wing monster (who looks not unlike the Man-Trap slugs), there was no worldwide plague to work through, no housing bubble, the environment was in trouble but as something we still had time to fix and the worst things we had to worry about were an illegal war we couldn’t possibly win – happy times. ‘Dot and Bubble’ though, for all the fact that its set in the fictional planet of ‘FineTime’ in some unspecified time that looks plausibly futuristic, is clearly what we’ve become while Russell’s been away: the technology that once brought us together and gave us hope has been turned back on us to make us splintered and confused, believing in fake data over what we can see in our own eyes and closing our ears to a social media bubble vacuum where the only opinions we hear are those that reflect our own. It’s a world of divide between white and ethnic and rich and poor alike, with smug little divas who know nothing about the real world the only people that anyone listens to – and yet have nothing of any importance to say. It’s a world that clearly no right-minded open-hearted being would ever want to be a part of, a society that indirectly leads to everyone we meet on this story being killed (is this the first time ever an entire society simply refuses the Doctor’s help before dying out?) and yet which everyone watching this story on first transmission clearly lives in. As with all the best Dr Whos ‘Dot and Bubble’ holds a mirror up to us and shows us that we’re the monsters, causing far more harm and damage than armies of Daleks or Cybermen.


Russell’s scripts have unfairly got a reputation amongst modern Whovians for being the ‘safer’ cosier more family orientated ones (at least compared to the jump-scares of Steven Moffat and the lectures of Chris Chibnall), not least because his trio of Who major monsters (The Slitheen, The Judoon and The Ood) are the cutest in the series. Since his comeback he’s not exactly been big on the Scary Marys either: Beep The Meep might talk the talk but for half of ‘The Star Beast’ he’s the sort of alien you want to take home and cuddle. I’ve always maintained though that there’s been a bite behind his writing, a darker angrier venom that doesn’t get unleashed very often but is so often merciless when it is – especially in a ‘karma’ sense, when a group of people or one or two individuals lets the world down: think what happens to prospective companion Adam in ‘The Long Game’ or no end of spoilt little rich brats (think Rattigan in ‘The Sontaron Academy’). I always wondered what Russell’s writing might have been like if he’d lived in an era that wasn’t one of (relative) peace and calm, like the cold war that ran across the first 25 quarter century of Dr Who history. Well now I know: ’Dot and Bubble’ is one of the wickedest, angriest most deliciously cruel stories in the show’s history, where an entire civilisation walks to their deaths from their own cold blind ignorance rather than accept the offered help of a stranger whose already helped save their lives.

I wondered too, after the casting of Ncuti Gatwa in the lead role, whether Russell was ever going to be brave enough to make use of the colour of the actor’s skin in one of his scripts. I hoped for a scene rather like that of the 12th Doctor in ‘Thin Ice’, a trip to the past when values were different to ours but which – despite Dr Who being a programme all about accepting different cultures on their own terms– were patently clearly wrong on every level. Instead of the past though Russell invents a whole planet of privileged little white rich kids, locked away in their own friend bubble and only listening to their own point of view. It’s the ultimate depiction of white privilege: social media, which when used properly can be such a tool for learning about other cultures and bringing the world closer to each other, can be used to cut off anyone who looks or thinks differently to ourselves, until the only voices and opinions we see are our own. Anyone whose ever accidentally knocked the two buttons on ‘Twitter/X’ and found themselves on the ‘general’ feed instead of their ‘friends’ feed will know this uncomfortable feeling (and it’s a social platform Russell joined again during the covid tweetalongs after giving upon social media many years ago): that creeping sense of unease that you’ve been congratulating yourself that the world is finally getting to a better place and agreeing’ with your opinions when, you’ve just been following people who increasingly share your views. I mean, my feed is full of people from all countries, ones from all backgrounds and cultures and come in all colours and sizes; heck there are even one or two Spice Girls fans out there I’ve most graciously allowed onto my feed. The one thing I don’t have are right wing racists who politically my opposites, because who wants to look at their venom and ignorance all day? Brexit and the mess of an election going on in America (between a president asleep at the wheel and another deliberately crashing the car) has only made the divide worse. And they, I’m sure, feel the same about me. So there we live in two separate bubbles, each one getting further apart from one another.


‘Dot and Bubble’ though goes one stage further: these kids, aged 17-27, are all white. We don’t know what happened to the kids of colour but apparently there were some: the character we follow, the gloriously named Lindy Pepperbean, says at the end how she doesn’t listen to people like the Doctor, despite the fact that he’s just helped save her life and shown up her ignorance. Even before then she locks him, while still listening to Ruby. Lindy’s friends list, a social media circle that takes on the form of a bubble inside the tech device called ‘The Bubble’, all look just like her: same blonde dye, same fake tans, same makeup. They’ve plainly never met anyone of colour – so why are they so prejudiced? It’s clearly not firsthand evidence, just something ingrained they’ve been taught by their culture, perhaps their parents or their school (if they even have one – perhaps this is the same era of Vicki’s hour a day electronic devices from Earth’s future). And yet, it’s so ingrained: these people are not like us, therefore they are of no use to us. Ncuti brilliantly sells the moment in what, due to a quirk of film scheduling, ended up being his first full day of work after the scenes alongside David Tennant on ‘The Giggle’ a few months earlier. He’s in denial, thinks she’s joking, then horrified, then laughs, then screams as a shocked Ruby tries her best to comfort him. It’s probably never even struck the Doctor that his colour would ever be a thing; he’s so used to being the person in the room that everyone automatically listens to; he’s travelled all across the universe where race doesn’t matter one iota, and he’s more than earned the trust of these privileged bratty white kids. He’s desperately trying to save their lives – and they won’t accept his help because of their own prejudices, preferring to believe in their own resources against alien slugs. It’s unspoken but we all know that this tiny band of rich fools won’t last five minutes in the real world – they aren’t even brave enough to use their own eyes in times of trouble. It’s all brilliantly played: I confess I hadn’t noticed at all that Lindy’s bubble was all so white (though I’d noticed the same weird hairdo: apparently bryl cream sales are big on this planet). Which is part of my own white privilege: a lot of  my Who friends, who are used to this prejudice firsthand, spotted is straight away. It’s all very well handled, a subtle slap in the face at the end of a story that seemed to be about something else entirely – which is a far better way of making your point than have Jodie Whittaker bleating on about the theme of the day from the safety of the Tardis.


Even before that ending, though, there’s something deeply creepy about a world that only sees what it wants to see, a world where people are not so much glued to their phones all day as have their phones glued to their faces. It’s a theme Russell already touched on in ‘The Long Game’ (when technology was implanted in our foreheads and all our media said the same thing) but which he takes much further here – it’s less of a comedy personal failing and more an ignorance that’s going to get everyone killed. Social media technology hasn’t yet reached the point where we wear it like a hat that blinds us to the world around us but that’s clearly where we’re heading: there are virtual reality goggles you can buy now not unlike the 12th Doctor’s sonic sunglasses and though at the moment they’re the privilege of the rich kids, well, we’ve seen in this episode how much everyone wants to be the rich kids who only have to work a full two hours a day, this is how bad things happen in society. There are so many great subtle dry digs in this story: Lindy’s inability to put down her bubble long enough to use her own eyes, blind and ignorant to the fact her co-workers are being gobbled up by slugs (there’s a great jump-scare, as great as any of other Moffat’s, when we think she’s got past them all only to be met by the giant one in the lift), the way she walks into a pole she doesn’ty know is there because her bubble didn’t tell her it was, the fact she blindly trusts her tech to guide her to safety even though anyone sensible would be legging it, the fake compliments paid to her by her online Doctor for keeping her heart rate low (even though the most active thing she’s done all day is pout), the way after a fright they’re more concerned with the fact she needs to use the loo than the fact she’s being eaten by slugs. Everything in this society is slightly wrong, slightly awkward. Then there’s the way she blocks the people trying to help her so she can stick her fingers in her ears and go ‘la la la’ because she doesn’t want to face it (or listen to ‘Itsy Bity teeny Weeny Yellow Polkadot Bikini’, which is worse!) The things you don’t want to face are only a block button away. Which leads on to another theme: I’ve had the feeling for a while now, since the gentle teasing of ‘Star Beast’, that maybe Russell T doesn’t like Gen Z that much, the new generation who are now the natural Who jumping-on stage he’s clearly catering for with the Disney budget. It was there again in ‘Space Babies’ and to a lesser extent ’73 Yards’. Russell hates the vapidness of these young people, their ignorance yet assurance that they’re always right, because they have the world of information at their fingertips in a way their parents and grandparents did not; nevertheless there’s a difference between having information and being intelligent enough to know how to use it or to even know how to look something up that you don’t know.


This is very much a culture of rich kids, privilege that means they don’t have to suffer life the way their poor peers do. Russell’s been here before (the Ood started off as slaves, doing all the jobs no one else wants to do; we see the under society of New Earth in ‘Gridlock’, one of my favourite of his scenes is the one added at the last minute to ‘The End Of The World’ where Rose comforts a maintenance worker whose so unused to kind words from rich visitors she’s momentarily stunned) but this is one of his most vicious attacks on class and I’m all here for it. After all, it’s amazing how easily human society adjusts to its own pattern and forgets that there are other people who don’t live the way you do: maybe all these rich kids were born to this privilege so for them their two hour shifts pouting, leaving them free to ‘party’, really does seem like hard work (‘Boring!’) They really have no idea how the other half live and think everyone gets to live like this – and those who don’t presumably just aren’t working hard enough. One little scene says so much of this world: Lindy effectively steps over dead bodies laid out in exactly the same way as the homeless sleeping on our streets: she doesn’t ‘understand’ or comprehend them and so she doesn’t see them: even without the slugs it says so much about our wilful blindness to what’s going on in lies beyond ourselves. And those people could be any of us, or them: its luck and nepotism, not taken that dictates our circumstances (there’s a neat nod to a past Russell classic about how tiny decisions, many of them made by other people, affect us all when Lindy is frequently told to ‘turn left’, a gag I suspect was overdubbed later when someone pointed this out given that at one point Lindy is visibly turning right!)


They say that Dr Who fans have always been different to most scifi-fans because they love learning (while kids who’ve been brought up on other let’s say more American scifi shows are likely to pick up another scifi book or even a science book Whovians are primed to pick up history books, social cultural study guides, works of literature mentioned – heck even recipe books if it will help us understand a point of view more); there isn’t that same sense any more thanks to the sheer volume of online information out there – not all of it accurate, not all of it fair and unbiased, not all of it speaking to us from outside our own protective bubble. I wondered for a while if Russell was being kinder in this episode – after all we don’t know who made these bubbles and how long they’ve been around or if these people even want them  or whether they just don’t know any differently; the scene where Lindy admonishes herself for being ‘useless’ for making a simple mistake is very Gen Z too – they’ve been brought up on a culture that both rewards them for absolutely nothing and one that doesn’t look kindly to the tiniest mistakes (I keep reading about how strict schools are now, how overly disciplined on the sorts of things my teachers would have turned a blind eye to or all of us would have been in detention all day every day and my heart goes out to them because that’s not what childhood is about at all). But no: by the end Lindy is a monster. All her friends are monsters too. That’s a brave stance to be taking with an audience you want to win over, I just hope Russell finds a story to redress the balance and show how actually gutsy this generation is, who’ve had to live through more things (war, famine, plague, environmental collapse, political hatred) than any generation since the war generation. After all, laughing at a younger generation is itself a form of prejudice and as a family show Dr Who is traditionally one of the only safe spaces a younger audience has to put their point of view across to their parents (then again, the Who story next to this one alphabetically is 1968’s ‘The Dominators, a rightwing tirade against hippies, so I’s not unprecedented either). Russell’s usually a kinder writer than that though – I hope a future episode redresses the balance.


Ah yes plague – you see I think there’s another theme beneath all that in this story and that, for the third story in a row, that theme is covid. The single biggest thing to happen to the world since the last time Russell was in charge of Dr Who, it’s also the reason he ended up back writing for it, after becoming involved in the ‘Dr Who lockdowns’. It is, if you listen to the world at large, all better now: the most you get are the sniffles and it’s just like a cold, so suck it up. It is, if you listen to the politicians, all behind us now as we have to rebuild our economy and go back to work and work extra hours to make up for being furloughed four years ago, etc etc. However, if you listen to the scientists who actually know how pandemics work and who have mostly spent the last few years screaming into the void (the scientists not in the pay of the governments and trotted out to say its safe anyway, but the actual ones who talk from the data), it’s as deadly and dangerous as it ever was killing hundreds of people every day. There are only two professions left that still do masking and ventilation as an actual thing: politicians (who mostly wear masks when they’re not on telly and have the most expensive ventilation systems around in their offices) and television. You see, they just can’t afford to fall behind schedule if someone gets ill (and it’s a relatively rich industry at that) so practically everyone still masks practically all of the time they’re not on screen. Covid changed our society in ways that are still being felt, a collective trauma we haven’t been ready to process yet, which took so many of us that everyone was touched by it somewhere except the lucky few, generally young and healthy people, who are locked in their own bubble and only know other young healthy people. After all, illness isn’t something people want to admit to. It’s treated in our society like a failing that’s somehow our fault – all the better to pretend to everyone else that you’re well and healthy and that covid only takes people who ‘deserve’ it.  The idea of a ‘bubble’ in the first place is such a covid-era word, from the days of lockdown when we could only legally see six people in case of spreading germs. Time in isolation was mostly spent talking to other people online who saw the same things we did: as an m.e. patient whose immuno-compromised I have a disproportionately large amount of friends and family who died directly as a result of covid and know lots others who got sick. And look at the shock of people who realise they can actually hug now, after so much time spent distancing, who look as if they’ve forgotten how to do it.


There were times when it felt as if everyone I spoke to regularly was either dead, dying or sick. And yet, when I spoke to some of my friends I didn’t hear from elsewhere, they didn’t see any of it: all their friends were young and healthy and they clearly had good genes where their immune systems kept them safe. There was a disconnect just like the one in this story that led to all sorts of side effects:: the amount of strangers I saw, even in my own social media bubbles, who said that covid wasn’t real and it was all a ‘conspiracy’, despite all the data to the contrary, in phrases just like the one in this story when people are being eaten by slugs. Even so, there was a sense of denial that came with it, a number of followers and friends who just disappeared overnight, just like this story, that none of my friends would talk about or allow themselves to think about. For many people the only way to get through covid was to pretend that it wasn’t happening – and that if it wasn’t it couldn’t possibly happen to them. Just look at the ending too: a Doctor, of all people, steps in to say they can save everyone, because they kind of can now: we know covid is airborne, that we can defeat it with vaccinations and masking and ventilation. But nobody wants to know: people think the danger is past now and will gladly take their chances with the slugs. So many doctors (or at any rate medical researchers) I know are tearing their heart  out over such ignorance, just like the Doctor does here. And a slug sucking your face, that attached to your body (just like a virus with a spike protein) is the perfect analogy: I only wish Russell had written in a line about how it doesn’t eat everyone and some people get ‘long slug’, eaten from the outside in slowly and still expected by society to do their two hours work a day or they get kicked out of FineTime. ‘You’re not really living’ say everyone to me as I spent my time stuck in my house as an alternative to death, ‘it didn’t get me’ – but as someone whose name is genetically early on in the alphabet and first in the queue to get eaten by slugs I prefer half a life indoors to being eaten by a slug, thanks. Oh and if you’re the sort of fan who wants to point out that Russell said he first got the idea for this story and pitched it to Steven Moffat in 2010, that was a brief sketch on a phonecall about a social media world with slugs; I remain convinced it was covid that, effectively, gave these slugs teeth as it were. Russell almost says that he thinks covid was created artificially, in a lab, to cull the population of people who don’t do anything much except take up space and resources too…then swiftly moves on, the Doctor’s words left dangling in the air.  


It all fits with the main themes of class and prejudice too, with covid revealing lots of unpleasant truths about the people around me, that I hadn’t known were there. Early on in the pandemic there was a study that revealed how ethnic minorities were dying at a quicker rate, right about the time of the ‘George Floyd’ riots over the endemic racism inside the police force. A former friend, who said that covid wasn’t real or dangerous on the one hand, said they should stay at home because there was obviously something genetically ‘inferior’ about people of colour. The truth, of course, is that they were far more likely to be at work despite the pandemic in conditions that meant they were closely packed in with other people, an unfair economic system giving them no choice but to turn up for work and get sick (needless to say, he’s not a friend anymore). One phrase you saw banded a lot during the pandemic’s early phases was ‘key workers’ – the nurses, teachers, binmen and council workers who had to turn up to work despite the danger or the country would have ground to a halt (this was Britain but it was the same all over). One thing that nobody seemed to point out: the ‘key work’ was all working class jobs. Doctors aside, the upper classes stayed at home, because who needed estate agents, lawyers, dieticians and business strategists when we were all at home?  


What happened when we went indoors for those months of lockdown? The insects reclaimed all of our human spaces, almost overnight. They didn’t care about humans and covid: they couldn’t catch it; to them we were momentarily further down the food chain and we didn’t like it. Like ‘Frontios’ it felt at one point as if the only familiar thing left at the end of the world would be the giant insects reclaiming their land. The slugs themselves aren’t named on screen though the ‘Unleashed’ behind-the-scenes documentary refers to them as ‘The Man-Traps’. I’m sad that nobody refers to them as ‘Tractators’, the giant woodlice from 1983’s ‘Frontios’ which must surely be an influence on this story. After all there are such parallels: the end of the world scenario, the way they shuffle along slowly unlike most Dr Who monsters relying on people being blind to them and the fact they are the monster in a story that’s really all about denial and ignorance in the face of overwhelming evidence. One thought: knowing how many stories Russell gets from reading the news were they inspired by the bedbug outbreak in France from 2022? A time when lots of British papers boasted it would never happen here and which the French media quickly said was something that only happened to poor people with bad hygiene habits rather than something to worry about (rather than attack of nature caused by a previously privileged ecosystem). They’re a worthy pun too, about how the world is always so ‘sluggish’ to catch on to what’s really happening and how we have to keep being ‘rescued’ by someone telling us something that we should really know for ourselves. They’re a great idea, all slobbering slime and killing by suffocation, so nobody ever hears them. They are, though, the weakest aspect of the story though I think: despite the extra Disney money and the advances in CGI they’re not any more convincing on screen than the lesser monsters from Russell’s first time round, like the Krillotane or the Pyroviles. In this story, more than usual, it’s so important that they look ‘real’ because the rest of this society is so obviously fake – but they don’t (the models used for the actors’ eyelines, as seen in ‘Unleashed’ are more convincing than I expected though  - perhaps they should have been men in costume instead, for all of the problems they had with the inflexible Tractators the first time round, who could barely move). Also their backstory is only sketched in: they’ve apparently been brought to this world to kill these people off, but by who? What for? I mean, these people are annoying but I’m not sure they deserve to die just because of that – show much better still this story might have been if there had been a back story of a rival tech to ‘Bubble’ who was trying to take over the market by killing off all their rival’s customers (it could be a bloke named Melon Usk, to go with the daft names and satire). A shame, especially given how cleverly Russell gives us all the exposition we need in Ruby’s scene trying to get Lindy to listen to her (which is so much more convincing a place to do it than the usual ‘scene in the Tardis nattering’ or ‘the baddy speaking to his minions’ scenes). The fact that they’re killing people off in alphabetical order is a bit weird too: it makes sense of why only some people have died and not others (and gee thanks Russell, apparently I’d be one of the last to be gobbled up before the ending!) but it makes no sense as an invasion plan or as an infestation and raises the very real question of just how intelligent these mute slugs are (I mean, are they killing people off a list? Can they read? Where do they even keep a list without getting slime all over it?) I fully expected another scene in here, one that explained everything or at the very least linked it back to this year’s big bad. I mean, it could still have something to do with The Toymaker and other divine Godlike beings, I suppose, but slugs seem a little too…Earthy for that.  



There is, though, one great scene I wasn’t expecting at all which is the defining moment of this story. We’ve been following Lindy all story and yeah, sure she’s annoying but she’s also quite sweet in an innocent naïve sort of a way: she’s the sort of character you want to shake out of her complacency and mother, sure, but you get the impression that she doesn’t wish bad on anyone; that the friends in her friends list are actual people she cares about. And then there’s that scene where she’s ‘saved’ by her favourite celebrity, Ricky September, who presumably once led her in a slug-singalong about the importance of washing your hands during slug lockdown. She idolises him: I’m not entirely sure why given he seems as vacuous as she does, but then he does a very brave thing and risk her life to save her from a slug. It is, if you will, on a par with some of the celebs (mostly musicians) still brave enough to speak out about covid and put their careers on pause by refusing to play indoor concerts or insisting on testing before gigs or taking their songs off streaming platforms that promote conspiracy theorists (if this whole sorry era has a hero It’s Neil Young. If it has another it’s Bruce Springsteen. It had a third in David Crosby, till he gave in after three years of refusing to tour and put his fans in danger till he faced going bankrupt – instead he tragically caught covid and died during rehearsals for his comeback). What does Lindy do? She says how September isn’t his real name, that really his surname is ‘Coombe’ and he deserves to be eaten first. And so he is, right in front of her, while she legs it out of danger. Lindy isn’t a cute character, she’s a monster. And the fact we’ve been in her head, seeing the narrative from her point of view and gone along with it, hits you in the stomach: what else have we been blind to by only seeing things from her perspective. It’s a really clever twist in a story full of them (though only a very brief Susan twist this week, as an ambulance driver): something Dr Who has never ever done before. I mean, it’s come close – ‘Mission To The Unknown’ in 1965 gave us a choice between terrorists and Daleks and ‘The Black Guardian’ trilogy spends a lot of time seeing things from Turlough’s point of view as he tries to kill the Doctor – but both stories were about people pushed to extremes who didn’t know any better. Lindy does. She’s a monster bigger than any slug and the Doctor knows it and still tries to save her – and then she’s racist to him. It’s such a great finale – I mean it was a good episode, already in my top 100, but that finale comes out of nowhere and says more than the usual techno solution ever could: I mean, it takes more than a reversal of the polarity of the neutron flow to sort this crooked mess out; these people are too far gone to save. And, in great Dr Who tradition, it’s all their own fault.



So much of this episode rests on the acting of unknown actress Callie Cooke, whose in practically every scene. She rather nervously jokes in ‘Unleashed’ that the last time an all-new character had this much attention it was Carey Mulligan in ‘Blink’ and that didn’t do her career any harm. I fear it won’t, simply because this is, on the surface level, a role that seems to be less demanding, of a spoilt rich kid without the range that Carey had as Sally Sparrow (indeed this one’s more like that other Doctor and companion-lite Russell story ‘Love and Monsters’, albeit a Monster obsessed with self-love). Yet in many ways it’s a better performance. Callie needs to juggle so many things at once: we need to like her enough to spend time with her, feel for her enough to identify with her, yet still be mildly irritated with her and believe that she’s still believable enough a monster to be capable of the biog betrayal at the end. She is all those things all at once, with a character who could so easily be a one-dimensional stereotype right on the, ahem, bubble of being good or bad. If Millie Gibson stole the show last week in Doctor-lite episode ‘73 Yards’ then she steals this one and a lot of the story works as well as it does mostly because of her. A word too for her friends though: they get precious little screen time and when they do they’re inanely singing ‘Itsy Bitsy Polkadot Bikini’ and yet there’s a sense of real people behind the masks here too, of a full culture that’s grown up warped that existed long before we first joined them. I just wish that the Doctor and Ruby had been a bigger part of the narrative, something caused by necessity (Ncuti was late to the planned filming schedules because of his final days shooting ‘Sex Education’; Millie, meanwhile, was busy shooting ’73 Yards’ back-to-back with this story). Unlike ‘Blink’ or ‘Love and Monsters’ where having the Doctor and companion there only briefly helped the storyline, this one misses them: we know, of course, that they’re both good people trying to help but it would make the story even punchier if Lindy and her friends could see more evidence of how good they were. Plus it seems more than a little odd that they’ve homed in on the very person who is about to be eaten by story’s end; it’s a good job they didn’t start with Zinedene Zidane or Zygon Zogbert or something or they might still be working the plot out.

Overall, then, no ‘Dot and Bubble’ isn’t perfect. By its very nature, as a story about shallow people in which the Doctor barely appears, there are none of those great passionate Russell T monologues of old to inspire you. I worry that this story is still too subtle to get through to the people who most need to understand it. I mean, it’s detractors will still say that it’s ‘just’ a weird oddball story about mean-eating slugs, moan about the lack of action (there is, perhaps, a few too many repetitive slug-escaping scenes and it’s all too slow motion to really be called an ‘action’ sequence), the lack of the Doctor and the fact that there are plotholes (or at least lot omissions) big enough to ride a slug through. Already this story’s detractors are out in force complaining about this story and particularly the ending) for being ‘woke’. Well, yes it is, but only in the phrase’s literal sense: we are all blind to something, asleep to basic prejudices in our own bubble of privilege that allows us to be ignorant of what is going on to people around us, even people who live and work a few feet away from us that we have grown accustomed to never ever speak to. ‘Dot and Bubble’ is Russell really slugging it out with white rich fans who say that Dr Who is not for ‘them’ anymore: it’s a show for all of us; if society starts including anybody on grounds of race or class that’s when society starts breaking down and everything starts going wrong. I love Russell’s writing when he bares his teeth like this and after a comeback era of largely colourful cartoons it’s so great to have a story with such a powerful message again. ‘Dot and Bubble’ is what I live for as a Whovian: a story that made me feel, made me think and was full of monsters – if not necessarily the ones I expected to be monsters when I started watching – told in such a bonkers way that no other primetime series would dream of doing or indeed get away with. It is, in short, my favourite story in a decade, since Peter Capaldi let Zygons be Zygons in ‘The Zygon Invasion/Inversion’, give or take Jodie Whittaker’s best turn in ‘Eve Of The Daleks’. At last I wear my Dr Who fan badge with pride, because this here is the reason this is the greatest show in the galaxy: the one that’s simultaneously the most fun and the deepest,  most sombre series you will ever see, saying things that no one else is in brave enough to say in a manner that’s all of its own making. ‘Dot and Bubble’ is exactly what this series is for, perhaps more than any other episode in its long history: giving a voice and a platform to people who might not get heard in such a mainstream way otherwise and pointing out uncomfortable truths nobody wants to hear. It’s in the grand of old Who tradition of telling us things we don’t want to see in a cute and playful way – and yet at the same time this story is utterly unlike anything that ever came before it, with a style all it’s own that’s somehow very ‘now’ in 2024. And to think Ncuti has barely started: indeed on pure screen time he’s on about episode three by now compared to most other Doctors. After a sluggish start to his era the 15th Doctor’s time feels as if it’s finally arrived and found its feet now – let’s just hope he gets to spend more time in screen next week (putting two Doctor-lite episodes together seems an odd move). 

+ POSITIVES I love ‘The Bubble’! It’s a combination of every social media going, a series of bright colourful screens dancing in the air that seem to give the sensation of having a wide view (after all, you have to turn your head to see everything and they stretch off into the distance) but which is actually narrow and restricted. It’s a clever idea and Disney money well spent. Those of you who’ve come to these reviews from my scifi book series ‘Kindred Spirits’ might know ‘the universal’ which is the social media used by twelve alien civilisations: in my head it looked just like this. Oh and if you want to know what a whole ‘Love Planet’ version of ‘Love Island’ looks like that’s in book five ‘Abundance’ published last year. Not that I’m saying Russell is reading my work or anything (I know he isn’t from the sales figures alone)…


- NEGATIVES Ricky September’s death would have had a lot more impact if we’d got to know him as a person rather than a caricature. I mean, is his saving Lindy a sudden change of morals or has he been hiding his true convictions in plain sight all this time? I like to imagine had had a failed string of singles called ‘The slugs are coming to get youuuu’ and was nearly dropped by his record label before doing a silly cover song about a bikini. This story would have been super-powerful if Russell had followed up his spotify-kicking episode ‘The Devil’s Chord’ and shown how lowering music to its lowest common denominator results in faceless vacuous nonentities singing empty songs like this when the real job of celebrities/musicians is to teach us as much as it is to entertain, to get us to see beyond our own bubble. If there had been any sense of that before Ricky’s last scene, had he at least tried to do the right thing before, his death would have been even more of a shock (after all, it’s a general law of Dr Who that the good guys win and the bad ones die – but not always, which is why it’s all more shocking when it happens the ‘wrong’ way round). Instead it’s just the death of a caricature who came god and turned into a real person in his dying breaths, which isn’t anywhere near as effective. I also totally thought Ricky was a hologram of the Doctor as the only way he would ever get Lindy to listen to him would be to become a thick white stereotype rich dude (there are definitely some Ncuti mannerisms going on there) but no.


BEST QUOTE:  ‘You don't have to like me. The only important thing is to get you out’.



PREQUELS/SEQUELS: Officially none, but ‘Frontios’ is clearly cut from the insect-covered cloth.

Previous ’73 Yards’ next ‘Rogue’


The Legend Of Ruby Sunday/Empire Of Death: Ranking - N/A (but #130ish)

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