"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’
