It’s incredibly timely that just as Amazon opens a new headquarters in New York to quite a bit of controversy, Doctor Who presents an episode that’s largely a fierce satire of Amazon, right down to the very reason for the current outrage. It’s an episode that ultimately revolves around dissatisfaction with automation and minimizing jobs, which is very curious and coincidental. I’m not saying that the soulless intergalactic delivery company that serves as the title of this episode is where the largest online retail conglomerate in operation today is headed, but it wouldn’t surprise me if something like it was in their ten-year plan.
Apart from this little bit of commentary though, “Kerblam!” is an above average episode for an interesting issue it tackles maturely, some good performances and humour, and a perfectly fine mystery by Doctor Who standards that subverts expectations. But its momentum is often shaky and the stakes aren’t all that compelling. Also the evil plan hinges on a universally accepted idiosyncrasy that’s a little bit hard to take seriously.
While travelling, the Doctor, Ryan, Yaz, and Graham receive a Kerblam! Man robot delivering a package (clearly they’re not a very reliable service as the package containing a fez was ordered during the Doctor’s Eleventh incarnation). On the back of the packing slip though is a message reading “HELP”, so the gang travel to Kerblam! Headquarters where a number of staff have been disappearing. Becoming employees there themselves, they investigate the suspicious goings-on.
Ryan makes the comment early on, “halfway across the universe and I feel like I’m back at work”. and Kerblam! certainly resembles a modern company more than most space-faring institutions Doctor Who has depicted over the years. Even the Kerblam! Man robots don’t seem too far off. This episode has fun too putting its characters in a work environment; the Doctor and Ryan in packaging, Yaz in the stockroom, and Graham in maintenance. There’s some comedy that comes with this, jokes at the expense of these kind of real-life retailers, but on a serious note it’s also trying to honestly relate life at various levels of company hierarchy through characters like Judy, Kira, and Dan who represent the working class. Dan may just be your typical middle-aged bloke with a good heart cracking jokes and working hard for his family (not too dissimilar from Graham in fact), but there’s sincerity to his convictions. Also, there’s Judy running the People Department with a firm knowledge of her responsibilities and authority, yet also open-minded and understanding. The episode seems to point in the direction of her being the villain for a while because, frankly, she fits the Doctor Who cliché of the one in charge being the one responsible. Even the Doctor has noticed this pattern and is suspicious herself until the climax. And Julie Hesmondhalgh does a fine job hitting this balance for the audience, reuniting with her Broadchurch co-star Jodie Whittaker to play a character who actually smiles occasionally and is as confounded and eager to get to the bottom of the disappearances as the Doctor, once she realizes their extent.
The mystery is interesting in how it does subvert that rule, not once but twice. The angry and obtuse middle manager Jarva Slade, played by Callum Dixon is also a red herring villain, when he too is just investigating things. But for these, the mystery is rather conventional if modestly engaging through its characters and their conclusions, until it comes to a climax which delivers on it pretty well, but with a fairly large asterix. The army of robots is a bit of a trite concept at this point, though the packages they’re delivering being not armed with weapons is great. But the detonative device that will kill thousands is somewhere between admirably creative and just plain stupid: bubble wrap. The grand weapon being used in the destructive evil plan of the generally unsuspecting custodian Charlie (Leo Flannigan) is the popping of bubble wrap. This as well as the show’s inability to really convey the reach of Kerblam! lowers the stakes dramatically. While it’s always been in Doctor Who’s ethos to make the ordinary and the trivial threatening, this just seems a little too goofy. As much as the internet may disagree, the temptation to pop bubble wrap isn’t nearly as strong as is believed. I suspect if this plan had gone through, Charlie would still have killed a lot of people, but only a fraction of his intended target.
Charlie’s not a strong villain per se, but he is a good representation of an extreme, probably better than the future Nazi from “Rosa”. Provoked by a hatred for technology that’s arisen out of a sense of disenfranchisement with Kerblam!’s mere 10% human hiring record, his is a crusade to discredit the Kerblam! Men and technology in general in the most psychotic way possible, by massacring the customers. It’s a clean illustration of how easily an ideological viewpoint can be warped by deranged individuals. The Doctor as usual makes the right case, the one in defence of technology, giving one of Whittaker’s best speeches yet combating his paranoid ideas about “the system”. “The systems aren’t the problem” she says. “How people use and exploit the systems, that’s the problem.” The Doctor’s challenging technophobia, which is good, as too often people seem to think computers being in charge of things will inevitably come at a cost for people, an impression Doctor Who itself has contributed to let’s be honest. I like Charlie’s stubbornness and refusal to see logic, close as he comes when reminded an unintended casualty was the girl he had a crush on (it would have been an easier resolution to redeem the little bastard), but more so the fact there is a genuine argument from where he’s coming from. That 10% figure doesn’t necessarily reflect well on Kerblam!
Kerblam! isn’t a very nice place as is, quite authoritarian when you think about it; everyone wearing ankle monitors that track their movements and listen to everything they say. There’s little freedom it appears too with tight schedules, strict work hours and timing, it very much feels like a company actively trying to get rid of its human cogs. However the people working there by and large seem to have no issues. The two blue collar employees we meet are both optimists, both somewhat naive, and both undeserving of their fates. Yet we never meet the person or computer in charge of Kerblam! and so these issues can’t really be confronted. The robots, though commendable for their intuitiveness to detect and resist their own exploitation (it was the system that sent that “HELP” notice), also don’t make the place very comfortable. As Ryan points out, they are creepy, have too much control, and bear in mind, they fought back against Charlie by murdering his love interest -maybe they’re not so great after all. The episode comes out on the side of Kerblam! in the end with the context of Judy’s efforts to make it more “organically” directed going forward. Hopefully that means it’ll treat its employees less like machines. Maybe Kerblam! needs a Union.
Claudia Jessie (Amelia Sedley on the new Vanity Fair) plays the woman of Charlie’s affections, Kira, and is really good as this eternally joyful but lost young woman too absorbed with and reliant on the company (when your happiness depends on thinking about other peoples’ happiness maybe you’re not in a fulfilling job). However her relationship with Charlie is very “T.V. awkward”, little better than something you’d see on show like The Big Bang Theory. As Dan Cooper, Lee Mack was a surprise. Whenever a popular stand-up appears on Doctor Who, you fear they’ll be too distracting, and while Mack doesn’t rise to the occasion as much as say, Frank Skinner, he does manage to feel genuine and a little charming. Some of his stand-up/panel show personality shows through, but he isn’t just there because he’s a big name to fill a useless part like has been the case with Bill Bailey, Lee Evans, Mitchell and Webb, and of course, Peter Kay.
There’s a very fun sequence where Ryan, repeating an ill-advised stunt he once pulled at his normal job, slides down a shoot to the conveyor floor with Yaz and Charlie in tow that kind of turns into part of the climax of Monsters Inc. He even accidentally pushes Charlie off of one belt which is pretty funny. Ryan is the only regular used to this kind of work, so we get to see an inkling of his work life and attitude in Sheffield. Right before this incident when his dyspraxia poses an issue he has a nice Three Musketeers moment to justify him and Yaz not letting Charlie go alone. A minor storyline for Yaz turns up in her relationship with and respect for Dan, whose death was the result of an order he took on on her behalf. He had a little pendant from his daughter that she takes back to her at the end of the episode. Graham has the least story this week, but the best comedy lines: “space postman -I’ve seen it all now”, “Kerblam!’s trying to kill their own customers, that’s the worst business plan I’ve ever heard”. The Doctor gets some herself and a couple references for fans (the fez as well as a callback to “The Unicorn and the Wasp”). But she also once again has that charming dedication to her mission that makes her just blow her own ruse at one point, and the intellect and confidence to know she can get away with this. And I still love her reaction to guns. When Slade points one at her, she doesn’t hesitate to immediately stun him in the neck till she’s takes it off him in one of the episodes’ single coolest moments.
Someone brought Kerblam! bubble wrap into the TARDIS at the end of the episode as the gang are leaving, and Graham looks at it alluringly even in the knowledge of what it can do. In this last shot, the episode knows its main source of tension was a joke. “Kerblam!” the episode managed to get by in spite of that, but I have much higher hopes for next week’s Jacobean-set show about witchcraft. Even if that show features a similarly silly Alan Cumming.
Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/jbosch/
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