Doctor Who Reviews: "Dot and Bubble"

So Russell T. Davies has clearly been watching some Black Mirror in his time away from Doctor Who, and as the bleak anthology series is wont to do, it provoked him. Black Mirror’s preoccupation with the ills and mystery of technology has long been shared by Doctor Who, and Davies himself tapped into it during his prior time on the show, most notably in the first series. But that was 2005 and a whole world away from 2024 in terms of technology and our dependence on it. Back then he could make fun of shallow reality television, but now the ways we are consumed by our technology provides a whole slew of new opportunities.

But “Dot and Bubble” is a double-header for Davies as it connects its social media satire with a heavy class and privilege-oriented critique that is mostly silly in nature until the very end when it is jarringly not. This is a classic monster episode of Doctor Who, but one in which you’re not particularly encouraged to sympathize with the victims.

One of them, or at least a target, is Lindy Pepper-Bean (Callie Cooke), one of seemingly hundreds of young adult residents in a pristine habitat called Fineworld isolated by the Wild Woods surrounding it. For their own protection they are kept in a bubble and almost constantly in their Bubbles -spheres around their heads that connect them socially but blind them to everything in the real world. These are powered by an A.I. called Dot that monitors and maintains even the most basic of human exercises like walking or urinating. People barely ever interact in person, and apart from sleep are permanently in their Bubbles.

It’s not a terribly subtle social media analogue, and it’s pretty clear Davies has a phenomenal aversion to it by the way he illustrates it having complete control over young people’s lives to the point they can barely think for themselves. But there is a certain prescience to aspects of it -that damn chip that Elon Musk wants to install in our heads comes to mind. The interface itself is very bright and bubbly in that manner common of certain sci-fi dystopian aesthetics seen in the likes of Squid Game or indeed Black Mirror. But it firmly fits in the Doctor’s universe as well.

Speaking of the guy, we first see him trying to interrupt Lindy’s friend group stream to warn her of danger and the monsters that exist in the real world, stalking people down and consuming them. This is one of those stories that joins the Doctor mid-adventure -he and Ruby have already arrived, assessed, and even figured out a way from outside to hack into the Bubble. And for most of the episode this is the only way we see them, through the screen of the Bubble, the very thing that is poisoning Lindy and the others and that needs to be shut off for her to complete tasks of escape. I wonder if Davies noticed the irony in that.

Anyway, once Lindy lowers her screen -is awoken from The Matrix if you will- she discovers that Finetown is mostly empty; and rather than people in her office -where she supposedly works sending information back to Homeworld but cannot articulate what it is she actually does- there are giant carnivorous slugs with gaping mouths and tendrils to pull victims in. The Doctor and Ruby guide her to safety and she communicates with her friends what she has learned -letting the Doctor and Ruby in to instruct them how to get to a conduit where they can escape and wait for rescue from their Homeworld.

It’s here that the episode reveals that all of these people are the children of the most elite and wealthy on their world, that they are essentially a bunch of trust fund kids that have been sent away for some reason to this remote colony, and that Lindy not knowing the ins and outs of her job is not so much a form of brainwashing as just the fact that none of them are expected to actually work. It’s one of a few times that Davies turns the tables on the conventions of this type of Doctor Who premise, by making its supposedly relatable figure a subject of ridicule or outright scorn. It’s honestly kind of clever the way that he gradually expands this, largely to the former degree before the latter. Lindy is vain and entitled, and very dumb. You can imagine its some kind of catharsis the way she is made to walk into a pole multiple times before figuring out how to go around it -it’s Monty Python level rich idiot humour at times. But it does have the effect of diminishing slightly the sting of the social media critique, because it very easily creates a barrier between audience and protagonist, where they don’t have to think about their own social media consumption much. This addictive trait is only applicable to the hyper-rich, and thus we don’t have to worry about it. Nor do we have to take the effects of online bubbles all that seriously in our own lives.

That takeaway is almost certainly accidental on Davies’ part, but it is still there -and reinforced by Lindy’s continued vanity. When her battery runs out (yes, these things are still battery powered) and she has to make her way to the conduit without the Doctor, she is unexpectedly guided instead by another person outside the Bubble: an extremely popular influencer called Ricky September (Tom Rhys Harries), and once he gets her past a bunch of slugs she comments on how a the worst day of her life might’ve become the best because she met him -Ricky rightly pointing out that lots of people are still getting eaten. A moment later when she’s back in the Bubble, she brags about meeting Ricky and calling him her friend amidst the dire circumstances. These moments are played as jokes at her shallowness and general lack of grace -although they hint at something more sinister that we’ll soon see. Ricky is well-rounded, spends most of his time outside the Bubble in spite of his enormous popularity, and is coded in a more conscientious light by repeatedly confirming consents for hugs or holding hands with Lindy.

Together they make it to the tunnel where the conduit is and Ricky tries to contact the Homeworld only to discover its human population has been eradicated by the slugs -though he chooses not to tell Lindy. The Doctor realized though that the slugs, which couldn’t have migrated into Finetown from the outside, had to have been created in the city by Dot. As Ricky enters a hundred number combination to access the door, the Doctor finally figures out that each person in Finetown who is dying is being eaten in alphabetical order (he arrives at this conclusion in disbelieving shock that takes so long to be revealed it feels like its own parody of the Doctor Who trope). He further theorizes that Dot has simply grown irritated by the spoiled entitled population of Finetown and so is algorithmically disposing of them. And of course this is the point where they realize that Lindy is next in line and Dot turns on her.

Now all the while this is happening, Ricky is entering the code and trying to get Lindy’s attention. And just when you think this means Ricky is some apparition by Dot, a traitor or a trap, Davies once again pulls the rug out in a way that ensures Lindy is unforgivable. Outside of her Bubble as Dot attacks her, she in desperation reveals that Ricky’s real last name is Coombes and that he ought to go first. She does this just as she finishes the combination so that she can get through while her crush is killed instead -and rather brutally for Doctor Who. Though we don’t see it in full, the little flying Dot that had been pursuing Lindy just moments before flies right through the middle of his head!

It’s the kind of detail that makes the moment stick, and it’s the point where it becomes clear there is no redemption or salvation for Lindy, at least in the eyes of the story. And it is Davies’ ultimate condemnation of her character and subversion of her narrative archetype. I find it fascinating too that the Doctor and Ruby don’t learn of this, nor do of course those couple friends who made it out too. Lindy’s cowardly betrayal is her secret, and her story about him going back and sacrificing himself even appears to convince the Doctor, whom she now meets face to face at the crossing outside his TARDIS.

Ricky’s own secret is revealed to her as the other survivors inform her of the takeover on their Homeworld -though it’s unclear if her comment about her parents ‘going to the sky’ is a coping mechanism or genuine belief. The couple dozen survivors are prepared to travel by boat into the Wild Woods to see if they can find help or safety there. As an alternative, the Doctor suggests taking them in the TARDIS and dropping them off wherever they like. They are galled, Lindy included, by the idea that they would go anywhere with the Doctor’s “kind of person”.

And Davies drops a last bit of utter contempt for these people. They go so far as to specify they wouldn’t want to get too close to someone like the Doctor, and Lindy revealing that she didn’t mind while he was saving her life remotely but couldn’t possibly stay around him. Gatwa plays very well this first experience with racism for the Doctor -a combination of disbelief, bemusement, sadness, and desperation. He pleads with them to let him save them but they won’t listen. Ultimately, he and Ruby have to let them go their own way, before they go theirs.

This ending comes close to betraying what could arguably be a cardinal rule for the Doctor in not letting people die if he can prevent it. But while the script makes clear his own conviction that they would be safer with him, it thankfully doesn’t go so far as to indicate he KNOWS they’re going to die out there -which I think makes a difference. The sudden racist reveal though is quite shocking. I know that Davies’ argument would be that it shouldn’t be -that we should presume a bunch of rich kids, who in their Bubble conversations are seen to be uniformly white, would be racist individuals more likely than not. And it’s fair, though I would say the episode needed a little more subtle pre-empt. Nobody having any bigotry problem with the Doctor throughout makes the eventual racism, and the particularly heavy nature of it, come across very odd. And in that Black Mirror spirit of the episode it feels a little rote. Like that’s a show that would go deeper, target the technology as systemically racist -and we have seen evidence of A.I. in our world displaying racial bias so there’s precedent. This way, it hews closer to the Twilight Zone and its very blunt and basic (though incredibly important for its time) social allegories. This Doctor being black means there are ample opportunities for the show to tackle race in ways it never has before -but this version of it felt rather lacklustre and abrupt.

Where “Dot and Bubble” succeeds however is in its indictment on the effects of social media -which is pretty harsh but effective. In a way, it’s almost an analogue to that future depicted in WALL-E, with nobody able or willing to function on their own without the comfort their technology provides. The episode’s take on wealthy young people isn’t so sharp, but it is often fun -even as this aspect at times gets in the way of the aforementioned theme’s immediacy. And Lindy makes for a very good twist on the outsider protagonist character of a Doctor Who story, whose faults instead of peeling away over the course of forty-five minutes, only become more pronounced, mean, and revealing. The moment she abandons Ricky implies a lot more about the wealthy elite with more genuine severity than the racism scene, and I think Cooke is very good at playing that.

The monsters are effectively gross and low-key creepy -part mollusk, part parasite. And I have to say that Davies and director Dylan Holmes Williams (back from the last episode) set the tone perfectly with regards to the use of “Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini” leading into the titles as perfect encapsulation of just how ludicrous and egregiously twee this world is. A part of me is actually curious to see what’s there beyond Finetown. But nobody should want to travel with racist rich kids to do so. 

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