Rating: 73/100
Sometimes Doctor Who episode ideas bounce around for a while before they finally get made. At the end of the Season 5 finale “The Big Bang,” the Doctor answers a call about a mummy on the Orient Express, but it’s not until Season 8 that the Doctor finally ends up fighting a mummy on the Orient Express in the aptly titled “Mummy on the Orient Express.” The Doctor has a time machine, after all, so he can take his time getting to certain crises.
When Russell T. Davies was leaving the show around 2009, new showrunner Steven Moffat would often ask him if he would come back as a one-off writer, and one idea that Davies pitched him was what would eventually become this week’s episode, “Dot and Bubble.” According to Radio Times, the conversation didn’t go too far, as it was determined to be too expensive for the show’s budget at the time. But now, 15 years later, with Davies back as showrunner and Disney pumping money into the show’s budget, they finally had the resources available to shoot “Dot and Bubble.”
In the episode, we visit a world called Finetime, a world made up entirely of people ages 17-27 whose families are rich enough to afford to send them to Finetime. Finetime residents spend only two hours a day working, and the rest of the time they party, all while being constantly connected to a perpetual social network. A bubble is constantly around their heads, giving them a live social network with all of the residents of Finetime, even telling them the direction to walk in so they don’t have to look at the real world with their own eyes. But, when an alien race attacks Finetime and starts eating the residents, it turns out that this might be a world that’s woefully unprepared for an alien attack. The Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) and his companion Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson) manage to gain the reluctant trust of one Finetime resident, Lindy Pepper-Bean, and try to guide her out of Finetime to safety, but they runs into difficulties as Lindy is not particularly cooperative.
This is an episode that I grew to like more on repeated viewings because my first impression of the episode was that it was really hard to care about the residents of Finetime. Besides the fact that they’re spoiled rich kids, they’re just generally unlikable people. It’s not just that they’re vapid and shallow; they’re mean to other people, particular the Doctor and his companion, Ruby. For that reason, I might have preferred to see the episode more from the Doctor and Ruby’s point-of-view rather than the point-of-view of the residents of Finetime.
But there are some elements that take a second or third viewing to catch, most notably the racial undertones in this episode. First, it was my viewing companion and good friend Liz who caught that there are no people of color whatsoever in Finetime. Every single resident is white. But then there are very subtle moments that point out the racism of Finetime’s residents, like when Lindy implies that she didn’t realize the Doctor was the same person the second time she saw him because she thinks all black people look the same. Truly, this episode would have been harder to do before the casting of the first Black Doctor, as a big theme of this episode is the refusal of the Finetime residents to be rescued from destruction by a Black man, much to the Doctor’s frustration.
But, while the racism of the characters is played off very subtly, there’s another, more boomer-esque form of social commentary in this episode that hits with the subtlety of a sledgehammer: “These damn kids are on their phones too much!” The anti-social-media message is pervasive, and it feels rather condescending to young people. I’m all for mocking the rich and vapid, but fears about the dangers of social media are typically overblown, and this episode takes it to an absurd extreme. There’s a scene where Lindy tries to walk without the assistance of her bubble telling her where to go, and she finds herself incapable of walking on her own. We get it, Davies, you’re old and don’t like new things.
The other thing that bugged me about this episode is that, while Lindy’s refusal to let the Doctor help her is rooted in racism, she does some other things that are shockingly ruthless to survive the situation, and it seems hard to believe that she wouldn’t take the Doctor up on his offer to save her life. The refusal to accept the Doctor’s help is central to the episode, but it doesn’t exactly square with her selfish self-preservation instinct.
That being said, there are layers to this episode that come to light on repeated viewings. Still, other aspects of the episode are shockingly unsubtle, beating you about the head with an obvious point. Frankly, I’m impressed that Davies was able to find any level of subtlety in this episode. But I can’t entirely get past the old-man-yells-at-cloud element of the story’s attempt at social commentary. It’s an uneven episode with some hard-to-swallow elements, but it’s certainly re-watchable.
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Photo courtesy of Disney+
