Even though it’s been out for less than a day at the time of writing this, I feel like the ending of Dot & Bubble will get talked about much more than the rest of the episode. The final five minutes are fantastic, and I will get to them, but safe to say Dot & Bubble had its work cut out to get me to like it.
This wasn’t an episode I was looking forward to, mainly because I remember the behind-the-scenes production photographs that came out when they started filming the series two years ago, and I remember thinking that the strange slug creatures, the episode’s main alien monsters, looked absolutely laughable. When I say laughable, I mean “they escaped from The Twin Dilemma and Warriors of The Deep” levels of laughable. And when I found out that they were in this episode, which also had a garish production design with colours and clothing styles that seem plopped straight out of an early Sylvester McCoy story, my expectation levels were quite low.
OK, it’s written by Russell T. Davies, who’s already delivered a couple of standout episodes in this era and has a tendency of making off-kilter production design and strange silly ideas work (hell, we opened this very series with an episode called Space Babies.) But still, the concept didn’t particularly intrigue me.
And then I watched it.
Dot & Bubble is one of the biggest surprises I’ve ever had with a Doctor Who episode. I was not expecting to like this nearly as much as I did, but I found myself drawn in and then blown away by this episode’s ingenious mix of satire, dystopia and quite chilling horror.
One thing that’s very clever about Dot & Bubble is the way that it plays with setting. This seemingly utopian environment Finetime is a massive suburban paradise, but the actual episode feels very claustrophobic, with much of it confined to within these bubbles that serve as the only thing the residents interact with on a daily basis. Their entire day is determined by the bubbles, which even tell them which way to walk so that they don’t walk into any furniture or walls. Of course, this is fairly obvious wordplay on RTD’s part. We too are confined to social media bubbles, we’re only seeing the things that we want to see or that interest us (i.e why my Twitter is either Doctor Who or rants about the Tories), and anyone we don’t like we can just block, much like our main character blocks the Doctor when he tries to help, dismissing him as a stranger.
Let’s talk about our main character for a second. Lindy Pepper-Bean, played excellently by Callie Cooke, is basically the perfect example of the blind servant in a dystopia narrative. She barely thinks for herself, loves her happy little life, and lives a carefree existence talking with her friends – though, of course, it’s broken fairly quickly when the Doctor and Ruby instruct her to look ‘outside the bubble’ to see the danger – a big massive slug thing that is gobbling up one of her work colleagues. It’s a disturbing but wacky image and also called to mind for me the scene in The Eleventh Hour, where the Doctor instructs Amy to look with the corner of her eye, where she sees the mysterious door in her house she didn’t even know was there.
It’s the tightest and most focused script thus far, with concepts that are all explored thoroughly, off-kilter horror and production design, great performances and one of the darkest twists I’ve ever seen in Doctor Who.
The satirical allusions to social media are on-the-nose to say the least, but that’s to be expected from a Russell T. Davies script and hey, he is normally really good at doing on-the-nose things well. This episode, however, is particularly good at it, and has really creative means of showing through the bubble how the world begins unravelling. I love how the amount of people that these monsters have killed is presented through Lindy Pepper-Bean’s chat room slowly emptying as people go ‘offline,’ as well as the subtle allusions to the ending with some of Lindy’s thoughts about the Doctor and Ruby being condescending.
I will admit at first the episode can seem like it’s criticising the young generation, who are too plugged in to their phones to be considerate people, and that viewpoint is obviously bullshit. However, Russell is ultimately too clever of a writer for it to really mean that, and as Finetime begins to disintegrate, so do the layers of not just the system, but the people too.
Although this has been classed as a “Doctor-lite” episode, much like how 73 Yards was last week, the Doctor and Ruby have a large amount of influence over this week’s plot. They turn up in the bubbles to alert Lindy to the danger and direct her where to go. There’s tunnels running underneath the town that lead to the river, where the survivors will make their escape to the Wild Woods, a place they are told they shouldn’t go.
What makes their prospects even bleaker is a very striking shot when Ricky September, a popular resident who Lindy admires, checks on the status of the other colony, where many of their families reside, to see that it has been totally ravaged. The image of an alien slug standing tall above a wasteland was particularly harrowing, even more so when the other residents never actually find out what has happened.
The final ten minutes here though, are devastating. Upon realising that the monsters are removing victims by alphabetical order of surname, a deliberate attempt by a system that has learned to hate its users, a major shift in tone and character occurs when Lindy ends up sacrificing Ricky September to the Dot, since September is in fact a fake name and it actually begins with a C. It’s from here that the entire script flips and it’s one of the bleakest and most genius scenes Russell T. Davies has ever penned for the show. It’s astounding.
It’s not often in Doctor Who that the ‘evil system’ might actually have a point, but the way in which the survived residents reveal them as loathsome, uncaring xenophobes who know their bubble and nothing else is a real gut-punch, and it’s not often we see the Doctor’s offer to help being met with dismissals this blunt and mocking. This is apparently one of the first scenes Ncuti shot for the role, and it’s one hell of a scene to start with too, being powerless to stop this oblivious society from heading to their certain doom.
The way in which he is stunned into silence, before uncontrollably laughing and then screaming in frustration, is not only unbelievably powerful and intense, but feels so unique to his Doctor. I can see Eccleston reigning hell on them, Tennant using his quiet fury to make them realise the consequences of their actions, or Jodie accepting that they won’t listen but still speaking her mind about their lack of morality. Here, Ncuti can only sit there and cry as these survivors leave without so much as a thank you. Not only was the system right to hate its residents, it let them foster hate and prejudice by keeping them in the bubbles.
Dot & Bubble really did sneak up on me. I was expecting it to be a light fluffy filler episode, albeit with a shade of Black Mirror-esque satire, but instead Russell decided to deliver his second fantastic episode in a row. It’s the tightest and most focused script thus far, with concepts that are all explored thoroughly, off-kilter horror and production design, great performances and one of the darkest twists I’ve ever seen in Doctor Who. Some episodes this series have occasionally felt a little disorganised, but this really came together in an incredibly powerful and affecting way. It’s the third great episode in a row, and proof that this era has really come into its own.
Also, the needle drop of Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini was amazing.
Doctor Who (Dot & Bubble) is available to watch now on BBC iPlayer
