Hang on, hang on, hang on. Forget everything else. We finally got a Doctor Who episode.
I’m blown away. “Dot and Bubble” is finally an episode of Doctor Who that feels like an episode of Doctor Who. And don’t lump me in with some of the other naysayers. I’ve tried my best to give genuine criticisms of this show, what I liked and what I didn’t. Last week’s episode, “73 Yards,” was real confusing for me. I’ve heard a whole bunch of great explanations since about what went down, things that made it make a little more sense to me. But it’s okay that it wasn’t the greatest thing, because now we’ve got “Dot and Bubble.”
Rich Kids in a Bubble
“Dot and Bubble” is a very interesting episode. It’s definitely allegory. It’s talking about social media, and it’s also talking about a privileged view of the world. It’s focusing on a white, privileged America type of scenario, though it’s in the far-flung future. There’s a world called Homeworld, and there’s a planet where these privileged rich kids, who are all represented as predominantly Caucasian, are doing some sort of data something or other, whatever the heck. But they only work two hours a day. The rest of the day they spend in this dot and bubble scenario, where you live inside the internet.
It’s riding on the coattails of Apple’s headset thing, where people were actually wearing it in public. I know there’s been video of people in them in cars and stuff, and it’s sort of crazy. This takes that idea to its nth degree, and in doing so it really lays out the pitfalls.
There are multiple layers of things being discussed here, and what’s funny is that the last four or five episodes, depending on how you count, felt super preachy to me. This didn’t seem preachy. This episode is how I’ve always expected sci-fi to work. Yes, sci-fi has always had commentary. It’s always talked about the hard subjects: diversity, racism, equality, economy, government, capitalism and whatever else. But it does it like this.
It’s funny, because Mrs. Know-It-All and I started the episode and I had this eye on it like, this is gonna suck. And then it didn’t.
Doctor-Lite? I Kind of Disagree
Now, people will argue this is a Doctor-lite episode. I kind of disagree. I feel more like “73 Yards” was a Doctor-lite episode. This reminded me more of “Blink,” which some people consider to be a Doctor-lite episode, but David Tennant’s presence and Martha’s presence were there most of the time. They were just on this pre-recorded screen thing, and you got the general gist of the idea. This is something similar.
Lindy Pepper-Bean Is Annoying, and I Love Her
Callie Cooke plays Lindy Pepper-Bean. She lives in this world and she’s the focal character, and it’s through her eyes that you see it. The episode gets into itself really quickly, because she’s essentially going through the motions. The Doctor tries to interrupt her, you’ve seen that, and she blocks him, and they show you the superfluousness of these people’s lives. It isn’t until she gets to work that all of a sudden Ruby shows up in her bubble and starts talking to her, almost like she’s surveying her. So Lindy goes along with it, like, okay, fine, whatever.
About halfway through that whole scene, Mrs. Know-It-All looks at me and goes, “She’s annoying.” And I was like, I know. I love her.
Where it ends up going I didn’t see coming, but I understood it a thousand percent. Because Lindy Pepper-Bean, and that’s the kind of names they all have, by the way, is one of those really annoying influencer type people. The kind who are so privileged it’s on another level.
Also, the entire cast literally reads like a who’s who of glorified square-jaw specimens. It’s kind of amazing. At one point Lindy runs into this one guy who goes by Ricky September, played by Tom Rhys Harries, and the Doctor and Ruby are like, “What, Ricky the singer?” “That’s him.” “Oh, nice one. Hot.” I just thought it was super funny.
The Office Is Empty
While they’re in these bubbles, they walk, and the thing tells them how. Go forward, go this way. It tells them how to walk to avoid obstructions and get where they’re going.
People are disappearing from her social media feed, so the Doctor and Ruby are trying to figure it out. Ruby’s like, well, who do you work with? She works with these other people. Okay, great, those six people are in the room with you? Yeah, of course. Well, can you take a look and see if they’re there? And she goes, “What, like, myself?” Yeah. “That’s not what we do in Finetime. You are so offensive.”
“I’m not kidding. Olive has disappeared, and Kipper, and no one’s heard from Alana.”
It’s only once that’s pointed out that she finally drops the bubble. Nobody’s in her office. Nobody’s there. And immediately to her right, there’s one of her co-workers being eaten by a giant space slug. I say space slug because we’re watching Doctor Who, and frankly anything with the word space in front of it sounds sci-fi.
Why She Can’t Walk
So she tries to leave, and she can’t walk. At first I thought to myself, God, that’s so stupid, that seems unrealistic. But the more I thought about it, the more it made sense, if that’s the world you lived in. There’s a thought process in science that says if you train someone to live in a VR world for long enough and then take them out into the real world, to them the real world would look wrong.
These people grow up in this dot and bubble social media world. To them, the minute you turn it off, the real world isn’t real. She’s used to mindlessly walking forward because the voice says walk forward, walk forward, turn left. Now all of a sudden she’s left to her own devices, she can’t steer, and nothing’s quite working right.
She manages to fumble through. The Doctor notices that, for some reason, she and several others aren’t being attacked by these things, and they finally determine that everyone’s being eaten in basically alphabetical order. The Doctor works out, loosely, toward the end, that the little dot and bubble AI has gotten so frustrated that it hates them, and it’s helped orchestrate and create these things to finish them.
C Comes Before Pepper-Bean
Ricky September helps her get to a certain place, and at one point he tries to call home to Homeworld. Homeworld’s gone. The screen he sees is literally just these slug things on their planet. They never say Earth. You can always assume it’s Earth. I don’t think it is.
She’s in this little bunker area, headed to a maintenance shaft from when the place was built a long, long time ago, and Ricky September is doing his best to save her. He’s like, don’t worry, I’m going to get you out of this, it’s going to be great. He’s putting these codes in, and while that’s happening, her dot is charged and back on, and they figure out that it’s actually the dot that’s trying to kill them. The Doctor’s like, you don’t understand, if that thing’s trying to kill you, it can kill you without those monsters.
Sure enough, the thing starts trying to attack her. So Ricky September does his best Luke Skywalker impression. He stands there with a metal pipe, whacking the thing, while she finishes putting in the code. The thing’s about to get her, and because she knows, she tells it his real last name is such and such, and it begins with a C. C comes before Pepper-Bean.
She turned on him. And I’m like, what?
The Moment I Learned Who This Doctor Is
She makes it. Other rich kids are there, and they’re starting this Lord of the Flies of rich kids. There’s this one dude who’s totally funny, the hiker hipster guy, who figures he’ll probably be the one selected for leader, so he’s running the whole thing.
The Doctor and Ruby are there, and the TARDIS is there. The kids are saying, we’re going to go out here, we’re going to tame this world, it’s going to be this and that. And the Doctor’s like, or, hear me out, come with us. We escaped, didn’t we? We can get you out of here in the blink of an eye.
And they tell him no.
He’s floored. He’s so beside himself. What I realized is that this is the moment I learned who Ncuti Gatwa’s Doctor is. He’s angry. He’s frustrated. And he will not exert any kind of will over them. He’s allowing them to make this choice even though it kills him, to the point that he laughs, and then he shouts, and they’re leaving anyway. At one point he’s like, you’re all going to die. What is wrong with you people?
It’s so frustrating. I felt frustrated for him.
The Verdict
Doctor Who’s “Dot and Bubble” lands at a solid 9 out of 10 on the Know-It-All Index.
Finally, an episode of Doctor Who. Man, I’m here for it. I liked it. I enjoyed it a lot. It wasn’t super preachy, and I was totally into it. I’ve now watched it twice, because I really needed to redigest it again this morning. And last week’s “73 Yards,” which I thought was rubbish? I’ve since come around.
Let me know what you thought of the episode. I’d love to talk more about this one and hear what you guys think. The conversation lives in the comments on the video above.
