Storytime with Rachel F Hundred

A classic Doctor Who lesson which breaks the bubble

Spoiler Warning

Finally, this season delivers a story which is not silly, not whacky, and delivers its emotional blows without pulling its punches.  If you can’t tell, I really enjoyed Dot and Bubble.

Conceptually, the idea of a TV episode providing a caustic and/or cautionary tale around the potential evil of social media is not new, and, while there is the surface lesson of getting so wrapped up with a virtual life that you miss out on the actual real world, its subtext here is the more important lesson to learn: prejudices fed in an echo chamber will inevitably lead to ugly people, no matter their surface beauty or outward perception of a perfect existence.

The lead character of Lindy Pepper-Bean, played to all of her aggravating surface perfection and deeper ugliness by Callie Cooke, is the poster girl for demonstrating this – and she is the most complicated and complex character to hit Doctor Who in a long while.  Lindy’s blonde Barbie-girl/Californian Valley rich girl-esque schtick initially suggests to the audience that perhaps she’s going to turn out to be someone with a heart of gold and unexpected depths beneath her bubbly and flaky surface impression which says she’s very, very spoiled and focused on unimportant things along with her equally fakely simpering Bubble friends. 

The story seems to set this denouement up and misleads us incredibly well.  Lindy in the first part of the story is annoyingly positive (we possibly root for her to be eaten at some points) – she’s so dismissive of the Doctor and the danger, horribly condescending to Ruby, and uninterested in anything but her own wants and desires – worried that her 2 hours of work gives her hands chapping.  But she is also genuinely scared and horrified when she realises that she is sitting next to someone being eaten, and is shown to be almost infantalised by the Bubble lending an innocence to her; she’s a slave to her Bubble, unable to even walk without it.  Cooke plays her incredibly well through this part.

The construction of the tale with the Doctor and Ruby only seen in their video chat for the majority of the episode also plays into this misconception as it is reminiscent of other episodes where the Doctor is similarly constrained in appearance on screen such as Blink (2007) or Love & Monsters (2006), and we are following a heroic character whether Sally Sparrow or Elton Pope.  Our expectation, our preconceived bias as the audience, is that Lindy will be heroic in her own right at some point. She does allow the Doctor and Ruby to warn her friends adding to this likelihood.   

The audience is also misled because as Ricky September (played excellently by Tom Rhys Harries) befriends and starts to help her through the crisis, the audience begins to adopt his point of view on her.  This is partially because Ricky isn’t quite as caught up in the bubble, and he clearly has some intelligence and morality about him (he points out to Lindy that thousands of people are dying when she proclaims it the best day because she has met him, checks on consent re touching with her).  If Ricky believes she is in need of help and protection, and the Doctor and Ruby think she is in need of help and protection, potentially she truly is a good person underneath her more annoying traits.

It makes her betrayal of Ricky pack one hell of an emotional punch which lands in a way for me that nothing has since the Doctor realised that Carla had forgotten Ruby back in the Christmas special.  The audience expects Lindy to call Ricky over and they escape together or to overcome her fear and aid Ricky in destroying the Dot, so…her throwing him under the bus to save herself is such a shock, and his death by malevolent Dot is quick and brutal.

That Lindy as a character goes on to lie about Ricky is not unexpected and lines up with the spoiled little girl woman child she truly is – something underlined by the way the other colonists reach out to comfort her about the Homeworld’s fate.  The subtle but impactful explicit ‘reveal’ of her belief in racial supremacy and that this is an ingrained cultural norm of the Bubble is almost anticlimactic in comparison because of course such a lying despicable person would have despicable views and beliefs.

For all parts of the internet like to complain about how woke Doctor Who is, the fact is that it has always portrayed certain lessons – no doubt down to its roots in children’s television – including racism is bad.  This lesson isn’t the in-your-face ‘racism is bad’ that was employed in Rosa (2018) and is actually more impactful because of that, not least because it unequivocally reveals the innate social norms the viewer accepts or does not accept in Lindy’s behaviour.

I’m of mixed race, but I didn’t really question that Lindy’s friends and the Bubble was all white, because I too live in a predominately white society.  I didn’t question that Lindy first blocked the Doctor, and I missed that her failure to immediately recognise him later hinted at that racial blindness of ‘everyone of a particular race looks the same’ trope.  I did think that her responsiveness to Ruby was based on likeness as both are young blonde women but did not contrast that as her being biased necessarily against a black man so much as her having an issue with the way the Doctor’s first attempted approach and message was constructed.  It was only when Lindy remarked she’d see the Doctor disciplined that I began to question why she was so against him. 

And then, the phrasing from Lindy and the other Finetime citizens noting ‘you are not one of us,’ ‘keeping up standards,’ labelling the Doctor’s science as ‘voodoo’ and warning against being ‘contaminated’ – all those are clear inferences about their own prejudice and bias.  Those phrases are historically common in extremist supremacy groups advocating racial purity such as Nazis or apartheid systems which employ racial segregation.

How many people didn’t get it at all?

How many people only got it in that last scene?

How many people got it from the first moment she blocked the Doctor but responded to Ruby or clocked that Finetime had a distinct lack of diversity?

Ncuti Gatwa’s performance is solid through out but he excels at that moment as the Doctor when he realises that Lindy and the colonists are refusing his help because of this incarnation’s racial skin.  His impassioned speech to try to convince them to accept his help anyway was wonderful and so in line with the Doctor’s viewpoint that he will try and save everyone (demonstrating his goodness contrasted against many of us in the audience who at this point were likely hoping the bugs will find and eat them). His outburst of frustration and anger at their continued refusal is beautifully acted and reminiscent of Tennant’s Doctor in a way that only adds to a sense of continuity in the character.

And historically racists, particularly supremacists, have been known to refuse the hand and help of someone who can save them purely because they are the wrong race.

This lesson is very, very clever in its construction.

I’m personally left with the fervent hope that Ricky who did not spend as much time in the Bubble might not have had the same views as his fellow citizens, but it is a little heart-breaking to think that maybe even Ricky who acted like a good guy throughout in trying to help Lindy and who was so betrayed, potentially might have held the same views about the Doctor as Lindy.

For all the brilliance in story and lesson construction, acting and production, there are a couple of nit-picks.  Lindy goes from barely being able to walk under her own steam to running down stairs with Ricky, and one of the colonists who survives confusingly introduces himself as Brewster Cavendish even though the bugs were eating people in alphabetical order and had moved on to the letter ‘P.’  The bigger nit-pick though is why the Dot thought to cultivate giant slug bugs and programme them to eat people in alphabetical order.  How and why did it do that?  Why didn’t it just kill them all in a mass dart through the head move?  Was there more to this than a suddenly sentient internet who realised humanity had to die because they were all terrible people?

In conclusion:

This is the type of episode which I had hoped for in the new Doctor’s run: clever, thought-provoking and just really well made and acted.  While it could be argued that 73 Yards was also similar in cleverness and production, I think this one is better, and I certainly enjoyed this one much, much more. Hopefully, this is an indication that the series will end the season with stronger episodes than its beginning.