Doctor Who: Dot and Bubble

 “You’re so good at walking!”

This episode is, obviously, brilliant. I suppose it’s Doctor Who riffing on Unfriended and other films of that ilk, but it’s so more than that, going beyond social media to other menaces of modern society, such as Alexa and other such AI nonsense that you won’t catch me playing around with. So we have a subtext… but this is Doctor Who in 2024. And there’s always a twist at the end.

So it’s the far future, and a bunch of rich, useless young people have been sent off to a colony to be stupid and decadent. They live inside a very literal social media  “bubble” and can’t even walk without an AI telling them where to go, a nicely blatant bit of satire. I know I’m middle aged, and let me pause here to say that, while I don’t play around with this Alexa nonsense, I’m as addicted to my phone as anyone. But, well, like Ricky September, I read books. But I confess to enjoying the skewering of thd younger generation here, oblivious to the fact that massive great gastropods are eating them alive because they literally don’t look where they’re going in their vacuous social media bubble.

Both the Doctor and Millie are restricted in screen time here, so Callie Cooke ably helms the episode as the vacuous Lindy who, we slowly learn, is not only stupid but not a very nice person beneath the surface vacuity and forced jollity.

Her scenes with Ricky September, a pop star who beats his typecasting by actually being a seemingly decent and clever chap who reads books and is brave and heroic (but, well, part of a dodgy society, as we will see- does he share its views, I wonder?), are hilarious examples of the comedy of awkwardness, Lindy utterly oblivious of what someone who didn’t live entirely online would know to be cringeworthy faux pax…

And then she cynically throws him under the bus to save her own skin. Ouch.

And then we have the twist. No, not Susan Twist, although she appears, and gets lampshaded a bit more strongly than in last episode… but the epilogue. The survivors… are white supremacists, and insist on hardship and probable death, useless as they are, rather than escape in a TARDIS owned by a black man. Wow. Cleverly, this puts an awful lot of Lindy’s earlier lines into quite a different context on a second viewing.

That hits hard. It’s fascinating to see RTD address Ncuti Gatwa’s African origins in this way. And, I suppose, the moral is that racism is not just immoral: it is backwards, decadent, weak, a sign of a society that will ultimately lose in the Darwinian struggle to more robust societies.

Wow. It’s been several hours, and the conclusion still hits hard. Three more episodes to go…