Dot And Bubble sees Doctor Who confront the black and white nature social media

Dot and Bubble slides into your Doctor Who DMs with the confidence of a fedora-tipping basement dweller and just like that overly solicitous (and hopefully not pictographical) overture it’s harbouring views which are toxically bigoted and blithely entitled. The entire episode is like an unskippable ad of awfulness, a pastel-coloured dystopia where likes and shares reign supreme, where engagement is the priority of the vacant and where the Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) and Ruby (Millie Gibson) must navigate the self-obsessed, self-absorbed selfishness of FineTime in an [ultimately futile] attempt to save the vain and the vacuous.

Doctor Who Spoilers

The adventure opens in the deceptively utopian society of FineTime, where social media is life, and appearance is *everything*. Lindy Pepper Bean (Callie Cooke) epitomizes the ultimate oblivious influencer, her existence a constant stream of curated content, irrelevant endorsements and shallow interactions. Wilfully ignorant of anything outside her metaphorical and literal bubble, anything which doesn’t align with her frivolous world view is dismissed, muted or – most severe of all – blocked, even when those concerns are voiced by members of her approved social circle. But when events become impossible to ignore and her friends start vanishing on livestream, her carefully curated picture-perfect lifestyle begins to crack. Enter Ruby and the Doctor – effectively reduced for much of the episode to ersatz pop-up ads in their own feed – to try and bring Lindy into the real world and evade the clutches of gigantic armour-plated carnivorous gastropods.

As I’ve said before, Russell T Davies is rarely a subtle writer and with Dot and Bubble he’s brought out his extra-large sledgehammer to play. Dot And Bubble establishes a world and characters who explicitly live in their own media bubble, a vapid echo chamber of affirmations and envy that insulates them from anything unpleasant, unwanted or undesirably different. It is perhaps unique in the annals of Doctor Who in that it offers an entire guest cast of characters who are so profoundly loathsome that you’re actively rooting for the monsters to gobble them up and starting to wonder if the Doctor is on the wrong side of this particular point in history – and that’s before RTD sets off his biggest thematic grenade in the blackly ironic finale.

There’s a slyness to the subversive elements of the episode, from the initially clunky expositional set-up to the introduction of a character we fully expect to go on a journey of self-discovery yet, at every opportunity, actively resists any kind of character development or redemptive epiphany whatsoever. The only trajectory seems to be from innocent victim to unrepentant villain, the epitome of the most banal form of evil imaginable – and one that the Doctor struggles to comprehend even as Ruby instantly grasps the heartbreaking hypocrisy.

The brilliance of Dot and Bubble lies in its central conceit: a social network that gains sentience and finds its users so offensively obnoxious and entitled that it decides to eradicate an entire civilisation to bring it to an end. It’s the kind of darkly sardonic storytelling that fans of Black Mirror will appreciate, and observers of Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter will recognise (in reverse), though it retains that unique Doctor Who flavour. The episode has little good to say about social media and its corrosive effects on its users and society at large and the more we encounter the users of FineTime, the more the network itself appears to be the force of righteous justice in this morally topsy-turvy tale. Even social media sensation Ricky September (Tom Rhys Harries), the brightest star in this glittering galaxy of self-absorption, reflects the hollowness of the influencer lifestyle, his rote video postings betraying a profound disinterest in the network that exalts and sustains him.

The initial terror of the slugs, although grotesque antagonists (and disappointingly not modernised versions of Frontios’ Tractators), dissipates as the episode devolves into campier territory, their menace undermined by the ease with which they can be evaded. But even this tonal tuning is merely tenderising the audience for Dot And Bubble’s coup de grace as it reveals the true nature of FineTime’s populace. The reveal, although subtle, is inescapable, an almost Sixth Sense-style reveal that drives a reappraisal of Lindy’s every innocuous comment or instinctive reaction that’s preceded it.

Millie Gibson’s performance as Ruby is a silent symphony of anguished emotion. Even as the Doctor delivers one of his trademark impassioned speeches, it is Ruby’s wordless reactions that steal the scene. She doesn’t merely stand back and stand by; she silently conveys the heartbreak of knowing the Doctor will fail to convince the FineTime fascists to let him save them and the pain it will cause him. It’s a spectacular background performance, making the audience feel the revelation of the racist culture of the FineTime survivors on a visceral level, a revelation that ironically probably wouldn’t have landed with such shocking power had scheduling conflicts not forced a much reduced role for Gatwa’s Doctor in the episode (although again, the ordering of episodes for the season feels clumsy thanks to this following on from the notably Doctor-lite 73 Yards). At least it does, finally, lend some explicit credence to the Susan Twist theory as the Doctor recognises her. Theory no longer, the Susan Twist is heading somewhere.

Dot and Bubble, though, works as one of those Doctor Who staples – an episode about something; a mirror held up to our own digital lives, urging us to question the bubbles we choose to inhabit. By keeping its bitter twist right until the end, it lulls us into a false sense of self-satisfaction as we nod sagely at the mind-numbing effects of the vacuity of online culture before kicking us in the teeth with the stark reminder that there are worse things festering in the digital depths than superficiality and self-absorption.

As the Second Doctor might well have said had he been present: “There are some corners of the internet that have bred the most terrible things, things which act against everything that we believe in. They must be fought.”

doctor who dot and bubble review
Score 8

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