Doctor Who - Dot And Bubble

TwitFace

Doctor Who -
Dot And Bubble
Airdate: 1st June 2024
BBC 1

Warning: Minor spoilers within.

Wow. A three in a row run of good episodes. Dot And Bubble is another above average episode of Doctor Who and my biggest question after seeing this current hat trick of pretty great shows is... what the heck were the BBC/Disney thinking by opening this season with two of the worst episodes possible? Why start off with the obvious duds?

So this one is about a society of rich kids who inhabit a planet where the one town, Finetime, is where they live and talk to each other on social media all day, including the ‘two long hours’ a day where they have to ‘work’. Their rich families pay for them to be there and many of them are incapable of even being able to walk around without the great holographic bubble of social media generated around their head, projected by the dot (aka, a flying drone) which generates the bubble. Which is a problem if, like the main and totally unsympathetic protagonist Lindy Pepper-Bean (played by Callie Cooke), all your friends are being eaten, alphabetically, by huge ‘digesting monsters’ and the only help you have are these two strangers who have infiltrated the social network, called The Doctor (played by Ncuti Gatwa) and Ruby Sunday (played by Millie Gibson).

Yeah, it’s tough trying to navigate streets by yourself with no arrows and instructions to show you how to move your feet. You will bump into lamp posts or you could, like many of Lindy’s friends, walk right into the giant stomach opening of various monsters walking... well, crawling... in the streets.

Now, this is proper science fiction, with a heavy dose of satire against both the generation of youth who spend all their time on various variants of social media (yeah, I’m probably guilty of that to an extent too... follow me on Twitter!) plus, basically, the dumb rich kids who are born into a privileged position in society. We’ve all met them... what’s in their wallet on any given day is way higher than their IQ. And I’ve got to hand it to Russell T. Davies, this episode was worthy and, quite in the style of, the late, great Philip K. Dick. In many ways.

And through it all, even though the episode is a pretty self contained story (and an excellent stab at ‘real’ sci-fi, for sure), they still manage to add another notch on the most blatant, so far, part of the underlying arc of the season. Namely, yep... another Susan Twist sighting. This time she’s playing the (dead but she doesn’t know it yet) mother of Lindy... but here’s the thing. Both The Doctor and Ruby react to her presence in this. The Doctor flags her as being the face and voice of the ambulances from the episode Boom (reviewed by me here) and Ruby also remembers her from somewhere else. And the hint there is, she maybe remembers her from last week’s alternate timeline and so, just like the timeline reset changed with Ruby having been to Wales three times instead of two, as originally stated at the opening of 73 Yards (reviewed here), it implies that we’re not completely done with the events of that last story yet. I hope that means we’re finally going to get some closure on just what the old lady version of Ruby was saying to terrify all those people... it’s a bit of an important and glaring omission (just as the previous David Tennant incarnation of the character not regenerating into Jodie Whittaker’s old costume hasn’t been credibly explained in the ‘in universe’ world... and it needs to be).

And, yeah, it was pretty great. The vapid and clueless losers who made up the entire (under 27) society of Finetime might just as well have had ‘conservative party’ stamped onto their foreheads. I think the current season of Doctor Who is certainly getting back on track and I think Dot And Bubble adds to the season considerably. That being said, next week’s so-called ‘Bridgerton’ episode is worrying me a bit. It’s the kind of programme I would naturally steer clear of so I hope the episode has something other than parody going for it. I guess I’ll find out in due time.