15.6: Dot and Bubble

In which I learn some things about myself.

Broadcast: June 2024

Watched: December 2024

“We’re shielded off! How did they get inside?”

So, I have a complicated relationship with this one, and I’m gonna be up front about the fact it doesn’t make me look great.

Tonally, it reminds me of Gridlock – the police uncontactable, the monsters invading, the sense of world breaking down with everyone trapped in their own little worlds. There’s also a mention of Plaza 55, which is surely a deliberate nod to Orphan 55, another story of a cosy world in a bubble invaded by monsters of man’s own creation. It’s this season’s example of the sort of Futureshock-y genre, the stories satirising contemporary issues that the show has always toyed with but which become a basically annual feature from about 1987 onwards.

Finetime (great name) is also “the number one centre for substack processing” which makes me feel personally attacked. And let’s be honest, at this point in history, the idea that social media has attained sentence and decided to start killing its users is quite resonant.

Anyway, that’s what I assumed that was what I was watching – a story about how social media was ruining us (“I don’t know how to walk without the arrows”; “It blocked me, I’m trapped outside the city”; etc). And I hated Lindy, a response I didn’t realise deliberate for quite a long time (I had been in a pub). The grammar of the building romance between Lindy and Ricky (”You’re SO good at walking”, “I thought this was the worst day of my life but maybe it’s the best”, the hand holding, the music) is so brilliantly done it makes her betrayal genuinely shocking.

So: I didn’t enjoy it, and I wasn’t watching especially closely, and yes this is obviously immense quantities of white privilege speaking, but I didn’t get what it was really doing at all. I didn’t spot that the entire guest cast was white, or realise that Lindy was being racist as well as rude in the way she spoke to the Doctor. I didn’t even get it at the end: I thought they were idiots, not racists. It just didn’t occur to me that anyone would be racist against Doctor Who.

My only defence here is that, on a second watch – once I knew it was trying to make me, specifically, aware of being a privileged little shit, rather than just being another of RTD’s occasional “aww, ordinary awful people, aren’t they BRILLIANT” stories – I liked it a lot more.

This is, incidentally, the second Doctor-lite story in a row, and was purportedly one of the first scenes that Ncuti filmed. How do we feel about him having to do scene in which he begs to be allowed to save racists’ lives before almost anything else, then?

I have another better and more reliable newsletter that isn’t about Doctor Who, and it’s currently 25% off! Ahh go on, it’s Christmas.

Other things:

• The Radio Free Skaro podcast called its episode on this “White Mirror”; the next one, on Rogue, was “Fowl & Fallibility”. Those guys are really killing it at the name game.

• For the second time this season it’s someone’s first hug. Wonder what’s going on with that.

• “Urine content is zero for the third day in a row” what

• Ricky September is 25? Is he bullshit (I looked it up, the actor’s 32, it’s quite Luke Perry). Mind you, they’re all too old for the numbers we see on screen.

• The homeworld population being zero genuinely upsetting. Ricky genuinely heroic. the look he gives Lindy when she betrays him – not angre or fear, just so, so disappointed – is amazing

• and then he’s basically shot in the head. Gah.

• Lindy delivers “They’re coming for me” in exactly the same way as Lesley Sharp in Midnight.

• This week the Doctor cries, again. Great coat, though. Susan Twist is Lindy’s mum, Penny Pepper-Bean

• The bit with all the muted people screaming when Gothic Paul gets eaten is amazing. Ditto, in a quite different way, the looks of genuine disgust when they see the Doctor.

• Weird how this was so expensive when the monsters and settings are both rubbish – the apparent paradise looks, by virtue of being filmed largely in a university campus on a grey day, incredibly miserable, and not especially fine at all – all the money went on Lindy’s bubble and those extras.

• The door that will only open if you put in a two digit number every five seconds for minutes on end is a particularly stupid bit of sci fi design, 42 eat your heart out.

• The guy playing Cavendish is brilliantly slimy. “We don’t have titles yet, but if the role of leader was up for grabs…”

• Racist walks into a lamppost, lol.