Doctor Who Series 11 First Impressions: Episode 7 (Kerblam!)

Here's your late stage capitalism sympathies, ma'am.

I was on a little vacation, damn it. This was supposed to be an easy one. It very nearly almost was! Then we got what we got. Okay. Okay. I can do something with this. It will echo what others have said to a degree, but in the end I'm but one perspective and I'll link some others which are more critical at the end of all of this. Kerblam!, then. Yes, with the exclamation point and all. Sitting in a room with one of my best pals while I was visiting him in the now-snowy wastes of Gander, Newfoundland... we sat back and watched Kerblam!. It was, all in all, a very enjoyable 45 minutes or so. I want to state upfront that, God help me, I had fun with this one. It's very well-designed, the concept pitch is wild and fun, the atmosphere is tight, the robot design is a perfect uncanny valley, and even the final reveal of the grand plan is such a simple and genius mass murder method that you can only applaud it. This is very good television, on the level of the gears of the sausage factory. What it also happens to be is something that Twitter has fucking eviscerated while I was away. I should clarify, that's my Twitter feed. The one full of lots of smart folks who absolutely lean left and came away from Kerblam! with various levels of disbelief and outrage. I didn't catch it at first, mostly because me and my pal were kind of chittering away and all, but on deeper focus? Oh yeah. There's a lot wrong here. The structure is sound, but the foundation is problematic to the extreme. I'm going to throw out an extreme statement and then try to back it up over the next few words. If I fail, feel free to call me on it. Okay. Kerblam! is the Talons Of Weng-Chiang for the 21st century. Wow. Holy shit. That's bold as fuck. What do I mean by that? It's expertly-crafted science fiction entertainment that's well-acted and, in any other respect, would be a hallmark of its era... but then the underlying message, text, and subtext come in. It's either enough to roll off your back and make you not notice because you had so much fun, as I (admittedly) did for those 40 minutes when I didn't know where this was going... or it appalls and offends, violating what one perceives as the heart and soul of Doctor Who. Wowie wow. Let's dig into THAT.



Elizabeth Sandifer, a lady who at this point basically inspired half of the words I blurp out on this red and white abomination, called Kerblam! "a perfectly good episode of Doctor Who that just happens to be... you know, evil.". Evil's a word you can use to describe an episode that's "Doctor Who vs. Amazon" in which Doctor Who takes the side of the exploitative mega-corporation acting above the law and upholds late-stage capitalism but in space. I fault nobody for referring to Kerblam! as such, but I want to take a different approach. A different word to describe what's going on here. That word? Insidious. This is why Kerblam! both works as an incredibly fun and enjoyable ride, and why so much of my left-leaning Twitter hates the everloving fuck out of it. Let me break down the crafty way this episode sells you. We have shady shit happening at Kerblam!, which is just Space Amazon, where the workers can't talk too much during their shift and they're basically monitored at all times. People are disappearing and the Doctor got a "help me" message in her space package which had a fez. That right there is the first bit of insidiousness, in a way. Continuity references to make you feel safe. There's even one to the David Tennant episode with Agatha Christie and the space wasp. That's a minor niggle and it's not being fair, not really. No, where we get the retroactive problem is with the plot. We obviously know the delivery robots are up to no good and killing workers, but why? We assume, of course, that Kerblam! is going the extra mile and vaporizing its own employees for some nebulous reason. Even the Doctor assumes so, finding plenty of evidence that seems to support her claims. She makes things clear to the people at the top in the Kerblam! offices; if there's some no-good bullshit going down, some corporate shenanigans, she WILL royally fuck it all up and ruin their shit. Yeah! Hell yeah! This is the kind of shit that I and other left-leaning folks love about Doctor Who! Hell, my favorite classic era of the show are the McCoy years, where he basically does this shit every other serial. When we found out Kerblam! was an episode about Space Amazon, we were hoping that Doctor Who was going to burn that fucker to the ground and walk away from the ashes!


That is not what happens. The fucked-up shit is, writer Pete McTighe is putting all the shit we want to see, all the prepping to tear down Kerblam! and stop corporate's evil plan... as a fucking red herring misdirect. No, the actual plot's over here with the janitor who wants to kill millions of people and make it look like Kerblam! did it so they go out of business and people don't trust robots so more real humans get hired for jobs and aren't replaced by robots. Dear god. Dear fucking god. I don't even want to begin to unpack that, but I have a feeling if I did I'd find nothing but bales of fucking straw. It gets worse. The system itself is rebelling against this attempt to make it kill millions, which would be admirable if it didn't try to dissuade the janitor from enacting his plan by KILLING THE GIRL HE LIKED. Yes! YES THEY DID THAT! Doctor Who somehow has pulled off a fridging, where the manpain that motivates the plot at the cost of the girl's life is centered on THE EPISODE'S VILLAIN. I have NEVER seen that before. I know I'm in the middle of a bad thing rant, but I'm giving you an oasis of positivity. The scheme here is killer bubble wrap. That is, bubble wrap that explodes when you pop it. This is fucking genius. EVERYONE pops fucking bubble wrap! As a murder method it's creative and inventive in turning an ordinary thing into a source of horror! As a grand scheme strawman against automation via mass murder? Jesus Christ. So, in the end, the Doctor slots into her passive role once more. Kerblam! aren't taken down a peg, the system isn't retooled for literally murdering an innocent woman to make the Nice Guy who has a crush on her sad and not blow up people, and nothing is changed. Everyone who works at Kerblam! is given a month off and two week's pay. Yes. You heard me. Think about it. That's such a darkly comic line that was meant in sincerity that I think I need to lie down.


That's... Kerblam! I got pretty mad at it myself. This is a paradox of an episode. It's not the kind of Doctor Who that I like, and it in fact wears the kind of Doctor Who that I like as a fucking masquerade in order to fool my dumb brain into liking it, and it works. God help me, it works at that because I still have that contact high of the fun I had the other evening watching it. Insidious is the word. Elizabeth Sandifer called it evil, and here's her thoughts. Caitlin Smith, the biggest Clara Oswald fan I can think of that isn't Jenna Coleman herself, had a real good Twitter thread about this. I'm still just very tired. Kerblam!, if you judge it solely on its first 40 minutes of your very first time seeing it unspoiled, is probably the third-best episode this series... but it's teetering on the edge. God, I hope something comes along to unseat it. I really do. In 40 years, will we have passionate defenses from brigades about this like we do with Talons? Christ, I hope I'm not part of this fandom to see that if it happens. Let's shut the book on that, for now.