Okay, paragraph break, I can say it, at first glance this appears to be a feature-length version of that awful fucking Wi-Fi joke from Resolution. WUH BUH HUH? PHONE NO WORK? HOW DO I OPERATE WITHOUT TELEPHONE? MOTHER I CANNOT CLICK THE BOOK!!! A shitty little one-off joke expanded into some Old Man Yells At Cloud horseshit, boomer social satire turned up to 11. The kids in this episode aren't just on their phones, their phones are their entire world. A sphere of social media surrounding and bubbling them, to the point where they don't have to engage with the outside world in any capacity. They don't even have the capability of walking without the Bubble guiding them. All of this leads to a culture so fucking brain-dead that when monsters invade, they're too glued to their Bubbles to even notice until they get swallowed whole. Vapid Gen Alphas so obsessed with the social media sphere that they just walk into the gaping maw of a Doctor Who monster. Hell, the entire revelation about where the slug monsters came from is bleak in its own right: your phones got so pissed off with how vapid you are that they gained sentience and decided to kill you in the most lurid gruesome way possible.
Boy, it's a good thing that's not what the episode is doing at all, huh? No, everything about the culture and pretty people of Finetime is engineered with a specific narrative purpose, and it ain't to bitch that you at home spend too much fucking time on Tiktok while eating Pringles and waiting for the new Doctor Who to drop. You are not the target of the satire here, the culture turned up to 11 to display just how silly being obsessed with your phone is. Dot And Bubble is taking aim at spoiled rich kids, hyperinfluencers, and just completely blinkered people who haven't touched grass ever. (Hell, when you realize this, the scheme of the Dots is literally "Eat The Rich") It is its own way of living, totally different to the material concerns that you and I face, and in a way it is its own kind of bubble that people remain trapped in, oblivious to what's outside their narrow little sphere. This is the real genius of Dot And Bubble: the bubble is not just the 360 degree sphere of Zoom call heads popping up and going HEY BESTIEEEEEE OH EM GEE SLAY, but an actual conceptual thing that limits one's own thinking to their immediate worldview and whatever surrounds them.
Which leads us nicely into that ending, in which this bubbled way of thinking leads the survivors of Finetime to reject Doctor Who's help at the end. Gatwa already feels a bit removed from the show for the second week in a row here; yes, he's present for a lot of it, but as a disocciated pop-up. Here he is, in the flesh, and the kids don't want his help because of their bubbled way of thinking. Doctor Who and his friend are outsiders, and they just about tolerate his help to get them this far, but the line is drawn here and now as they go off to what is probably certain doom. Gatwa's reaction to this idiocy is incredibly poignant, hitting a wide range of emotions rapid-fire. Incredulity, anger, and sheer sorrow. It's a standout performance, and like Millie Gibson last week it is astonishing to realize that it was one of the first things he ever filmed in the role. So it was that the episode ended, and I sat there pretty satisfied with the interesting 45 minutes we had. Yep. Just letting those thoughts simmer, not thinking much else about these Finetime fuckers other than "well they're a bit elitist and naive, huh?".
Then a thought struck me. Oh hey, there's some subtext involved in the rich spoiled white kids who tell the first black Doctor Who "Thanks but no thanks, we're not going with you, you're not one of us, buhbyeeee~". I did not pick up on this thread while actually watching the episode, and I don't know how badly that reflects on me but I chalk it up to privilege. I got there in the end, though, and started thinking about other elements of the episode. How every one of these rich Finetime kids is white. The way some of the lines play out. When Doctor Who breaks into Lindy's conference call, she reassures her friends that he will be disciplined for this. Even the rejection at the end has her say that screen-to-screen contact between her and the Doctor is "just about acceptable", but face-to-face is pushing it too far. Read between the lines, and you find a whole other bubble encasing the episode. These kids are racist as almighty fuck, bubbling themselves away into a rich white nepo baby ethnostate. They reject Doctor Who's help because he's an outsider, and that doesn't just mean because he's not a Finetimer. He's not a fucking white guy. The reaction at the end from Gatwa takes on a whole new level. It's not something I feel exactly qualified to talk about, but holy fuck is it there.
In some ways, there's a similarity here with The Witchfinders from the Chibnall years. That was the first episode to really have Doctor Who come across hurdles because she was a woman. This is the first to show Doctor Who come across hurdles because he's black now. It's a much better episode of television than The Witchfinders, but I will temper the end here by saying that one hopes RTD will get some writers of color in for later episodes with Gatwa, and that they will channel their experiences into writing what are hopefully wonderful stories. This is a wonderful story though, with RTD's trademark acidic bite at play as a story about KIDS ON THEY PHONES melts into something so much sinister as we learn the true scope of what's contained in this bubble. Fantastic television regardless. Let's keep the streak alive.
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