Dot and Bubble - A Review

This week's episode takes a swipe at the modern obsession with social media. Fans of Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror have seen this sort of thing before, and RTD2 did at least acknowledge a debt to that series in advance. 

Of course, a lot of other people have satirised this obsession in a variety of ways - so what makes Dot and Bubble stand out?

Well, it's got monsters for a start. Big Tractator-like things. 

It also has The Macra Terror as one of its forebears: an Earth colony, where everyone is mindlessly happy - brainwashed without realising it - whilst big monsters lurk in the background.

I half expected a Douglas Adams nod as well - the Golgafrinchan B-Ark from Hitch-Hikers Guide - when we heard that all these vacuous young people had been sent to this world by their parents. Sadly this was not to be.

How wise it is to have two consecutive relatively Doctor-lite episodes, smack dab in the middle of a shorter run debut season, only time will tell. Millie Gibson hasn't a great deal to do this week either, but then she's just had a whole instalment to herself.

With the stars on the virtual side-lines for much of the episode, it falls to Callie Cooke to carry the narrative.

She's Lindy Pepper-Bean, who inhabits a colony called Finetime in which everyone is having, well, a fine time. It's all pastel colours and no-one has to work too hard. 

The colony itself is reminiscent of The Simpsons movie, when Springfield was cut off by a transparent dome.

Like all the rest of the population Lindy is surrounded constantly by a bubble of social media screens.

(The story title refers to the dots which show when someone is typing a message, whilst the bubble also refers to messaging as well as the colony dome / the personal screens / and an algorithm which determines what information you are exposed to on-line).

I could just about accept the inability to put one foot in front of another had this society been a sedentary one, but having Lindy unable to walk without instructions was just stupid.

(And the idea that 17 - 27 year olds don't appear to be having any sex at all is another unrealistic aspect of the set-up. They should have been going at it like rabbits).

Lindy isn't exactly the sort of person you'd want to spend much time with. She is rude and arrogant, and also a bit Clueless. She and her friends are shallow and, we ultimately discover, fascistic.

You'll note all Lindy's friends are white, and they intend recreating their society elsewhere rather than replacing it, despite knowing that it has just tried to kill them.

Into this seemingly idyllic existence the Doctor and Ruby intrude via the bubble to warn of the threat which is infiltrating the colony.

RTD2 is primarily taking a swipe at empty-headed millennials and other tech-obsessed younger people and their herd mentality.

The only sympathetic character - a seemingly bland Tik-Tok style "entertainer" - is the one who uses social media only briefly, spending the rest of the time reading and expanding his mind.

Unfortunately it's the airheads who live to inherit the world, whilst he is betrayed (by Lindy) and killed.

(Though it's unlikely people who can't walk straight without help will last any time at all in a mountainous jungle environment. That dome will have been built for a reason).

The Macra Terror worked, despite its clunky monsters, because they were clunky. Too big and unwieldy, it was decided to keep them confined to the shadows and only come out at night. Perhaps Davies should have learned from this and used his creatures in a similar way. As it is, we see them in the full light of (sunny) day.

Why is the Doctor so keen to intervene here anyway? Who was to say this wasn't the indigenous species reclaiming its planet? (One criticism of The Macra Terror was the Doctor's gleeful extermination of a sentient alien species in favour of humans - potentially an act of genocide).

Had it been left a traditional monster story, I would have been a lot happier. 

As it was, it very much falls apart in the final section - turns out it's yet another AI gone wrong scenario... 

If social media algorithms hated their users that much, why not simply switch off? They have such control over peoples' lives that they could simply have got them to walk off a cliff. We also see that the Dots are perfectly capable of killing people in their own right, acting like remote control bullets.

Just how much worse were the parents for them to have wrecked the homeworld first?

(This is where we get our Susan Twist appearance this week - she's seen in a recording of Lindy's mother).

The big emotional payoff with the Doctor's pleading to try to save the survivors almost falls flat on its face as we know that these creeps simply don't deserve it. (The Twelfth Doctor would have happily sent them on their way, and we'd have punched the air). Had they been worth saving, it would have made the Doctor's failure more tragic and frustrating. A nice performance none the less from Gatwa, even if it was poorly employed by Davies.

The Doctor and Ruby now clock that they've been seeing the same woman a lot recently in different guises - yet just gloss it over... You'd think after Bad Wolf etc. that the Doctor would take such things a lot more seriously.

For me it was a really promising story, let down by its concluding chapter.