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Dot and Bubble
73 Yards and Dot and Bubble are very much a pair - high concept, Doctor-lite. I liked this one much the best of the two and it may be my favourite episode of the season, managing to maintain an overall internal consistency that I'm not sure any of the other stories achieved.
I was spoiled for the "twist" at the end (perhaps reveal would be better than twist). I've been watching on a Saturday evening because, much as I love Doctor Who, I'm too old to stay up until midnight for it. TBH, I'm probably also too old to stay up until midnight to see if the Tories are out (but anyway). On Saturday morning, despite avoiding social media, I saw a passing thing online somewhere about "planet of the racists" and with only that brief glimpse, things like the whiteness of the cast were pretty obvious from step one. I'm sort of interested that the racism, and its presentation as the punchline, have obscured in most places the wider discourse about the overt elitism of Finetime that was obvious from pretty early on. I mean, this is an episode that literalised "eat the rich". The racism was important to the way the characters were interacting with the Doctor, but was only once facet of the way these people were shallow and awful.
I'm not much of a Black Mirror fan. The episodes I've seen have always left me with a strong sense of "but it wouldn't work like that" combined with a kind of old-man-shouting-at-clouds blanket condemnation of any societal trend since about 1989. Dot and Bubble has been compared to Black Mirror in several places and I was braced for old-man-shouting-about-social-media but that was really a cover for its real and fairly timeless concerns about the ways elites insulate and justify themselves and their actions. Among other things, I was impressed by the fact it didn't bother with "by the way racism is bad" as a message but went instead for "this is what racism looks like" which is arguably a much more useful message to be attempting to deliver. This was a story that presented itself as a silly Doctor Who story about giant slug monsters and used it to explore concepts which, if not exactly subtle, were a lot more subtle than those one usually gets in SF media.
The only bit I didn't buy was people not being able to walk in a straight line without an arrow (and possibly the "never been hugged" stuff) but I think the story just about got away with it as part of the overall exaggerated way everything was presented.
A lot of this rested on an amazing performance by Callie Cooke as Lindy Pepper-Bean, working hard to show us a woman with flaws but in a way that encouraged us to downplay their seriousness and tempted us to expect a redemption narrative. The real twist, perhaps, was that there was no redemption narrative and that once all her bubble and fun was stripped away she was, in fact, a woman who would not only sacrifice someone to save herself (and who knows what anyone would do in such a situation) but do so without any apparent remorse. She pays lip service to empathy with those dying, and lip service to gratitude to the Doctor, but none of it goes below the surface of performance to her bubble.
Every so often, RTD, lets the mask slip and reveals, I think, that he fundamentally thinks the human race is awful and that we don't deserve the Doctor. Dot and Bubble was one of those moments and it was pretty stunning.
I was spoiled for the "twist" at the end (perhaps reveal would be better than twist). I've been watching on a Saturday evening because, much as I love Doctor Who, I'm too old to stay up until midnight for it. TBH, I'm probably also too old to stay up until midnight to see if the Tories are out (but anyway). On Saturday morning, despite avoiding social media, I saw a passing thing online somewhere about "planet of the racists" and with only that brief glimpse, things like the whiteness of the cast were pretty obvious from step one. I'm sort of interested that the racism, and its presentation as the punchline, have obscured in most places the wider discourse about the overt elitism of Finetime that was obvious from pretty early on. I mean, this is an episode that literalised "eat the rich". The racism was important to the way the characters were interacting with the Doctor, but was only once facet of the way these people were shallow and awful.
I'm not much of a Black Mirror fan. The episodes I've seen have always left me with a strong sense of "but it wouldn't work like that" combined with a kind of old-man-shouting-at-clouds blanket condemnation of any societal trend since about 1989. Dot and Bubble has been compared to Black Mirror in several places and I was braced for old-man-shouting-about-social-media but that was really a cover for its real and fairly timeless concerns about the ways elites insulate and justify themselves and their actions. Among other things, I was impressed by the fact it didn't bother with "by the way racism is bad" as a message but went instead for "this is what racism looks like" which is arguably a much more useful message to be attempting to deliver. This was a story that presented itself as a silly Doctor Who story about giant slug monsters and used it to explore concepts which, if not exactly subtle, were a lot more subtle than those one usually gets in SF media.
The only bit I didn't buy was people not being able to walk in a straight line without an arrow (and possibly the "never been hugged" stuff) but I think the story just about got away with it as part of the overall exaggerated way everything was presented.
A lot of this rested on an amazing performance by Callie Cooke as Lindy Pepper-Bean, working hard to show us a woman with flaws but in a way that encouraged us to downplay their seriousness and tempted us to expect a redemption narrative. The real twist, perhaps, was that there was no redemption narrative and that once all her bubble and fun was stripped away she was, in fact, a woman who would not only sacrifice someone to save herself (and who knows what anyone would do in such a situation) but do so without any apparent remorse. She pays lip service to empathy with those dying, and lip service to gratitude to the Doctor, but none of it goes below the surface of performance to her bubble.
Every so often, RTD, lets the mask slip and reveals, I think, that he fundamentally thinks the human race is awful and that we don't deserve the Doctor. Dot and Bubble was one of those moments and it was pretty stunning.