Doctor Who ‘Dot and Bubble’ spoilers follow.
This season of Doctor Who has had much to offer so far. Every shot has the monied sheen of Disney, Ncuti Gatwa’s Doctor is a fizzing delight to get into time-travelling scrapes with and there have been a couple of stellar episodes.
But where this season has faltered so far is in its ability to generate a villain dastardly enough to up the stakes and convince us the Doctor or humankind might actually be in any kind of peril. The closest we’ve come, with Jinkx Monsoon’s Maestro, was hampered with a meandering episode and a final face-off where their devilry was apparently done and undone on the underwhelming strike of a chord.
The latest episode ‘Dot and Bubble’ adds to the roster of disappointing evildoers – who have so far included a mortal booger and a grinning Welsh politician – a troupe of giant bristling slugs. Yes, they do absorb people into them, but they don’t even look like particularly fast-moving slugs.
We spend the fifth episode with the increasingly manic Lindy (Callie Cooke), who is a bit like a mindless Sim in need of constant instructions on where to go, from her bubble headset, and what to do, from the Doctor.
But it’s when Lindy starts to think and do things for herself that she turns into the real villain of the episode, escalating from unlikable to diabolical, and might explain why this season has felt so bereft of iconic villains.
Despite a brief stint running around the undercarriage of Finetime looking like Barbie and Ken cosplayers, Lindy throws the sweet bookworm Ricky September (Tom Rhys Harries) to the wolfish slugs.
Then, once she has escaped the hermetically sealed world of Finetime and finally meets the Doctor in person, she exposes the disturbing white supremacist dogma lying underneath the supposed peaches-and-cream utopia of twentysomething influencers.
Gatwa had confirmed ahead of this season that the show would make reference to the Doctor’s race. “We have to address those elements of the character now, because Earth unfortunately is still quite a funny little place,” he told Attitude. He added that it would be done in a “really interesting way”.
The closing moment is visually well told, with the Doctor clad in a swish chocolatey coat suddenly very clearly the only one not in the pale pastels of Finetime. In the face of Lindy’s rejection of the Doctor’s aid and company, obliquely over his race, he hysterically laughs, screams and cries.
It’s a raw and brilliantly well-acted moment, even if the rug-pull does appear out of thin air in an episode which had so far chiefly concerned itself with lambasting vapid youths for obsessive social-media diets.
In that moment, the Doctor’s faith in humanity appears to waver. Will he be changed when we return next episode to go back to Regency? We’ll see.
The end of ‘Dot and Bubble’ shows a thread Russell T Davies has staunchly woven into this season and its bust baddies: that it is humanity that is the real villain.
There was the bureaucratic planet who abandoned the talking infants of ‘Space Babies’, then the murderous technology spawned by a military industrial complex in ‘Boom’, the nuclear extremes of politicking in ’73 Yards’ and now a tech-savvy, social-obsessed youth of white nationalists in ‘Dot and Bubble’.
The storytelling hasn’t always been seamless and can fall into the finger-wagging pit of sanctimony, but Davies deserves acknowledgement for even clunky attempts tell sci-fi stories about the destructive ways we live now.
It’s just a shame Gatwa’s first season has yet to serve up a villain good enough to forget that the likes of the Daleks and Cybermen have been exiled to storytelling Siberia, but there are still some episodes to go.
Doctor Who‘s ‘Dot and Bubble’ is available on BBC iPlayer in the UK and Disney+ in the US.
Deputy TV Editor
Previously a TV Reporter at The Mirror, Rebecca can now be found crafting expert analysis of the TV landscape for Digital Spy, when she’s not talking on the BBC or Times Radio about everything from the latest season of Bridgerton or The White Lotus to whatever chaos is unfolding in the various Love Island villas.
When she’s not bingeing a box set, in-the-wild sightings of Rebecca have included stints on the National TV Awards and BAFTAs red carpets, and post-match video explainers of the reality TV we’re all watching.