Doctor Who Episode 6 shocks with a Black Mirror-style surprise

First, “Dot and Bubble,” the latest episode of Doctor Whoseems to borrow from Black Mirrors bag of tricks. It’s set on Finetime, a planet where everyone is accompanied by a small spherical AI assistant called Dot, who projects a “bubble” around their heads. In their individual bubbles, people live their entire lives – chatting in a group, watching funny videos or pop star performances – and they only seem to leave them to sleep. Even walking is mediated by the bubble, which tells them how many steps to take in each direction and guides them to the office, home and dinner. It’s a “today’s kids and their damn phones!”-style premise, but again: just at first.

The initially crude metaphor becomes even cruder when the monster of the week is introduced: terrifying slug aliens that eat the residents of Finetime alive as they walk unawares into their gaping mouths, unable to see beyond their bubbles. Our heroine of the week, the hapless Lindy Pepper-Bean (Callie Cooke), has her bubble’s food invaded by the Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) and Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson), who spend the entire episode trying to guide her to safety despite her skepticism from afar.

It’s a clever setup that’s reminiscent of the fan favorite Doctor Who Stories like “Blink” and tropes beloved by writers like Steven Moffat (who, surprisingly, didn’t write this episode): horrible things on the edge of perception, a hard limit on the Doctor’s ability to intervene, and a world designed for conformity, with safety dependent on the characters’ ability to escape societal gravity. This clever structure clashes with the painfully condescending metaphor at the heart of “Dot and Bubble” – which writer Russell T. Davies exploits to obscure what he is Really do.

Image: Disney Plus

Because between the seemingly lame satire about terminally online-addicted youth and the spine-tingling thrills of the plot, Davies quietly drops relevant details about Finetime and what’s really going on here. Who are these people? What are they doing? Why are they there? Each answer, delivered conversationally in an episode full of loud, candy-colored colors, even louder social commentary, and one of the scariest monsters of the season, barely registers. So when you finally get to the end and the truth about Finetime is revealed, it’s like the rug is pulled out from under you, and “Dot and Bubble” instantly becomes one of the darkest Doctor Who Stories that were once told.

[Ed. note: This means spoilers for the very end of “Dot and Bubble.”]

In the end, the people of Finetime are beyond saving. The first clue was Lindy’s quick dismissal of the Doctor’s warnings at the beginning of “Dot and Bubble” and that she only listened when Ruby Sunday spoke to her. Further clues piled up and led to the answer as to what had brought the snail aliens to Finetime in the first place: the Dots. The Dots learned in their algorithmic service to their users too much about them and started hating them. And it’s not because their technology-addled brains blind them to the real world; it’s because they’re fucking racists.

Lindy and the other Finetime survivors refuse the Doctor’s offer of a safe exit from Finetime, choosing instead to move into the wilderness, where they face certain death just because of what the Doctor looks like. Here the final details come together: terrifying insights into Lindy’s selfishness, her squeaky-white group of friends, and the fact that Finetime is inhabited only by the young adult children of the 1%.

Image: Disney Plus

Until now, Doctor Who was fairly cavalier about how the Doctor taking on the appearance of a black man might change the dynamic of the show. On the one hand, that’s understandable, even desirable – it would be crass and arguably regressive to immediately subject the Doctor to racism as soon as that becomes a possible outcome of the story. It also feels intellectually dishonest to pretend that it never matter. Davies, the white showrunner who staged this situation, chose neither trauma porn nor avoidance. Instead, he chose specificity: This is how the Doctor Work is more difficult now. There are some people who don’t want to be saved by him. There are some problems that can’t be solved by cosmic compassion and empathy. There are some people whose hearts are so mean that they don’t even want to save themselves.

Dot and Bubble argues that its hero’s role is to step into the breach and help, even in the face of such shocking contempt, because life is worth more than anything else, even the hateful little life – presumably because life can be redeemed and death is final. It’s hard to accept that, and Gatwa’s performance suggests that perhaps such idealism is not appropriate here. He laughs at the madness of the situation, then screams in pain. Who knows if it’s the right decision, but he made it. He tried.