Here’s the key thing you need to know about this week’s Doctor Who: the main character doesn’t appear in the show very often.
Yes, that’s right – it’s another Doctor Lite episode. But while last week’s brilliant 73 Yards was more like 2008’s Turn Left, in which the show’s co-stars took charge and showed off their incredible abilities, this episode is more like one of the most famous Doctor Who episodes – 2007’s Blink.
With 15th Doctor Ncuti Gatwa’s Doctor Who schedule overlapping with his final work on Netflix’s Sex Education, episodes like this ended up being a necessity for the production – but that necessity often creates beautiful things. As the saying goes, pressure makes diamonds.
Still, Dot and Bubble is no 73 Yards. It’s certainly no Blink. But the way it plays with the template that episode set for a lesser Doctor episode is fascinating, exciting and ambitious.
Basically, the Doctor and companion Ruby Sunday spend almost the entirety of the episode on a video screen, interacting with characters from a world we first learn about during the episode’s running time.
The world of Finetime is a bright, vibrant place where everything is fine – hence the name. Except, of course, this is Doctor Who. Everything is fine no Very good. In fact, the show’s subject matter is so dark that before it aired, people were comparing the show to an episode of Black Mirror, and the comparisons are sure to continue after the show airs.
The main character of this episode is the cloyingly sweet Lindy Pepper-Bean, one of the residents of Finetime. Callie Cooke does a great job portraying Lindy, making her lovable despite being a self-absorbed, average citizen living in a self-absorbed, social media-fueled rural city. It’s hard to make a character like this the main character, but Cooke does it.
The bubble in the title refers to a number of things in the story, both physical and metaphorical, like the Simpsons Movie-style dome that protects Finetime from the outside world, or the spherical “bubble” that surrounds one’s head when accessing a social media interface. But it’s more of a reference to Lindy’s “social bubble,” the friendship group and giant video call that the Doctor and Ruby eventually invade to find out why people in this world are disappearing. This is Doctor Who, so there are monsters – but there’s more to it than meets the eye.
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Whereas Russell T. Davies, the writer of 73 Yards, cleverly took a spooky idea to extreme lengths, Dots and Bubbles is him doing a lot of things at once. As a result, the episode feels a bit muddled by comparison. At its worst, it even feels a bit clunky. Given how little we know about Gatwa’s Doctor so far, it’s easy to feel sorry for him being limited to a video screen, even if (unlike last week) he does have a lot of dialogue and gives a solid performance throughout.
The themes and commentary of this episode deserve a deeper discussion, which I won’t do here for spoiler reasons. The finale powerfully conveys the idea of the episode, as we see the Doctor encounter something he’s never encountered before. It feels like a watershed moment for this incarnation of the character. It’s a powerful finale, and the episode certainly delivers messages and themes as subtle as a sledgehammer – but it’s in this delivery that Dot & Bubble does its best work.
As a standard Doctor Who adventure, it’s a bit underwhelming – continuing the theme of this season, which strives to provide fairly standard lighthearted and witty plots. In past series, episodes like this would have been considered “filler”, but it’s this filler that allowed episodes like “73 Yards” and “Dot and Bubble” to work. In this new era, the filler of “Alien of the Week” has been overlooked due to the small number of episodes. “Dot and Bubble” is full of ideas, despite its flaws – but I hope it will be appreciated by more and more fans in the years to come.
