Dot and Bubble, living together no more

In Martha’s first trip with the Tenth Doctor, this is what the characters say.

MARTHA : I'm not exactly white, in case you haven't noticed?

THE 10TH DOCTOR : I'm not even human, walk about like you own the place, works for me. Besides, you'd be surprised... Elizabethan England, it's not so different from your time.

Martha immediately senses that, as a racialised person in the past, things are probably going to go badly for her. But the Doctor brushes that aside with a clever line and, just like that, the adventure can begin without anyone having to worry about a vaguely important subject called RACISM.

Flashforward to season 14, RTD is back in charge of the series, and this time the Doctor is a racialised person. So can he still “walk around like he owns the place”? Was his advice to Martha really all that sound?

Four episodes into the season, the atmosphere of this new era has now been established, and it has already become clear that the Doctor no longer really has a place, no longer really has any impact, in a world that in twenty years has changed terribly and not always for the better. So now the question becomes: who is the Doctor, and why does he no longer belong here? That is, in theory, what this episode arrives at exactly the right moment to explore. I spent a long time wondering why this episode was so widely loved when it came out. The first time, I found it very powerful, with a striking message and a strong ending, while also being disappointed not to see much of the Doctor. On a second viewing, it struck me as a not especially interesting rip-off of a series I have quite a few problems with: Black Mirror. I brushed it aside with a clever line, just as many other fans do with other Fifteenth Doctor episodes. The good thing about time is that opinions evolve, reactions change, and analyses grow sharper.

Now that both Fifteenth Doctor seasons are over, I have rewatched this episode several times and it has worked its way through my mind. Usually each episode grows in me, but this one has taken detours in every direction instead. I could not pin it down. So this analysis is not here to claim that I have found the “truth” of the episode, but rather to offer the reading keys that have accompanied me while watching it closely.

At first glance, this is an episode that seems to say technology is making younger generations stupid… right up to showing that stupid people are also racist and/or vice versa. If that were all there was to it, then the episode itself would be stupid and would not interest me very much. It would just be a rather reactionary, blunt little speech. That is what bothered me on my second viewing. Was I wrong? I decided to revisit it much later to find out for sure. And when I looked more closely, I started to notice other elements.

Dot and Bubble focuses on a world inhabited only by young people, all of them permanently surrounded by holographic screens to the point that they no longer look at the environment immediately around them. When the protagonist, Lindy, encounters the Doctor and Ruby through those screens, she slowly discovers that huge slimy creatures are eating the people around her and that she is going to have to find a way to escape. It sounds simple, but in the end it really is not. Because Dot and Bubble presents a world the Doctor cannot enter. He can only appear there through a screen. A screen he uses to create an illusion, since he pretends not to be with Ruby in order not to unsettle the protagonist too quickly. The world of Dot and Bubble could lazily be read as a metaphor for young people spending too much time staring at screens. But it can also be read through another lens: one in which the screens are the necessary aesthetic device for talking about a world where the Doctor is only an illusion, a television series that reaches us only through a screen. We can hear him, sure, but we still prefer not to listen too closely, because he is kind, yes, but what he does is impossible. After all, in a science-fiction series, everything is illusion. So why trust him? Why trust the Doctor?

So Dot and Bubble comes very close to representing our own world in an extremely metatextual way. In Dot and Bubble, the Doctor cannot enter, just as he cannot enter our world. It is interesting to see that this idea will continue to be developed a little further as the Fifteenth Doctor’s adventures go on. Combined with everything the season has already established, you get the sense that the Doctor is suffering from being nothing more than a TV character inside his own universe. Or perhaps the point is to confront him here with a universe that is not his, but is symbolically closer to ours. Because what we discover over the course of Dot and Bubble is that this is not really a world where young people are overloaded with screens, but a world where everyone is racist. After 73 Yards, there can be no doubt about it: this season wants to tackle fascism head-on, along with everything that comes from it and makes it what it is. But is that too difficult a task for the Doctor? The episode seems to answer yes. Though with a subtle twist: what it really says is that it is impossible to help someone who does not want to be helped. You can only hold out a hand. But when you hold out that hand to people who, deep down, would rather leave you to die because you are “different,” is that not also helping in the wrong way? Because by the end of the episode, you can tell there was someone else to save too, someone who perhaps would not have reacted the way Lindy did, right?

What is more, the episode still ends on a troubling conclusion: racist people are not going to change just because you behave humanely toward them. That is not the kind of soft centrist idea that says we should all learn to live together. The ending says no, living together is not going to happen. That is a striking thing for an episode of a series this widely broadcast and this constrained in its writing to say.

The ending contains another observation too: survival instinct overrides the fantasy of belonging to some so-called superior race. Which proves that Lindy’s racism is just completely false soil, a supposedly solid, deeply embedded base rooted in habit alone. It is not an active feeling, but a passive one, because when action is required, Lindy suddenly does not care about skin colour at all.

But to explore all of this in more detail, here is the episode’s full breakdown. COMPLETE ANALYSIS OF DOT AND BUBBLE