Dot and Bubble - Complete analysis

But his tone is not exactly upbeat, so because Lindy is a bit fed up with it, she gets up and walks across her bedroom… following arrows generated by the bubble! Because yes, how are you meant to move through the real world if you are surrounded by a virtual one? When she reaches her bathroom, her virtual friends, the Rotterdam twins, tell her how much they adore Ricky September, that handsome blond singer who looks straight out of an insufferable YouTube video. BUT plot twist (not really): Lindy receives an unsolicited request from the Doctor, who appears on her screen to warn her. Lindy finds it horribly awkward, a bit like getting a spam phone call, and closes the Doctor’s video window. We then watch her vibing in front of the mirror to Ricky September while, in the background, a monster is just barely revealed… It is literally the most basic Doctor Who concept intruding into a Black Mirror-style atmosphere. But without the Black Mirror, really. Because Lindy can in fact see a little beyond her bubble, she just does not pay attention. Literally the way most of us do, more or less, these days. Why? Because it is easier to get rid of the man shouting that danger is coming than to confront the danger itself.

After the opening credits, we discover a dome sitting in the middle of some random forest landscape. The camera then frames the dome itself, which once again functions as a visual representation of a bubble, fully carrying through the episode’s central metaphor. Inside that dome, an advertising voice tells us how wonderful life is in “Finetime”. The holographic presenter projected onto the buildings says there is a “minor” issue with the weather radar. This habit of downplaying everything reproduces a way of speaking that sounds reassuring but is in fact deeply pernicious, and which increasingly saturates everyday life, especially for younger generations. Every piece of language in this episode is meaningful, and it reminds us that the same is true in our world. The way we speak comes from political choices that little by little shape the world and the people in it, right down to the wording of their emotions and feelings.

Lindy walks outside in her bubble, still following her arrows, and we discover that everyone in Finetime seems to do the same. Everything is pastel, sanitised, with no excess of anything in this “perfect” world. As Lindy walks along, a body is grabbed and very clearly eaten: today’s meal is a pastel-coloured Playmobil, yummy. Strange, these people who walk through the street without noticing something terrible happening right beside them: it would be like walking around and failing to see homeless people dying on the pavement, except of course that never happens.

Back at her “office”, Lindy reconnects through her bubble with the friend who keeps insisting that someone has disappeared. But Lindy decides that this is “not fun” and dismisses him. Then our dear Ruby appears, pretending to be a kind of phone spam. Lindy is brave to even listen to her; I would have hung up straight away. But Ruby is white and peroxide blonde, so Lindy is less irritated by her than she was by the Doctor. She is still suspicious, though, and explains to Ruby that she works for two long hours each day doing data processing: interesting, coming from an RTD who claims he only wants to generate content, to go straight for the very concept of data itself. It is almost as though he presents on screen ideas far less bland than the ones he offers in interviews. Which is to say: perhaps we should not always believe what creators say in interviews about their own work… Lindy KNOWS there are five other people with her in the office, but she refuses to actually look and instead tries to call a colleague through her bubble. Ha! Like people who decide to text each other even though they are in the same house! (That has absolutely never happened to me… ahem.) Ruby insists: get your head out of your bubble, Lindy darling. But Lindy finds that suggestion insulting! Her goth friend insists as well. Lindy claims she “can do whatever she wants” but still refuses to remove her bubble because it annoys her. A bit like a smoker who can quit whenever they want but would rather not. A bit like all of us, who could live without our phones but would rather not?

Anyway, Lindy gathers her courage in both hands (it is exhausting to watch someone struggle over something so simple, and that is the episode’s strength). She looks past the bubble and sees that nobody is there. She asks where they are. She does not understand: usually you work and then you play. Yes, in the end, that really is what new technologies tend to draw us towards—a childish relationship to time and to the world.

At that point, Lindy has already become pretty unbearable. Ruby tells her to look to her right, and she finally sees a kind of giant slug, though not very clearly. Yep—her colleague has turned into sashimi for molluscs. The music then becomes genuinely unsettling. Lindy just wants to go back to work, she is scared! She removes the bubble and the dot. She cries, and the camera moves into a close-up on her eyes: we experience the episode through the eyes of this difficult, not especially likeable character, and the direction makes that abundantly clear. The direction and the script are telling us that we ARE Lindy, and that is going to matter enormously later on.

She is disgusted and watches another person get eaten by a giant slug. She puts her bubble back on and plays a Ricky video to calm herself. Like when I see something horrifying in the news and decide to put on Doctor Who so I do not have to think about it anymore and can pretend it does not exist. Once again, this season is telling us that we are wrong to expect fiction to save us. Strange? Not really, if we have been paying attention to the season.

Ruby calls the Doctor in, but Lindy finds that deeply annoying. When the Doctor appears, Lindy accuses him: after all, he was never there before, and now suddenly he turns up exactly when the monsters do! And there we are—one little conspiracy theory in a single line of dialogue. It is brilliant, because that really is what happens in everyday life. The Doctor, confident as ever, tells her he is going to save her. But the Doctor has never been closer to what he is in our world: an image on a screen, powerless in the face of the horror outside. Another episode in which the Doctor does not really move: that cannot be a coincidence, it is a deliberate choice. Even if there were scheduling issues with Ncuti Gatwa during filming, there were other ways of handling that.

The dot does not seem to “see” the monsters, so Lindy has to get up and walk without the bubble. She stands, crab-walks a little, then crashes straight into the table because she does not know how to walk without the bubble. “I’m so stupid,” she says. And at that point, you both want to laugh and feel an enormous surge of sympathy for her, because the episode is clearly directed to produce exactly that response. In effect, her life-force has been taken away from her. She cannot do anything because something else helps her do everything. It is only an exaggerated version of what we ourselves experience, but not an implausible one. So Lindy summons the bubble again because she cannot walk without the arrows. “Shut up, I hate you, I hate you, I hate you,” she says prettily, foreshadowing the end of the episode and stressing the childish nature of this world made stupid. Lindy sets off with the bubble, waits for the lift, and finds the Doctor condescending because he tells her she is brilliant. Ah—interesting. A character openly pushing back against the Doctor’s paternalistic benevolence. Coincidence? Impossible. Just as James Bond was deconstructed in the Daniel Craig era, the Doctor is little by little being dismantled too. Daniel Craig, Ncuti Gatwa, same destiny?

Lindy comes face to face with a slug and does not dare turn around because the arrow tells her to keep moving forward. Come on now, Lindy, please switch on at least one neuron… But the slug ignores her, just like the one before, and the Doctor starts wondering why. He tries to work out what makes her different. Lindy, good citizen that she is, calls the police, but no one answers. She finally gets out of the building. Ruby and the Doctor ask her to remove the bubble, look around properly, and describe what she sees. She snaps, “I’m not a child,” because he speaks to her in the childish vocabulary she herself uses. That is fascinating: she wants to live in a world where she behaves like a child, where everything is smooth and plastic like a Playmobil set, but she rejects the Doctor’s patriarchal father-figure persona and his habitual benevolent superiority. Is this perhaps a representation of the child-king grown into adulthood? Is it a slightly reactionary way of saying, “this is what we are turning youth into”?

Lindy sees lots of people getting eaten and hides in a corner before pulling her bubble back up. She cannot understand why security is not stopping the slugs from carrying out these atrocities! She then explains to the Doctor and Ruby that rich children come here from the home world to work and party. We see Lindy’s mother, played by the recurring older actress whose face has popped up in every episode so far, and this time the Doctor and Ruby recognise her. But before we can learn more, Lindy realises that the pair of them are in the same room, and the Doctor admits it by standing up to join Ruby: BETRAYAL. And honestly, Lindy, you are still being very restrained—he could have revealed he was smartly dressed above the waist and in his underwear below! She immediately says that since they lied, it must be a conspiracy. Which means they are criminals! So she opens a group chat and all her friends start speaking over one another. She mutes them and tells them loads of people are missing. She talks to Gothic Paul and tells him people are being eaten, but he thinks that is ridiculous. Then a slug eats him right on screen and he disappears. Not so ridiculous now, is it, PAUL???

The others scream, but on mute: it is a lovely directorial idea. Nothing really has impact when everything happens through a screen. It was clearly a real challenge for this episode: how do you make Skype-like imagery meaningful? Some productions have managed it less well (War of the Worlds, little angel gone too soon). Lindy tells her friends that the Doctor is not as stupid as he looks, but that he will be disciplined later on: ah… now the racist subtext is beginning to show its hand a little. The Doctor tells them there are tunnels beneath the city and that they should head there and leave Finetime if they want to be safe. Suddenly Lindy is almost out of battery. She loses the connection and so loses both her directions and her bubble.

Now the direction is finally going to have to unfold a little. Lindy walks down the street while imitating the sound of the arrow, and smacks into a lamppost twice (the same one). The camera is gentle and seems to accompany her like someone helping a toddler take their first wobbly steps. Lindy finds herself in a street full of slugs and wants to cross it, but she cannot walk in a straight line and nearly ends up walking directly into one of the giant things. “I’m so stupid,” she repeats. But the camera does not frame it condescendingly. We are clearly witnessing someone’s first steps, and the direction knows it. So what happens when you hand freedom to someone who does not even know they have never had any? That is how the episode is built. No need for flashy flourishes: the camera moves closer to Lindy so that we can feel her fear in the face of her own incapacity, and it works brilliantly.

Then someone calls out to her and gives her directions. It is Ricky September in blond, flesh-and-blood form! Lindy is awestruck and starts walking along to cheerful music, following his voice. She reaches him, takes his hand, then throws herself into a big hug. It was her first hug… He apologises and says he should have asked first, but she says it was her fault. He asks whether it is alright to hold her hand and they go on together. There are two possible readings of that dialogue choice: is it there to show that consent matters, or is it a way of suggesting that even that has now gone too far, just like technology? Given the directions the series later takes, I genuinely wonder, and I very much hope it is the first option. In any case, the only person she ultimately accepts touching is the one who, for her, most closely resembles a screen made flesh.

Ricky September reveals that he does not always use his dot and that sometimes he even reads books. Lindy finds that “wild”. She says it is the best day of her life, and he gently points out that thousands of people are dying. But that does not bother her too much: Lindy is not exactly overflowing with altruism. It is interesting how shocking that can feel when fiction shows us a dynamic we ourselves live with every day from the comfort of our living rooms while the atrocities of war rage on across our own continent. The point of the episode is not to make us feel guilty, but to make us aware. And perhaps that is the most important thing in the Gatwa era: awareness.

In a building that looks like a hotel lobby, they decide to call for help by contacting the home world. Lindy complains that the Doctor is rude, while Ricky discovers that there is no one left on their planet: the slugs have killed everyone. But yes, of course, being “rude”, if he even is, is obviously the real problem… It is a perfect echo of right-wing rhetoric that erases the real issues by fixating on trivial things.

In any case, a question emerges here: who are these slugs? They are clearly attacking worlds deliberately, are they not? Symbolically they represent a soft, smothering threat—the kind of thing we do not want to see and which nevertheless puts us in grave danger in real life. It is their very design that makes that possible, and reminds us that the science-fiction ideas in Doctor Who are never chosen at random. If they were giant bees instead, it obviously would not mean the same thing. So thank you to this episode for restoring some dignity to the series while still stubbornly continuing to dismantle the Doctor’s image.

But back to our blondes: Ricky leads Lindy down into the underground levels. They run and arrive somewhere far uglier than the rest of the city. She calls it “so manual”. He says that in the old days people worked, and that it was hard. She says her own job is hard too, because her fingers hurt sometimes. Yes indeed—some kinds of work damage the body more than others. Quietly, the episode tells us that young people today are luckier. Where it edges into reactionary territory is that this is not entirely true: it is mostly true for wealthy young people. But Lindy comes from a rich family, and we understand that everyone in Finetime is a rich child. So Ricky really ought to say that there are still people who work hard today—the ones who physically build the places where privileged youth then go to party.

Lindy completely misses the intense political meaning of the sequence and switches her bubble back on. She tells Ruby and the Doctor that she is with Ricky, and both of them immediately find him rather sexy. We can revisit that when he plays Clayface. Ricky starts trying to work out the code for the locked door that would let them reach the Doctor and Ruby. Lindy boasts that she is friends with Ricky now: there is a huge critique here of internet culture, where relationships accelerate with absurd speed. It is all the more interesting because this is an episode embraced by a fandom that also lives very much online. Watching it, I assumed the fandom would feel attacked, but in fact I think the episode confirms something younger generations already know. The problem is not that we love the internet—it is that the people behind it manipulate us and harm us by taking away our human agency. So an episode like this tells us that we are like Ricky, that we are capable of breaking free from it, even if it is hard, and that is oddly empowering.

The episode makes a smart artistic choice by moving from immense, open nature excluded by a dome, to a sanitised, softly coloured but lifeless interior, and then to a dark, grimy basement that nonetheless represents the way out. It is in that atmosphere that the Doctor gradually realises why people are being eaten in a specific order. Because it is alphabetical! Lindy sees a woman being eaten on video and realises she is next. She panics. Ricky reassures her. He tells her he is going to save them. The Doctor says the slugs must have been created, because otherwise they would not eat in alphabetical order. And this is where the episode loses me a little.

The dot has become sentient and has learned to hate the people who use it, and it is the dot that feeds them to the slugs. That is a classic science-fiction film trope, but the episode had been subtler than that up to this point. Because it creates two problems. If the dot is intelligent enough to hate the people who use it, then it is intelligent enough to understand that it is nothing without those same people using it, is it not? And if it is clever enough to create slugs to eat them, then surely it is also clever enough simply to do what it later does to Ricky after an improvised baseball match, is it not?

Yes indeed, because the dot then attacks Lindy. Ricky plays baseball with it using a metal pipe. Hero that he is, Ricky tells Lindy to run. The dot knocks Ricky out and heads for Lindy instead. But Lindy throws out Ricky’s real surname: alphabetically he comes before her! So she betrays him to save her own skin and gets him killed when the dot drives straight through his skull. Which means… why create slugs if they can just ram themselves into the heads of people who spend every second of every day facing their dots? This extermination of rich kids could be over in a flash, could it not?

Anyway, Lindy does not waste time worrying about script inconsistencies, opens the door and walks out. Safe, proud of herself, she arrives in an underground passage where survivors are gathered alongside the TARDIS. She finds one of her friends and hugs her. She also finds Ruby and the Doctor, who ask where Ricky is, but she lies and says he went off to save other people. It is utterly chilling, and both the direction and the acting sell it beautifully. She thanks them in a painfully forced way. Her friend tells her that she and the other survivors are leaving Finetime. They also tell her that everyone is dead, including her mother. She says, “gone to the sky, lucky mummy, so lucky”: yes indeed, Lindy is still the same Lindy we met at the start. Childish and chilling…

The direction—both visually and dramatically—performs an extraordinarily powerful reversal in a matter of seconds. The episode has slowly built empathy for this character, for this human being, only to tell us that she has not changed at all. It is like when we try to tell ourselves that yes, cruel people, fascists and others, can change, that we have to try to understand them. That is probably true—one must hope so—but we should not fool ourselves: it does not happen in a matter of seconds. That is why the episode is powerful: it puts us in Lindy’s skin all the way through, so that we develop that empathy, so that we understand her, up to the moment when we no longer do.

The blond youths of Finetime are far too proud of themselves for being pioneers: they are going to discover the forest planet! With any luck they will meet some Ewoks, although once they discover there is “woke” in the name they will be terribly upset. The Doctor offers to take them in the TARDIS and bring them somewhere safe. The very static acting from Millie Gibson and Ncuti Gatwa here is striking: it is as though they are still trapped inside the bubble. That is a deliberate choice. In fact, the bubble is not just a metaphor. It is the lived reality of people like those in Finetime. They keep everyone else at a distance while pretending to be close. Ruby and the Doctor cannot move, cannot approach.

Lindy then tells him that he is not like them. She and her friend mock his “magic box” and call it voodoo. The Doctor does not fit the standards of Finetime. He understands perfectly well the blatant racism of little Lindy darling and her friend, but he does not care what they think. He tells them he will save them anyway. Yet they all refuse and would rather go off and die while imagining that they are going to survive. The Doctor starts to crack a little: he is disgusted, it drives him mad, he laughs nervously and then shouts. Ruby cries, embarrassed and upset. So the Nazi idiots climb onto a boat and the Doctor and Ruby watch them go, in tears. Then they return to the TARDIS and leave.

It is bleak. And it is so true. This sequence is perfectly written and staged. Once again the series is clear: we can do nothing for people who do not want to be helped, and that is what will lead us to ruin. It shows the inability of benevolence—something inherent to the Doctor—to cure the fatal ideas living in fascist souls. So what then? Does the Doctor simply leave? Does he let fascists get on with their lives? Is he just unable to fight? Here he can do nothing because he wanted to save them, not destroy them, but the question would obviously look different if other oppressed characters were standing opposite these people, would it not? If we knew who the invisible workers of Finetime were, the discourse would not be the same. So this is an episode that leaves us with many questions and makes us want to go further into the subject. It is the most political episode of the season, and probably the most political the series has ever been full stop. It is also an episode that hurts because it ends on a non-ending. Doctor Who can no longer wrap up its stories neatly. Is that once again a reflection on the now-obsolete identity of the show? Five episodes in, the Doctor who wanted to save the Boogeyman already feels very far away—because now the Boogeyman does not want him anymore…