Nothing about this should work. Off the bat, it’s sandbagged by being a second Doctor-lite episode in a row. And for those terminally irked by Space Babies—and I’m certainly at all curious how that’s going to do in the rewatch—this displays nearly all the tendencies that, if not why the episode was bad, at least very much set it up to fail. Which is to say, this is Russell T Davies in his always controversial farting aliens mode, to the point of featuring a character named Dr. Pee. Indeed, nearly every proper noun save “Gothic Paul” designed to be annoying. On top of that it features a sixty-one year old man writing about the evils of social media, taking to nuanced satire is like a backhoe to gardening. Its main conceit is a social media bubble that literally prevents people from seeing what’s right in front of them, its main character unable to even walk without her device’s assistance. And then, after forty minutes of this, Russell T Davies decides that he should probably address racism.
The most obvious thing to say, right off the bat, is that Gatwa makes this, effortlessly shifting gears through the Doctor’s increasing desperation before going off into an actorial guitar solo of gesture and expression. First the shocked horror, then the hysterical laughter, and then that awful, brilliant break into screaming before a lingering, tearful judgment that slowly hardens into contempt. It’s astonishing work, and it has to be—anything less than a standout moment to make every critic carve out a paragraph of heavy praise is going to sink the whole endeavor. That would be true even without the goofball antics of the first 95% of the episode.
But there’s something innately off about crediting the success of a Doctor-lite episode exclusively to the Doctor. Yes, this one makes sly use of its premise—Gatwa’s actually in an awful lot of it because you can shoot stupidly fast with a single camera angle and no set to speak of. But that’s just another reason to praise Davies, who turns in what is broadly speaking the episode everybody wanted from him when his return was announced.
The farting alien mode had, of course, already been perfected once, in the second most obvious antecedent to this, Gridlock. This is Davies building on that success. For all his satire is broad, it’s never careless. The Bubble is clever, both in its wordplay and as a visual concept, affordable now, as opposed to when Davies pitched this to Moffat. More to the point, it’s just conceptually sharp. There’s a ton of idle depth—acres of character work threaded through little details like follower counts and the little messages on people’s profiles.
But Davies also expands on the weird bleakness at the core of Gridlock, not just with the same “they’re all dead” reveal, but with an aggressive juxtaposition of the pastel-laden 60s retro-future vibe and the properly tense horror stretches. All of this sets up his final moment—that smash cut tonal whiplash from farting aliens to the nihilist Davies of Midnight and Children of Earth. The reveal that Finetime is segregationist is not so much a twist at the end as it is the resolution of a tension between silliness and horror that has been ratcheting up all episode, culminating in Lindy’s callous sacrifice of Ricky September. And it works as a catharsis, because it is in the end a reveal that everything we’ve been annoyed by all episode is actually contemptible.
I expect that when I post this I’m going to find out that I’m as out of step in my praise of this episode as I was in my criticism of 73 Yards. So be it. This slaps. It is to Davies what the Capaldi era’s highlights were to Moffat—a triumph of late style that evolves longstanding ideas into newer, better forms. What a delight.
- The most obvious antecedent to this is, of course, The Macra Terror itself. It’s a real pity that Davies didn’t work the name into the episode by having someone yelp “there’s no such thing as Man Traps!”
- This is one where my tendency to be spoiled makes reviewing more challenging, as I knew there was a thing about racism at the end, which meant I picked up on the cluing from the start. Davies, in Unleashed, spends some time musing on when people might notice the all-white cast, and it’s notable that the Bubble visual has the effect of repeatedly spreading them out for us to notice the pattern. It’s well set up, though I’m sure plenty of people managed to miss it anyway. Thankfully, however, the only people I’ve seen go so far as to complain it wasn’t set up are Bluechecks on X Dot Com.
- Of course, being spoiled also meant I had a solid five minutes where I was convinced Ricky September was the Doctor, aware of the racism, and using a hologram to take a form she’d actually follow.
- Impressively, Gatwa opened his work on this series with the racism scene. Talk about the complete opposite of the “ease the new actor in with some easier episodes,” basically going from this straight into The Church on Ruby Road, after debuting opposite David Tennant.
- I do wonder how this Gatwa-lite middle section of the season is going to play out in the overall rhythm. There is a certain loss of momentum that sets in over these two episodes—even as someone who really likes Dot and Bubble, I find myself struck by just how little of the Doctor it feels like we’ve seen, which is a faintly ridiculous thing to feel in a season that has Boom. I’m sure it’ll pick momentum up soon—next episode has the big guest star, for one thing, and will probably cliffhanger into the finale given Davies’ tease of Legend of Ruby Sunday starting with the TARDIS crashing into UNIT HQ. But the slow middle definitely feels slow, and having Gatwa be largely absent from 25% of his first season is rough on the face of it.
- So, here’s a question—where does Ruby recognize Susan Twist from? She says it in both 73 Yards and this, but expressly doesn’t recognize her from the ambulances. So… just the heckling in The Church on Ruby Road? Or is it Something Bigger?
- Department of overthinking it—the heckling scene is also the one where the Doctor is wearing the “first images of Ncuti Gatwa as the Doctor” outfit he wears in this episode, almost as if he’s following up on the “have we seen this person before” theory…
- One reason that’s overthinking it is because the series continues to lean on wildly loose storytelling. Here, unlike last week, it largely gets away with its worst gaps. Still, why do the slugs attack the homeworld? The episode largely suggests the Dot/Bubble social media culture is at least partially unique to Finetime, although Susan Twist does suggest she’s “only a bubble away,” so they clearly do still have Dots. Still the episode doesn’t really set up Homeworld as having the same vapid “drive your device to homicide” culture. More to the point, though, given that the Dots can just fly through your head, why are they creating slugs to eat people in alphabetical order?
- The reason these gaps work, though, is that this episode has the sort of unified thinking that 73 Yards lacks. I mentioned in the comments last week that it’s often useful to analyze horror movies by very literally stating the premise. The Sunmakers is about a system that works people to death and takes everything from them for profit. Heaven Sent is about being trapped forever by your grief for someone you loved. And this is about being blinded by and preyed upon by your social media bubble. That’s a tight enough unity that it bends the minor details around it.
- The interesting question for me here, as a reviewer, is whether I put it ahead of Boom or behind it. They are, after all, immediately comparable—Davies and Moffat both doing late style revisions of their classic styles. And I’m honestly not sure which one I like more. I’m harder on Boom’s ending, but I wonder if I’m not just holding Moffat to a higher standard. Certainly Boom had a real emotional thrill—a “my Doctor Who is back” joy that Davies is never quite going to have no matter how good he does simply by dint of not ever actually being my Doctor Who. But also, as you probably largely get if you read my stuff regularly, the rankings aren’t exclusively a log of my own taste—they’re also a way of telling a story about the season. And I’m suspicious of a story where Moffat is the high point of Davies’ first season. I’d really like to put a Davies episode ahead of him, and it’s either this or betting on the finale to be my favorite of the season. Equally, that’s probably a safe bet. And, hey, Rogue could pull off being a dark horse win. I’m almost certainly safe if I decide I want to put Boom ahead of this.
- Fuck it.
Rankings
- Dot and Bubble
- Boom
- The Devil’s Chord
- Space Babies
- 73 Yards