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So, I really liked “73 Yards” but I’m not going to do a separate post about it because I cannot in any way improve on @becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys ’s analysis of the Welsh folklore elements of the story. I will just observe that from an emotional point of view, to me the most important thing about “73 Yards” is how visceral it makes Ruby’s experience of abandonment. I’m imagining this is going to become important later in the season arc. So, moving on to “Dot and Bubble.”
I really liked this one, and it also played well with Mrs. P and PJ. Because I always watch them as fast as I can to avoid being spoiled, I often get to watch Doctor Who episodes a second time with the fam. This is an episode worth watching a second time. Though the Big Reveal is not, you know, Glass Onion caliber, it is very well prepared–indeed very much out there in plain sight–and once you know the ending, you can learn a lot about both the episode and yourself by going back to the beginning.
Anyway. The TL:DR on this one is: No, this is absolutely not an original premise. But that’s the point. I mean forget Black Mirror and “Nosedive”; E. M. Forster, in 1909, published a novella called The Machine Stops which anticipates the social consequences of ubiquitous technology with a startling degree of insight–albeit in an idiosyncratic and steampunky sort of way. Since at least the 1700s we’ve been warning ourselves about the dangers of overly relying on technology…and we do not listen. Or rather, *some* of us listen; but the world is increasingly controlled by those who don’t.
I will admit that based on the trailer for this episode I was not looking forward, because I really hated “The Long Game,” in which Nine and Rose get trapped on RupertMurdochWorld, and this seemed like it might be drawn from the same well. But though I wouldn’t call “Dot and Bubble” subtle, it is fresh. RTD’s greatest strengths as a writer for DW are: 1) a genuine interest in characterization 2) a great and seething discontent with what “real life” under late capitalism offers most of us and 3) passionate commitment to world-building. “Dot and Bubble” draws on all of them.
Spoilers below.
The basic situation of E. M. Forster’s The Machine Stops (1909) is this: Far, far, in the future, human technology has advanced to the point where there is no longer such a thing as unmediated experience. Most people spend their entire lives living in an individual hexagonal room to which everything they need (food, clothing, air, etc.) is brought, by the Machine. These rooms are part of vast subterranean complexes. Most humans no longer spend any time on the surface; it is widely believed that humans can’t survive in the outdoors without special breathing equipment and other adaptive aids. (This turns out to be only partially true. There definitely has been some kind of environmental catastrophe, but it was a long time ago and the ecological world has begun to recover.) People don’t see each other face to face; they interact remotely through the Machine, which links them virtually to each other. There are two existential problems in this story. One is that the experience of being human is being constantly impoverished and diminished; and the other is that the Machine is starting to break down, and of course the humans no longer know how to repair it. There is an automated repair system, but it manifests as a bunch of terrifying carnivorous worm things that attack and often eat humans who go above ground.
Has RTD read The Machine Stops? I don’t know. But clearly, Forster’s imagination anticipates many aspects of our current reality and includes a number of elements that also appear in “Dot and Bubble.” For instance, the protagonist, Kuno, is very bothered by the fact that he’s lost the ability to navigate physical spaces, and describes in detail the secret training he put himself through in order to be able to move around independently. Kuno’s mother, Vashti, abhors physical contact and can’t imagine why Kuno wants to see her in person, or indeed to do anything “not through the machine.” It’s true that Forster, poor man, imagines that given unlimited leisure time people will still give (and attend) lectures, but Forster’s opinion of the Ideas these people are constantly talking about is no higher than the Doctor’s opinion of the constant bubble chatter that he thinks may have driven the dot not only to sentience but to homicidal rage. At any rate, my point is that both The Machine Stops and “Dot and Bubble” are focused on conveying the disastrous effects of decades of mediated social interaction, not just on the individual level but on the cultural and social level.
“Dot and Bubble” does something new with this scenario by a) playing very successfully with the expectations created by RTD’s own writing conventions and b) identifying (eventually) a social/ethical/moral source for all this atrophy. Lindy’s abject dependence on mediating technology, and the shallow selfishness that has produced, are the symptoms and not the cause of what’s really wrong with her world. And since RTD does love to swing the clue hammer with a heavy hand, I want to take a moment to appreciate the amount of *showing* (as opposed to telling) that went into this.
In a behind the scenes interview RTD talked about how interested he was to find out when viewers Figure Out that Lindy’s society is founded on white supremacy. As he points out, TV casting (especially in BBC shows) is much more diverse than it used to be; but still, how long will it take individual viewers to notice that Lindy’s social world is–from what we can see of it–entirely white? And/or to see that as significant enough to be important to the episode’s plot? This is kind of a neat experiment, and the second viewing enabled me to appreciate the execution. PJ realized, after mulling over this episode, that there is a fairly obvious tell very early in the episode, when Lindy walks obliviously past a corpse lying on the pavement. As she steps past, we see the victim’s legs disappearing as his body is dragged out of the frame, leaving behind a smear of dark blue sludge. I thought it was a trail left by the giant slugs. But I think PJ’s right: it’s the victim’s blood. Which is blue and not red because these white supremacists have engaged in so much racist biological engineering that they LITERALLY have blue blood.
The endemic racism is also telegraphed in the world’s aesthetics, and this is possibly the coolest thing about the world building in “Dot and Bubble.” Bo Burnham’s epic pandemic project “Inside” includes a genius song called “White Woman’s Instagram.” The refrain is “Is this heaven?/ Or is it just a / white woman’s instagram?” Though I have never had an Instagram account, the images (described in the lyrics and replicated, often hilariously, by Burnham himself in the video) are instantly familiar to me as specific manifestations of the kind of bland, pretty, pastel, “positivity” aesthetic that blankets those regions of the Internets presumed to be frequented by women. Assuming that Lindy’s ancestors were capable of listening to that song with no self-awareness at all–an assumption I think is well grounded–it could have been Finetime’s theme song. For Lindy and the other Finetimers, heaven IS a white woman’s Instagram. It’s safe, it’s shallow, it’s pretty, it’s pastel, and it’s POSITIVE! After all, is not Finetime’s motto “Kindness All Day Long?”
Enforced positivity is another classic dystopia trope, from Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” to The Twilight Zone’s “It’s a Good Life” to The X-Files’s “Arcadia” to The Magnus Archives’s…I mean there are a lot of TMA episodes in this vein but the one with my favorite *title* is “We All Ignore the Pit.” What I appreciate about “Dot and Bubble” is the way Finetime’s aesthetic visualizes BOTH enforced positivity AND white supremacy, in such a way that they become inseparable. I can’t claim to have predicted the Reveal, but I did immediately note the oppressive and aggressive White Woman’s Instagramminess of the Bubble world. On a second viewing I realized that the Doctor unavoidably clashes with the Bubble aesthetic:
He’s got the same background and the same lighting as everyone else, but nobody else in the bubble–including, significantly, Ruby–is sporting blocks of bold color, and everyone else’s skin tones fit within a very narrow spectrum of peachy-pink. There are a few people with brown hair, but otherwise there’s almost no brown or black in the Bubble. The exception that proves the rule here is “Gothic Paul.” Finetime’s apparently lone self-identified goth does not own any black clothing–his leather jacket is white, the tee underneath it is white with some gray details, his background is aquamarine–and the best he can do as far as the Goth aesthetic is concerned is a slightly darker blue streak in his hair and a touch more eyeliner. So, I think most of us can agree there are few men on television today prettier than Ncuti Gatwa; but he’s pretty in a way that cannot be fully integrated into Finetime’s aesthetic.
And that is something it’s worth taking a moment to think about. Because this is not just the future’s problem. In everything from facial recognition software to AI generated images we can see just how pale and male the creators of the digital universe were and how unerringly that still reveals itself. The White Woman’s Instagram aesthetic is, in other words, not a product of technology itself but of the priorities, privileges, and blind spots of the people designing and still, largely, profiting from it.
Even if we don’t take time to think about it, we can–at least I can, on a second viewing–appreciate some of the effects of this enforced aesthetic. When the Doctor appears in the bubble, we see early and often how Lindy reacts with disgust and alarm to any image that is even slightly at variance with what she’s used to. The Doctor’s screen first appears surrounded by bright red warning text that picks up the red in his (orange?) sweater. Lindy waves it away immediately, and keeps trying to minimize him specifically whenever he appears on screen. Lindy always responds much more positively to Ruby than she does to the Doctor, and that is absolutely noticeable on a first viewing. (I love the repeated bits of Lindy saying “I blocked you,” “I slid you,” “you can’t do that,” etc., and the Doctor clicking his sonic thingy and saying, “Unblocked, honey!”) Even when she is interacting with the Doctor, she hits all the classic microaggressions (not distinguishing him from other people who “look the same,” calling him stupid, accusing him of being “condescending” whenever he reveals that he knows something she doesn’t know, etc.). But I guess on a first viewing I interpreted this as unconscious bias. Plot Twist! Unconscious bias revealed to be EXTREMELY CONSCIOUS!
So we thought Lindy’s biggest challenge was going to be learning how to walk without following the Bubble’s directions; but in fact that’s only one of the ways in which Lindy is being challenged to resist her conditioning. And she fails. She sickeningly betrays Ricky September–though as Mrs. P and PJ pointed out, Ricky September is probably just as much of a white supremacist as Lindy, given the likely tenor of Finetime-generated “history”–then lies about it, and then…
OK, so one of my favorite episodes from RTD’s first showrunning is “Midnight.” And one of the things I really appreciate about Gatwa’s performance of the Doctor’s reaction to suddenly discovering how deeply racist Lindy and her society are is that I think it is motivated not just by the current situation but by the previous Doctors’ encounters with humanity’s Absolute Worst Aspects. In “Midnight,” human paranoia about aliens/strangers/outsiders nearly gets Ten killed, and he is broken by that experience in ways that nothing else can break him. So in Gatwa’s reaction to Lindy’s rejection, I think you can see not just Fifteen’s pain, but Ten’s bitter and anguished recognition of that Thing About Humans that nearly got him thrown out an airlock in “Midnight.” That, at least, is one way to interpret the way the Doctor veers between cynical laughter, anguish, and grief. And, like, hats off to Ncuti Gatwa for that whole riveting sequence.
It is depressing to realize that rescue is impossible–or at least the rescue Forster imagined in 1909 is impossible. In “The Machine Stops,” the machine eventually does break down completely, leading first to mass deaths but ultimately, Kuno believes, to a renewal of humanity from those who have been living int he world outside. But from the year 2024 that seems–horrifying as the apocalypse depicted is–like a fantasy. We know that the machine never actually stops. It just gets shittier.
Anyway. I’m sure there are some harsh reviews already out there; but I liked it and I wanted to explain why. Voila. Now maybe I should drop my Bubble and go read something.