Doctor Who and Dot and Bubble

Well, okay, let’s start with that ending.

This season has been a little stingy about giving Gatwa any big show-offy grandstanding moments, scenes where he can really flex. That’s been in keeping with the gear this season has mostly operated in—the Doctor’s a fun-loving guy with big emotions who tends to inspire others to solve problems instead of solving them himself. No big showdowns, so to speak.

But boy, he really got to uncork everything he had here. When the penny drops at the end, it’s a remarkable performance as the shock moves through anger and finally lands on total disgust. The Doctor whose emotions are always at 120% finally gets something to really point that skill at, and he gets to physically embody the platonic concept of “Frustration.”

The character beat I really liked was right after, where he decides not to save those rich kids against their will. He’s absolutely got the ability to do that, and saving people who don’t want to be saved would solidly be in character—but also in character is deciding that, nope, he’s going to let these assholes go ahead and live with their chosen consequences.

As soon as Gatwa was cast, the odds seemed good that they were going to do something with the fact the Doctor has a new skin tone. It seemed obvious that RTD was too good a writer to just do an unreconstructed Very Special Episode about Racism, but presumably going to get addressed somehow. And they didn’t really talk about it, and the season to date has more or less ignored that aspect of the Doctor’s current physical form. And going into this week, there was absolutely no indication that was going to change.

Instead, we get 40 minutes of narrative sleight-of-hand, looking for all appearances that what we have this week is a 60-year old man satirizing social media. And it fully commits to this, hitting all the points you expect to see, even making the “bubble” a literal thing. The kids can’t do anything without their socials! They can’t even walk on their own! They don’t notice anything around them! There’s even a character named “Doctor Pee!” Two-thirds of the way through, you’re sort of rolling your eyes, thinking, “yeah man, I had a bad time on twitter too, maybe give the kids a break.”

Davies trusts that you’re just not going to notice that after a season full of incredibly diverse casting, that every person in the video squares has the same pale skin color. That comments like “I thought you all looked the same” will slide by without connecting to anything. The guest lead’s reaction to the Doctor in Ruby being in the same physical space is weird, but not so weird it sticks out.

At the same time, theres a vague but growing sense that none of the people on this planet are good people. It’s not just that they’re rich kids dependent on a sytem they don’t understand, and convinced of their own superiority, but there’s a more fundamental moral rot. By the time Lindy gets the man who just rescued her murdered to save her own skin, it doesn’t come across as a shock so much as “wow, they really are all assholes.”

Going into the last act, there’s a weird unease about what kind of story this even is—it doesn’t seem like we’re making fun of instagram anymore, and we also seem to have moved past a story about sheltered elite kids learning how to be better, so where is this going? And then the trap snaps shut, because we were on the Racism Planet, populated by people who would literally rather die than be rescued by a Black man.

I love how absolutely surgical it is. Instead of doing 45 minutes of “oh no, the south!” it’s 40 minutes of distraction and then an absolute gut punch. Part of what allows them to obscure the fact that this was “the racism one” is that because the Doctor wasn’t looking for it, neither was the audience, and so it sneaks up on both him and us.

Back when New New Who kicked off in November we spent some time speculating about why Davies would choose to come back and do more Doctor Who at this point in his career. Like all things, it’s clearly complicated and not just one thing; he gave an interview with a kid a few months ago where the kid asks him how he keeps coming up with new monsters, and his response is that it’s the other way around, and that he got the job because he can’t stop coming up with monsters, and I suspect that’s a lot more honest than the joking tone makes it sound. But it was also clear that he was angry and had things to say, and this is the kind of thing I was imagining.

Again like last week, I really feel like this needed a little card at the beginning that said “look, he was still mostly working on that show with Agent Scully. We didn’t leave our main guy out of 1/4 of his first season by choice!” The video squares was a tremendously clever fix, as it let him be in quite a bit of the show, despite the fact that those shots were probably all done in one afternoon with no set to speak of. This was the second one they filmed, as the second half of the first production block, which means that the Doctor’s shriek of rage was the first scene Gatwa filmed for this season. That’s a hell of a thing to land on your first day on the job.

I sketched the first draft of this out as I was coming down with COVID, and originally I ended this with “…and I’m sure everyone is going to be completely normal about this.” But it turns out they mostly were! There were the usual suspects who tried to claim it actually wasn’t racism at the end, instead something else that they described that was actually just racism except they didn’t know it, but mostly everyone was on board! It turns out the one everyone got weird about was the next one…