The world of Finetime seems happy and harmonious. But an awful terror is preying on the citizens. Can the Doctor and Ruby make them see the truth before it’s too late?
What did we make of it? This is our HOT TAKE.
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This season has been extreme. I have either loved the episodes or hated them. There is no in-between either love or hated luckily this week was a highlight of the season.
I saw the ending as a take on racism. All the people in the bubble were white. The girl even says something along the lines earlier in the episode about “all looking alike.” And at the end, they even talked about them being contagious I think. But the girl was only receptive to Ruby, being white, and the trumpet girl said something about online contact being okay, but not in person. It can’t be a coincidence that all the rich kids were white.
Yes, Dave and I got so fixated on the social media (which is what 3/4 of the episode was, with a few seeds sown about the racist stuff at the end), that we didn’t clock it as well as we could have. That said, RTD still stuffed the rug pull at the end, by making Lindy so unlikeable and stupid through the entire episode that when you get to the end and it’s like, “Ta da! She’s a racist!” I think the reaction would have been far more shocking if we’d liked this character and been rooting for them to survive all episode, then we learn they’re terrible. Instead we learn at the end that, basically, an awful person is awful. It’s not quite Black Mirror levels of ‘wow’. Dave and I will have more to say about it on the June 30 season wrap episode.
Yeaaah, the world and character building could have been a tad bit better. Rooting for the stupid girl to survive and making her be a surprisingly terrible person at the end was a bad twist. I’m hoping with more writers on board in the future, it’ll even things out. I was also hoping for a tearless Doctor this time around. I miss the stoicism that made it difficult to read what the Doctor was feeling.
That’s why she was surprised they were in the same room earlier in the episode.
I’m enjoying your hot takes again this series but I think you missed the elephant in the room with Dot and Bubble: racism. Lindy doesn’t expect the Doctor and Ruby to be able to be in the same room as he’s black, and they won’t escape with him in the TARDIS because he’s black. Hence Ncuti’s amazing amalgam of disbelief, horror and sardonic laughter at the end. It’s about social media bubbles and social bubbles in real life. Notice there are no non-white people in Lindy’s bubble. With a show that’s usually so diversely cast, they’re definitely making a point there. There are microaggressions from Lindy throughout to seed the issue. Worth another look, I think. Personally I felt the episode failed outside of this theme by having the Doctor and Ruby trying desperately to save someone we’d all rather see eaten by a slug and RTD’s “get off my lawn” view of younger people and their use of social media, which you nailed in your review. Cheers!
Hi Jim, yes, once the ep was recorded and thrown out into the world, we started looking at other commentary and noticing that piece of the puzzle that wasn’t there in the hot take. When you see it, ‘you see it’, but I note even RTD has queried whether the work was too subtle that it wouldn’t quite land, especially on the first go, for some. And certainly based on comments we’ve had from listeners, and even podcasts (see the venerable Doctor Who Podcast where @MicheleDWP got it but @whoman234 didn’t), it wasn’t landing the same for everyone. Dave saw Lindy’s shut down of Ncuti as being a shut down of Internet creepers, for example. “Aha! But she then speaks to Ruby… cos she’s white!” people will say. But actually, if you’re running with the Internet creeper theme, is a woman more likely to give another woman a bit of her time at least, more so than she’s going to give a random bloke? I’d say so. In the end, we were running more on that social media side of the narrative than the racism one. It’s been a very interesting episode to talk about, and revisit, and we’ll talk about it again in the season wrap on June 30.
Hi Rob,
Fair enough. It must be difficult recording hot takes immediately after watching. I’ve never done it and I don’t think I’d be very good at it tbh. I wasn’t meaning to be critical – I was just trying to help answer the two big questions you both had on the outrage at Doctor and Ruby being in the same room and the reason for the Doctor’s meltdown at the end. Personally, although I was thinking something was up with the all-white bubbles, I didn’t wholly click until the “You, sir” moment from Lindy. Up until then I thought Lindy was just rude and condescending to anyone outside of her bubble. Once I got the racist angle, I kind of worked backwards and remembered things that will have been clues all along. I’m fairly sure RTD wanted people to notice only at the end to get the full impact of the gut-punch for the Doctor. It’s an interesting piece of TV and it improves the more I think about it.
Anyway, keep up the good work. I’m looking forward to your next review.
Cheers, Jim
Hi Jim, I didn’t think you were trying to be critical 🙂 Just explaining where Dave and I have ended up over the past few days. It’s been quite interesting; the podcast was barely out there for download before he and myself were already discussing the element(s) we had missed after reading other people’s thoughts, and listening to some of the other early shows to go out there. Since then, we’ve received a lot of emails, particularly, explaining what we’d already worked through. Which is the nature of a podcast – you lock these words in time and although you might have moved on within as little as a few hours, like we did, we’ll always be accountable for our initial thoughts as long as the podcast is available online, haha. As it stands, I’ve earmarked your initial comment above, to be one of two pieces of listener feedback that we’ll use in the wrap show to highlight listener sentiment. We’ll also be reading a list of about 500 names of everyone else who sent us similar thoughts. It’s extraordinary, actually, while we have loads of comments for each hot take so far, no other story this season has generated anything like the same commentary that Dot and Bubble did. Not a bad problem to have, really! See you ’round!
I think this episode was much less about Gen-Z in particular, and more about classism and lack of substance (as well as the racism).
My son, who is Gen-Z, loved the episode, wasn’t offended at all, and loved the messages about classism and racism. It was his fave episode so far (and probably my second fave).
It’s been really interesting that Gen-Z don’t see themselves in this, and are running with, “It’s about class!” when all the tropes and stereotypes employed in the episode around social media use are very much Gen-Z ones. These aren’t the ways Gen-X behaves on social, for example. And this is something Dave addressed on the episode… will Gen-Z recognise this is commenting on how they use social, or think it’s something else? And it seems many are going down the latter route and deciding it’s a class thing when, in reality, everyone uses social, not just rich kids. So while the kids in the ep are rich, their social usage isn’t unique.