WARNING: SPOILERS
I must admit, I am very much enjoying the new season of Dr. Who. The most recent episode, “Dot and Bubble,” surpassed even my high expectations.
There is a storytelling technique I think of as “alienating the audience.” The basic idea is that you focus on a character’s struggle, getting the audience to identify with them and to hope that they will overcome their difficulties by the end of the story. But you start to introduce elements into the story that show the character in less than a flattering light, that highlight their weaknesses; in doing so, you challenge the viewer’s identification with the character, forcing them to ask themselves how much they continue to be committed to the character’s struggle.
This is what happened in this episode. At first, we identify with Lindy’s struggle and want her to survive. Sure, she may be superficial and she lives in a very insular world, but this doesn’t mean that she deserves to die. The first sign that not all is right with her is her rudeness to the Doctor, but so much is going on that we may overlook that. For perhaps the first 30 or 35 minutes of the episode, we are with her and hope she overcomes the murderous monsters. Then, shockingly, she sets her murderous dot on Ricky September, the man who helped her get to this point, in order to survive. I did not see that coming. How much a viewer is willing to continue identifying with her after this depends upon how strongly the identification was built in the preceding part of the show.
Then, it gets worse. The Doctor offers to take all of the survivors of Finetime to safety, and they refuse to go with him. Although it isn’t directly stated, the reason is because “you’re not like us,” which is to say he is black. This moment clarifies a couple of elements of the episode. For one thing, if the viewer hasn’t noticed before, all of the people in Finetime are white. For another, Lindy’s rudeness to the Doctor isn’t merely because he’s a stranger (she doesn’t have the same attitude towards Ruby), but in retrospect can be seen as her inherent privileged racism.
The episode shows the self-defeating nature of racism: that the survivors of Finetime would rather face imminent death than be helped to safety by a black man. (It is deepened by the irony that the one person who could have helped them survive, Ricky, who had read books and knew a lot of things, was murdered by Lindy.) The last shot of Lindy, smiling in smug superiority as she heads off to her likely doom, is one of the bleakest moments I can recall on the show.
This episode of Dr. Who was science fiction at its most entertaining and thought-provoking.