A sunny world, a bitter problem

At first, "Dot and Bubble," the latest episode of Doctor Who, seems to borrow from Black Mirror's bag of tricks. It takes place on Finetime, a planet where everyone is accompanied by a small spherical AI assistant called a Dot, which projects a "bubble" around their heads. Inside their individual Bubbles, people live their whole lives – group chats, watching funny videos or pop star performances – and they don't seem to go outside except to sleep. Even walking is mediated by the bubble, which tells them how many steps to move in each direction, and guides them to the office, home and to meals. It's a very "kids these days and their damn phones!" kind of premise, but again: just for starters.

The initially obtuse metaphor only becomes more obtuse when the monsters of the week are introduced: terrifying slug aliens that eat the denizens of Finetime alive, as they unwittingly walk into their gaping maws because they can't see past their bubbles. Our heroine for the week, the hapless Lindy Pepper-Bean (Callie Cooke), finds her Bubbles' flow compromised by the Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) and Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson), who spend the episode remotely trying to guide her to safety, despite her skepticism.

It's a clever set-up, one that hearkens back to fan-favorite Doctor Who stories like "Blink" and tropes beloved by writers like Steven Moffat (who, surprisingly, didn't write this episode): horrible things on the edge of one's perception, a hard edge for the Doctor's ability to intervene, and a world constructed for conformity, surely dependent on characters' ability to escape societal gravity. This strange structure clashes with the painfully condescending metaphor at the heart of "Dot and Bubble" – which writer Russell T. Davies exploits to hide what he's really doing.