you're listening to fusion patrol a listener supported podcast
each week we take a single episode of a science fiction tv series movie or
audio and overanalyze it to within an inch of its life welcome to the discussion
Hello and welcome to another episode of Fusion Patrol.
I'm Eugene.
And I'm Simon.
And tonight we are looking at Season 2024 of Doctor Who, Episode 5, Dot and Bubble and Squeak.
Or just Dot and Bubble.
Depends.
I like my name.
Before I get to the synopsis, I should say that I struggled with the choice of some of the adjectives I used in this synopsis.
I'm not entirely satisfied with them, but they are what they are.
Episode synopsis with suboptimal adjectives.
Lindy Pepper...
Lindy Pepperbean begins her grueling day in the usual way.
Checking her TikTok, brushing her teeth, interacting with fatuous friends, and measuring her pee.
all while surrounded by her bubble,
a continuous social media and life monitoring system
controlled by a device called a dot.
It surrounds her head, just like everyone else in fine time.
It's not quite like the usual morning for an unwelcome stranger
calling himself the doctor,
tries to whore his way into her carefully curated feed,
warning that she is in danger from monsters.
She blocks him, as you do.
At work, another stranger called Ruby Sunday breaks into her bubble.
Pretending to be an official, Ruby tries to convince Lindy to lower her bubble and look around,
suggesting that all the people who should be in her office with her might not be.
When she finally complies, she finds Bertie being eaten by a monster.
For whatever reason, the monsters are not being seen by their bubbles, so no one is aware of their presence.
Lindy tries leaving the building with her bubble turned off, but she's so unflaggingly stupid that she cannot even walk in a straight line without an arrow pointing straight ahead.
And cruelly, no one suggests that she hold her finger straight ahead of her and follow that.
She turns the bubble back on to navigate out of the building and runs into one of the monsters, which ignores her.
She manages to get outside and turns off her bubble, only to discover the monsters eating people all over the place.
She tries group chatting with her friends, and the doctor tries convincing them of the danger.
Many of them are already missing.
One is eaten while they watch.
The doctor sends them all the information on how to reach escape tunnels under the city,
but Lindy has a problem.
Her bubble battery is dead.
Unable to walk unassisted and with no way of navigating,
she is confronted by several of the monsters.
looking bleak, but Ricky September, mega-influencer, shows up and saves the day. Unlike the others,
he spends most of his day reading books with his bubble turned off. He still knows how to walk
unaided, helps Lindy reach the escape tunnels. In the tunnels, Ricky September uses the data
the doctor is sending him to unseal the door, a slow, tedious process that gives the doctor time
to work out that the monsters are eating people alphabetically. They've already wiped out the
homeworld and now they're ticking their way through the list on fine time, killing everyone.
Lindy and Ricky are safe from the monsters in the basement. The doctor suspects that the AI
in the dots that control the bubbles has been taking in everything these people have been doing
and has learned to hate them as much or perhaps even more than we in the audience do.
Lindy Pepperbean is next on the list.
Since the monsters cannot get into the basement, her dot comes to life and tries to kill her.
Ricky steps up to bat and fights the dot off with a makeshift bat.
But when it looks like there's no hope for Lindy, she tells the dot a secret.
Ricky September isn't his real name.
His real name is Combs, and he should be killed before her.
The dot agrees, and as Ricky stands agape at the betrayal, the dot kills him.
Lindy escapes through the hatch, where, on the other side, the Doctor and the other survivors he saved are preparing to leave Find Time and head out into the wilderness to start a new world.
There is only one small group of survivors, and the Doctor offers to take them in the TARDIS to another planet where they can start again.
Thanks, but no thanks. We don't want to associate with the likes of you. Goodbye.
And off they sail to their almost certain depths.
So, what'd you think?
It's the Doctor Light episode.
Again.
Which is the best thing I can say about it.
Oh, yeah.
But, do you like it?
I didn't hate it.
I'll just go right there.
I didn't hate it.
But, okay.
I have my issues, though.
Yeah, well, I mean, obviously, I like the Doctor Light episode.
I'm just a bit surprised, because last week was definitely a very Doctor Light episode.
And this was a sort of actually Doctor and Companion-like episode.
But there was more of Millie Gibson than was of Shooty Gatwa in it.
I know why it's a Doctor-like episode.
Remember we talked about last time that 73 Yards was the first episode filmed?
Yeah.
And this is the second.
And they were still filming Sex Education.
Shooty Gatwa was off doing...
Right.
So, yeah, that kind of makes sense.
in terms of even though you've got an eight episode run which you think you should have
plenty of time to just film everything sequentially you actually don't have your lead actor i mean the
other the other thing i was thinking about this the other thing is that they seem to have actually
filmed a lot of the new seasons of doctor who i.e the the kind of rtd2 era of doctor who
before any of it started airing.
So they seem to go straight into filming 2025 season.
I don't know why they have this new pattern
because only so far ahead you can get.
But I'm not complaining because I like these episodes
where you don't necessarily have
either the doctor or the companion
as the lead character who you're following.
They're in the background.
They may still be the most important characters in it.
I'm thinking about, you know, Blink as the template for this.
You're following a new-to-you protagonist, but the person who knows what's going on,
the person who's actually pulling all of the strings in the background,
is the doctor or the doctor and the companion.
The bad news is the sex education came to an end.
So, unfortunately...
actually watched it yet so i well i i don't know whether it's good or bad in terms of whether the
show or whether i'd like it or not it's just that they won't be filming anymore which means
shooty gatwick can concentrate his time on doctor who yeah yeah okay not good but well i i see i i
don't i'm i'm going to i'm going to kick off i think i mean this is taking the episode back to
because most of Shudy Gatva, he's at the end of the episode.
And I thought his performance, when you get the kind of final reveal,
the final twist in this episode, was the most interesting thing he's done so far.
I've kind of been a bit...
I liked him in the first episode because the running around,
or maybe it wasn't even the Christmas special,
or maybe it was the giggle, because he had 20 minutes or so in that.
But it was when we first saw him,
the kind of running around and being super manic and exciting and energetic
was novel.
And then the kind of jumping up and down going,
isn't everything wonderful, hugging each other all of the time,
started to get a little bit tedious.
And I felt that his performance, I wouldn't say one note,
I would say two notes.
It was either on that pitch or it was the kind of subdued,
the universe is in danger and everything is going to come to an end
and I'm so worried about it, I'm not even going to explain why,
that we saw in The Devil's Court.
But the reaction to Lindy kind of straight up turning him down,
I'm not going to go with you or the likes of you,
well, you, sir, are not one of us.
The way he laughed in disbelief
and that just turned into a kind of scream of anguish.
I just thought that was a really...
If I think about...
I mean, for obvious reasons,
none of the other doctors would have been in that situation,
but the kind of angry face for Tennant or Capaldi or whatever
would not have been as complex or as interesting
as the performance that Gass were gave in that scene.
So I've kind of got a little bit more faith
or hope at least for there being more depth
than I was perhaps worrying about.
I mean, I am not convinced that 15 seconds of acting
is enough to make me think he's turned the corner.
It's more than 15 seconds,
but also it's kind of, it's a critical moment.
you say he's kind of two note and i would have gone with one but i see your point about the
second note but there's something else that i've noticed i have seen and then maybe it's an act
okay it may very well be an act but i've seen two or three interviews or late night show sessions
with shudigawa and whenever i see him and then when i see him as the doctor i'm reminded of all
the people that used to say the third doctor is just john pertwee that's john pertwee being john
pertwee shooty gatwick's doctor is shooty gatwick that seems to be his personality it's not unless
he's acting in those interviews well obviously he's acting in the interviews that's what actors
do but but but but i i do think there's a sense in which if you're planning to be in in a show
where you're playing the lead you're normally i mean obviously past two episodes aside you're
normally in pretty much every scene in the show and it's a long-running show you need to lean into
that right acting is not about disguising yourself necessarily it's about putting yourself in or
putting your well it is yourself but yourself and your character into different situations and and
finding the kind of reactions to that.
And I think if you're a character actor,
you can do much more of that kind of,
you literally won't recognise who I am.
Like I re-watched Glorious 39 the other day
and I'd forgotten who was in it,
but Juno Temple, who you'll know from Ted Lasso,
played a role in that.
It's kind of a, for those who don't know Glorious 39, it's kind of a period drama.
And she's playing kind of period character.
And she's completely unrecognizable.
Completely unrecognizable.
And you can do that because it's a fairly minor character.
But I'm not sure that you can kind of expect to do that week in, week out, when that is your job for six months, a year.
I don't really feel like I'm watching Peter Capaldi or Matt Smith when they're playing the Doctor.
I don't think that's Matt Smith in real life, and I don't think that's Peter Capaldi in real life.
I obviously don't know Matt Smith in real life.
I find that hard to gauge, but I suspect it.
I think Capaldi may be a little bit different because he is a character actor.
So those are the roles that he's kind of played.
And also he's just phenomenal.
I mean, I've seen them in interviews too,
and they're not playing the same.
But they're playing something in interviews.
And I think the other thing about Capaldi
is that he's a much, much more private kind of individual.
If you compare Tennant, say,
I mean, even then, I don't know how you know who Tennant is.
You see Tennant doing interviews and he's playing.
Tennant doing an interview but you also have the privilege of watching Tennant in staged playing
David Tennant in his own home or whatever and you know that's not him either you can listen to him
doing his podcast you know that's not him either the performance is always a performance in whatever
situation it's in the only people who can judge whether that's truly who they are is are the
people who actually know them personally i think the closest you can come is to say how similar
are the performances they give to each other and like whether that's the performances they give on
chat shows or whether that's two dramatic performances how similar are they i think that's
different i think that's where i would say capaldi is someone who gives very very different performances
in different shows that he's in and even you know i mean tenant who is a phenomenal actor more so
than tenant i think well time will tell i suppose but uh anyway um i mean okay so he here is i i
let off this a little bit earlier i don't know that i i don't know that i got an answer from
you whether you like this episode or not yes i like the episode i thought i mean it was an
interesting episode it wasn't it wasn't necessarily my favorite episode even of this season but it's
on a level in in my view with 73 yard boom it well i to me to me it feels like we had those first
two episodes that were pretty dreadful and i just thought oh god this is you know this is the
standard of things to come and then actually since then i've enjoyed every episode in slightly
different ways this is interesting in the sense that it's got a really kind of charlie brooker
vibe i feel like dog on it i was going there but all right okay no i think it's a charlie brooker
vibe except for the fact that it's an incompetent charlie brooker vibe that is where i have my well
rtd cannot do this if this is his example of trying to do biting social satire he should
have picked a lane and stuck with it and and tried and i don't think it's a bunch of interesting
ideas strung together without much logical cohesion and so i'm i'm i'm i'm gonna go the
other way charlie brooker couldn't do this charlie brooker would have done something different
but it looks like Charlie Brooker.
This is the sense of...
Because, you know, if you remember when Netflix put a load of money in...
This is a bit...
Imagine that, an established TV show and then some streaming service
suddenly pours a load of money into it.
If you remember when Netflix put a load of money into Black Mirror
and suddenly they were able to do visuals
like the kind of graphics we get in this representing the bubble.
This, in terms of its visual appearance, the kind of highly stylized look,
the way in which all of those effects meld into the kind of costume design and all the rest of it,
this looks like that kind of Black Mirror stuff.
But this isn't a satire on technology, whereas I think almost all of the Black Mirror stuff,
it's about what they could do.
I mean, it's obviously not about the technology,
but it's about what the technology says about us.
Whereas the technology here is incidental in my view.
I don't know if that was your take, but even in, well, I don't know.
I don't know that I agree with it, that black mirror,
when it puts out the technology, it, and I admit,
I haven't seen all of black mirror, um, um, bits here and there.
And just, and I, and I love Charlie Brooker's work.
I hit episodes of Black Mirror I can't take.
So I watch a bit and then I don't watch it.
But it's still, even though it's about the technology,
it still has to be about how the people are impacted by the technology.
And so this has to be a bit about social media and social media addiction.
And, you know, I see a whole bunch of things like this doesn't know what to attack.
Yeah, I don't know what this is designed to go after.
Is it designed to go after social media?
If it's designed to go after racism, it's, you know, pretty late in the game before you catch that one, which is OK if it lands at home, if it lands home.
And, you know, is it about the dangers of A.I.?
Because, you know, they're just going to they're just going to decide we're not worth they're going to kill us.
Or is it about how awful rich people are, you know, but all of those things are the mix and it's just too.
It just doesn't gel for me.
So, you see, for me, the question was, what was the bubble? And I thought it was going to be the bubble is technology isolates us from each other. But it's not that, right? This is a community that is deliberately isolating themselves. They are, as it turns out, preserving their purity.
I didn't get that at first.
And I also have to, like, full disclosure,
I have to say I did not register the lack of diversity
until that final scene.
I was like, I guess I just thought it was all part of the,
this is the kind of appearance of this.
Because it's not Earth.
It's not humans.
Right.
We don't know.
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Which I think was intentional.
Yeah, it was kind of intentional from the way in which they were very stylized. You know, it could have been, wasn't exactly Sylvia Anderson, but it was a certain perspective on what the future looks like.
But obviously, an integral part of what the future looks like within the kind of this story is it's white, because that's the way that this society has ensured that, you know, this is a colony that has gone off to live there racially pure.
Wait a minute.
Is it?
Yes.
Is the planet that way, too?
Because I don't there's no evidence one way or the other.
as to whether or not they're in the world they're all wiped out too so the ai came to the exact same
conclusion they're all down there in their bubbles i think and i mean all the evidence we've got is
that all those people were in bubbles too but were they all white uh or were only rich people white
and they only sent their rich kids to the colony i i don't i don't know no no well no i i i i
I may be taking a lot from that line about being pioneers, but I think this is the whole society.
It's possible.
And if that's the case, I kind of think that there was a lot of there were a lot of clues they could have built in there that were a little didn't need to be complete reveals, but they needed to be a little bit more solid to make it to bring home the racism thing.
because you know i i watched it and i'm like i think they're talking maybe about him being black
and they did use the word voodoo which has has some connotations there but you know my wife
didn't see it i don't think it landed they could have i think it's incredibly well judged i i think
I think it's one of those where you can see everything once you know.
And I think it's hidden behind the fact that, so for example, all of Lindy's kind of reactions,
all of those kind of dismissive, standoffish rudeness, all that kind of stuff,
can be connected with it you know it's that initial misdirection around this is this is
about social media and this is about your kind of closed network and also what we bring to it
is you know when we look at the character of the doctor what i think we're seeing first and
foremost is the doctor but one of the one of the things about the doctor right that we know people
are going to react to is he's quite abrasive that i mean not necessarily always but there is
there is definitely that traditional through hartnell and baker c and capaldi the doctor
can be quite abrasive and he will tell people truths that they may not want to hear and he does
a certain amount of that in this episode and you can read some of lindy's rudeness and reactions
as being about that but in the end you know they're not well but it maybe except that lindy
is a horrible person yeah um i mean she has ricky who is very white and very much somebody she
uh is is enamored of i and that may not be the right word but a huge fan of and yet she
kills him dead with her words intentional but yes she does she does she absolutely does so i mean
she doesn't need racism there for her to be an awful person she is an awful person i do think
it's interesting that the doctor never finds out about that um you know that that information is
left off the table it's just for us in the audience to see how how horrible she really is
and yeah yeah yeah although although you know i again i i think and a lot of this i'd no idea who
cali cook is um never seen it to my knowledge never seen her in anything else before but it is
a really interesting performance it's not a perfect performance there are certain things i
didn't particularly like but there's a lot of complexity in it and she is because because
the doctor and to some extent Ruby are backgrounded in this episode she is the lead character she has
to carry the episode and as you say she is she's quite horrible quite unsympathetic so I think it's
an impressive performance from that point of view you know she's not it's not there are shades of
gray there right she she she has reactions she has feelings you know when when she discovers her mum
has died or whatever you you kind of see all that registering she's not sort of coming out and
saying oh my god that's terrible but you can see that despite her words about lucky mum that's kind
of hitting her hard and the stuff about when obviously you know having just come from that
situation in which she has basically sacrificed ricky she lies about him she lies about what
she's done and that again sort of tells a certain amount about her which is that she cares about
what people think about her right well that's what social media is all about well indeed and so that
you know that's a alarm well i think it's more than that it's it's more than that i mean i care
what other people think about me sure but i also care about people not thinking i had him murdered
yeah i mean that might even be a crime in fine time that might be a crime there i mean that's
that is a step beyond oh the social mortification if they find out that you know i wear the wrong
kind of underwear or something you know that i don't think i don't think she killed him i don't
think i don't think there's a crime there i mean i don't know the fine time um statutes there may be
a law against providing information that to that you know will cause that person to be killed
yeah that wouldn't that wouldn't be a that wouldn't be a crime under english law as far
as i'm aware isn't that i mean is that much different from paying someone to kill him
yes i mean you are you are arranging for someone else to kill somebody else instead of you
you know that's uh i'm not sure i think there's some i think there might be some culpability
there but anyway um there might be certainly from there but we can talk about it morally
legally we go but morally she's guilty of sin yeah i think from the from the from the point
of view of what she has done it's something that she knows is not a nice thing to have done i mean
And whether you can kind of say she should have sacrificed herself to save him, which is the flip side of it, I don't know.
But that would be the thing where you would say, well, you know, I can live with myself,
except you can't live with yourself because you would have been sacrificed.
But the point is she's done something that she knows is somewhat dishonorable.
So there are kind of aspects of her character that aren't just sort of out and out.
If this were the master, let's say, the master wouldn't be lying about it.
The master wouldn't be a nice person, but the badness of the master is not to do with dishonest-ish, to do more with the shrinking people to death, etc., etc., taking over the universe.
Incidentally, just mentioning the master reminded me of something that I was thinking while you were talking about whether there is that kind of depth that I hope there is in Judy Gatwa's performance.
So I'm just going to throw back to that for a moment.
I think there is an element in the way in which the kind of showrunner shapes the performance that, you know, may not be a true reflection of Gatwa's capabilities.
And so what I was reminded of was John Sim and the fact that in the RTD episodes that he appeared as the master, he gave a certain performance.
And in the Moffat episode that he gave, that he appears as a master, he gave a different performance.
He gave a good performance.
Indeed.
That I think was much more, certainly from what he said at the time of doing that performance in The Doctor Falls, was much more in line with what he would have liked to have done.
So I think there is an element of RTD knows what he's looking for from these actors.
and they may be to a degree constrained by it anyway sorry that was a sort of sidestep from
from lindy and uh her hiding what she'd done um i'm gonna say you know with the possible exception
with the possible exception of ricky september well 100 agree with the dots kill them all just
there was yes that's why i don't know i don't think it was about ai going bad because in a way
I was like, yeah, I kind of sympathize with the AI here.
I did actually think, though, at one point during the course of the episode that when Lindy was explaining about how they were a colony of all the rich kids, I'm like, oh, of course.
The parents sent them to this planet to die.
This is where you send your obnoxious, filthy rich kids who are just spoiled beyond belief.
Send them up there and let the monsters eat them.
That, I love it.
Eat the rich.
And then, yeah, they fouled that up.
I think I would have liked that a little bit better.
I will say that, like I say,
Ricky September was kind of okay,
but his rendition of little itsy-bitsy,
teeny-weeny, yellow, polka-dot bikini
was bad enough for me to put him on the kill list.
There you go, you wish.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, I wouldn't have, if any of them had survived,
he would have been the one,
because he reads books and turns his bubble off
and can still walk.
but um i you're just condemning lindy for doing something you've admitted you to do yourself so
i wouldn't do it like that though you kill him some other way you kill him with your bare hands
that's not the same no i just let the algorithm get to him i would worry about saving my life i
would not save my life at the expense of someone else's that's the difference which is what she did
she bought time for herself by putting someone else on the chopping block and that is not what
i'm talking about just saying that if you've got a list if you're an ai and you're out there and
you're taking people out i can you're saying that it's it's not okay to kill someone to save your
own life no it's also okay to kill someone because you don't like their itsy witsy teeny weeny yellow
polka dock bikini rendition no no no no no no no it is okay for me as a person in the audience
trying to second guess and quarterback the the the writer of a fictional episode where these
people aren't really going to die for me to say that character needs to die but for lindy who is
the character and for ricky who are the character that has to be consistent in world and she
absolutely killed him and that is wrong it's not wrong for me to want the character written out of
the show because that's not that truly is not a crime so it's like no i i see a different i see a
huge moral equivalence there between me saying that you know i i hope that they all fall in a
meat grinder looking forward you know in scene four and then it not happening and for in the
episode the people to push each other in a meat grind it's like yeah but that's a bit over the
line i'm just i'm just talking about the writer and he's a he's a jerk there's a there's definitely
a difference here between action and uh delayed second part through the writer uh wishes um but
yeah that that that yeah i mean if they could have done anything to make that more obnoxious i don't
know what it would have been let's see by the way what is the point of this episode that some people
aren't worth saving no i don't think that is the point because i think i think the doctor is very
genuinely i think the doctor is very genuinely trying to save them i think the ending is
essentially a tragedy and i think that is partly why it is important there are those kinds of
shades of shades of gray within these characters i mean i do agree they're all pretty kind of
objectionable but i i i think i think i think it's important in the way i mean i'm sure i'm
sure this won't be the kind of the end of what we see about the consequences of having a black
doctor all right i guess it'll be interesting to see if we do get i mean we've had black writers
on doctor who before but not at the same time as having a black doctor and i i kind of think
this will come back but but the interesting thing about the consequences of their racism being not
a direct effect on the doctor himself it's a direct effect on them you know they are they
are the principal victims of it in this story yeah yeah i it's a another episode i don't know
if we want to go through and count them this is another episode where the doctor does not save the
day that that's that is a kind of rtd sing i guess maybe not that the doctor doesn't save the day i
guess no rtd sing is high body count but yeah that whatever that whatever it is it's at a cost
and yeah part of that is the doctor not saving it i have to say i rather like those episodes
it's not important to me that the doctor saves everyone it's important that the doctor tries but
One of my favourite stories, my favourite Doctor Who stories, remains Creatures of Beauty, which is an audio story, a Peter Davison audio story from Big Finish.
And I don't want to kind of spoil it, but the doctor's role in that is a lot more complex than what you would typically get, which is the doctor turns up somewhere, discovers bad things are happening.
There is stuff.
The doctor stops bad things happening.
You know, some people die, but in the end, everyone's happy because the doctor has stopped bad things happening.
Doctor goes and moves on to the next one.
and this is you know at least one step away from that the doctor turns up somewhere bad things are
happening there is stuff some people die the doctor tries to stop bad things happening doctor
doesn't stop bad things from happening everyone dies yeah um do you think this is the writer or
the director's uh fault um lindy drops her bubble and uh she's been walking her whole life you know
one foot in front of the other and sure she's been following an arrow but uh
Uh, when she tries to walk out of the room, looking straight ahead at what she's trying to go to, uh, how come she keeps turning to the side and bumping into things?
I felt like that was incompetently directed. It's like, okay, I can't, I can't buy that. I could buy that you, I, I have trouble buying any of that notion.
Now, if you sat in the chair all day and the chair drove you around and then you got up and you're like, oh, I can't walk because I can't walk.
But they're they're all walking and talking and probably even chewing gum from time to time.
And then without an arrow pointing straight ahead, you can't walk straight ahead.
I could see how you might go. Oh, am I supposed to turn before I hit that wall?
Oh, wait, no, I can't see that either.
But but but that particular scene was so bad that was so poor where she just kept veering off to the side and hitting the desk that I was like, how did that get past?
I don't know any anybody.
I can understand having problems navigating.
I cannot have understand why you can't put one foot in front of the other, that there is no there's no physiological reason why you can't do that.
And also, everyone sure got over that fast, didn't they, by the end of the episode?
I'm going to say I don't think that you can separate out the writer from the...
As executive producer, RTD has an awful lot more influence than another writer, any other writer, would have on how the episode finally appears.
So I'm going to say I don't think that it's just down to the director.
Obviously, I don't know a lot about Dylan Holmes Williams.
He directed 73 Yards.
I thought that was very well directed.
I think the idea that without the bubble you have difficulty walking wasn't a very good idea.
And I think in terms of the writing, this episode feels really well paced.
These are short episodes.
They're under 45 minutes and we've had entire seasons where we've had 50 minutes, 50 minute episodes.
Plus Chibnall has managed to get quite a number of 60 minute episodes.
And this episode, if you're going to have a short episode, this episode feels like it's got an idea that you can do justice to within the time.
You know, it's not overflowing with stuff in the way that, you know, maybe Boom was.
I could imagine you could have got a double episode out of Boom farther than liked it.
You got a double episode out of Boom.
So this was generally pretty well paced, but it could have done with trimming.
If you'd taken that idea out of it, it would have improved the episode.
It just annoyed me.
Yeah.
Let's see.
Let's talk about the bubbles.
So I can't even repeat one of my comments here.
I'll have to censor it.
But let's start with the one that's not a problem.
How old are you when you get a bubble?
I mean, what do parents do when their kid's in a bubble or when their kid's not old enough to have a bubble?
Do they have to take their bubble?
Do they, you know, do you learn to walk before you get a bubble or does the bubble teach you how to walk?
It's like I don't think that's all that logical.
And the other one that I want to ask and translating this, do they have to turn them off when they are intimate and attempting to breed the next generation of Nazi fascist racist pigs?
Or do they keep the bubble on and does it like put up fantasies for them?
I'm not sure that they do natural biological procreation, given that the hugging seemed to be a bit unfamiliar.
That's true. That's true.
I don't even I don't even want to try to contemplate what that might look like now.
OK. Yeah. All right. Time for your visit to the clinic today.
um i i do you know a couple things i mean this is this is in the nitpick character but i just feel
like that an ai computer smart enough to realize that these people all deserve to die i just don't
think that it could be tricked by a name change i mean he's on the list they'll get to him when they
get to him if you'd said that to me like a year ago or certainly two years ago i would have 100%
agreed with you okay but since i know i have no problem believing this but but they have access
to all the information that these people have right they get all their information through
the bubble they all know this if lindy knows he changed his name so do the dots so you know
and and and this is the more important this is my comment about chat gpt my comment is
cannot alphabetize in the first place it it cannot alphabetize in the first place so if by walking
through an alphabetical list it's doing better than chat gpt and therefore i i fall back to my
position it's like i think it's gotten well enough that it would not be fooled by that
um but i'm not convinced and besides if she told chat gpt that his name is coombs
chat gpt would just come back as oh i'm terribly sorry about that i'm gonna update his information
that's coombs with a letter s right and you just like go right okay yeah fine
so i mean i i i'm not i'm not convinced by that i mean it it had its moment it had its dramatic
moment where she gets him killed because of that and if this had been if this had been pre-chat
gpt i absolutely would have believed this was computer logic right computer logic would
absolutely do that but not computer logic would not and i i think i'll take the i'll take the
side is i just don't buy it but um gosh who was who was lindy's mother then i seem familiar somehow
yeah she did look familiar somehow apparently she's dead so uh uh uh does she get killed oh
here's okay so a couple things the first off is is this the same person pretending to be different
people or is this something like clara who's been split and splintered along the doctor's timeline
living different lives and intersecting with the doctor's path i don't have an answer for that
question i just or is it or is it there's a shortage of equity actors and they just had to
use the same one each week it if they hadn't if they had apparently what rtd has said well
considering that they wrote it in the script that they say hey wait haven't we seen her before
i think kind of belies that rtd lies yes yes rtd lies but let's let's take another look at this
so they recognized her all right consider wild blue yonder neither the doctor nor donna saw her
she was not in the giggle nope she said good morning to mr newton before he went out to the
tree they saw newton in the tree yeah i didn't see it okay okay so typical bat that that reminds
me of the bad wolf reference in dalek where it's the helicopter pilots like there's a bad wolf one
coming in when the doctor and rose were nowhere near or no not privileged to that call at all
yeah you know okay but there you go church on ruby road you're carrying a grudge you know 19 years
later drunk woman in the audience ruby was there doctor was not she might have recognized her
no that was that no he was there for the uh disco not for the okay performance yep the the band
performance um he was outside the band performance because that's when he stopped the thing falling
on her but he wasn't in the as far as we can tell he wasn't in the room space babies they did both
see her taped message okay in the devil's cord she was the tea lady i'm not even sure they
interacted with her at all she's the tea lady i don't know if they i don't know if they had any
interaction and i'm not going to go back to watch it because he it's going to be you know 30 or 40
years before i go back to watch the devil's cord and i might die before then so you know i might
luck out in boom she was the ambulance definitely they both saw that yes so i'm good with that
73 yards obviously the doctor did not see her because the doctor didn't exist or something
yeah ruby saw her but she forgot it so it never happened yeah so what we have is maybe two
appearances maybe two 2.5 appearances possibly for that for them to clog onto it it's kind of
really and and and no offense to to miss twist she's pretty generic english old lady so i'm
you know give her a different haircut and she could probably pass me five times on the street
and i would not notice except of course i'd go what is an old english lady doing here
but you know i don't know i so i i don't think that's earned frankly that they're starting to
to recognize her but so i i i think that's strange i i or i put it another way if she did if they
why would ruby recognize her in 73 yards and then not recognize her the next time she saw her
or the no the same number of times you're like 73 yards that's undone but this is now the
replacement the next you know this is the equivalent to seeing her in 73 yards for ruby
right this is i i yes i agree ruby is more likely has seen her more times than the doctor has
definitely but i don't know and i know the doctor is supposed to be really clever but if the doctor
were really clever he would have noticed her does really second time he saw her i thought so
before he killed her oh you were i guess was it talking to her yeah um so i thought so um why do
the being killed might have sort of
knocked it out of her mind
for a minute there.
It's possible. It's possible.
I don't know. It just
it doesn't feel earned
here. I mean, I
know they're going for, you know, coming
into the finale. They've got to point
it out. In case there's people in the audience
who haven't noticed it.
Yeah, yeah. No, I
think the other way. I think it would
be odd if Ruby noticed
her in 73 yards but then and then we wound that back and then she sees her just as she did in 73
yards but this time doesn't recognize her okay i'm not going to disagree with that i don't disagree
with that uh i'm not entirely sure that ruby should have recognized her in 73 yards and certainly i
don't think yeah you're familiar yeah yeah i i don't i don't yeah you generic person you you
were kind of familiar yeah no i i i don't think it's i just i don't think it's working there uh
let's see do i have anything specific i do say i do wonder if uh you know for of all the stuff
there that bit about uh itsy bitsy teeny mini poke yellow dot bikini was a specific dig at tiktok
where people spend a lot of time taking other people's songs and work and and doing stuff over
it i'll take your words not i i don't know i don't have a tiktok account so i mean it's not
like i can't but i you know i know that's where a lot of you know more about what's going on there
than i do well you know us young people actually then i just wonder if that was if that was
something because i could see how artists might not be keen on that or then on the other hand
they might they're like oh they've got my song going and now i'm getting more record sales
maybe i don't know i don't know which way it works but i also don't know if that was the original
song he was singing to or whether that was him singing it it's been a very very long time since
i heard that song and i'm you know i could let it be that for a long time to come although i'd
you know rather listen to that on loop than see the devil's court again let's see i don't know if
we want to if we want to have any commentary on the doctor's commentary on i think it was ricky
hot uh or or not um really kind of not in character for the doctor this for this doctor
yeah apparently let's see anything else i just want to say that i never thought i would see an
episode that made kablam seem like biting insightful social commentary but now i have this is way
better than kablam oh i don't know that i would agree i don't like i said i didn't hate it but
it was it's like yeah i'm not i'm not i'm not like at this stage i am i am kind of still
looking back on the chibnall era very fondly but that was not a good effort
whereas this this was one of the better episodes of rtd2 so yeah i think i mentioned uh that my son
uh had asked to at random had asked to see the husband's river song and a while yeah a while
back and what's that one yeah and you know i seem to recall us not particularly being
hugely enamored of it no but i don't i don't know but you know something i loved it
watching it again i absolutely adored it i thought it was fantastically well done
and it may just be in comparison to what we're seeing and so yesterday he kind of randomly
popped up and goes and i don't know where he's getting these from he says we should watch angels
take manhattan good lord and and we watched that and it's still infinitely superior to anything
we've had this year it's like okay yeah yeah i mean like that you know yeah no he was he was
good and angels take manhattan was a bad episode from one of the best kind of runs of of doctor
So I get how, you know, it's difficult. There is an overlap, I think. You know, when I say Kablam was from a better season that was a worse episode than this, where this is a good episode from a bad season. There is that overlap.
But there is also, I think, a way in which we do sometimes re-evaluate episodes and we come back to them because our expectations have changed or because maybe we've come into what I want the show to be right now and what it is are perhaps in a bit of conflict.
If I come back and re-watch this season, I will do so with no illusions.
I will be fully aware of what it is and I will be in a better position to enjoy it for what it is.
And I think I have experienced that, you know, going back to RCD1 with, you know, some of the lockdown watch-alongs where I wouldn't necessarily have chosen a particular episode to watch, like The Stolen Earths, for example.
But watching it again, I have enjoyed it a lot more than I expected.
because I kind of, I'd already,
I guess I'd already priced in the things I didn't like
and I was more at liberty to enjoy the things
that I maybe hadn't noticed.
Perhaps, perhaps in five years
when Doctor Who is so much worse than it is now,
we'll come back to these.
I don't think it is just that.
But yeah, I also think,
there is an element of giving it the benefit of time passing and i didn't hate flux when
we were watching flux certainly i didn't hate as much as you hated it but now i'm kind of
looking back on flux thinking and and the the the middle whitaker season i still kind of think
there wasn't much in that that was uh worth particularly going back to but i yeah i thought
was a lot about flux that with the benefit of hindsight was perhaps better than we get we i
gave it credit for at the time and that's even with me giving it credit which you didn't uh do
you have anything specific about this episode do you have some things i do yes um so one of them
we kind of talked about it having uh echoes of black mirror i i thought there were echoes of
a couple of other things some of which are other doctor who shows um the the whole the kind of the
the bubble partly the bubble aesthetic and partly the kind of tapping into the zeitgeist stuff
reminded me of some of this stuff about uh satellite five station one the the what was it
what was it called in big bad wolf that yeah in bad wolf the or yeah all of that all of that stuff
in bad bad wolf and also the long game kind of echoes as a long camera which one's which the
one with the game shows and and the one with the game shows was bad weakest link and it's bad wolf
yeah yeah yeah i thought of that one when i was watching this and i and i and i honestly thought
about it and i said yep yep rtd just can't do this stuff well well i don't know about that because i
I quite liked some of those episodes.
I remember thinking, you know, the long game was not a memorable episode,
but tonally there was something like that.
And it's the tone that reminds me.
The other episode where it's the tone, again,
I don't think that thematically it goes the same way,
was Smile from the final Capaldi season.
Do you remember that one?
Yeah.
the same kind of social media vibe,
but coupled with that kind of clean, futuristic aesthetic.
Yeah, I can see that.
The other thing, which had nothing to do with the aesthetics,
but I couldn't believe that RTD wasn't thinking about this,
was when he talked about alphabetical order.
Did anything pop into your mind?
No?
Wow Bangor the Infinitely Prolonged?
The immortal alien from, I believe,
Life, the Universe and Everything,
Probably not in the original Doctor Who and the Cricketmen script that Douglas Adams wrote but was not used, on which that book is based.
But an immortal alien who gets so bored that they decide that they will go through the entire population of the universe, insulting every single one of them in alphabetical order.
Oh, okay. Yeah, no, I hadn't.
Ring a bell?
No, no. I mean, that, yes, that does ring a bell now that, now that you mentioned it, because he just popped up periodically through the books and would say something and disappear. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, I, it feels, it feels like, you know, the idea of the having, having disdain for the population and then expressing that in order, possibly insulting is a little more forgivable than murdering.
Yeah.
But, you know, it's, it's kind of coming from the same place.
i do do wonder where those creatures came from yeah i yeah they postulated initially that they
must have come from the wild outside but if that were true then how'd they get on the home planet
first so i i mean i don't know maybe a baby one there must have been ships going back and forth
there we go i don't think i don't know what's your point about well i think i think i don't i
mean i do think it matters very much but also i think you know the ai was controlling the population
and guiding how all that happened.
So I think there are very feasible ways
that that could have occurred.
Yeah, the one thing I wanted to, you know,
just in terms of talking about the Black Mirror-ness
of this episode,
why do you think we haven't had an episode of Doctor Who
written by Charlie Brooker?
I can tell you why we haven't had an episode
written by Charlie Brooker.
Why?
They did.
They called him and asked him to do it in 2017.
I think he said it was 2017.
I don't know.
Would have been during Capaldi's time.
Right.
And he was too busy to do it.
And he has said, I read an interview with him just today, in fact, he said, I really regret that because they haven't called me and asked again.
Right.
Well, I mean, in that case, I think my question still stands, which is, you know, why aren't they calling and asking again?
Because that's the why aren't they making him the showrunner?
Oh, well, I'm not sure I want to necessarily be the showrunner because I think there's a I'm not sure that there is quite the sympathy for the kind of show that Doctor Who is.
I still think it would be really interesting for him to to contribute an episode.
I mean, I thought 15 million merits from the first Black Mirror season was very Doctor Who-like.
It felt to me like it could easily just slot into the show.
But equally, I think if you cast your mind back to when RTD first brought the show back
and he was getting people with a profile like Stephen Moffat and like Mark Gatiss,
And in fact, like Stephen Fry, he got Stephen Fry to write an episode.
It's just Stephen Fry never delivered it.
But getting writers like Charlie Brooker, you'd have thought he would be doing that.
Now, I don't understand why he is writing so many of these episodes rather than using his kind of pull and the way, you know, he's so well connected that he could really be not just.
I mean, I think Chibnall went out of his way to get kind of diversity of writers in, which was fantastic.
And I wish RTD was doing that as well.
But not just the diversity of the writers, but actually some of those writers could be really high profile writers.
Yeah, I think you should definitely get some different writers in there.
And I mean, I, you know, I have felt I have actually felt for quite a while that I think Charlie Brooker could do it.
And I have seen enough about Charlie Brooker to know I think he is maybe not a Moffat level fan of Doctor Who, but I think he understands well enough to know that Doctor Who cannot be Black Mirror.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And that he could probably turn it in.
And I, you know, it's like I have always thought that.
And as I was trying to find out why he hasn't written, I saw several people going, oh, I really think Charlie Brooker should be the showrunner.
And I'm like, oh, OK, I'm not alone here.
Which was followed up by somebody saying, and I will agree with this person, is like, you know, I like Charlie Brooker and I would entertain that idea.
But I don't think I would be willing to let anybody be a showrunner who hasn't at least written an episode for it yet.
I mean, like, yeah, OK, fair enough.
It's like, fair enough.
Well, RTD won.
He.
I know.
Well, OK.
Maybe written a novel, but.
Yeah, but that's a little bit different.
yeah i don't i don't think that i don't think that would be my criterion but i'm yeah it wouldn't be
i don't know whether i don't know whether charlie but i think charlie brooker could
i think charlie brooker could write multiple interesting episodes but whether yeah i don't
yeah whether i would like where he took the show in the fullness of time because i take your point
I'm sure you could understand what the show is about.
But if you're going to stick with it for a couple of seasons,
if it's not what you really want it to be,
you're going to get very bored.
And if Charlie Brooker gets bored,
he's going to change it into what he wants it to be.
Like Jim O'Dea, you know.
I'm not sure I'm willing for it to be that dark.
That's basically my problem.
I have one last thing that just crossed my mind,
And that is, I did see an interview with RTD where he said that this story, he pitched, pitched maybe the wrong word, discussed with Stephen Moffat at, I don't know, Comic-Con or something, when Matt Smith was taking over as the doctor.
So, he's-
Well, RTD was going to write Moffat.
I don't know.
Well, see, that's why I didn't want to necessarily use the word pitch.
So he brought this idea to Moffat and said, here, I've got this idea.
And they talked about it and they both agreed there's no way they could do it.
So technically.
So, you know, now they're back and they can technically do it.
So basically all the ideas that were not good enough to do back then because they didn't have a boatload of money.
Now they can they can drag them up again.
But, yeah, I don't know that he was going to write it for him or whether he was just here's a free idea.
if you want to write it yourself or well the surprise was because rtd was very categorical
that he would not yeah write any doctor who after he left yeah but rtd i mean that was the surprise
that wise come back rtd lies yeah and you know we've talked about the fact that it would be very
interesting to see an rtd episode that was written by the man but not controlled god likely by the
him yeah yeah well when he's the showrunner he he makes all those kind of final decisions so having
having someone else having that level of input on an rtd script so it was much more a kind of
collaborative output would be interesting in my view do you have anything else i've got one last
thing which i want to mention which is picking up on something that we've talked about before which
is murray gold oh yeah i did you notice the score in this no i i haven't noticed the score in any of
the episodes and i do notice the score in the matt smith ones and i and i was thinking about that
and didn't write it down that his his his moffett era stuff was by far his best and this is just
nothing i big nothing no i i i thought well i mean i i love murray gold from the moment the
who came back and I thought he got better and better.
And so, you know, with the kind of change in texture
that he got through the Moffat era,
I mean, I don't know if it was better and better
or just because, you know, we'd had three or four discs
of his soundtracks by then
and this was a kind of different sound
because he was being asked for something different.
And so far, since he's come back to the show,
there hasn't been anything that has really caught my ear.
Now, this episode really did catch my ear
repeatedly a lot of the time because it sounds like he has been watching 1970s james bond i mean
oh wait wait wait wait you're right you're right you are right there was something james bond in
this and i now that you mention it i absolutely there was a point where i thought it was barn
film music for a second it wasn't i mean it was the but the bomb film in the in the final scene
that felt very bombed but in a lot of the others it was more the kind of 70s disco
kind of not kind of full-on but in the in the way that you know maybe that Marvin Hamish used it in
Spy Who Loved Me yeah this is this is a soundtrack that made me think I am I'm ready to go out and I
mean I'm sure it's not available yet but I'm ready to go out and buy this year's Doctor Who soundtrack
come on silver screen because I want to listen to this music now I also thought what the hell is he
doing because I have said before I don't want to notice the music during an episode because
it should be it should be with the grain of the episode it should all feel part of a piece not
standing out from the episode because it's running against it which I felt like it was
in this episode but you know i don't i don't mind because i'm i'm happy to have some i'm happy to
have gold doing something that's a bit different a bit new a bit interesting and which i'm looking
forward to listening to on its own yeah i don't know i i i definitely do not agree i think if i
think a score should be heard and we're never going to agree on that yeah and it should be
augmenting the story not hiding behind it i'm i'm not i'm not in the in the subtle uh there are
certain types of movies yeah we've had this argument before i'm not i'm not trying to dredge
that up again but i'm just i'm just saying from my perspective it didn't fit it it was the fact
that it was that it was yeah it was sticking out it was sticking out i was listening to music going
weird stuff's happening. Yeah, it wasn't the right music for the time. And it did remind me of Bond,
some Bond music. But it's like nothing Bondian was happening in this film. So why are you
channeling that? That's true. That's true. Oh, yeah, I should say he got what did join the
the league of legendary british actors because it's it's well known in the united states it's
well known that what separates the british actors from uh american actors is a the fact that they're
actually trained uh and b that man can they spit when they talk and he he hurled a big one when he
was uh because they're stage actors it's part of it's part of the um probably rather training
how to how to spew on camera uh on stage so it can be seen anyway uh and if you didn't catch
that folks it's it's during his laugh and cry scene it was really well lit that's all i gotta
say all right well in that case the next episode episode six of season 2024 of doctor who is
rogue and not rouge as i mistakenly uh wrote down earlier although i don't know
rouge might fit too and also also not written by russell t davis hey well i hope that's a yay
let's hope let's go yay that we will uh it was a new writer completely right new writer for
two new writers neither of whom i'm familiar with so yeah okay gonna be interesting great
um we'll see what they took from the character brief of the doctor and ruby and put on screen
because that's usually where you see
that's usually where you see the weird bits
is where they've got like the written paperwork
and they hand it to the writers
they say this is what we're going for
without them seeing all the other scripts
and then they latch on to what they think works
and they go
so sometimes you get really wildly out of place characterizations
and sometimes really generic ones
so it'll be interesting to see
what happens there.
All right, Simon,
thank you for joining me.
It's a pleasure, as always.
And listeners,
I hope you'll join us
all again next time
on Fusion Patrol.
You've been listening
to Fusion Patrol.
Thanks for listening.
If you've enjoyed this episode,
we hope you'll consider
supporting us at
buymeacoffee.com
slash Fusion Patrol
or patreon.com
slash Fusion Patrol.
For our monthly
Patreon subscribers, we're currently running a special series on Babylon 5.
Come join the conversation and find other content at FusionPatrol.com. And we're back on social media,
where you can also follow us on Mastodon and the Fediverse. Our address is at podcast at
FusionPatrol.com. Our music is Fight the Future by Amber Wolf.
This has been a Lone Locust production.