DOCTOR WHO: 73 YARDS, DOT AND BUBBLE + ROGUE REVIEW.

I said in my review of ‘Space Babies’ and ‘The Devil’s Chord’ that my preference in Russell T Davies’ writing was for the “searing, grown up drama” of his mature television scripts. In Ncuti Gatwa’s first season of Doctor Who, that shift began with Steven Moffat’s ‘Boom’ and continued with the immensely strong trio of ‘73 Yards’, ‘Dot and Bubble’ and ‘Rogue’.

Ncuti was largely absent from both ’73 Yards’ and ‘Dot and Bubble’, due to his commitments filming the final season of the Netflix comedy drama Sex Education (2019-2023). In both stories, this made for some inventive storytelling, even though, in the middle of a new Doctor’s first series, the feeling lingered that the audience still didn’t know this regeneration that well.

73 YARDS

Back to that searing, grown up drama I was talking about. A spectral old female figure stalking the Doctor’s companion Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson), remaining precisely 73 yards away, alluded to similar, classic ghost stories like Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black and, particularly, M R James’ short stories, notably The Treasure of the Abbot Thomas. But whereas in those tales the story generally ended badly for the protagonist, in ’73 Yards’ Ruby was able to weaponize her stalker and use her against Roger ap Gwilliam (Aneurin Barnard), the Welsh prime minister with a twitchy nuclear trigger finger.

It was never revealed what The Woman (Hilary Hobson) said to people in Ruby’s orbit – her adopted mum, Welsh villagers and UNIT among them – to drive them away. That wasn’t the point: the point was the continuing abandonment of someone who’d been abandoned since birth. That was heart breaking, and Gibson seized the opportunity to show what an accomplished, convincing and moving actor she is. Small wonder the producers of the upcoming adaptation of The Forsyte Saga cast her in the central role of Irene.

The story was also directed from Ruby’s point of view. Going into a creepy Welsh pub with equally creepy locals immediately recalled an An American Werewolf in London (1981), and a dozen other horror films Ruby must have seen, with similar scenarios. As the atmosphere became more unsettling with talk of "Mad Jack", the camera angles and close ups became more and more extreme, so it's a surprise reveal that the locals were teasing Ruby.

There were some other possible allusions to fantasy fare. The waving figure Ruby sees from train window recalls a similar scene in The Singing Detective (1986), and in The Dead Zone (1983), Christopher Walken’s character’s ability to forsee the future reveals that President Greg Stillson (Martin Sheen) is going to initiate a nuclear missile attack. Closer to home, in RTD’s own Years and Years (2019), President Trump destroyed a Chinese military base with a nuclear missile.

The way the narrative of ’73 Yards’ fast-forwarded through significant points of Ruby’s life, from birthdays to break ups with boyfriends, was an accelerated version of the same idea that operated in Years and Years from episode to episode. As for incorporating grown up themes, the hints that Roger ap Gwilliam was sexually abusing young party member Marti Bridges (Sophie Ablett), was done with economy in a few lines of dialogue and a reference to “wild” parties. It underlined how charismatic public figures can be monsters hiding in plain sight (even if we already knew that).

For all its unanswered questions – which may well never be answered – ’73 Yards’ was ultimately an uplifting story about making the best of your personal, sometimes harrowing circumstances. The dying Ruby’s statement that “Everyone’s abandoned me my whole life, but I haven’t been alone for 65 years” could be interpreted as a metaphor for mental illness – coming to terms with something you initially find terrifying and alienating, but eventually recognise can be a strength. There’s no sentiment more mature than that.

DOT AND BUBBLE

Advance publicity positioned ‘Dot and Bubble’ as Doctor Who’s take on satirist Charlie Brooker’s dystopian anthology series Black Mirror (2011- ). Its central theme is technology going wrong or being abused but, to be fair, Doctor Who was exploring those tropes before Mr Brooker was born (1971, before you ask).

What was reminiscent of Black Mirror was the technological nightmare being experienced by a member of the public (‘Fifteen Million Merits’, ‘Striking Vipers’, ‘Metalhead’). In particular, ‘Nosedive’ portrayed an idealised society in which people’s social and economic status depended on their social relations being rated out of five ‘likes’. While it’s easy to see the basis for this satire in Facebook, ‘Dot and Bubble’ went one step further with the autonomy of social media users being taken away completely.

From the moment Lindy Pipper-Bean (Callie Cooke) woke up in the Finetime colony, her head was enclosed in a bubble of virtual ‘friends’ that told her when to get up, when to go to the bathroom and which way to walk to work. When she wasn’t doing her “two long hours” of work per day, she was indulging in superficial banter with her “friends list”.

As satire goes that’s fairly broad – i.e. a society totally dependent on social media – but where this episode comes to life is in Callie Cooke’s performance. As the bubble encircles her head, literally blotting out real life, her face is seen in close-up throughout most of the episode. Starting off as perky, superficial but happy with her life, she experiences terror and panic as things start to go wrong and her friends are systematically eaten by genetically engineered monsters.

Cooke conveys all this with remarkable restraint and subtlety. Just how subtle only becomes apparent when you’ve seen the shock, twist ending of ‘Dot and Bubble’. Her remarks to the Doctor and Ruby - “This is a conspiracy! You’re criminals”; ““I don’t think he’s as stupid as he looks” – take on a new resonance when the inhabitants of Finetime are revealed as racist. Watch the episode again, and you’ll see carefully concealed contempt beneath Lindy’s comments to the Doctor. As a piece of contained, layered, complex acting, it’s – and I know this is a cliché – a tour de force.

The Finetimes aren’t only racist, they’re narcissists. When Lindy says to her potential boyfriend Ricky September (Tom Rhys Harries) “I thought this was the worst day of my life, but maybe it’s the best”, he reminds her that “There are still thousands of people being eaten alive.” That should have warned him that a few scenes later Lindy would engineer his death by Finetime’s controlling, rogue AI so she could save her own skin.

It's a brilliant scene. The first true, vivid, dramatic punch of Ncuti’s tenure, and its power doesn’t diminish no matter how many times you watch it. The same goes for the concluding sequence, which is an inversion of the climax of many a Doctor Who story across its 60-year history: instead of rebuilding their civilisation or escaping with the Doctor, the survivors of the carnage commit to a future the Time Lord knows will end in their deaths.

The reason? This regeneration is black.

Even then, the Doctor shows himself to be the better person by ignoring the Finetimers’ prejudice and offering to save them. His unbelieving, almost out-of-control reaction – ironically, for a story in which the Doctor minimally features – is THE scene of Ncuti’s era so far.

It's not all unremittingly bleak: on a story level, the Doctor and Ruby’s intrusion into Lindy’s bubble shows that social media can be used responsibly (i.e. to save lives) and, conceptually, the Doctor and his companion being powerless to help directly is something refreshingly new in the show.

The biggest recommendation I can make about ‘Dot and Bubble’ is that I thought about it for a long time afterwards. In a world where young people have never hugged or held hands, it’s not surprising that they grew up selfish, callous and self-absorbed. Grown up stuff indeed.

ROGUE

It’s somehow appropriate that for the Fifteenth Doctor’s first foray into heritage history – Bath, 1813, at a very big house in the country – that we first get to see Ncuti Gatwa really settled into the role. The Doctor’s character has always flourished in centuries gone by, so it’s appropriate that here we see his fully formed charm, wit – “Brooding. Good look. Do you practice in the mirror?” – impulsiveness, bravery and, uniquely for this Doctor, his sensuality. Perhaps his character came into focus in ‘Rogue’ because new writer Kate Herron (sharing writing duties with Briony Redman) directed Ncuti in Sex Education?

‘Rogue’ could fit almost anywhere in Doctor Who history, as the enemy aliens are such a fabulous Doctor Who idea: stealing the bodies and identities of humans so they can “cosplay” on their chosen victim planet, like they’ve been let loose in a global immersive experience. Indeed, the shape-shifting alien Chuldur are portrayed as malevolent children – see Indira Varma’s impressive shriek of “What could be better than A WEDDING!” – treating the casual destruction of human lives as a game.

While this is all enjoyably diverting, the real point of ‘Rogue’ is to be a romance for the Doctor with the eponymous title character. Not only that, a same sex romance. Not only that, but a same sex romance that includes a same sex, mixed race kiss. For a series that started out being primarily aimed at children, this scene shows not only how far the series has come in its acceptance of sexuality, but how much society has changed regarding what’s acceptable for young audiences. For once, I think it’s a change for the better.

It’s intriguing that the Doctor falls for the mysterious bounty hunter Rogue (Jonathan Groff, stylish, suave and looking “great in that jacket”). The character isn’t a million miles away from John Barrowman’s omnisexual Captain Jack, if slightly less of a cad (he even has an American accent). The scenes where Rogue shows the Doctor his ship, and flirts with him via his psychic paper, are pretty much a rerun of similar sequences between Jack and Rose (Billie Piper) in ‘The Empty Child’ (2005).

The mutual attraction is clearly centred on their adventurous, quixotic natures and lifestyles, and Gatwa and Goff’s obvious chemistry really sells the idea that the Time Lord might have met his romantic match (although River Song might disagree). Considering how the Thirteenth Doctor sensitively fended off Yaz’s romantic interest in her, we can only assume that the Fifteenth has decided to throw caution to the wind and live for the romantic moment.

The period setting was sold by its social mores: “A couple caught alone is a scandal”, a man not wanting to desert his wealthy female benefactor for love, men only dancing with women. To tell the Chuldur from the humans, there was a magnificent example of the contemporary social order being overturned, as the Doctor and Rogue dance together and Rogue – on one knee, no less – offers the Doctor a ring. In the most socially and sexually rigid of time periods, it’s a triumph of gay pride which also works in context.

Millie Gibson has fun as Ruby too, exhorting Emily (Camilia Aiko) to go against the male hierarchy and dump an unreliable suitor, as well as being very funny in her psychic earrings’ “battle mode” fight. When the Doctor loses Rogue and attempts to deal with it by breezing on to the next adventure, the hug Ruby gives him is a defining moment in their relationship: through her sympathetic humanity, he’s able to express his loss. Nicely understated playing, too, by Ncuti and Millie.

‘Rogue’ is a good, solid, well-told episode, entertaining enough but, for me, not on the same level as ’73 Yards’ or ‘Dot and Bubble’. But please – can we have less of the Doctor weeping? Yes, we get the point that the Fifteenth is in touch with his emotions, but as it’s happened in nearly every Ncuti episode, it’s overuse is in danger of becoming emotionally meaningless (not to mention a bit silly).

As I said at the start, a strong trio of episodes, which gives the season a pleasing backbone of quality.

I could have done without the ‘Susan Twist’ mystery being referenced in every story, as it did seem a tad heavy-handed at times. Still, with ‘The Legend of Ruby Sunday’ about to drop on iplayer, at this point the series is galloping confidently towards Ncuti Gatwa’s first finale as the Doctor.

If only they hadn’t started with ‘Space Babies’…!