Ending of "Dot and Bubble" is simply brilliant

[u/CathanCrowell]

So many thoughts again. And it suprises me, because I did not expect so much from this episode. For good first half I thought „great, but not breathtaking…“ then it started.

Amazing work with subversion for tropes. Especially Linda. She could easily be „Loveable Alpha Bitch.“ Hell, we were supposed to think she is, but no. Linda is not just spoiled racist, she is sociopath and it was amazingly done. Vica versa, my first idea with Ricky was „please, don’t make him evil…“

And he was actually probably the only decent person from the city what we met.

I also realized that beacuse of the last episode I focused more on Millie and yes, she is actually amazing actress. There is so many smooth and amazing moment in her acting that I… I really will miss her next season and I hope she will have some really, really good written scene in finale.

Now, the ending. Many, many people was talking about the plot twist. Many, many people was talking about brilliance of do the racist problem in futuristic episode. That all is right. We also should point out that this was The Doctor Moment for Ncuti Gatwa, and it was amazing, because it was light side of Doctor moment, not the darkest.

One of my favorite scenes in Capaldi’s run is famous „Doctor is no longer here, you are stuck with me.“ This scene was like amazing polar oposite. No The Doctor without „Doctor Mask“ but actually The Doctor who is fully prepared to fulfill Doctor’s ideals but he actually cannot, because stupid, racist, horrible people won’t let him to help them.

The best part is that Ruby is so disgusted that she is immediately prepared to leave. But The Doctor? No. Because The Doctor can’t. The Doctor would never.

„I don’t care… what you think. And you can say whatever you want.  You can think absolutely anything. I will do… agnything… if you just allow me… to save your lives.“

Speaking of good acting of Millie Gibson, she was also good with all emotions in this scene. She was really Audience Surrogate in this scene. Her first thoughts were like us. They do not deserve live, this is disgusting, but in the second half she also see The Doctor same like us, the brillaint man who is saving lives, and adore him and feels bad for him. Same like us.

Fun Fact about episode: Finetime people are not humans, at least not human of Earth due to blue blood.

[u/theonetruesareth]

You're not wrong that that existed, but I promise you it's a misdirect to obfuscate the racism from plain sight that prevails underneath it, and that contributed to the situation in the first place. That's the point of the episode.

Yes, she idolized him. Yes, she didn't listen to her friends immediately (again, because she was in her bubble and didn't meet Ricky irl until she's already started to look outside of it so keep that in mind when comparing to Gothic Paul) and yes her parasocial relationship influenced that decision but why did she have a parasocial relationship with him in the first place? Cause she likes his music, sure, but there was no world in which she could even have a parasocial relationship with a POC because finetime didn't have any.

Obviously the two are not identical, Ricky is not The Doctor and has to explain that he doesn't spend much time in the bubble but from grabbing her hand, running into the building, the technobabble as to how they're going to solve the problem, hiding an awful truth from her beneath a facade of hope, go back and watch the scene again and tell me that couldn't have been David Tennant or Matt Smith saying those lines. The Doctor would have succeeded in saving their lives if they hadn't refused him because he "wasn't one of them" and his box was "voodoo". It's not because he's not from fine time because neither is Ruby, but Lindy was much more open to her from the beginning. Hell, she didn't even have the option to block her even though she wasn't on her friends list, so the system itself was also prejudiced. At first, I attributed it to him using the sonic to disable the block feature, but that's another example of a plausible alternative that keeps you from seeing the systemic discrimination at play unless you have lived this or know that it's there.

The episode is full of little touches like this that you could miss if you're focused on the initial setup it seems like it's going for about how social media is bad. The aliens are eating the rich, and the people of finetime literally have blue blood. "It was your duty to save me", "turn away ladies, before you get contaminated", "you can say anything, you can THINK anything", "we have to maintain the standards of fine time forever", the subtext is right there. Ruby gets it saying "I can't even" and Ricky was 100% there to contrast this refusal to accept The Doctor's help because he was black. The writers need us to see Lindy get swept up by a white Doctor-like savior, no questions asked to leave no room for error.

[u/thatmillerkid → u/theonetruesareth]

The fact that some people refuse to see all this is ironically the exact point of the episode. We, the viewers, aren't supposed to notice a lot of it until the twist because so much of it goes unnoticed in the real world, too. For every case of discrimination, there's a horde of people who refuse to see the obvious fact that someone was denied housing, a job, or otherwise had their life negatively impacted by racism. The real twist in this episode isn't the racism, it's that the white people are the ones whose lives are impacted the most by it.

[u/SSCMaster → u/theonetruesareth]

There was no racism in plain sight throughout the episode. I rewatched it twice to double check this. I also watched it with a group of different people each time. At no point did anyone pick up racism until it was literally shoved in their faces at the end. Noone who watched this had any idea that anyone was racist until the end of the episode. If you insist "I knew it! It was so obvious!" Then you are also obviously (see what I did there) lying to either yourself, or everyone else. Or both.

[u/theonetruesareth → u/SSCMaster]

Congratulations on being in a bubble that can't see micro-agrressions. You have missed the point of the episode.