Dot and Bubble

We’re comfortably in the very good middle of the season here. Davies and the guest writers are doing really interesting stuff. Everyone’s happy.

Rave: Ncuti is just amazing at the end of the story. After the monster at the end of the book is revealed to be... racism, the Doctor gets to rant against the stupidity of it all, in a way that I found far more satisfying than the 13th Doctor’s “jeez, sexism is annoying” comments back in ‘The Witchfinders’.

It’s a tricky balance to hit, both in writing and performance, to express an alien’s frustration and rage at human stupidity while also not undermining the challenges that people in the real world have with this shit. Cleverer people than me have come down on both sides. To me, I thought the Doctor’s perspective was quite clearly an alien, looking down at the stupid humans and just not believing their self-defeating stupidity. But then, I’m a white guy who didn’t actually clue into the whole cast being white until it was pointed out, so my opinion is possibly not that interesting.

Rant: The plot... just doesn’t come together for me. The vibes are all there, but:

• The explanation for the monsters is just a guess, and not a particularly convincing one (disappointing as the design of them is so cool)
• The alphabet revelation falls pretty flat, because it doesn’t have a corresponding wrong-headed piece of logic to hang on (like the S.S. Madame de Pompadour in ‘The Girl in the Fireplace’)
• Everyone on the Homeworld being dead, again, just doesn’t tie into anything; it raises the emotional stakes for Lindy but again, doesn’t explain anything.
• Wouldn’t the dots know everyone’s last name already, including famous people? And even if they didn’t, why would they care if a human told them someone had a different name? Surely they wouldn’t just take their word for it? And if they were able to look it up, why didn’t they know it in the first place?
  • Actually, as I write that, I remember what it’s like talking to an LLM... and I wonder if maybe my perception of what it’ll be like to be stalked by homicidal robots in the future is just completely off-base.

Does any of that matter? Maybe not, but just imagine the same story but with Moffat doing a pass to actually join up those dots (and bubbles), and how satisfying that would be.

Am I becoming a Moffat fanboy? Maybe.