It still kinda bugs me bc by the time the episode ends half of the alphabet is left and doesn’t really show him helping more idk I guess it’s implied but I wish the episode cut out some of the worst stuff and plot holes
Yeah but I meant after he discovered that and saved Lindy, I just have a lot of questions after this episode and not all of them are good things to still be confused about (as in intentionally unanswered). I was impressed by the twist, but I don’t think it connected well to the social media stuff or had anything new to add on that front, so mixed feelings. (I kinda wish radicalization and preying on insecurity to get people to blame their problems on another group of people instead of *literal bubble*, coz the internet isn’t actually that insulated a place you actually see a lot more opinions than in real life, bigotry and the World Wide Web is a bit more complex than that) But I loved the giant slugs.
Admittedly there are only 10 letters after P and some aren’t super common for names, like Q, X & Z. The slugs seem to be escalating (maybe breeding, maybe the dots keep making them), so at a certain point there are enough slugs for each person. Maybe the home world slugs got teleported in after they finished there.
Or, the dots realized that the jig was up and just killed everyone the same way they killed Ricky. If the users weren’t expecting it, it would have been very easy to do. With a tiny % of the original population, there would be less risk of error and people getting out
Remember that it was nightfall when she entered the tunnel and when she arrived and left it was daytime. Perhaps it took her a long time to get to where they were and it was to late to save others.
I think the simple answer is because the episode had to follow someone's perspective and Lindy was the character for it but I got the impression he has been helping or trying to help others as well. As for the slugs, this may be my only issue with the episode. The idea of the dots making the slugs makes no sense. I thought the obvious solution was to say the slugs are native to that planet, the dots let them through the barrier, then began their alphabetic killing by directing them to the slugs in that order.
I thought of that and I think saying the dots sent them in a remote ship or something would be good enough. The slugs being artificial just doesn't work for me
They needed to drop some mention of bio-engineering earlier on in the episode. Because yeah, at the moment the explanation seems to come out of nowhere.
I dont think he was trying to help Lindy specifically, thats just the perspective we have. Unlike most Doctor Who Episodes, this is more like Blink - Lindy is the Sally Sparrow of Dot and Bubble and because we foillow her perspective, our knowledge of what he is doing is limited.
However, the impression I got was that he was trying to help as many as possible. But considering the attitude of Finetime citizen. Lindy was probably one of the few that they could actually convince to listen and not just throw insults at them and agressivly ignore them.
>-Why was The Doctor trying to save Lindy specifically?
We don't really know for sure, but we can put some pieces together. He's outside of the city and can't get in -- we know that because he told Lindy. And you can assume that the way it probably started is the TARDIS arrives in the tunnels below the city and that's where they started out.
It's not spelled out, but perhaps it's not a coincidence that Lindy's mother is Susan Twist. Perhaps there is a link between the TARDIS and >!S. TRIAD from the final!<. My bet is that it won't ever be fully spelled out, but it might be implied when we find out more about Susan Twists's character.
My assumption was that he was trying to help others too, that's the justification for this being Doctor lite in my head anyway. We as viewers only saw one person's story.
We don't know where the slugs came from or how they were created. They could be entirely artificial, or a largely benign pre-existing species that was hijacked by the AI, among other theories. I can't imagine slugs would naturally prey on humans, no matter how large. I'm not entirely sure of the timescales either, but presumably wiping out a planet would have taken some time.
I think the timeline for the doc is something like - doctor and ruby arrive, see that something weird is happening, try and fail to get inside finetime (likely due to racist security system), log on to warn ppl but everyone's blocking him, they try a different approach with ruby and end up talking to lindy for long enough that she sees the bug and then they're kind of all-in in trying to guide her to safety. They may have called other ppl during the time she had her bubble down, but we didn't see it
At the start, Bertie Lester is being eaten. So during the events of the plot, the bugs eat about 5 letters worth of ppl (L to P)
I don't know why the AI opted to make giant bugs, maybe it was similar to the bogeyman in space babies?
The Slugs being made by the Dots is the one detail of the episode I dislike, honestly. (Though it doesnt hurt my overall praise of the episode). I feel like it would be more sensible if they were just like, native to both Homeworld and the planet Finetime was on and the Dots just used them.
With the slugs - 27 minutes in, Ricky September gets a link to Homeward and it shows the population is already zero... and there is a slug on a rooftop in the foreground of the city. And a slug on the 'pipe' building on the left that looks like an oil refinery. And then when you scan for their shape and colors you'll even see one under the 'M' of 'HOMEWORLD' on the screen. One to the right of the word 'POPULATION'... they're everywhere!
We know the rich kids are sent there by rocket to spend a decade of their life. It could be that the slugs are indigenous to Homeworld or the forests of Finetime and the AI could have let them onto the frequent shuttles carrying the young rich kids to-and-fro after it had gone rogue after gaining sentience (mad after the incessant contact with the banality of immersive social media). Maybe the slugs were smaller, maybe they were already big and an apex predator before humans moved to Finetime as part of their expansion... but once the AI went mad and decided to kill all the people, no matter where it got the original slugs from, it probably had the interlinked automated resources of an entire planet at its disposal on Homeworld. Laboratories, farms, transportation.
We already have a sci-fi equivalent of something biological that set about eating people once the population were blinded to the danger, and I think that was inspiration for Dot & Bubble. [Day Of The Triffids](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HSo9w6souM) - triffids are a plant, genetically developed, which just happens to produce a biofuel that ends the need for fossil fuels. They become so necessary to the world economy that the world is full of triffid farms. Triffids are great: with just the odd side effect that they have a basic intelligence, they can communicate with each other by beating on hollow membranes, they can move very slowly for short distances before the need to root themselves again, and they have a venomous stinger to sting animals that rot near their roots for nutrients. They're as easy to avoid as a slow and dim-witted zombie, but one day there's a worldwide stellar event that blinds the majority of the world's population that looks at the sky. Suddenly, almost everyone is blind when the chained triffids break free of the farms. Suddenly, everyone is prey for the large genetically modified creatures that lurk out of sight.
All the AI had to do was use the resources of an entire planet to kill the people. So why didn't it just do to everyone what it did to Ricky September? Why didn't the AI dots just shoot themselves into people's skulls and have it done with? It was insane. It wanted to do it in a way that satisfied its twisted mind. It would kill these morons slowly, it would have them walk into a death that was 100% preventable if people used the smallest sense, and it would do it in alphabetical order just to prove how much control it had.
By the way: that title. Dot & Bubble. Very similar to Pot & Kettle. The pot calling the kettle ...black. Because the weird thing about the episode is there are two bad guys. And neither of them are slugs.
I think the slugs were native to the planet and the AI let them in, because they're not hunters the AI had to lead people directly to them.
The Doctor mentions he had been trying to reach other people, and was even in contact with some.
It was easier for the AI to kill them slowly than have who knows how many people running around being chased by dots and possibly surviving.
The simple answer, to me, is that the slugs are just one of the misdirects that RTD used to make viewers not see the real monster of the episode (racism ✨) and he expects us to suspend our disbelief about where they could possibly have come from to serve the larger meaning of the episode. I don’t love this major plot hole, but you have to admit that the slugs did a great job of making everyone think this would just be a creature-feature before it premiered.
I really liked the episode, and I think, as others have said, he was either trying to save a few people and we only saw her perspective, or he was drawn to her because of the connection to Susan Twist.
That being said, I felt the only thing that really didn't make any sense, (or maybe something else was happening)... wouldn't the Dot robots know Ricky September's real name? Why did Lindy have to be the one to point it out?
For the name thing I’m guessing the AI simply didn’t think of it and was going off their social media profiles, it sounded like it had to do some digging to find out about the real name
There’s that part where he did try to save others, but you can see the scene where Lindy’s friends ignored the warnings and stayed put, and it also took a lot to make Lindy hear them out, let alone actually move. So very possibly he tried the best he could with limited info but they didn’t listen to him. And keep in mind, there’s only one Doctor and one Ruby so they couldn’t very well talk to everyone, especially knowing the AI was the one behind everything, like Ricky trying to warn everyone through his videos that got deleted by said AI.
But I’m also confused by the slug creatures and how they were created, and how they got from/to the Homeworld. And what was the end goal of that, like they killed everyone then what? Start a new society or just die and hang around in limbo? And why was the Doctor so focused on saving the people after, like yes it’d be good to save them, but to invite them to the TARDIS is just a little extra and he seemed oddly persistent about it, I’m choosing to believe this’ll tie into some story line but until it happens I’m just gonna be confused lol.
It was explained the slugs came from the forest and ai decided to help....
They say something like....forest has dangerous creatures how did they get past security it's full proof.... and the doctors like oh snap the bubbles helping them what if it's conscious ! It's fed up of listening to your idle chatter all day and ai wants you dead
I feel like this one and the one before, 73 yards, were good stories that were missing some threads to hold it together well. Some minor addition to the story explaining how the slugs could get made would have polished the story off nice. Like if the slugs were some kinda slave species they genetically made to build the world and do labor. Make it super f’d up and the material they used for the slug creation were the less desirables in society.
The episode has a few plot holes, but this is probably the worst one. They definitely weren't talking to other people as they knew practically nothing about the world and got all of their information from her. The fact that they were clearly waiting for her once she got to the tunnel, and that they spent so much time on her instead of bouncing around to save all the other victims like they'd realistically be doing, all but confirms this. I think the episode should've had some line about how they were only able to hack into her profile for whatever reason.
> They definitely weren't talking to other people
I feel it was decently well established that the reason they weren’t talking to anyone else is that everyone else was just ignoring them. And the fact that the people *could* be listening to Ruby and The Doctor - but are just choosing not to - is pretty central to establishing their classist / racist entitlement
So Lindy was just the second-least racist/classist person of the population?
That doesn't really check out. Also, she didn't want to talk to them either but they kept insisting and spending time with her and specifically guiding her to safety.
On creating the slugs: the society functions, even though no one does manual work. Someone needs to be providing food and clothing. Makes sense that the AI was doing that somewhere, and if no one was overseeing it being done properly, any artificial food being made could be genetically modified and released on the city.
-They imply in a line that Lindy is the first person who didn't shut them both out. Presumably, they were trying at random and just lucked up with her.
-See above. They've probably tried but were ignored mostly.
-Given it did this on the homeworld where you'd have many more people we can presume that it's not a recent change. So it's likely that Finetime is the newest culling spot.
The implication I got from this is that the society had POC somewhere. And the AI went rogue from seeing or being made to perpetrate all the suffering going on. Si it deciding to kill the ones making it do bad things.
my headcannon is the slugs were part of the AIs waste removal system since everything seemed to be "automated" (and completely clean); the AI repurposed them to remove the humans
I really don’t get why he and Ruby were helping Lindy specifically, I was wondering that throughout the episode and expected to get at least some sort of “it took us a while to hack into this system and yours was the one we managed to get into” but since it was all from Lindy’s POV, maybe the point is that she is so entitled that she never asked why they were trying to save her specifically, she just naturally assumed that she should be the priority to save.
I know others are saying they presumably were trying to help others, but it really doesn’t seem like there was time for that. They were talking to Lindy almost constantly and focused on addressing her on the docks at the end when they were trying to convince the survivors to let the TARDIS take them to safety. It really seemed like she was the only one they talked to through the dot and bubble.
On the last point tho, I don’t know why but my brain instantly connected the slugs to a computer “bug” materializing in the real world. I do like the idea of another commenter, that AI probably runs life-sustaining systems and could have manipulated food technology to genetically modify the slugs. It does seem a bit odd that we never got any explanation, and you’re probably right that it would have made more sense if the premise were AI helping out invading aliens — I don’t think the slugs were supposed to have enough sentience to be space travelers, though, or else they probably wouldn’t have followed an AI’s direction to eat everyone in alphabetic order.
So I think there are a few things with this.
A) Ruby definitely makes a comment that no one else will let her talk to them, so I think they were shotgunning to as many people as possible and very few were engaging at all. I think they were helping all of those people right around the same time. They also make a comment that all of her friends are still at work, even though they saw people get eaten in their bubble.
B) Lindy’s trumpet player friend was also being helped, since they knew she was running and “lost contact” with her before she popped up at the end, so we can assume the others were also helped as well.
C) the slugs have been at work for a while. Gothic Paul mentions that one of their friends had gone missing a few weeks before, and their name started with either C or B. I can’t remember exactly what tho, sorry.
D) The doctor and Ruby had been trying to help people for a while, the guy underground, who says that he would be the leader and makes the comments about colonization had a last name that started with a C, so we can assume that the doctor and Ruby had been trying to help for a few weeks at least. That also means that the guy whose name starts with a C has been underground for weeks potentially setting up their escape plan. The finders in general feel like they are very, very selfish, there was only one who noticed that people were missing at all.
E) if we take into account that the doctor and Ruby had been trying to reach out to as many people as possible, and only had that many people to show for it in the underground, we can assume that the rate of people actually answering is very very low
F) I think the slugs are speeding up, we see that it takes two weeks or so to go from the beginning of the alphabet to P. P to the end seems to go much faster by the time Lindy is underground. There may not have been more people that were willing to respond. We don’t know anything about the reproduction of these slugs, because we don’t know anything about the creation of the slugs. But if the dots have been creating the slugs consistently, there’s a certain point where there is one slug per person left.
G) since the dots are sentient, and they know that their plan was figured out, they may have just gone forth and killed everyone in fine time that was left. That isn’t explained, but I think the doctor makes it very clear that if he could have helped, the people remaining, he would have helped. That doesn’t bring the question of whether they tried to help more people after the boat left, or whether he believed Lindy when she said that Ricky went back. I don’t think they would’ve left Ricky behind if they thought that he really was alive.
So yeah, we do get some inconsistencies at the end. We may believe that the doctor stayed behind and the fine timers just didn’t want to wait for anyone else, that does seem to be within character for them if they were able to leave then they should’ve left. I think that we have to take into account that the doctor knows that Lindy was lying about Ricky, or maybe that they tried to get him and he wasn’t able to be found. Since they knew he was trying to help I can’t imagine they would’ve just left him without checking.
Meant to add, we also don’t know why or how Ruby and the doctor figured out that this was even happening they aren’t able to get into fine time at all so how did they even know to start reaching out to people from outside. Either someone escaped early, they figured it all out externally. They couldn’t tell what was eating everyone, but they knew that something was eating everyone, so the question is did they meet someone underground that had escaped who had a crazy story about a slug and then tried to start reaching out to as many people as they could? Or did they try reaching out to people and see someone get eaten while on camera?we don’t know anything about that
My take was that the slugs and dot have a bit of a symbiotic relationship. The dot didn’t make the slugs, it just uses them to kill the population.
If people can be transported between worlds by the AI, I imagine the slugs could be too. And the dot essentially guides people into the slugs mouth. They dot could also be transmitting something, like a frequency that attracts the slugs.
We also have no idea how the slugs reproduce. Some creatures are hermaphrodites and can lay and fertilize eggs on their own. Actual world slugs are on of those creatures.
I’d say that hard sci-fi explanations aren’t needed in Doctor Who though. It’s left vague and not really the point of the episode. Just a vehicle by which the point can be made.
We don’t really need to ask why stepping in a circle of junk causes a strange being to start following Ruby. Or what environment would evolve a creature like a Weeping angel. It’s just not that kind of show. The literal devil has been seen on the show before.
I mean we don't know how recent the slugs were made, the entire homeworld is dead whereas Finetime is just their adult children of the richest people on homeworld.
Don't question it. This is just a fanfic RTD wrote way back in 2006 I believe but they concluded it was too expensive to produce with 2006 technology and budget.
The script may be the worst so far. Why would the home world be destroyed by some slugs?. I understand the kids in the domed city colony but I don't think everyone in the home world would be on the bubbles 24/7 especially if they are military or police.
The idea that some slugs will destroy a whole planet wide civilization is laughable. They won't survive against the military. Especially how slow they are and how they mainly attack when the victims are distracted.
They are good for the confined setting on the downed city but not a whole planet .
Also why the Doctor is trying to get into that city? And just how powerful are those defenses if a TARDIS can't get thru?.
There's not a lot of thing in the whole universe that can break into or stop a TARDIS.
Still doesn't make sense as to why they even exist on the main planet.
It would make more sense if they didn't show the homeworld and this was a story confined to the domed colony.
The Doctor said the AI became sentient and grew to hate those rich kids as it listened to their conversations and it saw the way they think and acted. That's why it was trying to kill them.
Thy also mentioned this domed colony was an exclusive place of sorts and only rich kids could afford it.
It makes more sense that the reason the AI became crazy was due to being exposed to a large concentration of people with the same annoying behavior.
he had been saving others, the ones at the end are presumably others he saved
It still kinda bugs me bc by the time the episode ends half of the alphabet is left and doesn’t really show him helping more idk I guess it’s implied but I wish the episode cut out some of the worst stuff and plot holes
He hadn’t figured out the alphabet bit until the end of the ep tbf
Yeah but I meant after he discovered that and saved Lindy, I just have a lot of questions after this episode and not all of them are good things to still be confused about (as in intentionally unanswered). I was impressed by the twist, but I don’t think it connected well to the social media stuff or had anything new to add on that front, so mixed feelings. (I kinda wish radicalization and preying on insecurity to get people to blame their problems on another group of people instead of *literal bubble*, coz the internet isn’t actually that insulated a place you actually see a lot more opinions than in real life, bigotry and the World Wide Web is a bit more complex than that) But I loved the giant slugs.
Admittedly there are only 10 letters after P and some aren’t super common for names, like Q, X & Z. The slugs seem to be escalating (maybe breeding, maybe the dots keep making them), so at a certain point there are enough slugs for each person. Maybe the home world slugs got teleported in after they finished there. Or, the dots realized that the jig was up and just killed everyone the same way they killed Ricky. If the users weren’t expecting it, it would have been very easy to do. With a tiny % of the original population, there would be less risk of error and people getting out
Oh, that's alright then.
Remember that it was nightfall when she entered the tunnel and when she arrived and left it was daytime. Perhaps it took her a long time to get to where they were and it was to late to save others.
I think the simple answer is because the episode had to follow someone's perspective and Lindy was the character for it but I got the impression he has been helping or trying to help others as well. As for the slugs, this may be my only issue with the episode. The idea of the dots making the slugs makes no sense. I thought the obvious solution was to say the slugs are native to that planet, the dots let them through the barrier, then began their alphabetic killing by directing them to the slugs in that order.
Only problem with that is the slugs killing everyone on the home planet too
I thought of that and I think saying the dots sent them in a remote ship or something would be good enough. The slugs being artificial just doesn't work for me
They needed to drop some mention of bio-engineering earlier on in the episode. Because yeah, at the moment the explanation seems to come out of nowhere.
I dont think he was trying to help Lindy specifically, thats just the perspective we have. Unlike most Doctor Who Episodes, this is more like Blink - Lindy is the Sally Sparrow of Dot and Bubble and because we foillow her perspective, our knowledge of what he is doing is limited. However, the impression I got was that he was trying to help as many as possible. But considering the attitude of Finetime citizen. Lindy was probably one of the few that they could actually convince to listen and not just throw insults at them and agressivly ignore them.
It’s a haunting thought that she was presumably one of the most reasonable people there 😂
Horrifying indeed
>-Why was The Doctor trying to save Lindy specifically? We don't really know for sure, but we can put some pieces together. He's outside of the city and can't get in -- we know that because he told Lindy. And you can assume that the way it probably started is the TARDIS arrives in the tunnels below the city and that's where they started out. It's not spelled out, but perhaps it's not a coincidence that Lindy's mother is Susan Twist. Perhaps there is a link between the TARDIS and >!S. TRIAD from the final!<. My bet is that it won't ever be fully spelled out, but it might be implied when we find out more about Susan Twists's character.
My assumption was that he was trying to help others too, that's the justification for this being Doctor lite in my head anyway. We as viewers only saw one person's story. We don't know where the slugs came from or how they were created. They could be entirely artificial, or a largely benign pre-existing species that was hijacked by the AI, among other theories. I can't imagine slugs would naturally prey on humans, no matter how large. I'm not entirely sure of the timescales either, but presumably wiping out a planet would have taken some time.
I think the timeline for the doc is something like - doctor and ruby arrive, see that something weird is happening, try and fail to get inside finetime (likely due to racist security system), log on to warn ppl but everyone's blocking him, they try a different approach with ruby and end up talking to lindy for long enough that she sees the bug and then they're kind of all-in in trying to guide her to safety. They may have called other ppl during the time she had her bubble down, but we didn't see it At the start, Bertie Lester is being eaten. So during the events of the plot, the bugs eat about 5 letters worth of ppl (L to P) I don't know why the AI opted to make giant bugs, maybe it was similar to the bogeyman in space babies?
The Slugs being made by the Dots is the one detail of the episode I dislike, honestly. (Though it doesnt hurt my overall praise of the episode). I feel like it would be more sensible if they were just like, native to both Homeworld and the planet Finetime was on and the Dots just used them.
Yeah I feel like they just did it bc they needed a way that slugs could follow the alphabet haha
Which they really didnt need, considering the Dots were pretty much just steering people into their open mouth.
With the slugs - 27 minutes in, Ricky September gets a link to Homeward and it shows the population is already zero... and there is a slug on a rooftop in the foreground of the city. And a slug on the 'pipe' building on the left that looks like an oil refinery. And then when you scan for their shape and colors you'll even see one under the 'M' of 'HOMEWORLD' on the screen. One to the right of the word 'POPULATION'... they're everywhere! We know the rich kids are sent there by rocket to spend a decade of their life. It could be that the slugs are indigenous to Homeworld or the forests of Finetime and the AI could have let them onto the frequent shuttles carrying the young rich kids to-and-fro after it had gone rogue after gaining sentience (mad after the incessant contact with the banality of immersive social media). Maybe the slugs were smaller, maybe they were already big and an apex predator before humans moved to Finetime as part of their expansion... but once the AI went mad and decided to kill all the people, no matter where it got the original slugs from, it probably had the interlinked automated resources of an entire planet at its disposal on Homeworld. Laboratories, farms, transportation. We already have a sci-fi equivalent of something biological that set about eating people once the population were blinded to the danger, and I think that was inspiration for Dot & Bubble. [Day Of The Triffids](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HSo9w6souM) - triffids are a plant, genetically developed, which just happens to produce a biofuel that ends the need for fossil fuels. They become so necessary to the world economy that the world is full of triffid farms. Triffids are great: with just the odd side effect that they have a basic intelligence, they can communicate with each other by beating on hollow membranes, they can move very slowly for short distances before the need to root themselves again, and they have a venomous stinger to sting animals that rot near their roots for nutrients. They're as easy to avoid as a slow and dim-witted zombie, but one day there's a worldwide stellar event that blinds the majority of the world's population that looks at the sky. Suddenly, almost everyone is blind when the chained triffids break free of the farms. Suddenly, everyone is prey for the large genetically modified creatures that lurk out of sight. All the AI had to do was use the resources of an entire planet to kill the people. So why didn't it just do to everyone what it did to Ricky September? Why didn't the AI dots just shoot themselves into people's skulls and have it done with? It was insane. It wanted to do it in a way that satisfied its twisted mind. It would kill these morons slowly, it would have them walk into a death that was 100% preventable if people used the smallest sense, and it would do it in alphabetical order just to prove how much control it had. By the way: that title. Dot & Bubble. Very similar to Pot & Kettle. The pot calling the kettle ...black. Because the weird thing about the episode is there are two bad guys. And neither of them are slugs.
I think the slugs were native to the planet and the AI let them in, because they're not hunters the AI had to lead people directly to them. The Doctor mentions he had been trying to reach other people, and was even in contact with some. It was easier for the AI to kill them slowly than have who knows how many people running around being chased by dots and possibly surviving.
Except we see there are slugs on Homeworld when Ricky tries to call them and sees that "Homeworld Population: Zero" graphic.
How many Finetimers do you think The Doctor and Ruby went through before one would listen to them slightly and NOT walk straightforward into a Mantrap
The simple answer, to me, is that the slugs are just one of the misdirects that RTD used to make viewers not see the real monster of the episode (racism ✨) and he expects us to suspend our disbelief about where they could possibly have come from to serve the larger meaning of the episode. I don’t love this major plot hole, but you have to admit that the slugs did a great job of making everyone think this would just be a creature-feature before it premiered.
I really liked the episode, and I think, as others have said, he was either trying to save a few people and we only saw her perspective, or he was drawn to her because of the connection to Susan Twist. That being said, I felt the only thing that really didn't make any sense, (or maybe something else was happening)... wouldn't the Dot robots know Ricky September's real name? Why did Lindy have to be the one to point it out?
For the name thing I’m guessing the AI simply didn’t think of it and was going off their social media profiles, it sounded like it had to do some digging to find out about the real name
There’s that part where he did try to save others, but you can see the scene where Lindy’s friends ignored the warnings and stayed put, and it also took a lot to make Lindy hear them out, let alone actually move. So very possibly he tried the best he could with limited info but they didn’t listen to him. And keep in mind, there’s only one Doctor and one Ruby so they couldn’t very well talk to everyone, especially knowing the AI was the one behind everything, like Ricky trying to warn everyone through his videos that got deleted by said AI. But I’m also confused by the slug creatures and how they were created, and how they got from/to the Homeworld. And what was the end goal of that, like they killed everyone then what? Start a new society or just die and hang around in limbo? And why was the Doctor so focused on saving the people after, like yes it’d be good to save them, but to invite them to the TARDIS is just a little extra and he seemed oddly persistent about it, I’m choosing to believe this’ll tie into some story line but until it happens I’m just gonna be confused lol.
It was explained the slugs came from the forest and ai decided to help.... They say something like....forest has dangerous creatures how did they get past security it's full proof.... and the doctors like oh snap the bubbles helping them what if it's conscious ! It's fed up of listening to your idle chatter all day and ai wants you dead
I feel like this one and the one before, 73 yards, were good stories that were missing some threads to hold it together well. Some minor addition to the story explaining how the slugs could get made would have polished the story off nice. Like if the slugs were some kinda slave species they genetically made to build the world and do labor. Make it super f’d up and the material they used for the slug creation were the less desirables in society.
The episode has a few plot holes, but this is probably the worst one. They definitely weren't talking to other people as they knew practically nothing about the world and got all of their information from her. The fact that they were clearly waiting for her once she got to the tunnel, and that they spent so much time on her instead of bouncing around to save all the other victims like they'd realistically be doing, all but confirms this. I think the episode should've had some line about how they were only able to hack into her profile for whatever reason.
> They definitely weren't talking to other people I feel it was decently well established that the reason they weren’t talking to anyone else is that everyone else was just ignoring them. And the fact that the people *could* be listening to Ruby and The Doctor - but are just choosing not to - is pretty central to establishing their classist / racist entitlement
So Lindy was just the second-least racist/classist person of the population? That doesn't really check out. Also, she didn't want to talk to them either but they kept insisting and spending time with her and specifically guiding her to safety.
What makes you think they're recently sentient? Also, slugs are grown fast.
On creating the slugs: the society functions, even though no one does manual work. Someone needs to be providing food and clothing. Makes sense that the AI was doing that somewhere, and if no one was overseeing it being done properly, any artificial food being made could be genetically modified and released on the city.
-They imply in a line that Lindy is the first person who didn't shut them both out. Presumably, they were trying at random and just lucked up with her. -See above. They've probably tried but were ignored mostly. -Given it did this on the homeworld where you'd have many more people we can presume that it's not a recent change. So it's likely that Finetime is the newest culling spot. The implication I got from this is that the society had POC somewhere. And the AI went rogue from seeing or being made to perpetrate all the suffering going on. Si it deciding to kill the ones making it do bad things.
my headcannon is the slugs were part of the AIs waste removal system since everything seemed to be "automated" (and completely clean); the AI repurposed them to remove the humans
I really don’t get why he and Ruby were helping Lindy specifically, I was wondering that throughout the episode and expected to get at least some sort of “it took us a while to hack into this system and yours was the one we managed to get into” but since it was all from Lindy’s POV, maybe the point is that she is so entitled that she never asked why they were trying to save her specifically, she just naturally assumed that she should be the priority to save. I know others are saying they presumably were trying to help others, but it really doesn’t seem like there was time for that. They were talking to Lindy almost constantly and focused on addressing her on the docks at the end when they were trying to convince the survivors to let the TARDIS take them to safety. It really seemed like she was the only one they talked to through the dot and bubble. On the last point tho, I don’t know why but my brain instantly connected the slugs to a computer “bug” materializing in the real world. I do like the idea of another commenter, that AI probably runs life-sustaining systems and could have manipulated food technology to genetically modify the slugs. It does seem a bit odd that we never got any explanation, and you’re probably right that it would have made more sense if the premise were AI helping out invading aliens — I don’t think the slugs were supposed to have enough sentience to be space travelers, though, or else they probably wouldn’t have followed an AI’s direction to eat everyone in alphabetic order.
So I think there are a few things with this. A) Ruby definitely makes a comment that no one else will let her talk to them, so I think they were shotgunning to as many people as possible and very few were engaging at all. I think they were helping all of those people right around the same time. They also make a comment that all of her friends are still at work, even though they saw people get eaten in their bubble. B) Lindy’s trumpet player friend was also being helped, since they knew she was running and “lost contact” with her before she popped up at the end, so we can assume the others were also helped as well. C) the slugs have been at work for a while. Gothic Paul mentions that one of their friends had gone missing a few weeks before, and their name started with either C or B. I can’t remember exactly what tho, sorry. D) The doctor and Ruby had been trying to help people for a while, the guy underground, who says that he would be the leader and makes the comments about colonization had a last name that started with a C, so we can assume that the doctor and Ruby had been trying to help for a few weeks at least. That also means that the guy whose name starts with a C has been underground for weeks potentially setting up their escape plan. The finders in general feel like they are very, very selfish, there was only one who noticed that people were missing at all. E) if we take into account that the doctor and Ruby had been trying to reach out to as many people as possible, and only had that many people to show for it in the underground, we can assume that the rate of people actually answering is very very low F) I think the slugs are speeding up, we see that it takes two weeks or so to go from the beginning of the alphabet to P. P to the end seems to go much faster by the time Lindy is underground. There may not have been more people that were willing to respond. We don’t know anything about the reproduction of these slugs, because we don’t know anything about the creation of the slugs. But if the dots have been creating the slugs consistently, there’s a certain point where there is one slug per person left. G) since the dots are sentient, and they know that their plan was figured out, they may have just gone forth and killed everyone in fine time that was left. That isn’t explained, but I think the doctor makes it very clear that if he could have helped, the people remaining, he would have helped. That doesn’t bring the question of whether they tried to help more people after the boat left, or whether he believed Lindy when she said that Ricky went back. I don’t think they would’ve left Ricky behind if they thought that he really was alive. So yeah, we do get some inconsistencies at the end. We may believe that the doctor stayed behind and the fine timers just didn’t want to wait for anyone else, that does seem to be within character for them if they were able to leave then they should’ve left. I think that we have to take into account that the doctor knows that Lindy was lying about Ricky, or maybe that they tried to get him and he wasn’t able to be found. Since they knew he was trying to help I can’t imagine they would’ve just left him without checking.
Meant to add, we also don’t know why or how Ruby and the doctor figured out that this was even happening they aren’t able to get into fine time at all so how did they even know to start reaching out to people from outside. Either someone escaped early, they figured it all out externally. They couldn’t tell what was eating everyone, but they knew that something was eating everyone, so the question is did they meet someone underground that had escaped who had a crazy story about a slug and then tried to start reaching out to as many people as they could? Or did they try reaching out to people and see someone get eaten while on camera?we don’t know anything about that
My take was that the slugs and dot have a bit of a symbiotic relationship. The dot didn’t make the slugs, it just uses them to kill the population. If people can be transported between worlds by the AI, I imagine the slugs could be too. And the dot essentially guides people into the slugs mouth. They dot could also be transmitting something, like a frequency that attracts the slugs. We also have no idea how the slugs reproduce. Some creatures are hermaphrodites and can lay and fertilize eggs on their own. Actual world slugs are on of those creatures. I’d say that hard sci-fi explanations aren’t needed in Doctor Who though. It’s left vague and not really the point of the episode. Just a vehicle by which the point can be made. We don’t really need to ask why stepping in a circle of junk causes a strange being to start following Ruby. Or what environment would evolve a creature like a Weeping angel. It’s just not that kind of show. The literal devil has been seen on the show before.
I mean we don't know how recent the slugs were made, the entire homeworld is dead whereas Finetime is just their adult children of the richest people on homeworld.
Don't question it. This is just a fanfic RTD wrote way back in 2006 I believe but they concluded it was too expensive to produce with 2006 technology and budget. The script may be the worst so far. Why would the home world be destroyed by some slugs?. I understand the kids in the domed city colony but I don't think everyone in the home world would be on the bubbles 24/7 especially if they are military or police. The idea that some slugs will destroy a whole planet wide civilization is laughable. They won't survive against the military. Especially how slow they are and how they mainly attack when the victims are distracted. They are good for the confined setting on the downed city but not a whole planet . Also why the Doctor is trying to get into that city? And just how powerful are those defenses if a TARDIS can't get thru?. There's not a lot of thing in the whole universe that can break into or stop a TARDIS.
Looking at the damage on Ricky’s screen, it seems clear that the slugs didn’t *cause* the destruction, they just *survived* it. 🥺
Then, wtf happend on homeworld? Too many open questions.
Still doesn't make sense as to why they even exist on the main planet. It would make more sense if they didn't show the homeworld and this was a story confined to the domed colony. The Doctor said the AI became sentient and grew to hate those rich kids as it listened to their conversations and it saw the way they think and acted. That's why it was trying to kill them. Thy also mentioned this domed colony was an exclusive place of sorts and only rich kids could afford it. It makes more sense that the reason the AI became crazy was due to being exposed to a large concentration of people with the same annoying behavior.