Doctor Who Tried (And Failed) To Save White Supremacists — Should It Have?
Image; BBC
Doctor Who (1963—present) is about a person, well, a Time Lord, traveling through time and space. He is an adventurer who saves humans in peril from alien foes, and a typical episode can take the viewer anywhere from the distant past to contemporary Britain to our space-faring future.
In the episode Dot and Bubble (2024), he travels to the moon of FineTime — a party planet where rich socialites only have to work two hours a day and then spend the rest of their time partying in virtual reality. They do not interact with people directly; instead, they see the world through a curated chat bubble of close friends and subscribers.
There, he encounters a civilization rooted in white supremacy, and we are left wondering if they are even worth saving.
The racism of FineTime
To the keen observer, you recognize the white supremacy of this society almost immediately. Everyone there is white. Characters are surrounded by images of their friends at all times, and there is not a single person of color in sight.
At first, one might be mistaken in believing that this is simply structural racism (i.e., when a society's systems uphold racism, irrespective of the opinions of any one individual). The main character for the episode, Lindy Pepper-Bean (Callie Cooke), makes it quite clear that only rich people are allowed on FineTime. Wealthy people are often white, especially when portrayed in media, and so if you are the type of person who is not unsettled by default white spaces, this portrayal might not phase you at all.
Yet the racism of Lindy seeps in immediately. Her moon is secretly under attack by insect-like aliens. When the Doctor, played this season by Black and queer superstar Ncuti Gatwa, tries to help her via virtual messages, she immediately ignores him. She does not ignore, however, his white, blonde-haired companion Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson), who gets a begrudging Lindy to talk to the Doctor. When she first does this, after attempting to block him multiple times, Lindy initially thinks he is a different person from the one she blocked because, unstated, all Black people look alike to her. She spends the rest of the episode disparaging the Doctor, including telling her friends that "he's not as stupid as he looks."
Her racism is stated explicitly at the end of the episode when Lindy meets the Doctor in person, and she rejects his offer of taking her and her friends off-world via his spaceship.
"We couldn't travel with you," she states coldly. "Because you, sir, are not one of us. I mean, you were kind. Although it was your duty to save me. Obviously. I mean screen-to-screen contact is just about acceptable, but in person? That's impossible."
Instead, she opts to go into the wilderness in an attempt to restart FineTime society. As one character remarks on their plan: "…we can go out there to this planet. And we can fight it and tame it and own it. We'll be pioneers. Just like our ancestors."
They are effectively attempting to restart the horror of their racist, settler-colonial society somewhere else, and as their boat embarks, my hopes for success are not with them.
The racist trolly problem
This twist is interesting because we, as the viewers, have been watching Lindy fight for survival against the alien invasion the entire episode. She serves as our point of view character and where our empathy is briefly placed. But by this moment in the episode, we are no longer rooting for her because we now know she and her entire society are rooted in a vile form of white supremacy.
And yet the Doctor pleads for her to still come with him, saying: "I don't care what you think. Okay? You can say whatever you want. You can think absolutely anything. I will do anything if you just allow me to save your lives."
They scoff at his aid, calling his vastly superior spaceship, the TARDIS, "voodoo." They then go off into the woods, where their lack of survival skills spells almost certain death for them.
On a character level, you can argue that the Doctor has a soft spot for people facing extinction. He is the last of his kind—a people that were quite imperialist in their own right. This history has colored his psychology, causing him to empathetically fight for the preservation of even the most monstrous of creatures. An earlier episode had the Doctor trying to save a murderous booger monster (see Space Babies). He is, of course, going to try to save a person whose entire species is teetering on extinction.
There is further the argument that a person engaged in rescue operations, which the Doctor is, should not pick and choose who they save. We do not ask firefighters to assess someone's ethics and morality before saving them from a fire, and there is good reason for that. It would lead to a whole lot of discarded people — though given the hierarchies embedded within our society, you can argue that that selection already happens (see I Was a Firefighter for 35 Years. Racism Today Is as Bad as Ever).
If the Doctor were to succeed here in helping the survivors of FineTime (and he does fail), I shudder to think of what future he might have helped build. Lindy has made no personal changes in the slightest. In fact, in a bid to survive the alien invasion, she kills off the only “Good White Guy” who might have been able to see past his own hierarchical thinking. If the Doctor helps Lindy and her friends survive, he will likely increase the likelihood that this white supremacist society will survive.
The episode creates a kind of racist trolly problem (i.e., in reference to a philosophical thought experiment where you are asked to choose which group of people a trolly will run over), where we are left to contemplate whether we should help those we consider despicable, even if they don't want our help. If a white supremacist is in trouble, do you try to help them, or do you let them die in the hope it builds a better world?
For the Doctor, the answer is clearly the prior, to help them, but because his aid is rejected, we are left wondering if his decision was the correct one. Given that the residents of FineTime would rather die than receive his help, you can make the strong argument that this question doesn't even matter.
A wibbly, wobbly conclusion
As Lindy's boat is departing in a desperate attempt to restart her supremacist civilization, I think of what I would have done at that moment. I am not sure I would been nearly as kind as the Doctor, and that's interesting because, in many ways, I am the future descendant of the people on that boat — at least metaphorically. My ancestors were white supremacists who "pioneered" (i.e., genocided) a land in the name of progress: a land we popularly call the United States of America.
I think of all the pain my ancestors caused: the cultures and languages lost, the lives destroyed, the environments altered for the worse.
I think of the pain we are still causing.
There is a tendency of "reformed" colonizers to over-identify with current oppressors in an attempt to "save them" from themselves. We all like to think that we can talk our racist friends, parents, or grandparents off that boat, and Doctor Who's Dot and Bubble makes clear that that's impossible.
Lindy is not going to be saved, nor does she want to be. She wants her racist society, FineTime, to live on forever, and maybe we should stop trying to save people like her.
They clearly would rather die in their own bubbles than listen.