When your screen time hits “doomsday.”
Short Synopsis
The Doctor and Ruby try to warn a vapid influencer society about monsters, but the locals are too busy filtering their selfies to care.
Extended Storyline
We open on Finetime, a shiny domed city where the air is clean, the outfits are pastel, and everyone under 30 lives permanently inside floating “bubbles” — holographic AR feeds that curate their entire world. You don’t look at the messy, boring reality around you; you look at the pretty little screen floating in front of your face. It’s Instagram, TikTok, and a Black Mirror episode all rolled into one.
Enter Lindy Pepper-Bean, our influencer protagonist. She’s cheerful, fashionable, and aggressively shallow. Every moment of her life is narrated into her “dot and bubble” feed: from breakfast choices to panicked squeals when, oh yes, monsters start devouring people in the streets. Yes, the city is under siege by slug-like horrors, and the citizens are being eaten alive.
But here’s the kicker: no one takes off their bubble long enough to notice. They stroll happily into the jaws of death because their feed doesn’t show it. It’s horror by way of willful ignorance.
The Doctor and Ruby hack into Lindy’s bubble, trying to warn her and the other Finetimers. Cue lots of wonderfully meta moments where Gatwa and Gibson are literally faces on her screen, pleading for attention while she’s more concerned with hashtags.
Lindy, to her credit, listens — sort of. She follows their instructions to escape the city, joined by a few fellow bubble-heads. But as the journey goes on, it becomes clear that the biggest danger isn’t the monsters outside. It’s the people inside.
Because Finetime is exclusively white, privileged, and blissfully unaware of the wider universe. When Lindy discovers the Doctor is an alien — and worse, not one of them — she recoils. Despite everything he’s done to save her, she’d rather trust her collapsing bubble than accept help from someone “different.” The escape plan collapses, not because of the monsters, but because of xenophobia and arrogance.
In the end, Lindy survives — smug, ungrateful, and willfully blind to her own prejudice. The Doctor is furious, Ruby is heartbroken, and the audience is left with the bitter taste of satire. Sometimes the monsters aren’t the problem; sometimes it’s the humans who refuse to see.