There may be no subject more ripe, or more obvious, for sci-fi satire than Amazon right now, as the corporate behemoth continues to push obliviously further into the kind of world-domination that only the most wild-eyed of cyberpunk writers could have imagined. It’s so obvious a target, that at first you might wonder what new territory there is for Doctor Who episode writer Pete McTighe to mine with his script for “Kerblam!”.
“Kerblam!” turns out to be a rousing romp, a nice change of pace from last week’s melancholy trip to recent history. Here, we have The Thirteenth Doctor (Jodie Whittaker) and friends dashing through an elaborate conspiracy that involves terrifying robots, suspicious clipboards, and, eventually, killer bubble wrap.
But that’s getting ahead of things. Let’s begin at the beginning. Let’s start with the fez.
Ah, the fez. What a completely unexpected, completely lovely little moment that was. This season of Doctor Who has (wisely) broken almost completely from the previous seasons, giving old and new fans alike a completely new slate for stories. Still, it’s nice to be reminded that Whittaker is indeed playing the same character as the likes of Tom Baker, Christopher Eccleston, and, yes, Mr. Matt Smith. The Doctor is over-the-moon with excitement when a robo-postman from the galactic delivery conglomerate Kerblam! zaps into the TARDIS with a package ordered by a previous self, but her mood darkens a tad when the box is discovered to contain a print-out reading only, “HELP.”
The Doctor immediately steers the TARDIS to the moon housing the Kerblam! headquarters. A quick bit of flim-flam with the psychic paper and the sonic screwdriver gets her, Ryan (Tosin Cole), Graham (Bradley Walsh), and Yaz (Mandip Gill) hired, though the group quickly learns that while Kerblam!’s systems are completely automated, protests from the local humans necessitate that 10% of the workforce must be human. The question is, who among that 10% sent for help?
The group splits up and begin making fast friends (and faster enemies) among the workers and management. Graham bonds with klutzy janitor Charlie (Leo Flanagan), while The Doctor and Ryan join an assembly line with Kira (Claudia Jessie) and overseen by manager Slade (Callum Dixon) and the head of organics, Judy (Julie Hesmondhalgh). Yaz is stuck moving packages around with the friendly Dan (Lee Mack), who talks lovingly about his daughter and proudly displays the indestructible charm she gave him that he carries with him everywhere.
In answer to your question, yes, Dan dies almost immediately.
Kerblam! is obviously a living hell, but it’s to the credit of McTighe’s script (and to the absolute bummer that is reality) that he doesn’t need to tweak the actual work culture of Amazon all that much to land in a futuristic dystopia. Ryan even remarks that the tracking devices placed on the group to ensure productivity are just like ones he had to wear at his last shop-job before heading out to traverse the galaxy. Posters howling “Live your best life!” line the walls, while the robot overseers have chipper voices and permanent smiles as they tell you to get back to work. It’s all a facsimile of happiness, masking some kind of deeper rot.
How deep that rot goes isn’t immediately apparent, at least not until Dan offers to make a delivery to a deep and dark portion of the facility in Yaz’s place. He is almost immediately killed by the robots, because what else are the creepy looking robots going to do. You know, that seems a pretty obvious sign that something is up.
Even worse, Kira informs the group that many people have gone missing in the building, supposedly fired but never turning up at home. The Doctor immediately bails on the undercover schtick and informs Slade and Judy that if it turns out they are in any way responsible for these disappearances, they’ll have her to contend with (“wrathful” is one of the few shades of The Doctor that Whittaker hasn’t had the chance to play yet, but her righteous rant in Slade’s office is exactly the kind of speech that Smith or Tennant would have rattled off, and Whittaker delivers it with terrific gusto).
Further snooping reveals that Slade has secret detailed, analog files on all the disappearances, which puts him right at the top of the suspect list. It turns out that the system is still registering the vanished employees as working, which means that something has gone wrong at the very core of the programming. By this point, Judy and Charlie are along for the ride but they seem unconvinced of the faulty system, at least until a robot charges in and starts strangling Charlie. That clears things up a bit. But that now leaves the problem of how to access a centuries’ old network?
Janitors to the rescue! It turns out that Kerblam!’s shrine to itself includes the first bot, a Dalek-y looking little charmer nicknamed “Twirly”, on account of the spinning lite brites that form his face. Meanwhile, the shy Kira is approached by robots informing her that she has been named Employee of the Month, and would she mind accompanying them to this isolated, locked room where no one can hear you scream, not that that’s relevant, just a fun bit of trivia, right this way. The system notifies the TARDIS team that Kira has been abducted, seemingly taunting them. Charlie, earlier established to have a crush on Kira, Yaz, and Ryan rush to access the inaccessible bowels of the facility, where Kira has been taken.
While that group recreates the third act of Toy Story 2 by zipping around endless conveyor belts, The Doctor keeps working on Twirly, soon discovering that the “HELP” message was actually sent to her not by an employee, but by the Kerblam! AI system itself. Before she could sort out what that means, Slade shows up with a gun. But before he can cause any kind of a ruckus, The Doctor accesses the teleportation drive of the delivery bot and zaps everybody away to Kerblam!’s basement, at which point she throat punches Slade into submission (she may not like guns, but The Doctor’ll still fuck you up, you cross her). But shocker of shocks, Slade turns out to have the most altruistic motives possible for someone running around with a gun. It seems that he has also been trying to get to the bottom of why people have been disappearing, keeping everything secret and on analog files because he wasn’t sure who he could trust.
So the management team that always turn out to be evil didn’t do it, and the AI system that always turns out to be evil actually isn’t, so what the hell is going on?
“Kerblam!” has the pace and tone of a romp, but around here it starts delivering some body blows. For starters, The Doctor and company discover a vat containing the sludgy goo that is all that remains of the disappeared workers. So that’s a shame.
In a beautifully cut together sequence, The Doctor and her team discover a massive assembly of robo-delivery men, each holding a package. It’s an army, but who is the general? And what are the weapons? At the same time, Ryan, Yaz, and Charlie reach Kira’s location, but she is sealed away and cannot hear them as they scream her name and pound on the glass. Kira suddenly finds herself presented with an empty package, inside of which is nothing but bubble wrap. So Kira does what everyone does when presented with bubble wrap.
She pops a bubble.
And then Kira…pops.
The group reconvenes and The Doctor susses out that the contents of the robo-army’s packages are beside the point. What matters is the miles and miles of bubble wrap each package is wrapped in, each bubble containing micro-explosives that could wipe out entire civilizations. Ryan, who is getting more assured and attentive with each episode, points out that Charlie’s reaction to seeing Kira play with the bubble wrap suggests that he knew in advance that something was up.
Yup, hapless janitor Charlie is actually the mastermind. There’s something troubling about McTighe’s script presenting the management of a soulless conglomerate as hapless but good-hearted patsies while the minimum wage folks are the ones to watch out for, but if nothing else it’s a handy reversal of how these sort of schemes usually pan out (on Doctor Who and other shows). It also turns “Kerblam!” into an interesting companion pieces to last week’s “Demons of the Punjab”. There and here, the central destructive force wasn’t aliens or robots or any kind of arcane powers, no. Instead, death and devastation are the result of an angry young man turning their back on love and empathetic connections and choosing to be swallowed whole by that anger. I don’t know if “toxic masculinity” was pre-planned to be a major recurring theme for this season or if it’s just happening naturally, but it makes for a strong counter to Whittaker’s Doctor and the diverse group of do-gooders that she has assembled.
Charlie reveals that his generation is fed up with only being offered 10% of the work, and so he has decided to lash out and bring the whole disappointing society down, starting by inserting himself into Kerblam! at the lowest levels and mastering their systems from within. The other employees died so Charlie could test his weapons and expand his powers, but the system recognized its own subversion and sent a message to The Doctor begging for help. Charlie makes to launch his army, but The Doctor jerry-rigs Twirly to redirect the fleet to deliver to Kerblam! itself, detonating right on the spot and evaporating Charlie where he stands.
Kerblam! is shut down (temporarily) and the TARDIS team makes ready to head out once again. Yaz asks if they might stop over to Dan’s house and return his indestructible charm to his daughter (“Hey little girl, we dug this out of the goop-puddle that was all that was left of your daddy”), which The Doctor happily agrees to. It’s a downbeat note to end on, especially with the tongue-in-cheek closing reminder that none of them, and maybe you, will ever look at bubble wrap the same way again.
Episode Thoughts:
-We’re cooking with gas now, folks. This is as straight-ahead, by-the-numbers a story type as Doctor Who gets, but between the terrific cast, McTighe’s sharp script, and a propulsive pace from director Jennifer Perrott, every element clicks and the result is one of the most purely entertaining episodes of the season yet. Like “The Tsuranga Conundrum”, “Kerblam!” is playing with familiar story forms, but it plays them with energy, verve, and a cheery spirit of invention and adventure. Whittaker seems more assured in the role with each passing episode, and the ensemble around her have established a terrific rapport.
-Special shout out to Leo Flanagan as Charlie. Flanagan has to play both the guileless klutz and the genocidal mastermind, and it’s to his credit that Flanagan makes both halves of the performance work in tandem with one another. You can see the cleverness in the early, benign sections, and you can see the insecurity even as he’s explaining his master plan. Charlie’s a monster, but a disturbingly human one, so much so that when his face flashes with confusion and terror right before his own explosives envelop him, you can’t help but feel something like pity, even as he deserved that, and worse.
-After one excited outburst from The Doctor: “You’re just making sounds now!” Graham protests.
-13’s Companions are much more supportive of the fez than 11’s ever were.
-The Doctor hurls verbal lightning at Judy and Slade, then turns to Ryan and Yaz, concerned. “Too bombastic?”
-Speaking of Judy, a nice touch in McTighe’s script is her character repeatedly catching herself referring to people as “organics”. No one comments on it, but it cleanly and clearly illustrates the way dehumanizing language and thoughts creep into the mind and take root.
-“Does she know what she’s doing?” “Some of the time, definitely.” You could swap out the “she” and that exchange could refer to any Doctor, which makes it perfect.
-Jodie Whittaker snarling “I never warmed to you” as an accusation/threat is both hilariously polite and genuinely terrifying. I think if she said that to me, I might cry. I’d definitely cry.
The Weekly Timey Wimey: Space postman.
Arc Alert: Ryan’s dyspraxia comes up for the first time in a while, though with Yaz’s help he’s able to overcome his issues with balance and leap across conveyor belts like a pro.
Most Whovian Moment: The above-mentioned fez is a delight, as is The Doctor recalling the events of “The Wasp and the Unicorn” when the subject of wasps come up. Oh, Agatha Christie.