Doctor Who: Dot And Bubble Review - 5 Ups & 5 Downs

Around the same time we discover the origins of the Man Traps, we discover the secret to why the citizens of Finetime seem to be dying in a specific order, and oh my, is it an anticlimax.

The Doctor treats this like it's a crazy reveal, really hyping it up with his patented "No... it can't be...", only for the big twist to be that the citizens are being killed in alphabetical order. There's no particular reason behind this system and the overreaction makes the moment almost comical. Had there been more logic to this twist – perhaps if they were a hivemind of sorts that could only focus on one objective at a time – I'd give it a pass, but it seems like more of a throwaway gimmick than anything.

There's also some inconsistency to this logic. If the murders started at the beginning of the alphabet, and the Man Traps ignored those later in the alphabet until the earlier ones were dead, how on earth did a bloke called Brewster Cavendish manage to escape, and why didn't this break the system? Even the Doctor doesn't seem to question it, despite the fact that it makes Cavendish extremely suspicious – especially since he also seems to benefit the most from the purge by proclaiming himself the leader of the survivors, and is the one spearheading this 'new life' for the colonists.

I also have questions about why the entire homeworld was murdered first and didn't seem to follow the alphabetical order. Why was Lindy's mother (played by our old friend Susan Twist), already dead by this point, while the Man Traps were somewhere around the 'Paul' mark?

I was so sure the murder order was going to be something to do with follower numbers, and I'm not entirely convinced that more couldn't have been done with that idea instead.