Kerblam!

Ooh, it's pretty close! It's *almost* something I enjoyed, and has some pretty memorable lines and moments. I think people are a little too hard on Kerblam over its flawed ending, but so much of it is so much closer to at least something resembling Doctor Who compared to the other dud episodes. Jodie Whittaker's initial enthusiasm on receiving a Kerblam package was infectious and one of those few moments in her time as the Doctor where I was really feeling her embody the character, at least a bit.

The story is a bit of a disaster in its implicit endorsement of capitalism (which the Twelfth Doctor will apparently go on to destroy) and of just the status quo in general, but really that's all just a clumsy attempt to get a little political around the automation trend. None of this is very original or well done, there's a bunch of dumb lines everywhere including that infamous line about being best friends with robots, the companions and even guest cast really don't have much to do, and overall it just doesn't work.

The Kerblam robots just look okay. A little bit of polish could have made this episode at least passable. It at least isn't a boring episode like so many other Thirteenth Doctor stories, and it tends to stick with me, at least a little.

Kerblam is such a fascinating episode to me, but not for any of the reasons it wants to be. It's an episode that takes a wild 180 degree heel turn in its politics about halfway through and never looks back. It has one of the weirdest endings of any episode of Who I've ever watched, and also one of the weirdest fan responses I've ever seen happen in real time. Five years ago, when it came out, I feel like the response was mostly "what?" And I absolutely can't blame them -- it's a confusing episode! But these days, reactions to the episode are much more polarized. Most people don't like it, but I've seen more than a couple people argue that we've all been too harsh on it.

Recently, I've seen multiple arguments that Kerblam is not actually a pro capitalism story, and instead it's about AI and the dangers of automation. There's about a thousand posts saying that all the kvetching about the "the systems aren't the problem!" line is misguided, because, well, she's actually talking about the literal Kerblam system -- the AI controlling everything.

So I'd like to talk through that argument.

Firstly, I'll say this: sure, Kerblam is not pro capitalism. What it is, though... well, we'll get to that later.

Most of the problems with Kerblam lie with the ending. The first three quarters of the episode take care to establish how much Kerblam as a company sucks. The human workers live there on the moon full time. They're constantly monitored. They're reprimanded for having conversations with their coworkers. They have to wear trackers on their ankles at all times. The script constantly comments on how creepy the robots are, how unpleasant they are to be around. All of these things are shown as bad. The company sucks! And the episode doesn't shy away from that at all.

Early on, the Doctor is told off for insubordination by Slade, a higher-up in the company. She starts interrogating him about the goings-on in the company, and notices that he knows something's wrong. She says this:

DOCTOR: Dan Cooper has vanished. Maybe you should call the police.
SLADE: There are no police here.
DOCTOR: The authorities, then.
JUDY: We are the authorities. Kerblam is its own jurisdiction. We have responsibility for all employee welfare.

Which says a few things to me. Firstly that Kerblam has control over the health and safety of literally all of their employees, as well as control over any problems that arise, which is another symbol of "this place sucks and should not exist". Secondly, the Doctor suggesting the police as a valuable resource who could help out in this situation. Now I don't exactly expect doctor who to say ACAB outright, but there's a consistent pattern of copaganda in Chibnall Who, even in tiny moments like this, and I feel that's worth talking about, especially in discussions of the ideology of this episode.

Furthermore, also fairly early on in the episode, the Doctor says this:

DOCTOR: What I don't understand is, why does Kerblam need people as a workforce? These are automated and repetitive tasks. Why not get the robots to do it?

She's right! This is hard, repetitive, menial labor that could easily be completed by the robots. So why do the humans do it? What is it about our society that makes it so we need to do these frustrating and boring jobs that we hate? Here's the explanation we get:

KIRA: Kandokan labour laws. Ever since the People Power protests, companies have to make sure a minimum ten percent of the workforce are actual people, at all levels. Like the slogan says, real people need real jobs. Work gives us purpose, right?

Oh, okay. Yeah, work gives us purpose. Sure. Famously a capitalist talking point to shut down complaints about labor conditions, but the episode doesn't even agree with this point, so I guess its fine. Even though we're meant to sympathize with Kira. whatever. Ryan then says this:

RYAN: Some work, maybe.

He's clearly disagreeing that the work people do here at Kerblam is meaningful and that humans need to be doing it. Which, like, yeah, I agree with him!

And then we get this...

KIRA: But I can still imagine families opening these packages. We make them happy by doing what we do here.
DOCTOR: You have a great approach to life, Kira.
KIRA: Thank you. That's so lovely of you. Nobody's ever said something that nice to me.

Kira bases her own self worth on the service she provides to other people -- to people in a better position than her, who can afford to buy things from Kerblam. The Doctor reaffirms this and tells Kira this is a good outlook to have, encouraging her to keep thinking this way -- like she expects Kira to stay in this job for the foreseeable future.

We'll come back to that.

Next thing I want to talk about? Charlie. He's introduced as a sort of quiet, awkward young man just working to stay alive. We then find out he's been killing several workers to test out his explosive bubble wrap, which he is going to then send to thousands of Kerblam customers to make them lose faith in the company and stop buying from Kerblam.

This is a very, very common trope in media, usually called the Strawman Leftist or the Well-Intentioned Extremist. The MCU is famous for it -- the villain in one of their shows a couple years ago was someone who basically wanted a world without borders, where people aren't displaced or thrown out of their homes for the benefit of others. The show even sort of agrees with her ideology! But... she was also a terrorist who killed innocent people and threatened to kill children. So that makes her the bad guy, and immediately aligns her ideas about equality with evil. This is propaganda.

Kerblam does this same thing with Charlie. Sure, he has the right idea: that Kerblam is an awful company, that the world he lives in is unfair, and that people deserve better. But the way he went about it was to try and kill innocent people. This, again, immediately aligns Charlie's ideas about equality with evil. This is propaganda.

Possibly the funniest part of this to me is that that idea of "right idea, bad execution" isn't even held up in the episode. Do you know who else murders innocent people to make their point?

The f**king system.

Kerblam's system intentionally lures Kira into a trap and murders her with Charlie's evil bubble wrap. To make him sad. So he knows how the families of his victims will feel. The sentient system kills someone, who has done nothing wrong, to prove its point.

Thing is... one of these instances, the Doctor defends, and the other, she condemns. Look at the difference in how she describes these two things:

With Charlie:

DOCTOR: Even if it costs people's lives. You kill a load of customers at Kerblam, let the systems take the fall for it, erode people's trust in automation, make people angry.

Aaaand then with the system:

DOCTOR: Except Kerblam's System does have a conscience. It's been fighting you, Charlie. It knew it. It sent a message across the galaxy, begging for help. That TeamMate in Slade's office, it was coming for you. And then Kira. It took her, knowing how you felt about her, to show you how it would feel. Because how you feel right now about Kira is how all those families and friends will feel if your plan goes off.

When it's Charlie doing it, it's killing. When the system is doing it, it "took" her. See the disparity there? Corporations have the authority to kill people in order to send a message, but individuals who kill for the same reasons do not. Corporate violence is just, individual/revolutionary violence is not. THAT'S the message this episode sends. That's why people call it pro capitalist.

Another interesting thing about the episode's confusion on its own ideology is the whole "ten percent" thing. Earlier in the episode, we learn that according to Kandokan law, ten percent of Kerblam's staff have to be human. But in his Big Villain Speech, Charlie says "we're supposed to be happy that ten percent of people get to work?" So... which is it? Is Kerblam the only employer on Kandoka? Does that make all of Kandoka a monopsony? If that's the case, and literally everyone else on the planet is unemployed, how are people buying that much stuff from Kerblam? How do they afford it? The episode doesn't interrogate this at all.

Anyway, then we get to The Famous Line.

CHARLIE: No! No. If that's the price to change how everyone on Kandoka sees technology, then it is worth it, for the cause.
DOCTOR: This isn't a cause. You're not an activist. This is cold-blooded murder.
CHARLIE: We can't let the systems take control!
DOCTOR: The systems aren't the problem. How people use and exploit the system, that's the problem. People like you.

I do think it's interesting that this conversation uses "systems" plural, while every other instance of talking about Kerblam's AI uses "system" singular. That's just sort of odd to me, and part of why I think this scene comes across as attempting to be commentary on capitalism, whether it intends to or not. The episode sets itself up as criticizing the practices of this corporation. The audience did not expect specifically the automation to be the ONLY problem here. The problem set up in the episode, REGARDLESS of if the AI has actually gone rogue or not, is the way Kerblam treats its human workers.

Here's the thing: if, in This Specific Instance, the Doctor is not referring directly to the System of Capitalism, then she is referring to The System, kerblam's AI, which KILLED SOMEBODY, as "not the problem". In addition to this, Charlie himself was not exploiting the system. He was hacking the robots, sure, but it's not like he was using them in the same way the company does. It really doesn't make any sense.

The system is what sent the Doctor the message asking for help, because there was someone disrupting the way it worked and disrupting its efficiency and profitability. Essentially, it called in the Doctor to play the role of a unionbuster and shut down the unhappy workers. The system has a conscience that it only ever uses to protect itself.

I think that the "systems aren't the problem" line is brought up mostly because it's a microcosm of all of the gigantic problems within ideology of the episode. Still, I don't think this scene is why this episode is remembered the way it is by most fans.

I think that goes to the ending.

So we've spent the last forty minutes of screentime establishing how much this society sucks to live in and how bad this company sucks to work for. We've talked about how the workers are constantly monitored, treated inhumanely, talked down to by (human) bosses, isolated from their families, and a dozen other horrifying human rights violations.

So what's the solution, then? Does the Doctor shut down Kerblam and advocate for a company that doesn't do these things? Does she insist that things change? Does she do anything but smile and nod?

SLADE: We're suspending all operations for a month, pending review and while the TeamMates are rebuilding Dispatch.
JUDY: All our workers have been given two weeks' paid leave, free return shuttle transport. And I'm going to propose that Kerblam becomes a People-Led Company in future. Majority organics. People, I mean. We're always looking for good workers to join our management team.
DOCTOR: Er, thanks. We're strictly freelance.

No. She does nothing in this scene, except to call her and her companions "freelancers". She takes no issue with ANY of the real, concrete problems with this company that the episode brought up. Slade promises that Kerblam will be shut down for a month, "pending review". If you know anything about corporations, you know that this means absolutely f**king nothing. They'll screw a couple more bolts into the door of the plane and send it out to fly again. Judy promises two weeks paid leave (which is hilarious, since the company will be closed for double that. what the hell are the workers supposed to do for those other two weeks??) and free return transport. To be clear, not free transport to and from Kandoka all the time. You get one (1) free trip to bring you back to work your shitty menial job and that's it. She's going to Propose more people can get jobs in this horrible working environment. She's not going to ENSURE that. She's going to propose it.

The resolution to the episode provides less benefits to the workers than modern day France, and we're supposed to think that's a good thing. That the good guys won. We've gone back to the status quo, and all is right in the world. Nothing changes! All of the problems that were brought up in the first half of the episode -- the monitoring, the isolation, the soul-destroying work that robots could do that is instead given to humans -- that's all going to stay the same. We get no indication that ANY of those problems are going to be fixed in any way. Instead, we get told that Judy is going to propose that even more humans are subjected to this treatment. Nothing is going to change. Nothing is going to get better. There will be more Dans, more Kiras, more Charlies.

And yet we're supposed to treat this as a happy ending.

It's an unfinished ending. It just stops. It's like if the Doctor had left Van Statten in charge at the end of Dalek. Or if the Doctor and Donna hadn't freed the Ood in Planet of the Ood. Or if Amy hadn't saved the star whale in Beast Below. Or if the Doctor had let the company keep operating in Oxygen. Or if--

You get the point.

The Doctor is a working class hero, a champion of the underdog, an inspiration for the oppressed, and they always have been. They would not have let this company keep running like this with little more than a smile and a nod. It is endlessly frustrating to me that the writers made this decision because not only is it politically stupid, it's massively out of character for the Doctor.

Like I said earlier, Kerblam is not a pro capitalist episode. It's not anti capitalist either. What it is... is capitalist.

Kerblam accepts capitalism as fact; as something that will always exist, even centuries in the future and galaxies away. It cannot be stopped, no matter how badly it mistreats us. We won't ever be free from it. As the Doctor encourages Kira, the most we can do is grin and bear it. People like Charlie, who think they can change things? Well, nice idea, but it can't be done, and he was a horrible monster who wanted to kill people anyway, so who cares?

In this society, there is a high enough level of technological development to the point where humans are not necessary to do this kind of labor. And yet in their society there is still a capitalistic construct that makes these humans feel they must endure it, they HAVE to do these jobs, in order to earn money to live. This is not questioned by the episode.

Kerblam doesn't know what message it's trying to send. It confuses itself and twists itself around into the world's worst mobius strip and it hopes the audience won't notice. So, sure, it's not pro capitalist. It's too incompetent of an episode when it comes to making any sort of stance in the first place to be pro capitalist. And no, it doesn't have a solid point to make about automation, either.

You can enjoy Kerblam if you want. I'm absolutely not here to stop you. But we should talk about the political implications of the art we consume. Who made it? What do they want us to think? And why do they want us to think that? It's a discussion they don't want us to have, and therefore one we absolutely should be having.

Needless to say, I don't like this episode. It's massively disappointing to me, and it feels like most people don't remember the episode well enough to understand why. There's other problems with the episode, other inconsistencies, such as Dan seemingly not having been killed by the bubble wrap and instead directly by the robots, but that's the sort of thing in this show I'm willing to look past. But the main reason I've rated this episode as low as I have is its ideology and its messy attempt at political messaging.