Finally, an episode that remembers this is an adventure show. “Kerblam!” is the most conventional hour of the season and it’s a relief. The Doctor gets a fez delivered by a robot postman, finds “HELP ME” written on the packing slip, and takes the fam undercover in the galaxy’s largest fulfilment warehouse to find out who sent it. Mystery, infiltration, a body count, killer bubble wrap. It moves. It’s also the episode people are still arguing about, and the argument is more interesting than most of what this season provoked.
An actual plot
The pleasure here is in the shape of the thing. There’s a question at the top, the question has an answer, and the answer is arrived at through investigation rather than a speech. The warehouse is a good setting, properly established for once: ten percent organic workforce, ninety percent automated, a moon-sized operation with a distribution centre, dormitories and a conveyor system you can actually picture. Pete McTighe bothers to build a place, which after The Tsuranga Conundrum feels like a courtesy. The Kerblam Men are a strong design, white and blank and permanently cheerful, unsettling precisely because they never stop being polite. There’s a genuinely good sequence with a teleport that arrives with only half a person, and the moment where the robots start marching in step is the closest this season comes to real menace. Splitting the fam up across warehouse jobs is smart, too. Ryan and Yaz on the picking floor, Graham on cleaning duty with a mop and a superb line about being invisible to management, the Doctor talking her way into the systems room. Everyone has something to do.
The horror lands because it’s aimed at the one character you’re not braced for. Kira is a sweet, slightly lonely packer who befriends Ryan and has never been given a present. So the system gives her one, and she opens it, and the bubble wrap kills her while Charlie watches through the glass. It’s a nasty, effective piece of television. The pop of each individual bubble is worse than any amount of screaming, and Claudia Jessie plays the delight turning to confusion perfectly. That’s the moment the episode earns its stripes as a thriller, and the AV Club was right that turning bubble wrap into a murder weapon puts this squarely in the show’s long tradition of ruining ordinary objects.
The twist everyone fought about
Then the reveal, and this is where it gets interesting. The distress signal didn’t come from a worker being exploited by the machine. It came from the system itself. Kerblam’s central intelligence noticed that a human employee was planning a terrorist attack, and reached out to the Doctor for help, because it couldn’t stop him alone. Charlie, the shy maintenance lad, is the villain. He’s radicalised against automation, he’s loaded thousands of parcels with lethal bubble wrap, and his plan is to trigger a mass casualty event so appalling that the public turns against robot labour and the jobs come back. Kira wasn’t collateral. He chose her, to make the point land. So the anti-corporate setup inverts. The company is not the villain. The machine is not the villain. The angry man with a cause who decided people were an acceptable price is the villain.
I like it because it’s the one time this season a script sets up an expectation and then refuses to deliver the comfortable version. Everything about the first half says the warehouse is going to be indicted. Instead the episode says the system was working and a person broke it. The Doctor’s closing line, that systems aren’t the problem and people are, is a properly contentious thing for this show to say and I respect the nerve. What bothers me is that it doesn’t follow through. Kerblam responds to the crisis by going to ninety percent organic staffing, which concedes the exact argument the episode just spent an hour dismantling. And nobody addresses the fact that the system solved its terrorism problem by killing an innocent woman as bait. That’s a monstrous act, waved through in the edit. There’s a braver episode here that sits with the discomfort. This one wants the twist without the consequences.
There’s also a bit of fan service that actually earns its place. The Kerblam Man’s delivery, the fez, and above all the Doctor pulling out an old-fashioned paper-and-string parcel all point back to the show’s long line of cheerfully lethal service machines, and the teleport that delivers a partial body is exactly the sort of gruesome throwaway the classic series specialised in. It works because it’s texture rather than plot. The episode doesn’t stop to explain the reference or expect applause for it, which is more than a lot of the modern show manages. Graham’s mop, incidentally, gets more characterisation than most of this season’s guest cast. A man who has spent his life being looked past, using it deliberately, is a good gag with a real edge on it.
Charlie doesn’t quite work
The one performance problem is the villain, and it’s a casting and writing issue rather than an idea issue. Leo Flanagan plays Charlie as so meek and so obviously nervous that the reveal reads less as a shock than as a relief that somebody finally did something. A radicalised man who murdered a colleague to make a political point needs either genuine conviction or genuine coldness, and he has neither. He mostly seems embarrassed. The script also gives him his ideology in a single burst at the end rather than seeding it. Everything he says about automation destroying communities is reasonable, which is the interesting part, and none of it has been visible in his behaviour for the previous forty minutes. Compare it with how carefully Demons of the Punjab builds Manish from ordinary young man to killer across a whole episode. Same idea, radicalisation ending in murder, executed with far more patience two weeks earlier.
Set against the rest of the run, though, this is the shape the season should have used more often. There’s a monster, a mystery, a location with rules, and jeopardy that escalates. The theme is present but it arrives through plot rather than being announced. Nobody stops the story to explain what it means. When the episode has something to say it says it in the last two minutes and then stops. That’s all I wanted from this season: a creature, a place, a problem, and characters I like solving it. Seven episodes in, it happened once.
What it leaves behind is a warehouse that exists, with established geography and real rules and an operation you can picture, which is basic and rarer here than it should be. It leaves the Kerblam Men, relentlessly cheerful and blank-faced and genuinely creepy when they start marching. It leaves Kira and the bubble wrap, the most effective horror beat of the season and the cruellest. It leaves a twist that refuses the obvious read, where the company isn’t guilty and the machine isn’t guilty and the radicalised man is, which is contentious and the better for it. And it leaves a conclusion that flinches, conceding the argument it won and never addressing the system using an innocent as bait.
Rating: 3/5. A proper adventure with a real mystery, a strong location and a twist with actual teeth, let down by an ending that won’t commit to its own position. After six weeks of themes wearing monster costumes, an hour that just tells a story is worth a great deal. Killer bubble wrap, a cheerful robot postman, and a villain who thought a massacre was a message. More of this, please, and fewer speeches.