The Doctor, after reciting the same speech to Bill that the Eleventh Doctor was known for delivering, takes her (without Nardole) somewhere into the future. They arrive at an off-world colony preparing for the arrival of humans escaping their own rotten planet, but find no one in the city and only small robots who communicate through (…groan) emojis. After doing dome digging they discover this city is more dangerous than they realized, and that it’s of particular threat to the incoming humans.
I like the idea of the Doctor and Bill in an abandoned futuristic city, a neat callback to the “The Daleks” back in 1963. But not only is the rest of the episode a far cry from “The Daleks”, it’s not even very entertaining in its own right. To start, the robots are really dumb. Not only are they incredibly non-threatening in design, being some kind of mix between Marvin from the 2005 Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy movie and ASIMO, but the emoji characterization is blatantly just bucking a trend. Doctor Who’s featured specifically timely technology and trends in the past, but this just feels too obnoxious, especially giving how incredibly dated emojis are. It doesn’t help that at a number of points, Bill just stops to take a photo with her iphone. The mood indicators aren’t as bad, the notion that it’ll never show its wearer their own mood is kind of interesting, but the smiley design is still there. The idea of the city itself being made of these microbots is more fascinating, and if the swarm that we see from time to time was the spotlight antagonist, I wouldn’t mind.
The story is also pretty flawed. As usual a lot of the mystery comes to the Doctor through extrapolating on menial connections, but I was genuinely interested when they discovered the dead bodies. There was even a good lead-in with the Doctor taking note of how mineral fertilizer was being used to grow the plants in the arboretum, but where could it be coming from. What I don’t appreciate is that for most of the episode the Doctor thinks he has a solution figured out: the humans are on their way but these robots have killed the shepherds (the set-up crew), ergo he has to blow up the city. However it turns out he’s completely wrong on that front. Him making a mistake is fine, but when it amounts to little more than padding out the episode you can’t help but feel short-changed. Thus there’s a disconnect between the two parts of the episode leading up to and after the Doctor’s change of plan. The former just comes off as something to fill time before the latter and is significantly less engaging.
During all this, the Doctor and Bill are the only characters to exchange dialogue (sometimes communicating through the ear because of a plot device), and they have some good moments. I do like how as the Doctor hypothesizes the way he does, all Bill can focus on is the recent revelation that he has two hearts. There’s also a moment where she brings up his accent asking if there’s a Scotland in space. These and a couple other moments are genuinely funny. The Doctor repeatedly tries to leave Bill in safety only for her to come up with an argument to follow. But Bill is more less given the stock companion role for this episode, and could’ve been switched out with anyone. Her dialogue can be annoying every so often as well. The minimal supporting cast aren’t memorable, except for the fact this episode really wasted Mina Anwar. Also, because she exists in this universe already through The Sarah Jane Adventures, it had me wondering if Rani was going to show up at some point. The Doctor doesn’t even have much dimension in this episode, and only the basic appeal that Peter Capaldi effortlessly exudes. Also, I’m sorry, but the line “stay away from my browser history” is not only grating, but leaves the unsettling implication that the Doctor watches porn.
The robots’ murder spree being the result of a technical oversight where they see unhappiness as a threat to this utopian colony they’re building, is also not an interesting a development. I think because this idea to purge unhappiness has shown up in science fiction a number of times before. Hell, “The Happiness Patrol” during the Seventh Doctor’s era did this same idea, and though that’s not technically a good episode, it’s at least more memorable to those who’ve seen it, if for nothing else than Sheila Hancock’s obvious Thatcher spoof and a ridiculous monster made out of candy. On a related note, it bugs me that the title, as simple as “Smile”, seems to want to push that phrase in a manner similar to “Blink” (still by far the best Moffat script on Doctor Who).
Bill discovers at one point, the body of the woman who started this, someone who died of old age and thus first introduced the concept of grief to the robots through her death’s effect on other people. Not long after, we learn that the last remnants of Earth (has anyone noticed there have been tons of “last remnants of Earth” in Doctor Who’s history?) are actually already there in frozen capsules. The Doctor almost committed genocide for real which is played as a goof, and when a handful of people awaken and learn what the robots have done to the shepherds, many of whom were friends or family, they immediately do the cynical human thing and decide to arm themselves to kill the robots. Somehow through this confrontation, the robots identify with being under attack which to the Doctor makes them alive. So he resets the computer and tells a story about a haddock. Which is a fine ending if you can avoid asking the question “WHY THE FUCK DIDN’T HE DO THAT EARLIER?” Was their not being alive before somehow a deterrent to just resetting them? Why did he wait this long? Even Bill seems to know this is anticlimactic, quoting The IT Crowd (“he turned it off then on again”) in response to the Doctors’ technobabble explanation of how he managed to do it. And so the people of this world are left to simply accept the fact their family and friends were murdered by robots just because those robots have the data they need to survive in their new habitat. It’s something that doesn’t sit well when the Doctor leaves them to this as their only option, and that they should be happy about it. I love moral ambiguity to the Doctor, but someone needs to question it, and no one really does here.
So yeah, a deus ex machina to a middling story at best, populated by irritatingly pandering villains that only seem to exist to be “hip”. Was there anything this episode really gave of value? Well in terms of continuity, we get some more hinting at the vault the Doctor’s guarding which of course means that a school will once again be his refuge between episodes. There’s also the reveal that he’s guarding this vault because of an oath he made, which I don’t think we’ve seen (otherwise the mystery of the vault would be moot). So I’d like to know who he made the oath to and why he’s restricted to Earth. And oh yeah, he’s restricted to Earth. In his sole scene of the episode, Nardole reminds the Doctor he’s not supposed to go off-world unless it’s an emergency. It’s the Third Doctor’s exile all over again. Despite my disliking the way the episode repeatedly used “smile” as if it were the next big Doctor Who title, I liked the Doctor’s “smile, you’re in the belly of the beast” line, regardless of how little sense it made in retrospect. At the end of the episode, you know as soon as the Doctor says they’ve returned to the moment they left, that they really haven’t. And when they open the TARDIS doors it appears they have arrived in 19th century London on the frozen Thames with an elephant in full sight. This is such a bizarre scenario I’m curious what will become of it. No damn emojis there, that’s for sure.
Comments
Post a Comment