Doctor Who: SMILE (S10E2) - Review

Doctor Who takes a look at optimism and I wonder why I don't like this episode more than I do

This is going to be a tricky one. And a tiny bit controversial maybe.

On the face of it, SMILE delivers on one of the biggest requests I had following last week’s episode THE PILOT. Having laid the groundwork for Bill and her relationship to the Doctor and the world of the show, I wanted SMILE to be more, well, Doctor Who-y for lack of a better phrase. I wanted the rest of the series to come at me with all the craziness and high-concept ideas it could muster and not to hold back. Well, SMILE doesn’t disappoint on that front. It’s one of the purest slices of hard sci-fi the show has offered in years, to the point where some have understandably likened it to the sort of episode you might get from Black Mirror*.

And yet, SMILE sits uncomfortably after its finished. SMILE is not a bad episode - it’s a solid slice of Doctor Who at its most thematically ambitious, but it lacks a certain spark to pull the whole thing together and so all of those big thematic ideas eventually can’t help but start to fall by the wayside.

So, for those who haven’t watched the episode and don’t give a shit about SPOILERS, let’s recap what happened in SMILE. Following on pretty much immediately from last week’s ending, SMILE opens with the Doctor ditching Matt Lucas’ Nardole to take Bill to a future human colony in the far future. Well, except, the humans haven’t really arrived at the colony yet, but it is fully functional and happily awaiting their arrival. The Doctor and Bill take a stroll and discover that whilst the facility isn’t home to any humans yet, it is home to millions of tiny micromachines called the Vardy, who move in groups/swarms and are eventually found out to be the literal material that the colony is constructed from. Think of them like the microbots from Big Hero 6 if that helps you out:

Also waddling around the facility are the emojibots – robots that interface with the Vardy and communicate expressly via emoji (it being a universal language :P). The emojibots (and the entire facility) are supposed to represent and ensure a utopian bastion of human happiness. So, of course, the emojibots go nuts and start converting any humans that are unhappy into fertilizer. How do they know which humans are unhappy? Every person (including the Doctor and Bill) gets given identifying patches that represent a person’s mood to passers-by. Given that the colony has become a waiting death-trap, the Doctor takes it upon himself to blow it up before the rest of the humans arrive.

There are a lot of moving parts to SMILE - more than I’ve accounted for in that not-so-brief synopsis. The episode never really stops spooling out information - especially in its final 15 mins or so, where the deeper secrets of the colony really start to unravel. SMILE has a lot to say and a lot to say it with, so its to the episode’s benefit that its ambitious concepts are as entertaining as they are. The emojibots are not scary –they never really overcome their unintimidating design – but they are interesting and a great reflection of the episode’s exploration of optimism.

Where the Doctor points out that the entire future colony represents the pinnacle of human optimism and happiness, the emojibots represent the most plastic, binary interpretation of that optimism imaginable: happiness and mood reduced to a simple emoji that, whilst universal, isn’t really open to whole degree of nuance. It’s a plastic, crude, inhuman (you could almost say corporate) approach to optimism that might be attractive, but it isn’t complete. We get this idea in a microcosm when Bill calls out the contrast between the sleek design of the colony and the ugly inner-workings of it. The Doctor points out how this represents the difference between robotic ‘dry’ brains (the outside) and humanistic ‘wet’ brains (the inside). It’s telling of the appeal of the Vardy (Vardi? Eh, whatever) that Bill initially prefers the facility’s outside.

Its this part of the episode that SMILE addresses so well. In particular, I find myself continually returning to a fantastic piece of foreshadowing near the opening of the episode, where the Doctor describes the city as ‘made from optimism’ at the same time the camera cuts to a horde of Vardy swarming through the air. Yes the city is actually built of Vardy, but aren’t they the embodiment of this clinical approach to optimism? Isn’t the Doctor still, in a way, right?

On top of this, SMILE also wants to have something to say about the Doctor’s role in all this optimism. The Doctor frequently puts up a sort of half-assed defence against the idea that he actively goes looking to fix the problems he comes across. Obviously, we already know that isn’t true and, sure enough, the Doctor still saves the colony. But the constant illusion to fairytales and the three wishes of the fisherman who caught the magic haddock strewn throughout the episode suggests something a little more specific. The Doctor is neither robotic, like the Vardy, or human, like Bill and the colonists. His presence borders on mythic and fairytale. The Doctor doesn’t solve the situation through magic, but place him into a situation like the one in SMILE and he sees the option others might not. Here, it’s the reset button, as the Doctor wipes the minds of the Vardy, leaving them to negotiate with the humans as to living conditions and…rent. That’s the magic of the Doctor, which might sound schmaltzy, but then this is a show that literally runs on optimism in the face of cynicism**, so if you expected SMILE to land on the side of anti-optimism, then you’re as new to this as Bill is.

And yet, SMILE is not an episode I feel particularly moved to rewatch. Its an episode that slams you with glossy production values (the colony looks stunning, all sleek and expansive) and full-blown sci-fi aesthetical nerdery, but the longer you get away from the episode, the less satisfying it feels. When I first finished SMILE, I was marching about feeling pretty good about the whole thing. Two days later and that feeling had turned almost into irritation. Something about SMILE feels off. For all its sleek outside, it’s lacking a bit of heart on the inside.

The problem is that SMILE lacks a spark and energy between the people in it. Not that I lay the blame at Capaldi and Mackie’s feet, who both do a great job. I don’t even think the problem lies with Bill’s character, but instead in the execution. SMILE is, in effect, a two-hander between Bill and the Doctor that has them wandering around on their own for thirty minutes before cardboard cut-outs passing as humans show up. That’s a great opportunity to explore the Doctor-companion dynamic, but I’m less convinced it’s a great way to continue to establish a dynamic. It’s the sort of thing I imagine might be really interesting once we’ve gotten used to Bill for three episodes or so, but doesn’t really work on her first proper trip in the TARDIS. Or maybe it could. But it doesn’t work here, as the first half of SMILE starts veering from ‘taking our time with it’ towards just being dull. By the end, I don’t feel like I’ve really learned anything more about Bill or her relationship to the Doctor which, for this kind of an episode, is sort of a big deal!

To better explain this, look at THE BEAST BELOW. Not a great episode, even by Moffat’s own admission, largely due to the fact that it’s got waaaaay too many ideas to really flesh out in 45 minutes***. But, for all the flack this episode gets, there’s an electricity and a freshness to that episode that’s lacking from SMILE. Just check out this bit:

Okay, it might be pretty silly and possibly an unfair comparison because Matt Smith lends the Doctor a very different style than Peter Capaldi. But compare it to any scene from SMILE and it just has so much more energy and zest. SMILE is the sort of episode I have to put effort into liking, when really I think I just find it quite dull.

THE BEAST BELOW even handles its character development more satisfyingly than SMILE. Remember that whole bit I talked about earlier where we learn how the Doctor usually abandons his ‘not helping’ façade to help save people? THE BEAST BELOW prods more at that in the first five minutes than SMILE does by the end of the first thirty. By the end, not only does Amy (and, by extension, new viewers) understand the Doctor’s capacity and need to step in and help but we understand how Amy factors into the equation as well. Contrast this with SMILE, wherein the Doctor resets the Vardy and Bill explains what the Doctor just did. Not only is it unsatisfying, it doesn’t even make a whole lot of sense.

Look, SMILE isn’t bad and I feel oddly curmudgeonly moaning about it as much as I have done. But for all the episode does to get Doctor Who back to the ‘monster-of-the-week’ format, it can’t help but feel oddly restrained. I get that Series 10 is designed largely for newcomers to the show, which is why I’m tempering this kind of criticism for now - we are, after all, only two episodes in. But Doctor Who doesn’t have to keep the stabilisers on to be entertaining or even appealing to newcomers (just look at THE ELEVENTH HOUR – a brilliant introduction to the show that’s also uncompromising in how ferociously fast it is).

Verdict:

★★★ (out of 5)****

Next Time:

THIN ICE

Next week’s episode is THIN ICE written by FACE THE RAVEN’s Sarah Dollard. From the looks of the Next Time trailer it looks like it’ll be a bit more romp-y than SMILE which might give it more of an excuse to let its hair down and inject the show with a bit more energy.

* http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2017-04-23/viewers-thought-doctor-whos-smile-was-a-lot-like-black-mirror

**Deleted scene from the brilliantly loony Craig Ferguson show that pays reference to this idea:

*** THE BEAST BELOW and SMILE both seem to have a lot in common (In fact, SMILE even references TBB with that whole thing about the Doctor having previously come across human ships in the future).

****I’m trying out a thing with star ratings at the moment. I’m really not a fan of rating things as I feel it detracts from more interesting conversations you can have about the film/episode/whatever in question. But, it was suggested I give it a go and I figure I might as well try it out. Oh and seeing as I didn’t do it last week:

THE PILOT: ★★★ ½ (that’s right, these things work in halves, too)

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