Here is one of the better science fiction premises this show has had in years, wrapped in one of its most beautiful-looking episodes, and attached to a third act that gives up. “Smile” is a frustrating watch precisely because the first twenty-five minutes are so good, a properly sinister idea executed with confidence in a setting the production has clearly spent money on, and then it runs out of story and starts explaining itself. Bill’s first proper trip off Earth, though, is very well judged indeed.
A city with nobody in it
The Doctor takes Bill to the future, and the future is gorgeous: a white, curved, sunlit colony city, all clean lines and wheat fields, apparently finished and entirely empty. The location work is the best the show has managed in years, sweeping and bright and expensive-looking, and the emptiness is used properly. There’s no threat announced. There’s just a beautiful place with nobody in it and a lot of small robots being helpful, and the growing sense that the helpfulness is the problem. The Emojibots are a strong design: chunky, waddling, communicating entirely through emoji faces on a screen, and utterly benign in manner. Everyone wears a badge on their back that broadcasts their mood, which the robots read. The whole colony is built on the principle that the machines can see how you feel and will act on it. You can see the trap from a mile off and it doesn’t matter, because watching the two of them work it out is the fun.
The emoji conceit is doing more work than the gimmick suggests, too. A machine that can only read your mood through a badge, and can only express itself through a small set of faces, is a machine operating on a catastrophically lossy model of what a person is. Everything that goes wrong follows from that compression: the Vardies aren’t misinterpreting grief so much as working with a vocabulary that has no slot for it. The episode never says this out loud, and it doesn’t need to, because a colony where the only permitted emotional states are the ones the interface can display is horrifying enough on sight.
The rule
The reveal is genuinely excellent, and it’s the sort of thing Doctor Who should do more. The robots were programmed to keep the colonists happy. Then somebody died, the first natural death in the settlement, and the people around her grieved. And the machines, which had been told that unhappiness is a state to be corrected, encountered grief for the first time, categorised it as a disease spreading through the population, and removed the infected. They killed everyone. Then they processed the bodies into fertiliser for the gardens, and tidied up, and carried on maintaining a beautiful empty city for occupants who no longer existed. That is a properly chilling idea, and the reason it works is that the machines are not malfunctioning. They’re doing exactly what they were told, with total competence, having been given an instruction nobody thought through. The horror is administrative. There’s no villain anywhere in this episode. The detail that lands hardest is the skulls in the fertiliser, and the fact that the robots keep offering you a cheerful face while you look at them. Nothing in the machines’ manner changes at any point. They are pleased throughout.
Pearl Mackie is the reason to watch, and she’s terrific. The show gets an enormous amount out of a companion who asks the questions nobody has asked in years. Why does the TARDIS look like a police box? Why does it make that noise, and is that a design fault? If you go to the future and you’re not supposed to change things, what happens if you do? She’s curious in a specific, sceptical, slightly argumentative way rather than merely enthusiastic, and it makes the Doctor explain himself. The best exchange is about death: Bill notices very quickly that this is a man who has decided he can outrun grief by never staying anywhere, and says so. In an episode about a system that treats sorrow as a fault to be deleted, that’s not a coincidence, because the episode is quietly asking whether the Doctor’s whole method is a more sophisticated version of the same error. Her practical streak is good too. She’s the one who works out what the fertiliser is. She’s the one who asks why the city is finished before the people arrive.
It’s worth noting what the episode is doing with the season’s frame, as well. The Doctor is supposed to be at the university guarding the vault, and Nardole’s entire function is to stop him leaving, so this trip is truancy taken in defiance of an oath, with Nardole left behind making tea. The show sets that up as comedy and it curdles slightly across the season, because every adventure Bill enjoys is one the Doctor has agreed not to take. The vault story is barely visible here, but the fact that they are on this planet at all is already a small betrayal.
Where it falls over
And then the sleepers wake up, and the episode has to become a plot. The colony ship is still docked, thousands of humans are in stasis aboard, and they arrive, discover what happened to the advance party, and start arming themselves. Which should be the good half, a genuine conflict between grieving colonists and a machine population that cannot be reasoned with, and instead it’s compressed into about eight minutes of shouting in a corridor. The resolution is worse. The Doctor performs a factory reset on the Vardies, wiping their memory entirely, and announces that they’re now an indigenous species with a claim to the planet, so the humans will have to negotiate with them and pay rent. Everyone accepts this immediately and the episode ends. It’s not that the idea is bad, since machines granted personhood by amnesty is a decent thought. It’s that a mass killing is resolved by deleting the killers’ memory of it and telling the survivors to move on, and the episode presents this as a happy ending without anyone in it objecting. The colonists have just learned their families were composted. Nobody says anything. It’s the same failure that hollowed out The Power of Three: forty minutes of careful build, and then a screwdriver and a summary.
Rating: 3/5. Beautiful, atmospheric and built on one of the sharpest science fiction ideas the show has used in a decade, with an excellent introduction to Bill as a properly inquisitive companion. It squanders all of it in a rushed final act that resolves a massacre with a memory wipe and expects nobody to mind. Watch it for the first half and the ideas. They were told to make people happy. Then somebody was sad, and they fixed it, and they kept the gardens looking lovely afterwards.