‘Doctor Who’ | ‘Smile’ S10E02 Overview
The Doctor and Bill arrive in a far-off colony, but quickly realise the only inhabitants are swarms of tiny robots sent to make the planet habitable for Earth’s refugees. Oh, and their larger counterparts communicate in emoji. Where are all the people?
SPOILER ALERT!
The Doctor is keen to take Bill off on an adventure, even after Nardole gets cross with him about leaving earth when he promised he wouldn’t. The audience is instantly tantalised with another glimpse of a larger story behind the vault at the university. They head to the planet of Gliese 581d, far in the future.
The ‘Doctor Who’ writers have asked us to believe in a lot of things over recent years: animated shop mannequins, baby fat-creatures, a city on the back of a giant space-whale, among others. But have they gone too far with this week’s emoji-bots?
As it turns out, these human colonists have sent a ship to another planet in order to prepare an atmosphere and habitation for them, using advanced miniature robots that can create building materials, and whose interface units communicate only in emoji - a small range of icons depicting facial expressions. (Admittedly, the welcoming faces of the emoji-bots are rather cute, though perhaps a little creepy.) Are you still with us?
Filmed in the City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia, Spain, the colonist’s new city is white, clean and minimalist - perfect for a futuristic city. The overexposed sunlight adds to the utopian feeling. That is, at least to begin with.
‘Smile’ has a different feeling to last week’s episode, getting straight back into an adventure on a far-off world and time. The Doctor and Bill have great chemistry together already, with Bill showing her smarts time and time again throughout this episode. Of course, her love of adventure is reflected in her emoji-badge.
In a quintessential Doctor moment, he recognises that the emoji-bots have become a self-aware species, attempting to convince the humans that the robots deserve to co-habit on the new world that they prepared for the humans. He even throws in an ‘IT Crowd’ reference to lighten the mood.
The Doctor’s ‘Magic Haddock’ story reminds us that computers are truly limited by their programming, and chillingly, they decided that human sadness is not compatible with life; but this seems unlikely. Isn’t the first thing we program into artificially intelligent machines the express order never to harm humans, unless they are programmed for war? Still, ‘Smile’ paints a tragic picture that hopefully will be resolved by the reset of the emoji-bots and some compassion from the newly awakened humans.
Bill and the Doctor return to London, only to find that they didn’t quite make it back to the Doctor’s office in the present day. Instead, they arrive on the frozen Thames, at the Great Frost Fair of 1814, at which an elephant was, in fact, led across the ice.
Tune in next week to see what The Doctor and Bill get up to next in ‘Thin Ice’!
Watch ‘Doctor Who’ every Saturday night at 7:20pm on BBC One; 9pm on BBC America; and Sundays at 7:30pm on the ABC and iView in Australia.
