DOCTOR WHO, SERIES 10 EPISODE 2:
SMILE
Doctor: Twelfth (Peter Capaldi)
Companion: Bill
May 2023
Well, after an excellent season-opener in The Pilot, what’s up next on the docket? A disappointment!
Maybe I’m being unnecessarily harsh, but “disappointment” feels like the right word to describe Smile with. It’s a brilliant concept, and very Doctor Who—robots told to prioritize human happiness going rogue via killing those deemed too “unhappy”—but it is deeply, deeply let down by its resolution. I think perhaps the more I think about this one the less happy with it I feel.
But first, what works? Well, this is only Bill’s second episode, but she’s proven herself handily to be a compelling and interesting character as a companion already, which is great. Most of the episode is literally only her and the Doctor wandering around this city, which is a bold move but it’s totally backed up: it is extremely fun to see the two of them hanging out and talking. They very explicitly have a teacher-student dynamic, as Bill is quite literally his student, but it’s a fun one where they both rag on each other a bit. It’s a great time. Bill has a moment where she nearly gets left behind in the TARDIS but chooses to come back into the dangerous city in order to help, which is brilliant: the Doctor basically just picks up “yeah, okay” and moves on. It’s another solid demonstration of the dynamic between this two, and I like it quite a bit.
Nardole is once again here! Sort of! He really only cameos in the beginning, which is fine, but it means I once again have very little to say about him. Maybe he’ll get his time in the spotlight soon.
This episode shifts into a different episode about halfway through it, and I think it does this very successfully: in the first part, we feel the suspense because we know what’s going on (and how much danger there is here) but Bill and the Doctor don’t: in the second part, it leans more heavily on the mystery and I think does so very successfully. There’s one rather brilliant explanation of everything that’s been going on so far that I just love. In the third part none of this leads anywhere compelling, but we’ll get to that.
Actually, no. Let’s get to that now.
I think the best way to get into the problems with this episode is to start with something that happens very early on: when they’re first entering the city, the Doctor and Bill find their ears to have (in the Doctor’s words) “received an update.” By hijacking the nerves of their ear, they can now basically communicate wirelessly while within the city. Bill’s response to this is a cheery “I’ll never need to charge my phone again!” and the Doctor’s is something along the lines of “Welcome to the future.” It’s very weird, because to me this strikes me as deeply terrifying. Like, that’s your ear!! You only have the two ears, and you didn’t consent to having your ears messed up or anything! What if something goes wrong? Looking at the rest of this episode, what if something goes wrong? This is never touched on.
Spoilers below:
And this is indicative of a further odd sort of lack of coherency to the episode’s resolution. We are told that the robots (whose names I’ve already forgotten) have become sentient, that the humans had better get used to them and make friends with them, that they’ve forgotten that they killed your friends so, uh, sorry! They’re cool now! Promise! This is, in effect, basically not a resolution at all. The first humans to wake up from the pods are treated as having been ludicrously quick to anger when they heard that their friends, family, lovers had been horrifically killed for no reason, when in reality, come on, that’s a perfectly reasonable response to murder. Anger is a perfectly reasonable response to murder, and the fact that the story expects everyone to go “Well! All’s well that ends well!” when many people died and the reason they died has not been dealt with is ridiculous on its face!
Furthermore, we are summarily told at the end of the episode that the robots have become sentient. This was news to me, because we get zero evidence for that leading up to it. The robots, in fact, behave paradoxically like actual robots: they follow commands, they show no instances of free will, and in fact everything they’ve been doing (all the murders, y’know) have been due to a misunderstanding of a command. To be told that they are now a sentient species who live in this place built for humans on the wishes of humans and that the humans are now more or less invading is patently bizarre! Even more bizarre is the way the Doctor, when “turning them off and on again”, doesn’t actually say anything about disabling the way they murdered all these humans’ friends! Instead, the bereft humans are treated with a very holier-than-thou attitude that feels more like victim blaming than anything. Not just by the Doctor and Bill, but by the episode itself. It’s just!! Aargh!!!
Oh, and the emoji stuff is a bit silly. I mean come on.
Overall Thoughts:
Smile is the first clunker of the season, and I’m really hoping it’ll be the worst, because the more I think about it the less I like it. Still, the majority of it is pretty great, and it’s basically the last five or so minutes where everything goes to shit. Watch it if you want some great Bill and the Doctor dynamics, or Bill’s first real adventure in the TARDIS (and that part of the episode, don’t get me wrong, is great!!)—but you can skip the ending. It’s not as solid as The Pilot, I think.
Next up, we’re going to Victorian London on the frozen Thames in Thin Ice! And they get PERIOD OUTFITS!