Smile

Chapter The 202nd, where at first I feel sad for a while, but then I watch Smile, I go ahead and watch Smile...

Plot:

The Doctor and Bill arrive on a colony world in the far future to find a city set up for colonists. It is deserted except for tiny microbots that swarm around called the Vardy, and some bigger (but still quite cute) bots with faces that display emojis, and act as a human-Vardy interface. They discover human bones being ground up for fertiliser in the gardens: the robots' programming has gone wrong - they're supposed to make the humans happy, so they have started to kill anyone who isn't smiling. The Doctor escapes with Bill back to the TARDIS, but wants her to stay there while he goes back to destroy the city. He surmises that the people killed so far were a set-up crew, and that more humans will eventually arrive on the planet to be killed by the Vardy if he doesn't intervene. Bill follows the Doctor back into the city and they find within it the spacecraft the humans arrived in. The Doctor goes to the engine room to set it to self-destruct, but Bill discovers a young boy roaming the ship - the colonists have already arrived; apart from the set-up crew, they've all been in cryogenic storage near the engine room, but are now waking up since the Doctor and Bill entered and activated the circuits. The Doctor cancels the self-destruct, and persuades the mob of awakened colonists not to go on the attack in response to the killing of their friends and relatives in the set-up crew. He has realised that the Vardy / bots have become a sentient and autonomous lifeform, and helps them and the humans negotiate a peaceful way to coexist on the planet in future.

Context:

I'm lucky enough to have a ticket to the BFI showing of the new animated version of The Evil of the Daleks on 12th September 2021 (which is still in the future at the time of writing, but which I'll blog about here once I've seen it). When I published the last blog post for Terror of the Zygons, it was quite early in September, and the screening is happening - unusually for Who events at the BFI - on a Sunday. As such, I won't get round to writing up all my notes on the event for likely a week minimum afterwards, as the day job takes up a lot of time on weekdays. I didn't want to leave so long between posts, so I though I'd squeeze in a quickie (it's always been an ambition) in between. Smile is a new series single-parter, so perfect for the task. Rather than waste time trying to persuade the family to watch with me, I watched on my own once everyone else was in bed or engaged elsewhere. I viewed the Blu-ray version of the episode from the Season 10 boxset.

First Time Round:

I watched this first on the evening of its debut BBC1 broadcast on 22nd April 2017, slightly time-shifted, accompanied by the whole family (Better Half, and three kids, two boys and one girl, the youngest of whom was only four at the time). I remember everyone enjoyed the story, though I felt it was a bit slight. The following day, we travelled up to Windsor and had a night and a couple of days in a hotel in Legoland. The Monday was an inset day at the little 'uns school, so we'd taken the opportunity to book when it wouldn't be as crowded as normal. Something in the Doctor Who story they'd watched before they left must have resonated, as I remember the kids, helped by the Better Half, making emojibots out of Lego in the hotel room. I wish I'd taken a picture of them back then to drop in here now, but there was an awful lot of Lego everywhere. Everything was made of Lego - too much to photograph it all.

Reaction:

I struggled to find similarities between this story and the last one covered by the blog (see Connectivity section below), but it occurred to me as I watched that Smile has lots in common with The Beast Below, the second story of Steven Moffat's first season as showrunner in 2010. Both have the Doctor and his new female companion embarking on a trip into the future after their previous introductory episode was out of the way; both have the Doctor and his new companion investigating together for a reasonable amount of time without other character interactions; in both, the Doctor has to manage a conflict and moral quandary between a group of humans on a spaceship and the so-called "monster" of the week that turns out not to be so monstrous. Both contain robotic creatures whose faces change to get progressively more unhappy, and they both end with a lengthy scene teeing up the next story. Was it coincidence? Was The Beast Below a story that the writer of Smile Frank Cottrell-Boyce happened to have remembered? Did Moffat point him in its direction for use as a template?

Whatever, it's an interesting parallel. They both take place at the same point in the Doctor / Companion relationship - the introductory story has been a whistle-stop affair, but this next one is where the two characters size each other up. The best part of this story are the early sections where it is just Capaldi and Pearl Mackie 's interactions as they explore alone. This lets Bill, as well as any recently embarked audience members, find out the standard details - stolen TARDIS, two hearts, etc. - but also showcases Bill forcing the Doctor to reveal his nature (and therefore the concept of the show): he might claim not to want to get involved, but he can't leave if there's a chance to help, and he feels he has to be the one to do it: "You don't call the helpline because you are the helpline" as she puts it. In The Beast Below it was "You never interfere in the affairs of other peoples or planets, unless there's children crying".

Pearl Mackie is so brilliant in the role of Bill, so talented and so precise. The character is all questions, questions, questions, which could be irritating if less well handled, but she makes Bill not just fabulous and fun but wise, but with an offhand manner so it's nowhere near overbearing. Capaldi synthesises his two prototype takes from each of the previous years - not as grumpy as his first year, but still a bit grumpy; not as wacky as in his second year, but still a little unpredictable. It just makes one wish that he'd stayed on for another year as he'd just found the perfect balance for the character and had the right supporting cast (as well as Mackie there's a little comedy with Matt Lucas's nagging Nardole) to allow him to shine. The script is also well structured to show off these characters at their best: Bill hesitates for a moment, but then follows the Doctor back into danger in order to do the right thing, as she's made of the same stuff he is. As it is all about the regulars, the guest cast don't get much of a look-in. Mina Anwar and Ralf Little have not much more than cameos. A giveaway that the emojibot plot is not necessarily the main draw here compared to just watching our two heroes together is that the set-up is made very clear to the audience before our heroes cotton on. That's not to say that there isn't good stuff there though, like the wit of the "skeleton crew" that turn out to have been reduced to piles of bones - and a couple of interesting story developments (Cottrell Boyce makes up for his 2014 misfire In The Forest of The Night with a solid script here) but it's a subplot.

What also raises Smile above the rest is now it looks. The location is beautiful, the white curving walls of the City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia, Spain are almost custom built for a futuristic setting such as this. They are shot very effectively too, but are just one of the glorious vistas on show throughout the story: there are the cornfields stretching out as far as the eyes can see, and the grimy industrial interiors of the spaceship. There's also crisp, effective iconography: the blue jelly cube food, the mood indicator badges, the bot faces with the transitions taking each character seeing them through a set of cutesy stages towards their own destruction. Production designer, the late great Michael Pickwoad, was a bone fide genius and could give you anything from minimalist futuristic to grimy industrial, and does so here within the space of a few minutes. It's not just talking and landscapes either: there are some nice shock moments, a couple of good action moments, like the Doctor's tussle with the emojibot on the engine room gantry, and some difficult truths and compromises faced head on in the plot (the Doctor's voiceover monologue telling the story of the magic haddock just avoids being too smug and is instead a little bit magic). It even has an elephant at the end. All told, it packs a fair punch for all that it seems quite a small story at first glance.  

 

Connectivity: 

Both Smile and Terror of the Zygons see the Doctor on a spaceship to which he does some violent rewiring in order to get the ship to self destruct.

Deeper Thoughts:

The Gatekeepers of Doom. Smile is just one of many examples of science fiction to use robots - at least in passing in this Doctor Who story - as a metaphor for slavery. By having such a theme, even fleetingly, I would expect someone somewhere to have taken against the story. At least it gives the lie to another social media trend, that only the latest years with Jodie Whittaker have had themes informed by a social conscience or progressive politics. In the parlance of our current times, Doctor Who has always been "woke"; classic Who went from "Kal is not stronger than the whole tribe" in the first ever story to "If we fight like animals, we'll die like animals" in the last; in between ran the gamut of themes such as the impact of colonialism, fighting against fascism, the dangers of polluting the environment, etc. etc. In some periods, of course, this was much less pronounced, and if those eras are a particular fan's favourite, they could feel that their show recently has been saddled with an agenda... but only if they put their blinkers on and ignore the show's rich history. The epitome of the "social justice warrior" approach to their favourite programme perceived by this group of fans is the decision to cast a woman as the Doctor in 2018 (and then again in 2020). This, mixed in with various flavours of dislike of Chris Chibnall's writing / quality control filtered through social media creates a particularly toxic online persona that fits a vocal minority. These have been regularly moaning for the last few years, and crowing recently as the end of the Chibnall / Whittaker tenure is in sight. This can even include fans who are perhaps more aware of the show's history than others, and therefore should know better.

Recently, a couple of more famous older fans have been making such pronouncements on twitter, and it's caused a lot of comment. As usual, the majority of responses are rejecting their take, but - as is the way with the medium - nonetheless amplifying it. Younger fans seem pitted against older ones (disclaimer: not all younger fans, not all older ones), playing out in miniature the polarised generation gap that of late seems very prevalent in media (both old and new) in the UK certainly but elsewhere also. At this point, I have to consider my own behaviour. I am after all an older fan who has had a pretty intensive and detailed long-term interest in the show. My reviews on this blog can be very critical on occasion. But I hope I'm fair and articulate my rationales (one of the reasons I save my critiquing for a blog and not a micro-blogging site where character limits are thieves of nuance), and I hope that I always remember that someone is a fan of every story. I'm Gen X, though, in real life as well as in Doctor Who terms. I'm neither one thing nor t'other - not a Boomer that was there from the beginning watching from the afternoon of Saturday 23rd November 1963, but not young - or even relatively young - and coming to things later with fresh eyes. As such, as it sometimes is with other fevered discussions in the wider world of politics between Boomers and Millennials, I feel all I can do is watch from the sidelines as the two polar opposites do battle. I'm lucky, though, I think, not to have had too hard a job of shrugging off the illusion of privilege. Doctor Who does not belong to me, or anyone.

Older fans may see themselves as the gatekeepers, but they're not and they can't be. Fandom is open to all, whether you've seen every episode when it first went out or not. I knew that from the start as it had been going ten years before I was even born, and almost twenty before I got into the habit of watching it regularly. Anyway, as with any area of study, the more you find out about Doctor Who the more you find out there is yet to learn. However much you know, unless you're maybe ace researcher Andrew Pixley you'll very quickly find several people who know more than you. That can be scary, of course. This all stems from fear ultimately. Fear that something special to one is going to be taken away, or damaged, or will have to be shared with too many other people. This is at the route of all the polarised discussions I'm seeing at the moment: fear of getting old fueling arguments about funding the social care of an ever-ageing population, fears of individual freedoms being too easy sacrificed for the common good in the discussions on masking and vaccinations, fear of immigration. Just because we may think the fears are unfounded, we must have empathy for the fearful. As depicted in the later scenes of Smile, we eventually have to work together even if tough compromises are inevitably involved, because the alternative is perhaps our own doom.

In Summary:

Smile does make me smile, mainly because of the great onscreen chemistry between Peter Capaldi and Pearl Mackie.