Smile: Ranking - 195

 Smile

(Series 10, Dr 12 with Bill, 22/4/2017, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Frank Cotterall-Boyce, director: Lawrence Gough) 

'✋☺👍👌👂👌👀👍👈👉👽👽👽👽👽👾✊💢💣💥😍😱🙏'(the review of this story from this website's 744th edition, downloaded from the year 4563 via a black hole) 

Ranking: 195

 

 Bill’s first ‘class field trip’ in the Tardis with her new and rather mad lecturer is a memorable one, continuing the soft low budget re-launch of the series started in ‘The Pilot’ with a story that reminds me a lot of ‘The End Of The World’ – a statement of intent of just how big and epic Dr Who can look and how wide the possibilities are. ‘Just look at what we can still do that we’ve never done before’ seems to be the motto and Steven Moffat throws everything at this story after a more subdued opener: some of the best location filming in the show’s history (in Valencia, where ‘The Two Doctors’ was filmed, but this story makes far better use of the location, notably the impressively futuristic ‘City of Arts and Sciences’ complex that looks as alien as any bit of Human architecture ever built), a great tracking shot of nanobot aliens across an alien wheat field (well, they call it wheat but it looks more like Barley to me. Maybe it’ a futuristic hybrid of the two? Anyway, Dr Who is really getting the hang of what CGI can do in this era and it really sets the scope for this being an alien world) and emojibots (of course emojis are going to be the official universal language of the future, it seems so obvious in retrospect!)  This is a story shot against futuristic white backgrounds for most of the time, a blank empty canvas for Dr Who to be shot into space again with a new companion and a new spring in the step of both the showrunner and The Doctor (indeed, so white is everything in this building you half expect the Clockwork Robots’ from ‘The Mind Robber’ to march out from somewhere). Underneath it all, though, it’s business as usual with a story about humanity in the future landing on Gliese 581 (crazy name, crazy planet) while still going through some old issues involving robots, communication and Humans still searching for the Garden of Eden. Indeed, it’s simpler than usual: after a run of highly complex timey wimey stories this is the arguably most straightforward story we’ve had since ‘The Beast Below’ at the beginning of the Moffat run or maybe ‘Planet Of The Dead’ at the end of Davies’.

As with ‘In The Forest Of The Night’ Frank Cotterall-Boyce, arguably the biggest name writer of this era of Who, has pitched things a little young, as if he thinks Dr Who is only watched by children. He also has a habit of rewriting the sort of things that are Dr Who’s bread and butter as if unaware the series has been doing things like this for sixty years, delivering them with the ‘ta-dah!’ demonstration of a magician who doesn’t know that his secrets have been revealed so many times before. At least this time, though his ideas are much closer to the spirit of Dr Who, albeit using a few too many old ideas of ‘fertiliser’. For instance this story is yet another ‘last humans in space’ story, something that makes a mockery of all the other times Dr Who has tried this, with similar tales of cryogenically-frozen bodies waiting to be woken up when the time is right (‘The Ark’ with Vardy robots as a more high-tech replacement for the Monoids, ‘The Ark In Space’  with a plague filling in for parasitic insects and ‘The Beast Below’ with Emojis rather than Slider authority figures you want to keep on the right side of, all doing much the same thing, but no one seems to have told Boyce that). Similarly the show is knee-deep in stories about robots that were badly treated by the Humans who co-exist with them and go wrong due to a ‘misunderstanding’ (see ‘Robot’ ‘The Robots Of Death’ ‘The Girl Who Waited’). Then there’s the other aspect of the story is the idea of a city where everyone is forced to be happy, even when they don’t want to be, where the natural human response of grief is something to be outlawed (the entire plot of ‘The Happiness Patrol’). Even the part of the story that impressed everyone, of having robots building a colony before Humans get there, is what The Mechonoids were doing in ‘The Chase’. Notably all these stories use these scenarios as jumping off points or deeper, more complex stories (for instance ‘The Happiness Patrol’ looks at the struggle of the people in power to hold onto a false reality and the underground movement that swells up to defeat it); ‘Smile’ just has an emojibot created by Humans in the distant future that gets cross when you look upset and viewers who have seen any Dr Who before this year know where this story is going long before The Doctor does. In fact, given the way Boyce seems to think there’s only one travelling ark in the far future and The Doctor nearly wipes out all of humanity by ‘accident’, you can’t help but feel you actually know this series better than its author. 

 
The same applies if you watch Dr Who straight from the era’s biggest name British scifi series ‘Black Mirror’, a sort of ‘Twilight Zone with gadgets’ anthology series where technology that’s meant to make life easier making it harder. If Charlie Brooker were ever to write a Dr Who episode you suspect it would look an awful lot like this. Yet this is still a Dr Who story deep down, more about Humans than robots. For the robots have been programmed to make sure the Humans are ‘happy’ without ever being told that no Human can ever stay happy their whole life through – that sad things are just a byproduct of being alive. By chance (he really wasn’t much of a fan) Boyce had come up with a combination of stories that had never been tried before and which has the subplots running under the surface of a lot of these other episodes front and centre: what does it mean to be Human? Especially in a distant future where we’ve fled our home planet and gone out into space. We like to think that being alive in the future with all our advances in technology will have solved all our problems, but why should it when technology doesn’t change the Human parts of ourselves? Humans are adaptable and everything is relative, so a Human in the far future, though cosseted and protected and free from a lot of the fears we have now, would still have to cope with the basic parts of being Human, like loss and feeling sad (the same goes for our generations that have a longer life expectancy and fancier gadgets but have only ever extended life not banished death altogether). No matter how real they become, no matter how accurate, there will always be a gulf between a person and a robot because they’re not made to ‘feel’ in the same way. Talking to a Human, however person-like, about loss and grieving is as silly as talking to your toaster about depression or your hoover about feeling hungry: they’re not ever going to understand because they don’t function that way. ‘Smile’ goes out of it’s way to have The Doctor talk about prejudice, of ‘wet brains’ and ‘dry brains’ that think differently but are both equal and both valid, but they’re never going to be the same deep down, just living lives in parallel.  So when death hits the survivors of humanity and everyone starts grieving the robots, trained to keep people happy, get their sparkplugs in a twist and see it as a plague of misery that has to be wiped out, little knowing that their wave of terror is just compounding the problem. Why would they? Robots don’t understand grief. Once more in Dr Who the problem comes from poor programming, from an object that doesn’t understand the assignment he’s been given and a problem that would be solved if we talked to one another more and better. Which to give Boyce his due is actually a pretty neat distillation of something at the heart of all those other stories and means that we get one of those clever Dr Who stories where there is no villain or ‘monster’, just a mistake and misunderstanding, closer to how Humans mess their world up in real life. It’s also the perfect mirror for what happens at season’s end (‘World Enough and Time/The Doctor Falls’) when Bill experiences the prejudice of being considered a ‘robot’ firsthand (technically she’s a Cybermen, but close enough). 

Unfortunately it’s one that’s already been done: nearly one hundred and fifty years ago in fact, in the book ‘Erewhon’, written by Samuel Butler in 1872. I’m amazed no earlier Who author had touched on Butler who was a Victorian satirist one considered the ‘father’ of science fiction alongside H G Wells and Mary Shelley, though his books are less timeless than either of his contemporaries being firmly rooted in Victorian society and values. Nevertheless his books are full of technology gone mad and he more or less ‘invented’ the robot in this book (though it took a Scandinavian playwright in the 1920s to give them a proper name), glorified helpers that were meant to take all the drudgery out of everyday living and allow even working class men to be treated as Kings. In ‘Erewhon’ an explorer, fleeing Victorian inequality and looking to convert natives to Christianity, looks for another land and discovers it after a great voyage, a place built by robots-without-a-name. At first he thinks he’s found paradise: everyone appears to live happily and greets him with a smile. But soon the narrator finds out it’s all a fake to keep on the right side of people and the society is all topsy-turvy: crime is treated with kindness and compassion while illness is seen as a ‘failing’ that has you sent to prison. Yes, it’s a comment on how leniently criminals are treated compared to the workhouse, with a few jabs at Christian values about turning the other cheek thrown in, but there’s a lot in there about fear of technology that’s ruling itself, about how ‘incomprehensible’ it is that we can live together and understand one another. All machinery has been banned in Erewohn after a number of accidental deaths because it’s just not safe. The best gag in what’s rather difficult reading: children signing waivers that forgive their parents for the inconvenience of being born (something tells me Douglas Adams read this book too). If you’re thinking to yourself that it’s all coincidence and Boyce wouldn’t have read a book that obscure check out the name of the spaceship: there’s a giant letter ‘E’ and some smaller letters that make out ‘Erewohn’ (a word that, if you haven’t already guessed, is backwards for ‘Nowhere’; indeed the working title for this story was ‘The News From Nowhere’). The only thing it’s missing is the emojibots.

There’s another issue at the heart of all this too that isn’t looked into as deep as it perhaps could have been. Boyce creates the Emojibots as a natural exaggeration of the time we’re living in now, a time when language has been reduced to those funny little emotions you get in phones. It’s not actually that unlikely: emojis ‘work’ because they’re a sort of universal language between people of different cultures who struggle to express meaning. Though we like to think as if ‘we’ invented them they’re really not that different to Egyptian hieroglyphics or Aztec carvings from two thousand years ago (drawings are so much easier to understand than words). In a distant future, when Earth has imploded and by necessity everyone has had to create a single language to be understood it’s an obvious one to choose. But it comes at a risk: words come with layers of meaning. The parts of language learning that people struggle with most isn’t the spelling or the grammar but the ‘hidden meanings’, the unwritten rules about being able to understand at a glance when someone is being sarcastic, or hinting at something, or making a hidden point within something else. There are subtle social clues, phrases that you would never use in polite company, words that are every bit as accurate but ones you would never use for fear of upsetting someone. Our modern day, when the vast majority of our communication is online texting/emailing and you can spend your entire day without talking to someone in person, at work or at home comes at a cost too: there’s no body language to go with words, no tone in your voice to reveal how you’re ‘really’ feeling. Sometimes all you have to go on is the basic sentence on paper, open to multiple interpretations. That’s why the emoji was invented really, to convey whether you mean what you say or if you’re joking. For someone like me, who is always poking fun at something, they’re a Godsend. But even then people use emojis out of context so they don’t always mean what the face would imply. Sometimes there are hidden meanings even within emojis. The emojibots, the ‘Vardy’ robots (named for a friend of Boyce’s, Dr Andrew Vardy, a professor of robotics at the University of Newfoundland who’d collaborated with him on a book ‘Bruno Wins!’) are a great idea in principle, the idea of communication taken to its basic level. But being such a simple story ‘Smile’ never quite sees this aspect through to the end: The Doctor doesn’t re-programme the robots to teach them language, or moan about the dangers of using emojis. He basically solves the story in the simplest way, by turning them off and on again and tells the Humans they need to learn to live together. How are they supposed to do that without a common language? Won’t it all just happen again? It’s such a shame that a story about the importance of communication ‘forgets’ to communicate how to solve it all.  The emojibots are deliberately unthreatening, which only makes it more threatening – while at last the Doctor makes the comment he should have made back in the 1960s to shut people up who laughed at the monsters: ‘when something is lumbering that means it’s confident it doesn’t have to run!’

What with being such a simple story that botches the ending and cobbles together ideas from another half dozen scripts I would be easy to dismiss ‘Smile’ altogether. However, there’s a bunch of things this story has going for it that none of the earlier variations had most of which comes at the start. One is the fact this is Bill’s first trip in the Tardis so we’re seeing the usual Dr Who thing with genuinely new eyes. Fittingly for a story all about communication Bill is one of those people who says the silent part out loud, accidentally asking awkward questions that no one else had thought of or was too polite to ask. Whether by Boyce or (more likely) added by Moffat there are some great lines here about things that Dr Who fans have always taken on trust: the fact that The Doctor stands at the Tardis console when he has seats round the outside (asking if he has really long arms), that the Tardis doesn’t have a steering wheel (‘you don’t steer the Tardis, you negotiate with her’), whether he’s an intergalactic policeman if he travels in a police box and that he’s responding to people’s requests for ‘assistance’. She’s a breath of fresh air as a character, an utter novice in contrast to Clara’s assumption she was on The Doctor’s level and Bill has the most tutor-pupil relationship since Dr 4 and Leela. We also see how being with her after years with Clara changes the Doctor, bringing out both his more  protective and lecturery sides. Neither fully trust the other yet this early on (The Doctor’s still in post-Clara gruff hermit mode even though you can tell he’s secretly been dying to run off with someone again like the olden days) and seeing what the future does to humanity, both as a species and to individual people’s morals, is as scary for Bill as ‘The End Of the World’ was for Rose, while reminding us that the Doctor is an alien whose as comfortable here as he is in ‘our’ time, with one of Peter Capaldi’s better blends of dashing hero and grumpy old git. The first half hour of this story is just the two of them exploring, like the olden days (Boyce last watched the series regularly in Hartnell’s day and it shows) and it’s their chemistry that makes this story work as well as it does as they wander through the beautiful ‘liminal’ spaces of Valencia’s beautiful buildings, designed to be full of crowds, alone. Frankly it’s a shame when everyone else starts waking up half an hour in and it becomes another Dr Who runaround. I would happily watch these two on a travelogue show all day.

That’s the other thing going for this story: it looks like no other. We’re so used to Dr Who stories, even modern Dr Who stories, being low budget and with studio backdrops or quarries filling in for alien planets that to have one this alien-looking and strange is a great move. Unlike some stories that rather waste their settings (despite the name ‘Vampires Of Venice’ could have been anywhere really, while ‘The Two Doctors’ made down the road in Seville doesn’t have any Spanish feel to it past the clichés) ‘Smile’ wouldn’t look anywhere near as good without the location filming which is wonderfully alien and strange. Having such a relatively ‘empty’ story, with lots of room to explore it is a great move. Full marks too for having the Doctor actually solve the mystery by standing still in a corridor for a change, realising that the nanobots haven’t just created the city but are the city.  Even the outside filming, with a Theresa May-like merry journey through a wheat field with a long shot that shows no one is around for miles, is fabulous: rather than simply having the Tardis land in the middle of the action it gives this story space for the duo to explore. It also reflects another Victorian writer, Frank L Baulm and Dororthy’s journey to Oz through fields like these, to some degree a metaphor about country dwellers feeling lost in big (Emerald) cities run by charlatans who don’t offer what they promise. The fact the city isn’t just built by ‘tinmen’ but is the tinmen only makes it funnier.  

The third thing going for this story is the witty dialogue, most of which pokes fun at our idea the future is in any way going to be different to life as we know it now as well as showing a fine line in snarkiness and context that runs parallel to the emoji message. The child who wakes up from a thousand year cryogenic sleep and immediately asks ‘are we there yet?’ tells you everything we need to know that humanity hasn’t changed. The Doctor responds to Nardole’s complaint that The Doctor is running away from his responsibilities and taking Bill with her by asking ‘why is she here?’ (‘Because she isn’t anywhere else’) and The Doctors’ response to moving the Tardis that after 2000 years he’s entitled to take the stairs. Bill’s sighing comment that they’ve come all that way across several million miles and everyone’s out (little knowing how prescient her comment ‘should have sent a text first’ will turn out to be). Her realisation with The Doctor that ‘you don’t phone the helpline – you are the helpline’. Though they don’t quite come out and make the joke, the pun of wondering where the ‘skeleton crew’ is and finding out a scene later, that they’re now skeletons is a deliciously dark pun too. A story all about the importance of communication needed to handle it’s dialogue well and it does: for the first half at least ‘Smile’ sparkles, making up for its relative lack of action early on by never being more than a scene or two from a classy quotable line. Sadly they cut my favourite scene though, The Doctor checking through his futuristic Observer’s spotter’s guide of spaceships to check which timezone they’re in!

For the most part, then, I like this one and the mystery at the heart of it an awful lot, it’s just the resolution that turns my Smile upside down. The Doctor and Bill are so good together and the empty environment such a change of pace that it’s a real shame when other colonists start to wake up and fill the place with their stilted chatter. The decision to keep everyone to the end was probably made to keep costs for the location filming down, but given their lack of screentime all these Human colonists are caricatures at best. It’s also uncomfortable, in a story about how human emotions are more than just happy or sad faces, how much these characters only swing from one extreme to another: just look at how quickly Steadfast moves from placid neutral to anger at what’s been done to the other Humans. There’s no joy at being awake (even in the future with perfect technology you’re going to think twice if you’ll wake up after a sleep that big – especially if you’ve learned about other Human colonists facing giant wasps and Monoids), no surprise at finding other people in this city, no awe at what the nanobots have been able to create, no delight at having survived, not even concern about his fellow passengers. The other colonists at the end of the story are every bit as angry too, instantly, more or less on waking up (I mean, I know I can get that grumpy being suddenly woken up but I don’t start shooting at things. Usually). I did wonder if Boyce was making some clever comment on how the use of emojis instead of language has caused humanity to go through violent moodswings in the future, meaning we’re no longer capable of juggling a mixture of feelings. Except this would mean the emojibots would struggle to read The Doctor and Bill, that they would be an utterly useless design (no one would need a robot to read if people had a particular feeling if it was that obvious) and that Kezzia and Goodthing seemed capable of all sorts of conflicting subtle feelings in the teaser sequence (Mina Anwar, Rani’s mum in ‘Sarah Jane Adventures’, barely needed to have turned up for work that day given she’s dead within a minute: these two originally had a lot more scenes, all cut).

Because we don’t really get to know any of these Humans we don’t feel for them, beyond this being an intellectual exercise. Oddly the stakes were higher when these future Humans were strangers, not extras.The moment the Doctor and Bill discover what’s been going on, with colonists turned into fertiliser, ought to be horrifying – not least because Bill has been eating the space-food grown from their bones – but it isn’t because we don’t yet know if these people are good or bad. For Dr Who audiences trained on ‘The Ark’ especially we automatically assume the robots have been enslaved by the Humans and made to work against their will. Oddly for a story about emojis, we haven’t been ‘told’ how to feel yet and it’s a problem that isn’t really changed by the sudden ending. Who are we supposed to sympathise with? The Doctor seems to think it’s the robots, but even if this isn’t ‘their’ fault, neither is it any of the Humans’ (barring perhaps the computer programmer). The ending really is too easy by far, without any thought for the ramifications and difficulties this colony will face in the future, living amongst the bones of their loved ones. ‘Re-setting’ the machines so colonists and newly sentient robots gets to live together in peace is a very Dr Who solution, made without war or bloodshed, but one that feels a little too pat and simple to be true. I mean, I don’t know about you but if an alien was trying to kill me, even for good reasons, I’m not sure I could fully trust it again; heck I’m reluctant to turn my laptop back on after it’s been in one of its moods in case it electrocutes me. This colony clearly don’t have a future, but ‘Smile’ is so concerned with a story simply that it can’t afford to go there – even if it’s a story all about the dangers of over-simplifying things. 

Another aspect of the story I have issue with is that wretched ‘magic haddock’ story. Boyce decides to stop the action, mid-battle, for the 12^th Doctor to deliver a lecture: perfectly in character true but he’s had half a dozen opportunities to explain this before so why is he doing it now? Boyce also thinks he’s written some great moral message here, about a man asking a magic haddock for three wishes and wasting the first two through his clumsy syntax, asking for his brother to come home and a pile of gold. It turns out that he gets sent the man’s dead body along with some gold in payment for his heroics, something the man puts right with his third wish. But if The Doctor had said ‘genie’ the audience at home would have got the story instantly, while the syntax issue is just the folk tale ‘The Monkey’s Paw’. It’s a way of being clever for clevernesses sake: if The Doctor had learned the story from a giant spider that delivers karma (‘Planet Of the Spiders’) it would have been perfectly in keeping with the series. But magic haddock? That’s just silly. Plus he’s asking for trouble – given that it’s Bill he’s pontificating to here it’s amazing she doesn’t insist on going to that planet next. There’s a half theme of being careful what you wish for across this year, with the monk three-parter especially (starting with ‘Extremis’) but also the flat that’s too good to be true in ‘Knock Knock’(was Moffat wishing he hadn’t taken on the job that gave him so much work?) but the foreshadowing feels clumsily inserted here compared to the other stories.

For all that, though (no, don’t shoot me, look happy face!), I still like this funny little story. There are few other Dr Who stories that both look and sound this good and for half an hour at least you can easily believe that you’re in another world, in another time. There’s a really strong message at the heart of this story, about how no matter how far we go Humans will always have to deal with difficult subjects and that even if robots make our lives easier they can’t take away the pain and heartbreak that comes with being human. I really dreaded this story the first time round after how bad ‘In The Forest Of The Night’ turned out, but it’s a work far more in keeping with Dr Who as a concept, making good use of the author’s interest in robotics and technology. Despite Moffat’s weariness at being back in the showrunner’s chair, after trying to leave the show and Chris Chibnall not being ready to take over, there’s a real bounce in this story’s step that will run right the way through the year as he finds new ways of saying old things and comes to the series with fresh eyes, digging deeper into his inner seven-year-old across series ten and it rubs off on all the other writers too. There’s plenty of reasons to smile here then, though the correct answer is to have a whole variety of emotions common to mid-tier Dr Who episodes that have so many good ideas but can’t quite make the most of them.  

POSITIVES + I’ve long wondered which Dr Who companion most resembles who I would be if I was taken across time and space. At different times I’ve considered Harry (perpetually clumsy), Rory (comic relief often out of his depth), Peri (alternating bouts of sarcasm and weariness) and Vicki (giving cute nicknames to ugly looking monsters about to eat me). I really think that it’s Bill though: she’s mostly one step away from a breakdown, constantly bewildered by real life never mind life with the Doctor and her fellow Earthlings often feel more alien to her than the aliens she meets. She’s a very natural mixture of impulsive, kind, courageous and scared that makes her feel more ‘rounded’ than most and the ‘single-emotion’ threat of the story really shows that up: no robot would ever be able to single Bill out for destruction because there are always too many emotions passing across her face. This could so easily become irritating, but Pearl Mackie somehow manages to make Bill adorable, fearless, loyal and empathetic rather than just lost and wet. Because of the way the handover between showrunners was made (Moffat getting an extra year he really wasn’t expecting because Chris Chibnall wasn’t ready in time) Bill only got one season in the Tardis and less time on-screen than any other modern Who companion bar Martha and Dan (and now Ruby and Belinda), but even by her second story she feels like a real rounded believable credible character we both recognise and can sympathise with. It’s a real shame she wasn’t in the series for longer.  

NEGATIVES - I’ve loved him since his breakthrough role in ‘Two Pints Of Lager and A Packet Of Crisps’, he’s one of the best DI’s in ‘Death Of Paradise we’ve ever had, he’s excellent as Guy Fawkes in the best Dr Who game ‘The Gunpowder Plot’ and I’d long hoped Ralf Little would be in Dr Who one day properly, maybe even as the Doctor but…goodness he’s not at his best here, mis-cast as Steadfast who, as the name suggests, is something of a walking cliché. Ralf is one of the biggest Whovians to ever appear in Dr Who so it’s a real shame he wasn’t given a part that asked more of him than looking grumpy and shooting at things.

BEST QUOTE: ‘Do you know what it means when something chases you very slowly? It means there's a reason that they don't have to run’.

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