“Episode 2 review – nods to Black Mirror made this an excellent adventure”

Smile! You’re on Cardiff camera! This week, showrunner Steven Moffat and star Peter Capaldi’s farewell series continued with a visit to an eerily empty human colony, staffed by cute robots with emoji faces.

New companion Bill is settling in beautifully

We picked up exactly where we left last week: with dinnerlady-cum-student Bill Potts (Pearl Mackie) welcomed into the Tardis, choosing where she wanted to go first (the future, obviously) and being flung straight into her first “proper” space-time adventure.

Mackie’s scene-stealing character is already proving a palpable hit. She’s wide-eyed about the place she’s visiting (“I’m on a spaceship, like, for real!”), lapping up her new-found knowledge (telling the Doctor “You are an awesome tutor!”) and determined not to be the damsel in distress – hence her annoyance about the Doctor (Peter Capaldi) twice trying to keep her out of danger.

The story was like a mini-Black Mirror but end was a swizz

Charlie Brooker’s dystopian sci-fi anthology series Black Mirrorspecialises in tales of tech gone awry and this had a similar theme: an emoji-based world where you have to keep smiling or you die.

Writer Frank Cottrell-Boyce – whose previous Who credit is 2014’s unfairly maligned In the Forest of the Night – had lots of fun with the concept. The mood indicator badges were a smartly sinister creation, the flocks of tiny robots were like cyber-starling murmurations, while the Doctor kept distinguishing between human “wet brains” and robotic “dry brains”.

Things took a dark turn with wordplay about the colony ship’s ”skeleton crew”, as it turned out the machines were using ground-up human bones as a calcium-based crop fertiliser. The story even became oddly affecting in its final act, as the Doctor and Bill realised that they were battling a “tsunami of grief” or “plague of sadness”.

Our main complaint plot-wise? That rushed ending, which left us feeling short-changed. The Doctor simply used his sonic screwdriver to turn the emojibots on and off again, resetting them and wiping their memories, then ran away. Come back, that’s cheating.

David Bowie tribute hidden in script

“I’m happy, hope you’re happy too,” The Doctor told an emojibot – a lyric from the chameleon of pop’s 1980 hit Ashes To Ashes. As a Bowie superfan, Peter Capaldi must have been delighted to slip in this sly nod to his hero, who died last year.

Capaldi partly based his Time Lord look on Bowie, adding the white button-down shirt as a tribute to the Station to Station album cover, and also said last year that if he had a Tardis himself, he’d travel back to attend a Ziggy Stardust concert: “I’d seen him in the late 70s in Glasgow, putting all my cash into tickets for three of his four-night run, but I never saw Ziggy Stardust. I’d love to have seen those shows. I can’t believe he’s gone. A genius.”

Cutesy entry into the Who robo-canon

There’s an illustrious history of robots in Doctor Who, with memorable metal villains including the Cybermen, the sandminer slavebots in The Robots of Death and giant robot K1 in Tom Baker’s debut adventure.

The Emojibot droids here were on the goofy rather than the sinister side, recalling Robby from Fifties sci-fi classic Forbidden Planet. They had a certain charm but I couldn’t help cheering when the Doctor smacked one with a outsized spanner.

A word about the production design, too. Partly shot at the City of Arts & Science Museum in Valencia, futuristic colony world Gliese 581D was splendidly realised and looked a minimalistic treat. Kudos goes to director Lawrence Gough.

More clues about what Doctor’s guarding on Earth

We found out here that the Time Lord is not supposed to go “off world”. As he semi-explained to Bill: “A long time ago, a thing happened. As a result of the thing, I made a promise. As a result of the promise, I have to stay on Earth, guarding a vault.”

Clear as mud, then. The mysterious contents of the vault, possibly Cybermen or Master-related, looks set to be the running narrative theme of this series.

Mobile phones became a running theme

Realistically for a 21st century yoof, Bill Potts is mobile-mad. She snapped photos with her phone, worried about its battery running out and was delighted to discover that the language of the future is emoji.

“We’re in the utopia of vacuous teens,” sighed the Doctor. Yet even he was infected by all the smartphone-speak, with his aside of “There’s probably an app for that.”

This tech-savviness extended to online metaphors too. Bill made neat observations about grief “going viral” and the Doctor being “a living helpline”. They also had an amusing exchange about the Tardis having broadband. “Stay away from my browser history,” warned the Doctor darkly. The mind boggles. Kitten videos and eyebrow-plucking advice forums, do we reckon?

The series is putting fun back into show

This episode was rather reminiscent of the Russell T Davies era – light of touch, packed with ideas and neat gimmicks, lovely writing, lots of heart and just scary enough.

Indeed, this was a textbook Doctor Who romp: travel to strange world, uncover mystery, get into scrapes, solve everything and hop back into the Tardis for the next one. No dark narrative arcs or over-complicated plotting, just a self-contained adventure. We’re enjoying this “soft reboot” and return to classic Who enormously.

Nardole’s appearance was worryingly cursory

We noted last week how bumbling butler-ish sidekick Nardole (Matt Lucas) wasn’t justifying his place and seems even more of a spare part now that Bill has arrived. Well, this week he appeared for a mere 40 seconds – during which he already seemed jealous of the new arrival and was promptly packed off to make tea, like an alien version of Mrs Hudson from Sherlock. But not as empowered.

Unless Nardole gets a storyline of his own soon, there seems little point in him being there. Go Nard or go home.

Next week’s story stomped into view 

We ended Smile by journeying straight into next week’s episode, Thin Ice, with the TARDIS landing in Regency-era London, where elephants stroll across the frozen Thames.

So we’ve had a future episode and next up is an historical one, complete with corsets and top hats. See you back here to discuss it.

“A grief tsunami! It’s a tough one to sell and I’m not buying it”

★★ I was very kind to Frank Cottrell-Boyce’s first stab at Doctor Who in 2014. I’ve no sense of how In the Forest of the Night went down with TV viewers in general, but I know it was received like a turd in the post by most of the fans and followers of my acquaintance. I had hilarious emails from some well-known names in fandom who thought this was the worst travesty in Who since… well, since the previous one. It bottomed Doctor Who Magazine’s poll that year.

I didn’t mind the episode, which, among other absurdities, saw the entire Earth forested overnight, then abruptly deforested. I forgave because I appreciated the writer’s valiant attempt to weave some poetry into Who, fashioning a fable that paid homage to William Blake – even if, in so doing, plausibility, physics and reason were lobbed out of the window.

I doubt that Cottrell-Boyce hears or heeds his critics. But, with Smile, he seems to have responded by leaping to the other end of the fantasy spectrum. He’s gone all scientific. Instead of a visionary like Blake, he’s consulted the enlightened thinkers of today. I read in DWM that he’s asked real science experts to share their concerns about artificial intelligence and predict where technology and robotics might take the human race and the problems we could bring upon ourselves.

Doctor Who benefits from an occasional injection of hard science. There are only so many “the Moon is an egg” miracles we can swallow. The series has a record of drafting in boffins to stiffen its scientific backbone. In the 1960s, Dr Kit Pedler was hired as an adviser and developed the Cybermen; in the 70s, producer Barry Letts thought it wise to subscribe to the New Scientist, and one of its contributors, Christopher Bidmead, became a lofty script editor of Tom Baker’s final year.

In Smile, Cottrell-Boyce presents a persuasive and optimistic vision of the future and how human beings might set about colonising other planets. As a production, it looks extraordinarily beautiful, from the gleaming surfaces and sweeping arches of the colony base (in reality, the City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia) to the endless expanse of crop field where the Tardis lands. So far, so utopian. But, as the Doctor points out, there’s something awry in this new Garden of Eden.

I completely buy into the idea that if humans ever do make it out into the stars, we’ll have robots doing all the preliminary graft, constructing and seeding new worlds, while the people lie abed in cryogenic suspension. And that one small miscalculation or change in programming could have dire consequences for the colonists, as endured by the aptly named “skeleton crew” who are revived first.

At first glance, the Vardies (which Cottrell-Boyce has named after one of his advisers, robotics specialist Andrew Vardy) look like a harmless murmuration of starlings. These microbots can interlock to form the solid mass of architecture that shelters the colonists. They can also disassemble to dive-bomb a human body and reduce it to bones and fertiliser. One’s faith in nanotechnology dwindles by the second.

The dinky little Emojibots are terribly cute. Great design work. Every kid should have one. They wouldn’t look out of place in Star Wars – or even 1960s Doctor Who. They put me in mind of the Chumblies from Galaxy 4 (1965) and the Quarks from The Dominators (1968) – servile robots that were appealing in their day but very much of the moment. Likewise, playing with emojis is a bright idea, but will they really become a universal language enduring far into the future? Somehow I doubt it. I use emojis liberally but I sense they’re already losing currency and in a few years will look as outdated a form of communication as smoke signals do to us now.

For all its innovation and glistening vistas, Smile also moves at the snail’s pace of some of those aforementioned 1960s Doctor Who serials. It’s plotted like a very long Episode One from the old days, before jump-cutting to the last ten minutes of an Episode Four. Doctor 12 and Bill could just as well be Doctor One William Hartnell and his chirpy companion Vicki arriving on an alien world, blundering about, laboriously, arthritically uncovering the mystery of the week. If it was aspiring to, say, the cold excellence of The Ark in Space (Tom Baker, 1975), it shouldn’t have made plain what the threat is right at the start.

This unusual approach could have worked in Smile’s favour, giving us chance to concentrate on the Doctor and Bill, but it’s a sparsely populated episode. We need more people. The few humans we do see aren’t on screen long enough to become characters. They’re drips – from the women who wibble and die at the start, to Steadfast, the uninteresting plank who wakes up at the end and is hardly worth Ralf Little showing up for.

Peter Capaldi and Pearl Mackie remain hugely watchable. Oddly, she’s slightly less vivid as Bill. Despite her colourful clothes and striking outline, which are almost cartoonish, she’s more lightly sketched than she was in The Pilot or will be in Thin Ice next week. Peter Capaldi relishes the tracts of exploration and explanation, but even he looks unconvinced by his big light bulb moment: “Grief! Grief as plague!” he trills. “The Vardies’ job was to maintain happiness… They identified grief as the enemy of happiness and everyone who was experiencing grief as a problem… A grief tsunami.” It’s a tough one to sell and I’m not buying it.

At the close, I’m almost asleep as the “scary handsome genius from space” swishes around, having “pressed the reset button” on the Emojibots and the Vardy. He accords them the status of an “emergent new lifeform” with whom the humans must make friends. It’s a salutary lesson writ large; it’s also a leaden anticlimax.

Fatally, for a tale that toys with emojis, there are few convincing reactions on display. Situations force the cast to go through the motions of emotions. There’s no one to root for and, as a viewer, I make no emotional investment. Smile presents interesting ideas but, as drama, is as bland and insipid as emojis themselves.

So a :–) to end on … Smile plays out with a foothold on the frozen Thames and the next adventure. Don’t be distracted by Peter Capaldi’s shorter haircut as he exits the Tardis. A friendly elephant advances in the fog, trumpeting the fact that Thin Ice will be a cracking episode indeed.

‘Emojis, wearable communications. We’re in the utopia of vacuous teens’

What’s the best way to bed in an as-yet-unknown actor as your brand new companion? Well, one way could be to all but dispense with a supporting cast, and have her and the Doctor spend the best part of 45 minutes walking around a deserted city, talking.

That’s the (often deceptively simple) premise behind writer Frank Cottrell Boyce’s return to Doctor Who, as Bill takes her first trip off-world, a now familiar story trope where a companion gets to experience everything for the first time. For such an esteemed writer, Cottrell Boyce’s first outing In The Forest Of The Night didn’t exactly go down incredibly well. It’s a thankfully different story here, in what is already shaping up to be a strong series. While sharing that “into the unknown” flavour – why is the city deserted? – the episode gets space to tell its story slowly amid some lovely character work.

Capaldi’s Doctor feels reinvigorated by Bill, and despite some initial uncertainty, the Educating Rita element to this series is actually working well. Bill’s excitement at the newness of everything genuinely does feel infectious and charming, while it takes an actor of some skill, in Pearl Mackie, to hold that much screen time with very little else going on.

Perhaps the most delightful thing about Smile is Cottrell Boyce showing his chops as a children’s author, by displaying an admirable lack of cynicism. Take emojis –Cottrell Boyce said something rather beautiful while previewing the episode in the current Doctor Who Magazine:

I love watching what happens with emojis, how people use them for different things, and the change of meaning of them; it feels like a growing language, a universal language of some sort. This episode was always about utopia and utopian ideas. It seems to me that the emoji is a utopian idea. It’s this yearning for a language that’s universal, and doesn’t depend on literacy and allows you to be creative and funny with it. The messages that kids send with emoji are really funny, and at the same time there’s something really touching about it.

And for that, he gets a free pass for that sight gag with the £ signs at the end.

‘The robots want you to be happy, but they got the wrong end of the stick’

The fable of the Magic Haddock makes for a lovely poetic flourish, keeping this very sci-fi story in the realm of fairytale. Although it’s not entirely necessary, as the Emojibots game was blindingly obvious from the start, which led to be a bit of flab in the middle as they simply wandered round awaiting the big reveal. Thankfully, a far more satisfying twist lay at the end, with insightful things to say about artificial intelligence, sentience, slavery and colonialism, with a not-entirely-sympathetic human race led by Ralf Little as Steadfast. We’re in someone else’s city now.

Still, by the end, Bill is versed and ready to go in one of the central tenets of what the Doctor is all about, after asking: “I get that somebody needs to do something, but why does it have to be you?” And finally to note – last time a companion had their first trip to space it was in The Rings of Akhaten. The time before that it was The Beast Below. On the basis of that alone, I think we can chalk Smile down as a solid win.

Fear factor

After “blink or die”, “hold your breath or die” and “keep smiling or die”, Cottrell Boyce has come up with another potent source of nightmare fuel.

And no lie, the crumbling skeletons, crashing skulls and bodies as fertiliser has to count among some of the grimmest body horror ever seen in Doctor Who. I’m a little surprised those scenes made it through compliance.

Mysteries and questions

Matt Lucas takes a back seat as Nardole this week, but as predicted he’s proving an enigmatic one to watch. Certainly he’s a lot more forthright than the buffoony android we’ve seen in the past. Clearly, he has some kind of hold over the Doctor, unimpressed at his having moved the Tardis. The Doctor is in turn exasperated, calling him “mum” under his breath and hurrying him back off to butlering duties. All of which begs the question, what oath did the Timelord take? Why is he not supposed to go off world? And what exactly is it in this vault?

Continuity corner

The Doctor refers to having come across humanity’s evacuation vessels before. And indeed he has, in 1975 serial The Ark In Space, which takes a remarkably similar premise to a very different conclusion.

Meanwhile, there’s no obvious connectivity at all, but who among vintage fans could have resisted a thrill of nostalgia to the demented camp majesty of 1988’s The Happiness Patrol?

Deeper into the vortex

• Bill’s crash course continues, as she continues to ask the questions nobody is supposed to: why are the Tardis seats so far away from the console, and if the Doctor has two hearts, does that mean he has really high blood pressure?

• Here was one of the most elegant explanations for why the Tardis keeps landing in random locations: “You don’t steer the Tardis, you reason with it; the one space between where you need to be and where you want to go.”

• “I’m not Scottish, I’m just cross.”

• The Emojibots surely provide, if nothing else, Doctor Who’s most lucrative merchandising opportunity in quite some time.

Next week

As we saw in this unconventional cliffhanger, we’re off back in time to London’s last great frost fair on the frozen Thames of 1814. Sarah Dollard, the woman behind the excellent Face The Raven, returns to writing duties and yes, that really is an elephant on the river.

If you’ve been following all the Doctor Who gossip, spoilers, previews and reviews, you’ll already have seen glimpses of the futuristic city featured in Smile, the second episode of series 10.

The surreal setting was in fact Valencia’s City of Arts and Sciences (CAS), a futuristic complex that features a museum, an auditorium and an aquarium.

Early promotional photos from the series showed Peter Capaldi and Pearl Mackie on set there with the mysterious and terrifying emojibots.

And yes, aside from the fields of wheat, it really does look like that in real life.

But as one of Valencia’s most famous tourist attractions, there are plenty of other interesting facts you should know.

It is huge and made up of different elements

The entire CAS complex is just under 2KM long and it takes a good 20 minutes to walk from one end to the other – depending on how quickly you walk.

At the heart of it is the science museum, which hosts temporary and permanent displays.

Next to it is the Hemisferic, an underground IMAX that primarily shows science-inspired 3D films.

A building that resembles a helmet sits at one end of the complex.

This is the Palau de les Arts Reina Sofia, an auditorium that’s mainly used for operas and other musical performances.

On the other end of the complex is the Oceanografic, the largest aquarium in Europe.

There are two other structures: the Agora (an events space) and the Umbracle (a landscaped walk way)

Some famous architects were behind the CAS

The CAS is perfect as the setting for Doctor Who.

t has an other-worldly quality thanks to its futuristic design by Santiago Calatrava, a world-renowned architect who was born in Valencia.

Calatrava is known for designing the Trinity Footbridge in Manchester, for example.

He’s also behind the upcoming The Tower at Dubai Harbour Creek, which will become one of the tallest buildings in the world once it’s complete in 2020.

But Calatrava is not alone in creating the unusual landscape.

Felix Candela, another Spanish architect, was behind the design of the aquarium.

It’s situated in a river bed

Valencia is unique in that it has transformed a riverbed into a park that runs the length of the city.

The riverbed had once belonged to the river Turia, which was diverted after a flood.

Today, the park is the perfect spot for locals to exercise and you can travel its length on a bike all the way to the seaside.

The CAS is situated in an area that’s close to the sea.

The aquarium has a very, very cool restaurant

As well as being the biggest aquarium in Europe, the Oceanografic is also home to an underwater restaurant of sorts.

Submarino is set below ground level and inside are enormous panes of glass dividing the diners from the aquarium on the other side.

Watching fish, and the odd sting ray, swimming round and round has to be one of the most relaxing dining experiences out there.

“Have You Tried Turning It Off and On Again”?

The Doctor (Peter Capaldi) has a long and complicated relationship with humanity on Doctor Who. He has saved the human race from certain death more times than even he can probably recall at this point in the show’s epic run and the humans he loves so much have clearly rubbed off on the two-hearted Time Lord over time. But the Doctor may have reached peak humanity in “Smile,” when he saved the day by essentially turning something off and on again.

Now, it’s entirely possible — and even probable — that this isn’t the first time the Doctor has solved a problem by basically hitting the reset button (please don’t ask me to remember everything that’s ever happened on this show, my brain can only retain so much before it also resets), but the TARDIS also has internet and so I refuse to rule out the possibility that maybe the Doctor just now got around to bingeing The IT Crowd and was inspired by Roy’s familiar mantra. It certainly wouldn’t surprise me and it definitely wouldn’t upset me.

Doctor Who is lighter and brighter in Peter Capaldi’s final season

But robots are also nothing new in the world of Doctor Who, and the tiny microbots and emoji interfaces in “Smile” were an attempt to update the familiar trope of self-aware robots seemingly revolting against their masters for a new generation, one that increasingly relies on ever-expanding technologies to function. Was it silly? Well, they were emotion-identifying robots with emoji faces, so yes. But the storyline also gave us Capaldi smiling from ear to ear in an attempt to trick the bots into believing he was happy, and honestly, that sight alone was worth sitting through an hour that I’m pretty sure was the result of some writer’s 9-year-old only communicating with them via emoji.

Capaldi’s Doctor has often been depicted as curmudgeonly — and it has suited him and the show quite well, especially in the wake of Matt Smith’s rather spastic Doctor — but the lightness that made last week’s season premiere so bright carried over here, and it’s great to see Capaldi have an opportunity to play around and have a bit more fun with Pearl Mackie’s companion Bill. They’re a truly delightful pairing, with Bill’s presence in the TARDIS and in the Doctor’s life a breath of fresh air.

The Doctor loves how optimistic humans are — which is such a Doctor thing to say — and Bill continues to be amazed by the number of possibilities now before her, which makes her the perfect traveling partner. She told the Doctor she wanted to go to the future to see if it was happy — which should have been our first clue that we were headed for another close call for the human race in an emotionally-fueled hour about how grief is not the enemy but a natural part of existence — and that’s simple and beautiful in a way that Doctor Who hasn’t been in a while.

How to survive April’s incredible (and incredibly overwhelming) TV schedule

Bill brings out the Doctor’s more playful side, makes him want to break the promise he made to stay on Earth and protect whatever is in the mysterious vault that Nardole (Matt Lucas) keeps reminding him about. She makes him want to explore everything that’s ever happened or ever will happen and this allows him to embrace his more childish side, the part of him that’s been locked away of late. Like Bill, he’s once again looking at the whole of existence with a sense of wonderment. It’s infectious and lends to the series a renewed energy.

Plus, Bill continues to ask questions that we honestly should have been asking all along. Like, why are the seats in the TARDIS so far from the controls? This woman is brilliant. Please let her stay forever.

Doctor Who airs Saturdays at 9/8c on BBC America.

“‘Smile’ is light, fun sci-fi.” 4/5

CultBox – read the full review here.

“Pearl Mackie’s Bill, again, steals the show… Furthermore, the relationship between her and Capaldi’s Doctor feels fresh, interesting and entertaining… ”

Den of Geek – read the full review here.

“… there are some fantastic SF images to soak up. The episode looks a treat…”

MyMBuzz – read the full review here.

“‘Smile’ proves Capaldi and Mackie are an all-time great TARDIS team.”

Digital Spy – read the full review here.

“I’m totally sold on this new Doctor/Bill dynamic at this point, and this season’s new direction as well.”

IGN – read the full review here.

“… packed with ideas and neat gimmicks, lovely writing, lots of heart and just scary enough.”

Telegraph – read the full review here.

“And with a couple of surprises and a gorgeous cinematography that makes the most of the futuristic planet setting, Smile will do as the title suggests and leave a smile on your face”

The Digital Fix – read the full review here.

“… gorgeous direction by Lawrence Gough and continued fabulous chemistry between Capaldi and Pearl Mackie.”

Nerdist – read the full review here.

“Bill Continues to Make Us ‘Smile’ Despite Creepy-Cute Emojibots”

IndieWire – read the full review here.

“…‘Smile’ is the perfect way to explore the two characters’ burgeoning relationship, by placing Bill’s wide-eyed wonder front and centre …”

Screen Rant – read the full review here.