Smile

It speaks emoji!

Steven Moffat has admitted that for this season, he is going back to the old RTD model of companion introduction in a contemporary setting for story one, a jump to the future for story two and then a trip to the past for story three. That makes this the future story, written by the same fellow, Frank Cottrell Boyce, as who wrote In the Forest of the Night. One can only hope this is an improvement on that work, though I will admit that the direction and visuals of that story were pretty good. But that also made the end result that much more disappointing.

Plot Summary

After taking Bill aboard the TARDIS, Nardole enters to chide him about not traveling. The Doctor however, shoos him off and then takes Bill away on an adventure, intending to land the TARDIS back in his office a few seconds after that moment. He lets Bill choose and she opts to go into the future.

On a planet 20 light years from Earth, a group of human colonists are working to establish a settlement. One woman is walking around the city, checking on the wheat crop, followed by a swarm of microbots. She is summoned back by a fellow colonist, informing her that her mother has died, along with a number of other people. She urges her to keep smiling as she tells her. The first colonist, becomes upset, not knowing what is going on. An interface drone registers their sadness and the microbots swarm down, stripping everything except the bones. The second colonist attempts to keep smiling but she is consumed as well.

The Doctor and Bill land outside the city some time after this and walk in to explore. An interface drone hands them buttons which display their mood in the form of an emoji face, not visible to themselves. They are confused by the lack of people and the Doctor theorizes that this is an advanced set up by a robot team and the rest of the colonists will arrive later. He drops that theory when they enter the garden and see interface drones fertilizing the plants with a calcium carbonate mixture. Knowing that there should have been a small team of humans to go with the robots as a set up team, he opens the fertilizer storage units and finds the bleached bones from before being crushed to make the fertilizer.

The Doctor and Bill attempt to leave the city but are cornered by several interface drones. The Doctor urges Bill to smile, lifting their mood slightly and sending the drones into a state of confusion. They want people to be happy and only attack when registering negative emotions. Somewhat alieved by their change in mood, the drones allow the Doctor and Bill to pass. However, the Doctor and Bill's mood shifts closer to fear upon reaching the outskirts of the city and a portion of the city breaks off into a swarm of microbots. The swarm breaks off as the Doctor and Bill leave the city.

Fearing for the lives of the future colonists, the Doctor decides to head back and destroy the city. He tries to leave Bill in the TARDIS but she follows him soon after leaving. Meeting back up and keeping themselves continuously smiling, he shows her that the entire city is made of the microbots, which he calls the Vardy. They go deeper into the city, looking for the initial colony ship which the city would be built around. They find the door and enter, though this sets off alarms for the Vardy, who dispatch interface drones against them.

The Doctor and Bill find a map and the Doctor goes on ahead, telling Bill to guide him via the map. Bill however soon cottons on to the fact that the Doctor already memorized the map and is just trying to keep her safe. She goes after him but discovers the body of an old woman lying in state, a tablet containing the history of Earth and the colony at her feet. Meanwhile, the Doctor manages to set up a feedback loop that will destroy the ship and the city but can't seem to override the failsafe. He is attacked by one of the drones but manages to knock it into the chasm over which the reactor sits.

Leaving the room of the woman, Bill meets a young boy who is confused and asking of they've arrived. She takes him to the Doctor, who has just manages to override the failsafe. Shocked, the Doctor has the boy take him to where he came from and finds a room of cryogenically frozen people. He runs back and resets the power source back to normal. He then heads back to the room, finding that a medical tech has awoken and is beginning to awaken others. The Doctor orders them to stay put informing them that something has gone wrong and he will update them shortly. Bill then takes the Doctor to see the dead woman.

Looking through the history, the Doctor realizes that this woman died of natural causes and was the first death recorded by the colony. He death created grief among the colonists to which the Vardy did not understand. Thinking it a plague, they sought to neutralize it by consuming the organic matter. However, this spread grief and fear throughout, resulting in the Vardy murdering all those who had been awoken early to help establish the colony. Finding the boy missing, the Doctor tells the awoken colonists what has happened and how they need to work together to solve the issue. The colonists however react by grabbing guns and going to attack the robots.

The boy wanders out into the city looking for his mother, who was awoken early. He is presented with an emotion badge just as the colonists enter the atrium. The boy reacts in fear and growing sadness that his mother might be dead. The drones register this and the Vardy begin to swarm to eliminate the threat. The colonists then destroy one of the drones and begin shooting at the swarm. The Vardy react by counterattacking the colonists and the Doctor notes a reaction on the other drone similar to anger. Realizing the Vardy have become sentient he finds a control switch in the destroyed drone and uses his sonic screwdriver on it.

An electrical surge passes through the Vardy and they reset, wiping their knowledge of the humans. The Doctor then informs the colonists that as the Vardy have forgotten the humans, they are now the native inhabitants of the planet and they humans will have to negotiate terms of co-existence. The Doctor speaks with the Vardy and sets up terms for the humans to stay, then he and Bill depart in the TARDIS. The Doctor lands, thinking they have arrived in his office just a few seconds after they left but find themselves on the frozen Thames with an elephant walking outside.

Analysis

I am torn on this story. Visually, it's very nice. I also think the set up and the interplay between the Doctor and Bill works very nicely. But it also feels derivative and the second half falls apart for me. I was left with the feeling that the story was inspired by seeing a robot talk in emoji and it just spinning out from there.

I think one of the earliest mistakes of this story was in not stringing out the horror element longer. Some rework was already done as the opening scene of Bill and the Doctor in the TARDIS was placed before the scene of the Vardy attack. I'm sure that as written, the Vardy attack was supposed to be the cold open X-Files style. However, I think it would have worked even better not to have that scene at all. Cold open with Bill and the Doctor on the TARDIS and go to credits after they land and just as the Doctor is about to open the door. This would leave the viewer in the dark about what exactly happened and preserve the suspense aspect. Knowing that the people were consumed by the microbots, horrific as they made it look, still took away an element of tension as we know it's only a matter of time before discovering the details.

I also think a little more time could have been spent discovering the result of the Vardy attack. As it happens, the death of the colonists is found out only a quarter of a way in and they make their escape all the way back to the TARDIS by the halfway point of the story. That could easily have been truncated into making the discovery longer and then finding and hiding in the ship rather than getting all the way back to the TARDIS. I think holding the tension longer would have improved things a bit more as I felt like the center portion of the story sagged a bit.

I did very much the interaction between Bill and the Doctor in this. In fact, most of the story is very good solely due to their reactions. Bill is wonderfully inquisitive and asks questions that are perfectly natural but generally haven't come up before. The Doctor is clearly enjoying being adventuring and being a teacher again as well. He is more protective of Bill and clearly does not trust her in a Clara sort of way yet. Or perhaps he does remember Clara and the nature of her death and wants to avoid a similar fate for someone he is becoming fond of.

One other thing I enjoyed was how the Doctor kept jumping to conclusions and having them be wrong. It rather reminded me of the Eleventh Doctor and how he would jump to the wrong conclusion and then correcting himself, though that was played more for laughs. Here we simply have the Doctor asserting his superior mind and forming ideas before finding all the evidence. It's a small thing but one of the few moments of comedy in this story.

Despite my misgivings about the way the tension was played, I was generally enjoying the episode until the discovery of the boy. Then things spun out of control. First off, why did the boy wake? Since that is the point that halts the Doctor's attempts to blow up the city, it would have been nice to see why he just randomly emerges. Was he unfrozen through an automatic trigger they made? Why did he get up and move around before the medical technician who should have been the first one out (as per The Ark in Space). It's such a crucial point in the story that to just have him hanging out bugs me.

I also dislike the instant human reaction to just run out and kill the robots. If they were going to do so, why wouldn't they wake all the colonists up first and have a huge army ready to go? Or if they lack the weapons to march en masse, why not think of a way to overpower them through outthinking them. The robots may have supposed to have been their servants but they should also know that the robots outnumber them billions to one. Frontal assaults are wiped out in seconds through that method. It's an irrational response that seems so out of place with the rest of the story.

My third point of annoyance is the backhanded "Deus Ex Machina" ending though turning it off and turning it back on. A simple act of the screwdriver erases the core memory of the humans and they're overall point of existence. Now they simply are, having achieved sentience. If that was the answer, why didn't the Doctor do it before. Reprogramming a machine is a lot easier than blowing it up. He could have easily captured a drone near the edge of the city, reworked it in the TARDIS and then sent it back out to pulse wipe the memory. With that done, they could have explored the city in safety. I really dislike quick fix endings like that as they undermine so much of the earlier story.

I was strongly reminded of a few things while watching this story. The monitoring of emotions and manifesting displeasure at it reminded me of the Smilers in The Beast Below while the idea of keeping a smile and happy thoughts reminded me of the Bart segment of Treehouse of Horror II, which itself is a parody of The Twilight Zone episode, It's a Good Life. I'm still not sure if I find that clever or tired since it's an idea I've been aware of for a long time. I also got an I, Robot vibe from the idea of robots killing humans in the act of trying to serve their best interests.

I will say that the direction was quite good and the visuals were very, very impressive. I believe I heard that this was filmed in Spain and the overall look of it was quite stunning. They even used a specific bit of filtering to give the exteriors a "not quite Earth" look to things which was a very nice touch. Whatever other problems it story had, it was nice on the eyes.

I was also intrigued by the idea of using a somewhat serialized format. The opening scene of Bill and the Doctor in the TARDIS is clearly meant to take place right after the Doctor has invited her in at the end of The Pilot. Likewise, the story ends with them stepping out on to the frozen Thames, leading directly into the next story, Thin Ice. I rather like that, even if it doesn't leave the large gaps that Moffat clearly likes for the insertion of either books or Big Finish stories.

Overall, I'd say that positive outweighs the negative for me on this story but just barely. The visuals, the interplay between the Doctor and Bill and the tension filled story up to the point where Bill finds the dead older woman are good, even with my minor objections. But the latter portion is a fairly steep decline for me. The storyline and the acting the of all the characters others than the Doctor and Bill just gave me a bad feeling, like brushing a cat's fur the wrong way. While much better than his initial offering, I think this story could have used another rewrite to work out all the kinks.

Overall personal score: 2.5 out of 5