WARNING: SPOILERS, sweetie
First, we were told not to blink. Then, we were told not to
breathe. Now, Doctor Who is implementing another thing that we have to do in
order to survive: Smile.
In the second episode of series
10, the Doctor takes Bill to the future to see one of humanity’s first
off-planet colonies. But there’s something wrong: there’s no colonists. Only a
bunch of smiley faced robots – called Vardies – who eliminate those who are
unhappy. Forcibly equipped with badges that reveal their true emotions, a smile
may be the only thing that can keep them alive.
So when this episode was first
announced – and the Vardies were called “emojibots” – I wasn’t entirely on
board. It seemed like the show as trying too hard to make emojis scary. I
mean…they’re freaking emojis! Also, I was never a huge fan of emojis. Never got
the appeal of them. Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t need a keyboard full of
faces to convey emotions through a text. Back in my day, if we wanted to tell
someone we were happy, we had to manually put in a colon and an end
parenthesis. And if we wanted to convey more complex emotions, we had to get
creative. But I digress.
The Vardies wound up being not
that bad or eye-rolling. The emoji aspect of them is greatly downplayed, with
their changing faces and connection to the emotion patches reminding me more of
mood rings half the time. I think they only mention the word “emoji” twice in
the entire episode, and I never really felt like they were a forced attempt to
appeal to a younger demographic (remember when the show tried to make wi-fi
scary?). Though the thing about emoji being the only form of human
communication to survive was a bit much.
Their design isn’t really scary –
not even when their eyes change to skulls – but their mode of killing people is
pretty creepy (hugging them while swarms of nanobots eat everything but their
bones). There’s also the fact that they don’t know what their doing is wrong,
that killing people that are sad is somehow helping society. That trope has
always terrified me; the notion that artificial intelligence rationalizes
murder as “helping” since they don’t know any better. You can program
intelligence all you want, but morality is a different beast altogether.
On the Moffat Monster Scare-o-meter™, the Vardies
score 2.5 Moffs out of 5.
 |
| So the Emoji movie looks good. |
(This rating system is quickly becoming a
misnomer since Moffat didn’t even create this things. Eh, whatever. He’s still
showrunner, he gets the blame.)
The episode itself is your standard plot where
the Doctor takes his newest companion to the future to show them what humanity
is up to. It brought back memories of episodes like “The End of the World”,
“New Earth”, and “The Beast Below.” There are a few neat concepts thrown in
here, though. The idea of grief being spread like a plague – and the Vardies
treating it as such – is interesting, as well as the challenge of forcing
Doctor Grumpy-Brows to smile in order to survive. Also, the Doctor nearly
destroying an entire settlement in order to save humanity, not knowing that
humanity was there all along was a fresh twist to this classic episode formula.
Bill and the Doctor continue to have great
chemistry. Bill in particular continues to amuse me as a companion with her
fresh view on the Whoniverse and the types of questions she asks. In this
episode: “Why are the TARDIS seats so far from the controls?” and “Does having
two hearts means the Doctor has really high blood pressure?”
We also
get more scarce, tantalizing details about the promise the Doctor made.
Specifically, “a thing” happened. Because of this thing, he made a promise. And
because of this promise, he can’t leave Earth. Of course, this being everyone’s
favorite renegade Time Lord, promising are made to be broken if it makes for
entertaining television.
Also, in
an addendum to last week’s review, I hadn’t considered that the Doctor
travelled back in time to take pictures of Bill’s mom as a present to Bill,
seeing as how she never had any pictures of her. Sometimes I’m a little dense.
But he could still have a history with her to be revealed later.
The
ending is the only part of this episode that I have real problems with. The
Doctor “presses the reset button” on the Vardies to make them not want to kill
sad people anymore. Aside from this coming across as kind of deus-ex-machina-y,
why did the Doctor have to wait until he learned that the Vardies had become
sentient to rewrite their programming? Also, the humans show concern about
living with robots who killed their friends and family, and the Doctor and Bill
basically tell them to get over it. A bit insensitive, but I guess when the
alternative is looking for another settlement with the possibility of
humanity’s extinction…
 |
| Just wait until the episode where the monster is a sentient Instagram profile. |
“Smile”
is a decent episode and follow-up to a pretty good season premiere. It has some
good concepts and ideas thrown into a familiar episode formula, and gives us
more hints into the season’s story arc. What’s really inside that vault that
the Doctor’s guarding? Could it be John Simm’s Master, who is slated to appear
later in the season? Could it be the Doctor’s granddaughter Susan, whose
picture had a lot of focus in the previous episode? Could it be the real Jay
Garrick, trapped in an iron mask that cuts him off from the Speed Force? Wait,
never mind, wrong show (also, spoilers for season 2 of The Flash).
Final
verdict: 7/10.
NEXT WEEK: In Regency England, something is frozen inside the River Thames. And it’s
eating people…
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