Doctor Who Series 10 Episode 2: Smile

Starring Peter Capaldi, Pearl Mackie, Matt Lucas
With Kiran L. Dadlani, Mina Anwar, Ralf Little,
Kiran Shah, Craig Garner,
Kaizer Akhtar, Kalungi Ssebndeke

Written by Frank Cottrell Boyce
Directed by Lawrence Gough
Produced by Peter Bennett
Executive Producers: Steven Moffatt, Brian Minchin

This review contains spoilers.

The tenth twenty-first century series of Doctor Who has been keenly promoted as a new start, but it’s enthusiastic about showing it’s taken old lessons to heart. Smile follows the precedent of The End of the World by taking Bill to the far future, to have (recalling one of the promotional lines of 2005) an adventure in the human race. However, where The End of the World was a celebration of diversity within and beyond humanity, giving the Doctor and Rose a range of different beings to interact with in separate story branches, and a villain who did not appreciate the parable within her own narrative, Smile concentrates much more on how the Doctor and Bill react to each other in an environment where humanity is absent, memorialized by an environment intended to cater to human needs, the murderous machines built to help the last humans, and by the fertilizer made from the skeletons of the slaughtered.

Bill’s hope when setting off is to find that the future is a happy one. This is a change from her present, where study with the Doctor provides hope in a background of low aspiration and petty betrayals. The Doctor takes her somewhere which has supposedly discovered the secret of human happiness – and there’s an irony in that the colony building screams its optimism to the Doctor when there are no living (or at least awake) humans present. Bill doesn’t seem to be addicted to crisis and peril in the way that some of her predecessors have been, and Pearl Mackie conveys well her evolving assessments of the situation. Where Rose in The End of the World could phone her Mum when she needed reassurance that her world was still there, it’s the smell of rosemary in the nursery which reminds Bill of home, and that home is the student union rather than her foster mother’s. Steven Moffat’s Doctor Who heroines tend to be detached from family much more than Russell T Davies’s earthly lead characters, and have a corresponding need to build alternative networks.

Bill’s search for belonging is not buried so far down as it was for Amy or Clara. Her distress at realizing that the colonists might be the last remnants of humanity bubbles up from Pearl Mackie like an unexpected hot spring on downland. Doctor Who has form for seeing companions bond with abandoned children, which arguably include since Listen the Doctor himself. Here it’s Praiseworthy whose awakening, soon after Bill’s discovery of (I presume) his dead grandmother, gives Bill someone to hope for, and whose protection is the catalyst for the story’s resolution. In the final TARDIS scene Bill has moved on from the abstract ideal of happiness to the more practical question ‘Is it going to work?’ before going on to tentatively accept responsibility with the Doctor for the ‘jump-start(ing of) a civilization’. Given that the Doctor knew the colony by its positive reputation. perhaps she already had her answer, but Bill is still the student working out these questions for herself, perhaps like the young audience at home. The episode sees another accessible, believable performance from Pearl Mackie, immediately well-established in Doctor Who’s soil without obvious need of ground skeletons.

Bill’s idealism is balanced by suspicion of deep-rooted prejudice. Her reaction to seeing that the Doctor has been served two algae cubes to her one is to ask whether this is ‘a bloke’s utopia’. However, her sense of the epic survives; even after the cryogenic units have been revealed and the Doctor has acknowledged that he was mistakenly going to blow up the human colonists, he calls the ‘shepherds’ who awoke first ‘those with (relevant) skills’. For Bill they are ‘the brave… the best’. Epic is important, with many of the colonists having names whose meanings are obvious to the listener. Like the warrior classes (at least) of early European cultures, their name patterns claim ownership of their own story. It’s a neat irony, and one which offsets any romanticization of colonization, that to survive the colonists end up having to pay rent to their servant caste. Back in 2003, Russell T Davies’s ‘pitch document’ for Doctor Who emphasized that it should be ‘pioneers’ who take viewers into space in the series, rather than alien creatures. It might be a leap too far to emphasise here the associations of Frank Cottrell Boyce and Steven Moffat with Liverpool and Glasgow, two of Britain’s biggest slave-trading ports, but the case is there for making that connection when considering the story’s shaping of the colonist narrative. Such stories inevitably express debts towards tales of settlement in the American West or in this case, with its intensive agriculture, the American South or European colonies in the Caribbean.  Admittedly, as transposed into Doctor Who, these tropes are rarely left uncriticized. Here the enslaved evolve into an indigenous people before the colonists can properly revive, leaving the claims of the colonizing culture hollow. The Vardy robot murders, however, fit less comfortably into a ‘slave revolt’ parallel, but instead suggest the futility of trying to second guess and avoid unhappiness. Perhaps everyone is on better terms with human folly by the end of the story.

So much of the episode is a two-hander between Bill and the Doctor, who gradually reveals more of his personality to her. Peter Capaldi continues in a much more relaxed portrayal of the Doctor which is much easier to watch than his disgruntled, tortured Time Lord of series eight or the most midlife crisis-ridden moments of series nine. He’s someone who enjoys his travels again, which have been cast in a new context now he is sworn to stay on Earth to protect the Vault. Capaldi enjoys or makes us enjoy the multiple levels of denial: the evasiveness, the childlike naughtiness – referring to Nardole as ‘Mum’ – and his insistence that he doesn’t set out to save the day, but just passes by and mucks in, delivered in a tone which suggests the Doctor barely convinces himself more than he fails to convince Bill. As Bill says, he’s a great tutor, but the Doctor’s lessons are often in what he does (or does not) rather than what he says. He’s careful not to betray his suspicions about the absence of people in the colony to Bill, who is too curious and too excited to look at the Doctor’s mood badge and see that he is considerably less happy than she is. At the same time, the Doctor wants to protect her from the horror of the situation, leading to a powerful variant of the ‘Let’s get back in the TARDIS and go’ trope. Here the Doctor pretends to himself that Bill will be happy watching movies in the TARDIS while he dodges the robots again to blow up the city, but at the same time he’s not disappointed that she rebels and comes with him. A tidy parallel is drawn between the mood badges and the sign on the TARDIS door. The Doctor denies that he travels the universe putting it to rights, but the TARDIS seeks out ‘urgent calls’ anyway where the Doctor can usefully provide advice and assistance. Smile provides a restatement of the Doctor-companion relationship – Bill’s sigh as she leaves the TARDIS reminds me of Sarah Jane Smith’s resigned plodding after the fourth Doctor as he sets off towards problems, or Turlough’s transfer of the Doctor to Peri’s care in Planet of Fire – ‘Look after him. He gets into the most terrible trouble’ – but nowadays the Doctor’s methods and assumptions are questioned much more, and rightly so.

I didn’t find the emojibots as ‘cute’ as I felt it was hoped the audience would. There was an innocence about them – they (and the Vardy robots they represented) wanted to smile, they were unhappy without people but unhappiest when people were incomprehensibly sad. They were more compelling when being sinister, staring out of windows balefully like figures in the 1980s Miss Marple television title sequence. Given that the entire city was made of Vardy robots I expected to feel it brooding a little more, but the light and architecture didn’t lend itself in that direction. Instead much matter-of-fact internal photography was broken into by slightly jarring shots, such as the view of the sun through the latticework of the glass roof, as if we’re looking up through a skeleton’s rib cage. The use of the City of Arts and Sciences in Smile plays with both architectural intention and alternative meanings derived from other angles. The Hemisfèric, according to its website, is intended to suggest a huge human eye but we never see it from an angle which would encourage that interpretation. Instead, it sometimes appears like a sunken, skeletized beast. Soaring optimism lives alongside inevitable decline; that the Wheel Turns (to recall Kinda) is a recurring part of Doctor Who. The robots’ loss of innocence, as they reveal they understand the concept of rent (and the pound sign has survived to Doctor Who’s far future) is the basis for a better society than one based on robot servitude.

There’s a contrast in the portrayal of the colonists themselves which could have been better managed. The introductory scenes featuring Kezzia and the Vardys outside in their pastoral idyll, celebrating the pollination of crops in a golden field under a blue sky, impress: one warms immediately to Kiran L. Dadlani, and once inside the city, Mina Anwar is a familiar and reliable television face who does not disappoint here. The costumes, with their suggestions of wings and gauze, suggest holiness but are only introduced when we know everything is going wrong: a tragedy in heaven. One could comfortably spend forty-five minutes with Kezzia and Goodthing, and the ease of their introduction and sudden dispatching is a greatly effective piece of misdirection. However, Ralf Little’s Steadfast and his fellow gun-toting revivees could come from an entirely different society. Their outfits aren’t co-ordinated and one doesn’t have the sense the production has the same grip on these characters than it did on the two Shepherds met and lost before the credits.

As with The Pilot, the script is dotted with odd nods back to earlier Doctor Who stories, particularly twenty-first century ones. These deliberate references seem to suggest that a phase of the series including both Russell T Davies’s era and that of Steven Moffat is coming to an end. The Doctor’s mention that an algae emperor ‘fancied me’ recalls the tenth Doctor’s memory of Martha in Partners in Crime, and we learn that yes, lots of planets have Scottish people claiming independence from everywhere they land. These are ironic takes but they suggest that the Doctor’s life and the programme’s is a little more complicated now than it once was: glibness has consequences. The Doctor’s method of winning at chess – knocking over the board – is dishearteningly similar to the gameplay of a neoliberal financier of which I’ve read, though The Curse of Fenric’s change of the rules so that the pawns join forces would have seemed as contrived as it did then and even more out of place. The references to The Ark in Space, indirectly through the Doctor’s expository dialogue, and directly through Steadfast’s self-identification as ‘Medtech One’, are nice in a vague sense of suggesting Doctor Who has a long-term scheme for human future history (though one would be hard-pressed to get anyone to agree on what it is) but it must jar for several long-term fans in that although there is an element of specialization depicted, Smile doesn’t quite portray the same kind of stratified society as that depicted on Space Station Nerva.

The most disconcerting features, though, were a couple of lines of dialogue. I’m not sure that the Doctor should be rubbishing a society which communicates through emojis as one for ‘vacuous teens’ – he’s more open-minded than that, surely? Towards the end, as the Vardy robots prepare to strike down the survivors of humanity, Bill has a redundant ‘What’s happening, Doctor?’ which doesn’t serve her previous character development well. This review is based on an advance viewing copy, watermarked as a work in progress, and I wouldn’t mourn those lines if it turned out they had not made it to the broadcast cut.

A more pleasing recall was the device of linking the second and third episodes together with a cliffhanger, as the TARDIS fails to return to the Doctor’s study and Nardole’s kettle but lands on the frozen Thames in Regency London and the Doctor and Bill are approached by a curious but not that threatening elephant through the presumably freezing fog. We go from a clinical and almost sterile environment to a cluttered one which pre-dates modern hygiene and where exotic animals replace robots. The Doctor’s magic haddock of fable (and the final, ‘face on’ view of the city as giant fish) is about to be realized as a more intentionally threatening undersea beast – or is the season catchphrase of ‘not evil, just different’ to be repeated?

Overall, Smile is a welcome addition to the series. It’s by no means as slow as I feared after reading the Radio Times preview, it uses its locations well, and cements the partnership between the Doctor and Bill, both adventurers in contrast with the cautious, rule-keeping Nardole, and where Bill’s wide-eyed enthusiasm reignites the Doctor’s interventionist wanderlust. It doesn’t always quite come together, but there are strong performances and ideas and design ideas which should keep an audience intrigued and entertained until the end of the episode, together with a not-heavily carried sense of myth, as might be expected from Frank Cottrell Boyce on the strength of In the Forest of the Night. The horror is depicted in a pre-watershed friendly way with enough grim humour to amuse enough of the audience while the youngest have the joke ‘skeleton crew’ explained to them. Perhaps it could all have been a little more buoyant, but on the whole Smile is dramatically convincing and sets the audience up well for next week.

The Unofficial Doctor Who Limerick Guide

Compiled By: Jenny Shirt and Christopher Samuel Stone

LIMITED RUN - available in Hardback and Paperback

Please see the social media link:

https://www.facebook.com/doctorwholimericks/

There Once Was a Limerick Book~
Using Old Legends as a Hook
Covering Over A Hundred Pages..
... A Dozen Time Lord Stages
It truly demands a good look.

[Reviewer’s Own Summary Limerick]

Although limericks are designed to be light hearted through their very nature and fixed structure, the book is for a very worthy cause in MIND. This charity is one of the most renowned in its sector, and one of a number of causes that has been given further credibility and support by Great Britain's very own Prince William and Kate Middleton. (And as we know the Queen is as loyal a Who fan as any in the history of royalty).

Dozens of contributors feature in this collections, and there are likewise dozens of accompanying illustrations - some are simple 'motifs' and some would look handy gracing a proper comic strip or cover art for a book. Each of the Doctors feature in full colour glory, with a selection of their stalwart companions. Amongst the majority of names that are perhaps less well known in fandom, are some of the more prolific and important literary authors to grace Doctor Who over the years - such as Andy Lane, Jonathan Morris, and John Peel.

Each of the contributions was carefully chose, and the editors have thoughtfully arranged different waves of limerick in either thematic or Doctor 'era' order. I appreciated how actors' names and characters or types of races were mixed together in the same piece at times - perhaps highlighting also how effective Doctor Who tends to be in its escapism, even if much of its history had barely sufficient production values for the sheer ambition of imagination.

I also enjoyed just how irreverent the fans/contributors could be with supposedly sacrosanct 'classics'. To my mind anyway, part of being a dedicated fan is to sometimes accept its limitations, but still embrace them in the right spirit. The Tomb of the Cybermen has perhaps suffered of late with the ‘return’ of its Season Five colleagues – The Web Of Fear and The Enemy Of The World - but is still essential viewing. Plot logic for this long-lost story was never its strongest feature, and whilst the effects for the emerging Cybermen from their hibernation pods do work in glorious black and white, there remains the certainty that cling-film is one of the cheaper props available (even back in the late 1960s). Both these aspects are mentioned in Kingsley Clennel White’s sharply written piece.

The limericks are pitched at both the highbrow and lowbrow levels, with some managing to make sense to children, without being too obviously risqué – and yet  still working on that adult level.

But even in the space of five lines, with an overly rhyming 'gimmick' there is every so often a truly poignant example in the mix. The Third Doctor's death and the "tear" is brilliantly brought back into focus by Callum Stewart. An ambiguous picture – which could be argued is Alpha Centauri shedding a tear from his/her/its lone eye - manages to really hit home just what a monumental moment in the show’s history was the passing of the torch, from one amazingly magnetic leading man, to another of the same calibre (though markedly different in his image).

 

Producer Ian Atkins; Script Editor Ian Atkins

Executive Producers Jason Haigh-Ellery and Nicholas Briggs

Written By: Jonathan Barnes; Directed By: Lisa Bowerman

Cast

Trevor Baxter (Narrator), Christopher Benjamin (Narrator)

A two part Short Trip? Surely this is a Medium Meander then, but believe me - it's a joy to have these two parts as they are surely two of the best Short Trips to date.

Jonathan Barnes brings us an infectiously enjoyable tale of our two favourite Victorian gentlemen as they recount a recent adventure in a lecture to the Club For Curious Scientific Men. The tale follows them as they both fight the sinister Men of Dice, simultaneously, from two different countries. Professor George Litefoot (Trevor Baxter) finds himself being chased across a beach on the island of Minos by floating gunslingers. While back in London we find Henry Gordon Jago menaced by a terrifying, huge arachnid in the basement of his very own theatre. Both are helped in their fight by a certain enigmatic Time Lord that they are proud to call a friend, its just that the version of the Doctor that they encounter here has a very different face to what thy are used to.

I was lucky with this story. I had seen no promotional art, so fully expected it to be a tale in the same vein as most other Short Trips, a companion recounting an unseen tale which involves THEIR Doctor. The set up of these stories usually the same in that you would normally expect a narrated introduction to the story by the companion, followed by the Doctor Who theme tune of their Doctor. Being completely unspoiled, I listened to the opening narration from Baxter and Benjamin, there was a pause - and I waited for the fourth Doctor's theme. What I got instead was the tenth Doctor's theme in all of Murray Gold's loud strings and drums glory. I couldn't help but grin like a loon. 

The teaming of these two great characters with a modern Doctor is genius. There are one or two other surprises along the way that I refuse to spoil as their reveal is a pure joy to listen to, and discover as the story unfolds.

And unfold it does - the narration is very fast paced, switching from the straightforward storytelling of Litefoot to the bluster and pompous exaggeration of Jago. The story goes backwards and forward between the two characters, each time leaving a mini cliffhanger in it's wake, eventually bringing the pair together beautifully in the end where they must literally perform for their lives.

Trevor Baxter and Christopher Benjamin are simply exquisite. We need to bear in mind that these two have over 120 years of acting experience between them - and it shows in a very good way. Big Finish are lucky to have them, and we are equally as fortunate to be still listening to them.

The Jago & Litefoot Revival is essential listening to fans of the show, thank you Big Finish for allowing us to be able to listen to this brilliantly executed tale.

The Jago & Litefoot Revival Acts 1 & 2 are available to download separately from Big Finish now.

Written by David Llewellyn
Directed by Scott Handcock

Cast: Kai Owen (Rhys), Nerys Hughes (Brenda Williams), Karl Theobald (Mr Tate), Ryan Sampson (Mr Nichols), Ruth Lloyd (Nurse Brown), Stephen Critchlow (Dr Fletcher)

Big Finish Productions - Released March 2017
 

Eighteen months since the first Torchwood audio was released by Big Finish, which started a continuous run of twelve monthly releases followed by three special releases which has seen this fledgling range go from strength to strength, the monthly series returns with the first of six new releases which promise to continue their successful expansion of the Torchwood universe.

Visiting Hours finds Rhys Williams (Kai Owen) visiting his mother Brenda in hospital where she is recovering from a routine hip operation. Brenda is once again played by the wonderful Nerys Hughes who previously appeared in the television episode Something Borrowed. There is a great chemistry between mother and son and when strange things start to occur, it is Rhys who is forced to take the lead without being able to ask for help from his wife Gwen. Both characters are a joy to listen to, especially when they find themselves in danger and Brenda starts swearing like a trooper!

The two main characters are ably supported by the small supporting cast including Stephen Critchlow as the mysterious Dr Fletcher, and Karl Theobald and Ryan Sampson as henchmen Tate and Nichols. The story reaches a sinister conclusion with the appearance of the robotic cleaners who reminded this reviewer of being scared by Paradise Towers. The almost too neat ending suggests that we may not have heard the last of Fletcher and his cronies.

Overall, this is an enjoyable start to the new series of adventures from veteran Torchwood writer David Llewellyn. On this form, the series looks set to continue as one of the most consistently strong ranges produced by Big Finish. Next month the series heads stateside as we meet an all new cast of characters in The Dollhouse.

Visiting Hours is available now from Big Finish and on general release from 31st May 2017.

Producer Ian Atkins, Script Editor Ian Atkins
Executive Producers Jason Haigh-Ellery and Nicholas Briggs

Written By: George Mann, Directed By: Lisa Bowerman

Cast

Tim Treloar (Narrator)

Gardeners' Worlds is read by Tim Treloar, who has proved his considerable vocal skills at representing Jon Pertwee as the Third Doctor in a number of earlier Big finish releases – and I must say his version of Pertwee is pretty much spot on.

The story itself takes place during the time when the third Doctor, Jo Grant, and UNIT are at the top of their game. The TARDIS is still incapacitated by the Time Lords, so this adventure is well and truly Earthbound, however the 'old girl' does get an outing......

For the most part the action takes place in the quiet, sleepy village of Colston Burghley, where strange things are appearing and disappearing, the oddest of all being some very odd looking silver flowers. The Doctor discovers what he believes to be some form of time distortion, and starts to investigate the 'root' of the problem in true blustering and bamboozling third Doctor style.

Of course the Doctor manages to get to the bottom of the mystery before any serious harm is done (apart from, at one point wiping out poor Mike Yates from their current reality), and things return quickly to reassuring normality.

Comparisons to The Dæmons are inevitable, and I couldn't help but picture that stories setting when imagining Colston Burghley, but the comparison is easy to put aside. My only complaint about Gardeners'Worlds is that the writer, George Mann seemed to want to embrace the era so much that he couldn't help but have the characters of Jo Grant and Mike Yates just repeating the Doctor lines back to him as a question in a way of coaxing a simplified explanation for the benefit of the viewers (or listeners, in this case). I found this to get a tad repetitive after a while, but also found myself chuckling at how accurate the story telling was for the time, of how we have moved on!

Gardeners' Worlds is an essential listen to fans of classic, third Doctor adventures, that is brought even more to life by Treloar's very accurate impression of Pertwee in the role, in fact, Trelor's characterisation of all the characters were uniformly excellent. I can't help but think that this extra layer to the storytelling might have raised this tale slightly above from being just a good, but enjoyable story.

Gardeners' Worlds is available to download now from Big Finish.