'Smile' review [Frank Cottrell-Boyce]

The Doctor and Bill meet an Emojibot in a human colony.

The Doctor takes Bill to one of the first extraterrestrial human colonies on the planet Gliese 581 D, twenty-light years from Earth, for her first real glimpse of the future. What they find is an empty city, populated only by Emojibots, with no colonists to be found.

Frank Cottrell-Boyce also wrote series 8's 'In the Forest of the Night', a weak episode lacking in tension and threat.

Spoiler Zone

The episode

As a character piece, this episode is good at helping us learn more about the Doctor and Bill, and it's fun to see Bill exploring a new world with far more curiosity than Amy in 'The Beast Below' or Clara in 'The Rings of Akhaten'. The city in a field of wheat under a blue sky is a beautiful image, and it really is a visually stunning episode.

Unfortunately, the episode is otherwise rather dull. The Vardies prove to be barely a threat, although the Emojibots prove to be less gimicky than expected. The Emojibots identifying grief as plague is an interesting idea but this plot point is spoilt in the pre-credits sequence. It would have been much more effective to have kept that from us and let us learn as the Doctor and Bill learn. The resolution - turning them off and back on again - is an unsatisfying cop-out. The idea that the Emojibots were sentient now and the true inhabitants of the city is very unconvincing given that we saw nothing of the sort before the "reveal".

The Doctor deciding to blow up the colony is a reckless and un-Doctorlike decision. The human characters feature so little that he might as well have blown them up. The actors are simply wasted in the roles.

Overall this was a largely insubstantial episode saved only by visuals and our two protagonists. A disappointing first journey for Bill. And what on Earth is food sexism?

TARDIS crew and co.

• The Doctor: "Don't sentimentalise me. I don't just fly around helping people out." The Doctor visits the planet with Bill and helps out when he encounters danger. He's not a hero.
• Bill Potts: "Thanks for bringing me. This is a great day out." Bill asks questions and makes jokes about everything she sees, which is a refreshing change. She's relatable in a way that Clara never was.
• Nardole: "Your oath, sir. You're not supposed to go off-world unless it's an emergency." Nardole barely features in this episode, and when he does he's simply a grump.

Click here for more series 10 reviews