Smile (Doctor Who)
| 266 – "Smile" | |||||
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| Doctor Who episode | |||||
Promotional image for the episode
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| Cast | |||||
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Others
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| Production | |||||
| Directed by | Lawrence Gough | ||||
| Written by | Frank Cottrell-Boyce | ||||
| Produced by | Peter Bennett | ||||
| Executive producer(s) |
Steven Moffat Brian Minchin |
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| Incidental music composer | Murray Gold | ||||
| Series | Series 10 | ||||
| Length | 46 minutes | ||||
| Originally broadcast | 22 April 2017 | ||||
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| Professional ratings | |
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| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| Rotten Tomatoes (Tomatometer) | 89% |
| Rotten Tomatoes (Average Score) | 6.84 |
| The A.V. Club | B+ |
| Entertainment Weekly | B |
| SFX Magazine |   |
| TV Fanatic | |
| IndieWire | B+ |
| IGN | 8.6 |
| New York Magazine | |
| Radio Times | |
"Smile" is the second episode of the tenth series of the British science fiction television series Doctor Who. It is written by Frank Cottrell-Boyce and was broadcast on 22 April 2017 on BBC One. "Smile" received generally positive reviews from critics, with critics commenting on the Doctor and Bill's growing relationship.
In the episode, the Doctor (Peter Capaldi) and his new companion Bill Potts (Pearl Mackie) visit an off-Earth colony only to find it devoid of any life except for robots that communicate via emoji.
Despite Nardole's caution, the Doctor allows Bill to select her first destination for a trip in the TARDIS. They land in the far future on an off-world Earth colony. The colony is empty except for millions of nanobots called the Vardy that maintain it, along with robotic avatars that interact with the pair via emoji. The robots give the Doctor and Bill badges which report their emotions also through emoji—seemingly the only way to communicate with the Vardy.
The Doctor suspects they have arrived before the full colony ship is due, but remains curious as to the absence of any type of pre-colony crew preparing for their arrival. They discover the bones of these humans being used for fertiliser. The Doctor realises that if the Vardy sense they are not happy, the nanobots will consume them to their skeletons, and warns Bill to keep smiling as they escape. The Doctor locates the ship that brought the pre-colony crew to the planet, planning on overloading its reactor to destroy the Vardy before the arrival of the unsuspecting colonists. However, Bill discovers a young boy who leads her to a large number of hibernation chambers including some humans just awaking; the Doctor realises that this is the colony ship.
The pair review the ship's logs from the non-hibernating flight crew. The Vardy were programmed to help construct and operate the colony and make the colonists happy, monitoring the emotional state of the colonists through the emotion badges and avatars. When one of the flight crew died naturally, it created grief amongst the crew that the avatars were not programmed to register. The Vardy took this as a sign of disease, and killed those who displayed unhappiness. This created a "grief tsunami" which rapidly wiped out the flight crew, and will likely wipe out the waking colonists when they discover what happened.
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