TV Review Dr Who Smile

Tweet

Spoiler alerts The Doctor and Bill arrive on a planet that has been prepared for Earth colonists by an advance party and their robots. The trouble is, the humans have vanished, leaving the cute little robots reading people’s emotions through the emoji badges that register happiness levels. Danger arises if anyone shows sadness, in which case the sub-micro-nanobots that constitute the very fabric of the buildings, strip the sad humans to the bone and recycle them as fertilizer. The Doctor learns that a natural death among the advance crew has plunged the landing party into grief, and the nanobots have picked up on the sad emoji signals and slaughtered everyone. The Doctor races against time to sort the robots out before the rest of the Earth colonists awaken (having already arrived but still in suspended animation). The Emoji-bots are insufferably cute, looking like extras from Wall-E. I felt sorry for one when the Doctor uncharacteristically killed it with a spanner. The rather simplistic magic reset button premise of the ending, switching them off and on again to clear the programming glitch was rather a cop-out though I liked the Doctor inspiring the Emojis to act a ruthless landlords to keep the humans in check. The Emoji smile is replaced briefly with a row of £££££’s. We get to hear a little more of the Doctor supposedly staying in exile on Earth in our time to monitor some as yet unseen entity in a Panopticon style prison vault. No doubt this will unfold in future episodes. The closing teaser of the Frozen Thames in 1814 is a great introduction to the next adventure. Arthur Chappell