Series 10, Episode 2 | 1 part | First broadcast: 22 April 2017 | Writer: Frank Cottrell-Boyce | Director: Lawrence Gough
Cast
- Peter Capaldi as the Twelfth Doctor
- Pearl Mackie as Bill Potts
- Matt Lucas as Nardole
- Ralf Little as Steadfast
- Mina Anwar as Goodthing
- Kiran L. Dadlani as Kezzia
- Kaizer Akhtar as Praiseworthy
- Kalungi Ssebandeke as Nate
Summary
Letting Bill choose her first-ever destination in the TARDIS, the Doctor brings her to a gleaming but eerily empty human colony maintained entirely by microscopic robots called the Vardy and their emoji-communicating avatars. Investigating the colonists’ absence, the pair discover human bones being used as fertiliser and realise the Vardy, tasked with keeping the colonists happy, interpreted a crew member’s death and the resulting grief as a contagious “disease” to be eradicated, triggering a “grief tsunami” that wiped out the advance crew. With the still-hibernating colonists beginning to wake and the Vardy showing signs of emerging sentience, the Doctor defuses the standoff by resetting the robots to a state before they equated sorrow with sickness, then offers to mediate a lasting peace between colonists and machines before he and Bill depart, landing next on a frozen River Thames.
Interesting Facts
- The nanobots, the Vardy, are named after Andrew Vardy, a real-world professor of swarm robotics at Memorial University of Newfoundland who had previously collaborated with writer Frank Cottrell-Boyce on a short story drawing from his research.
- The colony ship is named Erehwon, a nod to Samuel Butler’s satirical novel “Erewhon,” about a traveller who discovers a seemingly utopian society built on harsh, inverted logic.
- Location filming took place at the strikingly futuristic City of Arts and Sciences complex in Valencia, Spain, standing in for the alien colony.
- The Doctor’s warning to Bill not to look at his TARDIS browser history echoes an identical line he gave to Osgood in the Series 9 two-parter “The Zygon Invasion”/”The Zygon Inversion.”
- This was Frank Cottrell-Boyce’s second and final Doctor Who script, following the divisive Series 8 episode “In the Forest of the Night”; critics broadly considered “Smile” the stronger of the two.
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