10 Things about Who: 10.2 Smile
Here we are again, with ten talking points about this week’s episode of Doctor Who: Smile by Frank Cottrell Boyce.
For newcomers, last week’s 10 Things About Who: The Pilot explains what little rationale there is behind each post. And if you haven’t yet seen this week’s TV episode, don’t come running to me if you find some of the stuff below to contain spoilers…
1. Happiness Patrol
“I’m glad.”
“And I’m happy you’re glad.”
The concept of a world that is fuelled by enforced happiness is one that is not unknown to Doctor Who. 1988 story The Happiness Patrol.
Graeme Curry’s story of an Earth outpost of enforced happiness had a lot going for it. If you read the novel version, its concept of a world where happiness is enforced, rather than merely being encouraged, is a face of a chilling dystopia. On screen, budget requirements and poor design decisions (including a Kandyman who looked like Bertie Bassett, the personification of Bassett’s Licquorice Allsorts) reduced the power of the central metaphor.
In contrast, Frank Cottrell Boyce’s story plays out with echoes of that, but with an element of contemporary criticism — the reliance on emoji to express mood — of the kind that has more recently played out in Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror series.
As a result, Brooker’s series being intended to play current concerns out to extremes, each scenario is unashamedly contemporary.
The problem with Doctor Who is that its episodes end up being viewed for years, even decades afterwards. So, when Smile is viewed in five years’ time, there is a possibility that its reliance on knowledge of emoji makes it feel as relevant as the dial-up modem connection in 1993’s WarGames.
2. Face with Tears of Joy
The ideograms that have become known as “emoji” originated in Japan in the late 1990s. The invention is credited to Shigetaka Kurita, who was part of the team developing mobile internet platforms for Japan’s NTT DoCoMo network.
Initially Kurita created 180 icons, drawn in a 12x12 pixel grid. Today, Emojipedia counts 1,394 vector-based icons — not including combinations and variations such as skin colour. And the list continues to grow: 2017’s update, agreed in March and which should start appearing in operating systems later in the year, includes icons for vomiting face, Mage, Elf and Vampire, as well as the national flags for England, Scotland and Wales.
3. Smize, you’re on Candid Camera
When the Doctor says that smiling improves one’s mood, Frank Cottrell Boyce is not being glib. Psychologist Pual Ekman first theorised that a smile that used the muscles including those around the eyes — a “Duchenne smile”, named after the French neurologist Guillaume-Benjamin-Amand Duchenne who first documented the difference between a “full smile” and one that’s only put on for show — could affect one’s mood.
In the decades that was to follow, America’s Next Top Model would come to popularise the term “Smizing” from judge Tyra Banks — an apparently made up portmanteau word implying “smiling from [or with] the eyes.”
Which is exactly what the Doctor wants us — and, especially, Bill — to do within the empty city.
4. Keep smiling
Oh, you knew that this area of scientific research was too good to waste on a single bullet point.
The concept of a Duchenne smile having a positive effect on your mood was documented in Grin and Bear It: The Influence of Manipulated Facial Expression on the Stress Response (DOI: 10.1177/0956797612445312) by researchers Tara L. Kraft and Sarah D. Pressman, published in the September 2012 issue of Psychological Science.
Kraft and Pressman recruited 170 people and asked them to hold chopsticks in their mouths with their teeth. One third were trained to smile with their mouth only, one third were trained to exercise a Duchenne smile, and the final third (the control group) were instructed to “hold the chopsticks gently in their mouths with their faces relaxed”.
Participants were given tasks which elevated their heart rate, then looked at how they smiled affected their recovery to a baseline rate. Kraft and Pressman discovered that the group using Duchenne smiles experienced significantly lower heart rates than those who weren’t smizing.
However, their results do come with a caveat. Frank Cottrell Boyce might want to look away now…
The generalizability of these findings to the real world is questionable given the artificiality of the setting and manipulation.
Spoilsports.
5. An awful lot of running
Bill recalls her description of the Twelfth Doctor’s running style (“a penguin with its arse on fire”) when she sees him running back to the city after he vainly attempts to make her stay in the Tardis.
It’s an apt visual description. I have no idea if Peter Capaldi genuinely runs like that, but his Doctor certainly does. And it has a practical purpose — for despite all the running up and down corridors or through cornfields in Doctor Who, nobody ever sprints at the speed you surely would if being chased by monsters. If they did, the production team would need to build longer corridors, and the actors would be out of breath all the time (although of course, a little bit of smizing might help lower their post-cardio heart rates).
While David Tennant has possibly been my favourite Doctor since 2005’s revival, he never did a particularly good job of running slowly but making it look urgent. Capaldi’s unique style feels far more hurried, while being slow enough for television purposes.
6. Looks like something new
There’s no getting around it — the Vardies’ city looks unlike any location we’ve seen in Doctor Who. It makes me want to visit the City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia, the striking two kilometre-long building complex that formed the bulk of the location work in this episode — even if it is actually slap bang in the middle of a bustling metropolis rather than the idyllic cornfields we see here.
In addition to the digital matte work that replaced the sprawl of Valencia with countryside, the occasional flashes of blue light running along the walls helped provide the sense of a city that is active and alert, rather than just being empty.
It’s noticeable over the last few seasons that filming sessions in overseas locations are now de rigeur for Doctor Who. From the volcanic landscapes of Lanzarote standing in for the moon’s surface in Kill the Moon to the use of the Western sets in Almería’s “Mini Hollywood” for A Town Called Mercy (and nearby mountains for Asylum of the Daleks), we’re seeing more and more inventive ways for the series to feel like it’s visiting multiple worlds and time periods, in a manner that just wouldn’t be possible if the production team stuck to Cardiff and its surrounding area.
7. Erewhon
Whoever came up with the name for the Earth colonists’ ship either had a prescient, if rather pessimistic, view of their journey.
Samuel Butler’s novel Erewhon; or Over the Range was first published in 1872. Starting out as an adventure story, Butler creates a fictional land of Erewhon in order to satirise Victorian society and imperialism:
The novel begins as an adventure story, using the convention of travel in an imaginary country. To the story’s narrator, Erewhon at first seems utopian in its disregard for money — which lends status but has no purchasing value — and machines — which have been outlawed as dangerous competitors in the struggle for existence. Erewhon has also declared disease a crime for which the sick are imprisoned, and crime is considered a disease for which criminals are sent to the hospital. As the unnamed narrator further examines the institutions of Erewhon, his illusions of utopia and eternal progress are stripped away. [source]
If you were embarking on a voyage to establish a new life and culture in a far off land, would you not think that naming your craft in such a manner might, just might, tempt fate a little?
8. “There’s something you need to know.”
I’m still loving Bill’s ability to use her SF knowledge to point out the blindingly obvious. Any time she takes the rise out of Michael Pickwoad’s Tardis interior (my least favourite of the post-relaunch Tardis sets) is fine by me.
But you would have thought that a sci-fi fangirl would know better than to state a nebulous “Doctor, there’s something you need to know” over whatever communication setup they conveniently got awarded upon entering the city.
After years of watching Star Trek: The Next Generation and its brethren, you being to notice all the times that Riker, Geordi, Chief O’Brien, B’elanna and all the rest alert their captain with a vague “There’s something you need to see,” over their comm badges — and apparently don’t bother describing what it is until their superior officer gets there.
And is Bill and the Doctor’s new communication system still with them? Inquiring nit-picking minds want to know…
9. There is no magic haddock
The story the Doctor tells of the magic haddock, who grants three wishes in the worst way possible, may sound familiar to you. Except for the bit about the magic haddock.
The Doctor’s summary of the story is basically a beat-for-beat description of the 1902 short story The Monkey’s Paw by W. W. Jacobs. The titular object has the power to grant wishes, but does so in the most ghoulish of ways.
When Mr White comes into possession of the paw, he wishes for £200 — which he receives in the form of compensation when he son is killed in an industrial accident. After the funeral, he is persuaded by his wife to wish his son back to life — little expecting that he would do so as a revivified corpse…
Throughout the story, fate is presented as amoral. The Whites are tormented by the effects of their wishes not because they have done anything wrong, but because a single wish can be fulfilled in unpredictable ways.
The Monkey’s Paw has been adapted numerous times into plays, film, TV and radio versions — even into two operas.
The Magic Haddock: The Musical remains unproduced.
10. Whither Nardole?
A mercifully brief appearance from Matt Lucas this week, as the mystery of the vault plays out more in conversation than in visuals. I think it’s unlikely to be able to maintain a sense of mystery throughout the whole series at this rate, though; in fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Doctor’s absence — and the apparent breaking of an oath — had repercussions within the next couple of weeks…
