Written by Tom
Utopias, Captialist Realism, Colonialism and more in the Doctor Who episode ‘Smile’.
[Previously: “Doctor Who: The Pilot” vs. Heteronormativity]
One of the great joys of Doctor Who to me is how it’s everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach to storytelling allows the myriad of images it crams into every episode to spark off each other in fascinating and deliciously over-signified ways. That’s what I love about ‘Smile’: the way that it’s bricollage of images and concepts come together to create a mad-house which practically bristles with half-formed radical ideas. Sure, the end result is one of the most staggeringly incoherent episodes that NuWho has ever done. It’s narrative structure, built on constantly reversing what we think the plotline is, only serves to fracture the thorough-threads from one idea to the next, making it hard to figure out what they’re actually supposed to be; this means that it never gets the chance to properly merge its ideas and images into any one central point, leaving the episode filled with gaps which serve to nullify and weaken many of episode’s overall implications. Then again, the presence of these gaps and the lack of path through them only gives us the space to travel through the episode ourselves and come up with our own counter-narratives to the show itself, whether what we see is intended by the show or not. So let’s do that: a stroll through one of Doctor Who‘s most over-signified episodes in years, pulling at its ideas until they eventually break apart.
Let’s start with the theme that Frank Cottrell-Boyce, the episode’s writer, definitely meant to put in here: Utopia. According to interviews, the inspiration behind ‘Smile’ came when Cottrell-Boyce was thinking about Utopias and, more accurately, noticed that utopias didn’t really pop up in sci-fi anymore while dystopias were all the range. As such, he decided to write an episode about an utopia, coming up with this episode’s hyper-modern colony base designed to be the perfect place for future humans to live.
Anyone who’s read Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism will be aware of the reasons why Utopias are currently out of vogue. (more…)
FNORD 