Smile is another one of those episodes where perfectly normal behaviour suddenly becomes perilous, as in don't blink!, don't breathe!, stay out of the shadows! but to my mind is rather less successful than such stories as Blink and Silence in the Library. I may be rather biased, as unlike Bill, whose face is always 'doing expressions' when she doesn't want it to, my face tends to look naturally glum, whatever I am thinking. Often what I am thinking is homicidal thoughts about the passing strangers who interrupt my perfectly happy thoughts by calling out "cheer up love, it might never happen!" so a world in which you have to smile or face being composted was hardly likely to appeal much.
It started well, with the Doctor sneaking off in the TARDIS with Bill whilst Nardole was making the tea, and the futuristic city looked fantastic. However, there was something not quite right about the pacing. A large chunk of the episode involved Bill and the Doctor exploring on their own, without all that much happening, and then the ending, once the colonists awoke, seemed oddly rushed.
It seemed rather out of character to me for the Doctor's first instinct to be to blow the city up, rather than to fix the robotic malfunction. Even if he believed that the colonists were arriving in a separate ship, what did he think would happen to them when the colony ship arrived to find a bomb site rather than a functioning city?
My biggest problem though was with the whole 'smile' thing. The mood badges were placed on the back. The implications is that they sensed mood (like those mood rings that used to be popular), so how would a faked forced grin make any difference?
Overall, some nice ideas, but could have been so much better.
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