New Who 5.11: The Lodger
The world which this story presented was very sweet. The Doctor out of his depth in the midst of normality is always good value, and I loved his incompetence with money, his description of Craig's kitchen-diner as a 'parlour', his cheek kisses, his guess that football is a game played with sticks, his emergency tea-making ("Reverse the enzyme decay! Excite the tannin molecules!"). Ten might have protested at the idea of Christmas dinner with Rose's mum - but actually, he fits in perfectly well once he accepts. We've seen him scoffing chips, drinking mugs of tea, sitting on a bus. Yes, he was alien when he needed to be - but he could be very human too. For all the time Eleven has spent on Earth this season, he has much less of that - and in that respect feels much closer to past Doctors (especially Four) than his most recent predecessor.
Injecting the Doctor into the story of Craig and Sophie worked nicely, too. I liked his obliviousness to Craig and Sophie's UST - even while picking up on the fact that she has two sets of keys for Craig's flat, one of which Craig has been fondling. And his needling of Sophie about why she doesn't just go off and see the orangutans; and the way he somehow does recognise, deep down, why neither of them really want to be anywhere other than suburban Colchester, with one another. It's interesting to note that the basic tension in their relationship is exactly the same as the one in Rory and Amy's. Craig is for booze + pizza + telly while Sophie is for crises and orang-u-tangs - except that really what both parties in both couples want most, and are failing to communicate, is each other. Maybe this is just a Moffatesque trope - people who paid more attention to Coupling than I ever did will have to let me know. But it feels in the current context like a microcosm of how Rory and Amy's storyline will pan out.
I thought at first that the story was going to be companion-lite, along the same lines as Ten's Midnight. It was a little lighter on Amy than most of the other episodes so far this season (perhaps excepting The Hungry Earth, where she gets captured early on), but it isn't properly 'lite' in the RTD sense of barely featuring one of the regular characters at all. Have we seen the last of this format, for either Doctor or companion? As far as single, stand-alone episodes go, it would appear so. But the BBC's synopsis for the last episode of the season suggests that Doctor-liteness will be an aspect of the finale.
I found the resolution pretty disappointing, though. Things started to go downhill for me at the point where the Doctor just conveyed everything Craig needed to know about him via a head-butt, rather than talking him round as he has done EVERY OTHER TIME he has needed to convince someone to go along with his plans FOR THE PAST 30 SEASONS. I don't want to be the annoying Old-School fan who insists that all continuity must be maintained at all costs - but when you literally have to jolt your plot along with a head-butt, you may have a problem.
As for the figure in the upstairs flat, it has been built up into something pretty scary by the time we climb the stairs with the Doctor. It was stopping the TARDIS from landing; it was causing hysteresis; it has something that looks awfully like a TARDIS of its own; it has a perception filter. There are some pretty big implications, there - what is this incredibly powerful being, and where has it come from? But as it turns out, we go from the shock realisation of OMG A TARDIS! right down to something vague about a crashed ship which can be defeated by a kiss in the space of about three minutes. I recognise that there is some possibility that we will find out more about this ship in the season finale, like who the original crew were and how they crashed. But in the context of this particular story, it felt weak and under-resolved.
Anyway, we have lots of Romans coming up next week! And the promise of resolution about River Song and the Time Crack - or at least the first half of a resolution, anyway. I'm pretty excited about that.
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Injecting the Doctor into the story of Craig and Sophie worked nicely, too. I liked his obliviousness to Craig and Sophie's UST - even while picking up on the fact that she has two sets of keys for Craig's flat, one of which Craig has been fondling. And his needling of Sophie about why she doesn't just go off and see the orangutans; and the way he somehow does recognise, deep down, why neither of them really want to be anywhere other than suburban Colchester, with one another. It's interesting to note that the basic tension in their relationship is exactly the same as the one in Rory and Amy's. Craig is for booze + pizza + telly while Sophie is for crises and orang-u-tangs - except that really what both parties in both couples want most, and are failing to communicate, is each other. Maybe this is just a Moffatesque trope - people who paid more attention to Coupling than I ever did will have to let me know. But it feels in the current context like a microcosm of how Rory and Amy's storyline will pan out.
I thought at first that the story was going to be companion-lite, along the same lines as Ten's Midnight. It was a little lighter on Amy than most of the other episodes so far this season (perhaps excepting The Hungry Earth, where she gets captured early on), but it isn't properly 'lite' in the RTD sense of barely featuring one of the regular characters at all. Have we seen the last of this format, for either Doctor or companion? As far as single, stand-alone episodes go, it would appear so. But the BBC's synopsis for the last episode of the season suggests that Doctor-liteness will be an aspect of the finale.
I found the resolution pretty disappointing, though. Things started to go downhill for me at the point where the Doctor just conveyed everything Craig needed to know about him via a head-butt, rather than talking him round as he has done EVERY OTHER TIME he has needed to convince someone to go along with his plans FOR THE PAST 30 SEASONS. I don't want to be the annoying Old-School fan who insists that all continuity must be maintained at all costs - but when you literally have to jolt your plot along with a head-butt, you may have a problem.
As for the figure in the upstairs flat, it has been built up into something pretty scary by the time we climb the stairs with the Doctor. It was stopping the TARDIS from landing; it was causing hysteresis; it has something that looks awfully like a TARDIS of its own; it has a perception filter. There are some pretty big implications, there - what is this incredibly powerful being, and where has it come from? But as it turns out, we go from the shock realisation of OMG A TARDIS! right down to something vague about a crashed ship which can be defeated by a kiss in the space of about three minutes. I recognise that there is some possibility that we will find out more about this ship in the season finale, like who the original crew were and how they crashed. But in the context of this particular story, it felt weak and under-resolved.
Anyway, we have lots of Romans coming up next week! And the promise of resolution about River Song and the Time Crack - or at least the first half of a resolution, anyway. I'm pretty excited about that.
Click here to view this entry with minimal formatting.