If you're only familiar with Gareth Roberts' works from his earlier
Doctor Who and
Sarah Jane Adventures episodes, you might not realize how funny he can be. There are jokes scattered throughout his television work, but nothing more than other episodes by different authors. If, however, you are familiar with some of his
Doctor Who works in other media (such as his Big Finish audio
The One Doctor or his season 17 Missing Adventures), then you may have been wondering when that Gareth Roberts would show up on the TV version. With "The Lodger", he's finally arrived.
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Craig is slightly exasperated by the Doctor's appearance while
Sophie is over. ("The Lodger") ©BBC |
It's a simple idea: force the Doctor to have to pretend to be a normal 21st-century person for a few days and see what happens. (It's so simple, in fact, that Roberts had actually used it before: this is technically a remake of a
Doctor Who Magazine strip with the tenth Doctor and Mickey instead of the eleventh and Craig, although Roberts basically wrote this episode from scratch.) The result, however, is pure joy -- Matt Smith is clearly having a ball with this, and he's been given the perfect foil in James Corden (perhaps best known to American audiences now as Craig Ferguson's successor on CBS's
The Late Late Show). Ostensibly this is about the Doctor trying to deal with an alien spaceship that's preventing the TARDIS from landing, but really it's about his relationship with his new flatmate Craig. The Doctor, bless him, does try, but because he's currently the eleventh Doctor, a persona that often seems more child-like than just about any of the other Doctors (the only other real comparison would be the second), he's wonderfully uncomprehending of all the social cues he's being given. So we get some really great dialogue from the Doctor as he tries to work out on the fly the best things to say and do to avoid arousing suspicion, usually getting it slightly wrong. The most obvious one is the Doctor's repeated
la bise greetings (the cheek kissing) to people (something, one suspects, he picked up from Vincent van Gogh last time, as Vincent does it to Doctor Black), which seems to slightly throw everyone he does it to, but there are also lots of magical little lines, like his explanation of where he learned to cook ("Paris, in the eighteenth century. No, hang on, that's not recent, is it? Seventeenth? No, no, no. Twentieth. Sorry, I'm not used to doing them in the right order") or his outrage at Sean's assertion that their pub football team would "annihilate" the next team ("Annihilate? No. No violence, do you understand me? Not while I'm around. Not today, not ever. I'm the Doctor, the Oncoming Storm, and you basically meant beat them in a football match, didn't you?").
Of course, the Doctor being the Doctor, he can't help but stand out, even when he's trying to blend in. He seems to naturally excel at everything: he can cook, play football (which must have pleased Matt Smith no end, as he wanted to be a professional footballer until a back injury diverted him into acting), and work at a call center better than Craig can, seemingly without trying. He also inspires Sophie to travel the world and chase her dreams, rather than spend the rest of her life stuck in Colchester. These actions are the sort of thing we expect from the Doctor, honestly, but it drives Craig mad, which leads to even more wonderful Doctor-Craig sparring, culminating in another mind-meld-like thing
à la various Tennant episodes, albeit this time delivered via headbutt. (And look, another brief look at all the Doctors -- this new production team seems significantly less reticent about dropping in quick references to the past than the previous regime. We also get Smith singing "La donna è mobile", much like Pertwee did in
Inferno, but it's not a total capitulation to older fans -- Roberts didn't follow through with his initial idea to make the villain of the piece Meglos from the eponymous story, with the joke being that the Doctor doesn't remember Meglos at all.)
Yes, there's a plot involving an alien ship on the roof, luring people to their doom, and while it's driving a decent amount of the story (and will become retroactively important next series), it's not really the point of the story. The point of "The Lodger" is to show the Doctor as a fish-out-of-water tale without realizing he's a fish-out-of-water, and it's to provide a double act between Smith and Corden, and at these two things it's terribly successful. The only thing that's slightly odd is that the message seems to be that it's OK to stay at home as long as you're with someone, which is rather the opposite of the show's usual message of "go and experience new things", but even this isn't terribly out of place, as the primary conceit is "love conquers all". This is an extremely entertaining and very funny episode with some outstanding comedic acting from Matt Smith and James Corden, and a strong contender for best episode of series 5.
