An Hour of Who a Day: July 9: "The Caretaker"

July 9: "The Caretaker"

Stuart Manning's poster for "The Caretaker"
(from Doctor Who: Exclusive The Caretaker
poster revealed)

I'm not quite sure what to make of this episode. In some respects it wants to be a comedy, much like Gareth Roberts' last two scripts, with the Doctor attempting to blend in at Coal Hill as the school caretaker. (Incidentally, is this whole setup an in-joke harking back to Remembrance of the Daleks (where the headmaster thinks the Doctor is applying for the job of caretaker), or is it simply a coincidence?) However, they don't push very hard on this "effort to blend in" storyline, so as a comedy it doesn't quite work. There also seems to be an effort to see what happens when Danny finally encounters the Doctor, but the result seems awfully heavy in such a lightweight vehicle. Oh, and there's some stuff with an alien death machine called a Skovox Blitzer, but that's frankly incidental to either storyline -- although its brutal killing of a policeman is also at odds with the lighter tone "The Caretaker" wants to adopt.

In theory this should work. There's something inherently right about the idea of the Doctor as a school caretaker, something that should lend itself to lots of entertaining situations about the Doctor failing to grasp why he has to keep cleaning bathrooms or mopping floors or replacing light bulbs, all the while trying very hard to blend in and failing miserably. But somewhere along the way this went astray. The Doctor does blend in; sure, he's a little odd at times, but he's able to clean and fix things as he goes about his plan to save the planet. He can clean a window, even if the significance of the graffiti scribbled on it eludes him. He looks completely at home screwing around with a junction box while talking to Danny and Adrian. He even knows where the paper towels are.

This is the environment in which Danny is introduced to the Doctor, and it's not what you'd expect. There's little whimsy to be found here (despite Peter Capaldi's best efforts to make all the insulting comments jokes). The Doctor is angry, and Danny is betrayed -- he doesn't find it wonderful at all, he just wonders what else Clara hasn't been telling him. This does make the confrontation between the two of them in the TARDIS more powerful than it otherwise would have been: the Doctor may hate soldiers and think they're inherently stupid, but Danny accuses the Doctor of being an officer, and it's not a charge that the Doctor has a ready response to. "One thing, Clara," Danny says. "I'm a soldier, guilty as charged. You see him? He's an officer. ... I'm the one who carries you out of the fire. He's the one who lights it."

It's these conversations that ultimately unbalance the whole thing; Danny Pink is far too proud a person to just brush this stuff off, and the Doctor's far too prejudiced to see past the "soldier" aspect of Danny. (At least, one hopes that that's the prejudice involved. As Graham Kibble-White pointed out in Doctor Who Magazine, there's a streak of clueless racism at work in this story -- the three troublemaker students we see are all black, and Danny must be a PE teacher rather than a maths one (and can't be the object of Clara's affections) -- hopefully because he's a soldier and not because he's black. Oh, and there's the Doctor's mistaken belief that Adrian is Clara's boyfriend: the intention of the episode is because he vaguely resembles the eleventh Doctor, not because he's white, but once you see these things in a different light it's hard to unsee them. I do think that this is a completely unintentional subtext, but the fact that that no one on the production team noticed this is slightly worrying.) These are weighty topics that "The Caretaker" doesn't have easy answers to (partially because they're holding some of them back for the series 8 finale), but because of that they sink everything else, and the ultimate impression is that "The Caretaker" is uncertain of what it wants to actually be -- something rather surprising for this phase of the show. This isn't the comedy story with some darker elements thrown in; it's an examination of darker topics that occasionally adds a joke or two. As an exploration of the fractious relationship between Danny and the Doctor, and what it means to be worthy of the Doctor's trust, this is fairly engaging, but by most other standards "The Caretaker" falls short of the mark.