Doctor Who - Season 5 - Episode 11 - "The Lodger"

Spoilers ahead, but as this is a week late, I shouldn’t think this is too big a problem.

So, Moffat rounds up all of his sit-com buddies and gets Simon “Men Behaving Badly” Nye to write an episode which turns out to be a rather nice little “bottle show”. He gets Richard “Vicar of Dibley” Curtis to write another, which pleased some with what they saw as its heartfelt artistic passion, but which so irritated me with its cack-handed monster that I couldn’t buy into the emotion of the climactic scenes.

So it’s left to Gareth “The Shakespeare Code” Roberts to give us Timelords Behaving Badly, also known as the Smith and Corden show. Unfortunately for Doctor Who fans, this was within days of Corden and Patrick Stewart making total twats of themselves at that awards ceremony, and so it was with a certain amount of trepidation that we approached this slightly unusual episode.

I thought that the set-up was fresh and funny. I like the idea of The Doctor having to spend several days passing as human, without the aid of a chameleon arch and a load of borrowed memories, without a companion to fall back on, and with the added complication of being dropped into a will-they-won’t-they-best-friends-each-too-scared-to-make-the-first-move situation. And, to his credit, Coren played his part with sincerity and wit and Daisy Haggard – so good recently in Psychoville – is also suitably vulnerable and yet not pitiable.

Add to this a wonderfully creepy mystery up the stairs and Karen Gillan making the absolute most of the pretty limited opportunities she’s given and we should be all set, right? Right? Sadly, this is yet another near miss, in a season which has been littered with them. I’ve long said that history will record that Russell T Davies’ chief contribution to Doctor Who, once it was actually back on the air, was the care that he lavished on every single script, whether it had his name on it or not. Some, he simply burnished up. Others, like The Satan Pit, he rewrote from top to bottom. When he didn’t perform uncredited rewrites, either for contractual reasons as with Fear Her, or due to illness as with Daleks in Manhattan, the results were generally unpopular stories which languished at the bottom of season polls. Possibly the reason that some of his credited stories were not so well received is precisely because only one mind is at work on them.

Moffat is thought to have a rather more hands-off approach to scripts. Pitching ideas to writers, suggesting plot turns here or character beats there. Protecting the tone through the production process, but nothing like the kind of top-to-bottom rewriting that the horribly overworked Davies indulged in. The result is that many of this season’s scripts – especially those without the name of the executive producer on them – feel a little undercooked, or have holes in the plotting which let them down.

The Lodger is let down in two different but equally serious ways. The first is that, with no passionately ranting Welshman babbling about “truth”, too many gags have made their way in which can’t be justified beyond “wouldn’t it be funny if…?” The Doctor’s omelette-making is overdone, his behaviour in Fatty’s office does nothing to earn the praise which Fatty’s boss lavishes on him, his lack of knowledge social niceties is totally at odds with the Third Doctor’s easy bonhomie with UNIT soliders and Whitehall penpushers; his bewilderment at the sport of football is hard to take following the Fourth and especially the Fifth Doctor’s fondness for cricket, and his inability to integrate with Fatty and Doe-eyes is almost impossible to accept as a continuation of the Tenth Doctor’s Christmas Dinner with Rose and her family.

All of which I could just about let go, if not for the fact that they fumble the climax so badly that it calls into question almost all of the preceding half-hour. Once Doe-eyes goes upstairs to her apparent doom, we the audience are well aware that the stakes are suddenly much higher than they were. But the Doctor has been steadfastly refusing to mount those stairs and find out what has been going on up there for days, letting innocents march to their death while he twats about on the football pitch or spits out wine or chats to Amy in the TARDIS. Suddenly, he has no reason to wait any longer, but all that’s changed is that Fatty’s caught him out. Any reason to wait still exists. If there was no reason to wait then he’s just let all those people die because… well, because pretending to be human was more fun!?

Pretty much all of which could have been avoided if he’d known it was Daisy Haggard up there, but he doesn’t. He and Fatty run up the stairs, not knowing who they’re going to find. The final scene is well-done and if the slack plotting didn’t ruin it for you, then Fatty and Doe-eyes’ eventual reunion is both neat, resolving both plots at once, and satisfying, but it’s a shame that the villain is yet another Moffat implacable robot on auto-pilot, a reprise of the Chula nanogenes from The Doctor Dances, the clockwork robots from The Girl in the Fireplace, or the Atraxi from The Eleventh Hour.

So, some funny lines. Some charming performances. A novel situation, but a lack of rigor, truth and care which left me more let down than entertained. Neither the disaster which this clash of genres might have been, nor the triumph given the talent on display. Three stars.