Tom Salinsky

Terrible dereliction of duty around here lately, sorry about that. I think partly because none of these three episodes provoked terribly strong feelings in me. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. As Tat Wood acutely points out in the About Time series, the production team fatally forgot how to churn out good, solid, workaday episodes in the mid-eighties and it nearly ended the programme for good. That’s what these three are – good, solid, workaday episodes in their different ways.

So, for a start I’m not a Listen hater, nor do I think it really deserves to be spoken of in the same breath as Blink. It’s great to see Moffat sit down and write a non-special, non-arc episode and it’s generally good stuff. I don’t subscribe to the notion put forwarded by some bloggers that having Clara give the proto-Doctor nightmares is an enormous ego trip for the writer (“Isn’t my character special? Isn’t my character the most significantest ever?”) but I do think that having already been threaded through the Doctor’s timeline, she isn’t the best choice for this role.

I didn’t mind the Danny Pink soap opera stuff, but I was put out by the fact that an enormous amount of plot hinges on Clara wilfully withholding vital information from the Doctor out of utterly uncharacteristic embarrassment (as noted the part is horribly underwritten, but Jenna Coleman plays her with a forthright vigour which is completely at odds with this narrative choice). And I don’t mind that the whole story is a closed loop, accomplishing nothing by its end, because some of the individual moments are so arresting – notably The Thing Under The Bed Covers – but I desperately care that we were never told what the The Thing Under The Bed Covers was, and I can’t quite escape the suspicion that that question will be answered in a future episode.

Three and a half stars seems miserly for an episode that was so formally daring and so much fun to watch, but four seems over generous given its various flaws. Tell you what, because Young Danny was so brilliantly cast, I’ll bump it up to four.

I’ve had the same conversation with several people regarding the extraordinary find of two Patrick Troughton stories long thought lost (one episode still eludes us). Do you prefer the amazing ambition and individuality of Enemy of the World or do you find more to admire in the way that The Web of Fear is just like every other Patrick Troughton base-under-siege story but so much better? I’m in the latter camp – I can’t overlook the way Enemy trips itself up when the execution isn’t up to the ideas. So I’m perfectly happy with Time Heist being a pretty unambitious by-the-numbers script. It’s chief problem is that it isn’t quite as novel or original as perhaps it thinks it is. There’s actually precious little here we haven’t seen before and most of the twists are pretty easy to see coming. But it clips along very pleasingly, nothing is wasted, nothing is flubbed and it is novel to see the Oceans Eleven genre grafted on to Doctor Who. Four stars seems about right here too.

Finally, The Caretaker. All three of Gareth Roberts’ The-Doctor-Blends-In-With-Earth-Humans scripts have had some basic problems of plot credibility. It rarely actually seems necessary for the Doctor to have to blend in with Earth humans in order to solve the ostensible problem. Of the three, The Lodger is easily the best and Closing Time with its vile love-conquers-all-ending is handily the worst. The Caretaker sits in the middle. Again, it seems utterly unnecessary for the Doctor to either bother to dress up as a caretaker at all, or to be so brazen about it. Clara and Danny’s romance which was tolerable in Listen is really rather irritating here and the Scovox Blitzer is a remarkably generic and unthreatening creation which seems to have been designed by Kroagnon The Great Architect and which would have been much more at home in The Sarah Jane Adventures.

Whereas Time Heist was a romp with a bit of vinegar to balance it out, this is just larks and that’s hard to take over 45 minutes unless the level of invention and humour is absolutely top notch, and here it isn’t. The Doctor continually referring to Danny as a PE teacher is very funny, but the subplot with Courtney the cocky school kid is dull and goes nowhere. Danny Pink’s soldiering which had been a distant bell sounding every so often to punctuate the relationship now becomes a great clanging gong, drowning out everything else about him and the whole thing seems a little short on story for the running time. When it works, however, it works, and I have to give it props for Danny rejecting Clara’s absurd lies about rehearsing for the school play. Three stars seems about right.