The Caretaker: Ranking - 239

   The Caretaker

(Series 8, Dr 12 with Clara, 27/9/2014, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writers: Gareth Roberts and Steven Moffat, director: Paul Murphy) 

Rank: 239

In an emoji: 🧹

'So, Doctor, I'm just going through your paperwork on your first week with us. You say you've checked the cupboards for Voord, exterminated an infestation of p'tings and made interstellar contact with a mop and bucket that suddenly turned sentient after being beamed from the Spectrox galaxy. Well, that all seems to be in order and you're still more reliable than the last guy we had, he looked like Richard Briers but spoke in a really funny accent and was followed everywhere by a giant cleaning robot. Well, here's your pay. You want it in what currency? Jammie Dodgers and fish custard?!?...'

‘Dr Who’ is, as we’ve seen many a time, an elastic format that can take in most other genres: drama, comedy, horror, even Westerns, documentaries, reality TV, quiz shows, sport and farce. One genre I assumed it would never do is that of the soap opera, the format that’s so diametrically opposed to it in many ways. As a (very) general rule soap viewers watch because they find comfort in the receptiveness of the storylines, the reliability of the unchanging characters and a fleeting feeling of glee that there are actually some people in the universe with lives as ugly and messy as yours. ‘Dr Who’ of course is different to that – it goes somewhere different every week, hops about in time and space at random while the characters within it change and grow, learning more about themselves with every passing adventure, while there’s the secret feeling of glee as characters who feel like ‘us’ end up saving planets, and defeating monsters making us feel ‘gee, maybe I could do that if the Tardis ever comes a calling’. Soap operas tend to make me very depressed about humanity and where we’re headed and work on a sort of collective frustration; Dr Who makes me feel joy and hope for the future. They shouldn’t fit together at all and quite often they don’t, but that hasn’t stopped certain people running the show from trying. ‘An Unearthly Child’ is a little bit soap operay, a ‘Byker Grove’ style plot about a troubled but brilliant kid at school with a strange home life being investigated by her teachers (even though what they find is far from domestic realism). One time production assistant turned producer John Nathan-Turner loved his soap operas and the Peter Davison era of the show especially became about the effects that travelling around in time and space had on the companions – even if the effects were caused by rubber pink snakes and the death of a close friend in a spaceshuttle during a Cybermen attack rather than, say, a bit of cheating or a car crash. JNT was such a fan he even stuck Dr Who against its polar opposite ‘Eastenders’ in the 1993 charity special ‘Dimensions Of Time’, the ultimate in the extraordinary world of Doctor Who colliding with an ordinary one. Russell T Davies brought that element back a little, giving companions lives beyond the Tardis doors and showing that ordinary life continued while they were away having adventures in time and space. Mostly, though, companions managed to keep their home and adventuring life separate (Tegan’s journey is the most complex, with a stop off in earth in between her two eras in the Tardis, but basically people lead one life then another, not the two in parallel). When Steven Moffat took over the show one of his big changes was in taking away that family element – Amy, Clara and Bill are all lonely orphans who don’t leave a family behind who’ll miss them in quite the same way. He does still give his characters lives outside the Tardis but they tend to be through their jobs or love lives – and ‘The Caretaker’ is about both, The Doctor going undercover at Coal Hill School (the very place his grand-daughter was enrolled back in the very first episode) and Clara’s struggles to keep her boyfriend and her time-travelling companion apart. 

 It’s an unusual story, to say the least, Dr Who at its least scifi and most soapy as for once this isn't a story about saving the universe but Clara struggling to find a work-life-time travel balance. It's an odd and often uneasy mixture, lurching from melodrama (Clara and Danny going one step forward to two steps back in their love life), action (on the run from killer robot-like aliens!) and pure farce (the Doctor's insistence that the bloke Clara loves isn't Danny at all but the guy who dresses a lot like the 11th Doctor. Well he is a teacher - bow ties and tweed are de rigour amongst teachers, never mind cool). How you feel about all this really depends how much you invest in the story of Clara and Danny’s love life and how much you accept the fact that the Doctor has an irrational jealousy of what Clara gets up to when she’s not there – something he’s never really shown to any of his companions before (bar the odd twinge when Captain Jack was first sniffing around Rose). I personally like Danny, he’s a sweet character, a reformed soldier turned maths teacher whose been to hell and back and just wants a quiet life where his biggest problem is a 5th former failing their GCSEs rather than a battalion of friends being killed. He’s the sort of dependable, quiet chap you want on your side in a crisis but oddly emotional for a soldier, struck by pangs of guilt and remorse most soldiers have trained out of their system. Danny’s an interesting take on the sort of teachers who were everywhere in the immediate post World War Two years, when many teachers had been conscripted to fight and turned into soldiers, the vacuum filled by returning wounded soldiers who couldn’t find any other work besides teaching and who took their post-traumatic stress out on the children in their care, the very people they’d ‘fought’ to save. There was a whole pandemic of this – Pink Floyd’s concept album ‘The Wall’ (a short snatch of which you hear the Doctor whistling in this story at one point) is all based around this same theme, of the most unsuitable rigid tortured souls shaping impressionable young minds and expecting them to somehow function in peace time when they grow up to become adults. This was still very much happening in 1963 when Susan was at Coal Hill School, which is why Ian and Barbara stand out for being young and kind, two things that not many teachers had in common with real life back then. Danny, thankfully, is nice, a reformed soldier who regrets fighting and comes to teaching not so he can take his anger out on the next generation and destroy their hope so much as let some of that hope wash over him and make him belief in humanity again. I’m willing to bet that writer Gareth Roberts, born in 1968, had at least one of these teachers still rattling around in his school somewhere: his analysis of Danny is just too good. 

 I’m fond of Clara too, much more than most of the fanbase seems to be. She’s torn, particularly across series 8, wanting a ‘normal’ stable sort of a life and the sort of adventure that only being with the Doctor can bring. She’s managed to somehow straddle her two lives till now, making the most of the fact the Tardis is a time machine so she can effectively lead a double life without anyone noticing (although Danny is observant enough to pick up on her sudden tans, the way she looks as if she’s been running already when he invites her out on a jog and the Doctor mentions the fact she once had to eat two meals in a row). You feel for her as she just longs for a normal boyfriend whose more reliable than the Doctor, who can tether her to Earth the way she needs – though equally she can’t quite bring herself to give up on her adventures just yet. A lot of modern Who is about the tension between the extraordinary life you enter and the ordinary life you have to give up as a consequence and few stories do that as deftly as ‘The Caretaker’, where it’s the A-plot for a change, not relegated to a B-plot. However, there’s a problem at the heart of this love story which means we can never quite bring ourselves to invest in it the same way as the Doctor and Rose, or Amy and Rory: these two just aren’t right for each other. Danny’s someone sweet whose learnt the hard way to be tough and wants to unlearn it all, who needs someone patient and caring and solid to help him overcome his trauma he still carries around with him. His desperate pleas to Clara in this story to always tell him the truth are a direct result of what he’s been through: he’s seen how short and precious life is, he doesn’t have time to waste. Clara, for her side, is naturally brash and sassy, while her adventures have taught her the importance of being kind and deep down she doesn’t really need someone solid and dependable at all. She’s an adventurer, an explorer, she needs someone who can give her what the Doctor gives her, just in a more rooted, Earthbound type of a way. What she really needs is the Doctor in human form. She’s not right for Danny and he’s not right for her. You can already feel before this story, the sixth of the year, the tension between them and the way their different outlooks on life have caused all sorts of arguments and even if you can’t put your finger on why you just know this partnership would be doomed even if (spoilers) Danny hadn’t been converted into a Cybermen and killed in the final episode of the year. You know from the opening seconds that the Doctor and Rose ‘belong’ together even though something bad is always likely to tear them apart because theirs is a doomed kind of romance tat’s ominous from the start. You ‘know’ Amy and Rory belong together too by their shared chemistry and the way they bend their characters to be who the other needs them to be without sacrificing their core selves. In the same way you know that Danny and Clara are heading to the divorce courts within a year if they ever finally get together because their basic needs are so different that, in order to compromise, they would have to become two entirely different people to be with each other. Also, truth be told, while Jenna Coleman and Samuel Anderson are great individually, they have very little chemistry together (there's a much greater spark between Jenna and Peter Capaldi, which complicates matters about whether this is a ‘love triangle’ or not, though honestly its a relief the scripts don't go there with yet another Doctor-companion love tryst like other years). Never once do you feel Clara and Danny even like each other much, never mind love each other and without that the script rather falls apart. Which means the big emotional impact of this story and this series arc as a whole falls kind of flat. 

 Maybe the Doctor knows this, which is why he’s acting so out of character this story, sniping away and acting far more harshly to Danny than anyone in this series who hasn’t actually pointed a gun (or a crossbow) directly at him. You could argue that the Doctor is being an over-protective father not wanting to see his favourite daughter hurt on dates, but that seems oddly ‘human’ for the 12th regeneration in particular. Instead (and along with his similar reaction in ‘Robots of Sherwood’) he comes over as a hurt ex, which isn’t him at all (the 11th Doctor never had that kind of relationship with Clara, a few truly bizarre lines about her short skirts in private aside – it would make sense of this story if he had, given his assumption that she’d dating Adrian, the bow-tied tweed jacketed teacher in this story who very much resembles Matt Smith’s Doctor, tinged with the sadness that the 12th Doctor knows he is much older and less suitable for her in ‘Human’ terms, except that this Doctor doesn’t understand human aging at all and calls himself younger looking than Clara at one point in this story). That jealousy just doesn’t fit this character or his relationship with Clara, which is more like brother and sister than jealous passionate lovers – I think the writers were going for a ‘Green Death’ style ending here, where the 3rd Doctor leaves Jo’s engagement party looking forlorn, but that was more the Doctor’s sadness at losing his best friend – here it shouldn’t matter to the Doctor at all if she’s with Danny or not as long as she still steals away to fly with him in between lessons and dates. Even if you take it as just a personality clash, that seems a bit out too. The Doctor’s never attacked anyone for being a ‘soldier’ before. Sure he might not use guns himself except as a last resort, but he’s spent enough years around people who have to know that there are many many reason to become a soldier including some honourable (if misguided) ones. He’s also smart enough to pick up that Danny is not a natural soldier, that he’s embarrassed by all that he was asked to do and is trying to turn his life around: most Doctors would have identified with that and supported it. The only part in all of this complicated love triangle that rings true is that Danny recognises the Doctor as a ‘commander’, in the story’s best line stating that ‘I’m the one who carries you out the fire – but he’s the one who lights it’. He sees the Doctor as his opposite, a soldier whose pretending to be a caretaker (rather than a teacher who once pretended to be a soldier) and sees already that the Doctor is pushing Clara so far so fast that she’s doing what he used to do, obeying orders without question, and that one day she’ll end up like him, burnt out and guilty. The two men in Cara’s life might be at different sgaes in their adventuring, the Doctor having come through the worst of his survivor’s guilt and out to the other side, but basically they’re the same. And not ‘so similar their small differences rub each other up the wrong way’ like a regeneration story – they both want the same things, they both want Clara to be safe, they’ve both seen the darker side of life and want to flee it. The only difference is that one’s had enough of fighting now and the other still can’t stop their curiosity getting them into trouble. Honestly though I expected the end of the season to have them as best friends finding out they were the same and Danny travelling in the Tardis. Instead they never get past this mutual spikiness and the Doctor’s childish put-downs make him as unlikeable as this character’s ever been (well, since Sylvester McCoy pushing Ace to her limits in stories either side of the time they were at Coal Hill School and William Hartnell in the first story set there funnily enough; it must be something about this place that brings out the worst in people). 

 Even when he knows what’s really going Danny doesn’t react in quite the way you’d expect: companions like Ian, Seven and Sarah Jane took several stories before they quite believed they really were travelling in time and space, but Danny’s response is more on the lines of ‘aha – I knew you were keeping a secret form me!’ and never ‘wait – what?!’ Despite their extra screen time this week Clara and Danny both feel a little bit like cardboard cut-outs compared to their other appearances and while their stop-start relationship is clearly changed by the big revelation of what Clara’s been up to, it still feels as if it doesn’t fundamentally change much about their relationship from hereon in: Danny always knew Clara had a secret; from now on after he knows what it is he just changes it to suspect she’s broken her word and gone back to her travels instead (hint: she has). You can get away with that in a long running soap opera that needs to tell a lot of stories a week and can afford to study each character in turn, so it can hit a big reset button, but in a series that’s only on for thirteen weeks a year plus a Christmas special ending up in more or less the same place we began feels like a cheat, a filler episode before we get back to exploring people as they explore space again, rather than merely exploring people like lesser series. It feels this whole year as if we focus on Danny and Clara’s relationship woes way too long when there are so many other (admittedly more budget-draining) things to explore.

 Those major fundamental flaws aside, I still quite liked this story, which makes a lot of clever points about a life of time travel that few other Who stories have managed before. Gareth Roberts is the modern series’ most consistently funny writer, filling the hole of Robert Holmes and Douglas Adams from the ‘old’ series and while the Doctor let loose on a school isn’t quite as funny as the Doctor being let loose in a flat or a shop (as per Gareth’s other scripts ‘The Lodger’ and ‘Closing Time’) there are still lots of clever moments here. We haven’t had a school setting outside ‘School Reunion’ (and the Sarah Jane series of course) so the idea of this extraordinary world of the Doctors hitting the very mundane and repetitive world of schoolwork is a format that’s itching to be explored for the younger end of the family audience watching at home. While the Doctor will make a good and typically eccentric university lecturer later on, it makes sense he’s a caretaker here too: an outsider in a staffroom full of teachers who teach things out of books they don’t know firsthand while he gets his hands dirty and makes things work in the present (it’s the old Romana relationship all over again) while maintaining the safe running of an environment where people only ever notice when his job goes wrong is pretty much what he does anyway. I like the fan-pleasing fact that the Doctor finally takes the post up after talking about it in ‘Remembrance Of The Daleks’ too. Clara being helpless to prevent her two very different worlds colliding is also a clever theme: everyone has a ‘professional’ persona they use when at work or at school compared to being out with their friends. Anyone whose ever bumped into someone who knows you in one context in another, such as a friend at the school gates or at a works drinks party with plus ones or starting working in the same building with someone you went to school with, will recognise Clara’s angst here: will this person I love still like the ‘other’ me, or will they see it as a lie, a betrayal of who I am when I’m with them? This is made worse by the fact that truth is such a big thing with Danny whose gone to great lengths to admit his past to Clara including the parts he’s ashamed of and the fact the Doctor, while he changes faces and persona every few years, tends to be the same in every situation he’s in so doesn’t understand her predicament. One thing I wish this story had done though (and which was there in the draft script) is Clara’s frustration with the pair of them for trying to shape her into the person they want her to be, ending the original story cross and telling both of them that she doesn’t need their permission to be herself. Had they turned that aspect up front and centre and dropped the Doctor’s jealous comments and made him more of a concerned friend than a bitchy ex then this could have been a great episode rather than a merely good one. 

 There are a few other niggles this week too. Alas we don’t get to see much of Coal Hill itself, beyond a playground, a corridor and Clara’s classroom and after so many years of waiting it’s sad we don’t get at least a few flashbacks to how it used to be (‘Remembrance’ handled that nostalgia element much better). It does seem odd that a marauding alien would just happen to choose this of all schools to run around in (that sort of thing seems to happen an awful lot to this school - I'd love to see the Ofsted report. Oh and you'd think someone walking down the corridor would say 'I wonder if these strange events we keep hearing about is in any way related to what my mum told me about the two schoolteachers and the fifteen-year-old that just disappeared one day when she was at school - only for the teachers to turn up two years later with some daft story about this weird schoolgirl being left behind on an alien planet. No wonder my mum failed her O levels that year’. You'd think it would make the school newspaper at the very least. And yes I bet they have one: Clara’s exactly the sort of English teacher to push her pupils into making one). The only pupil we get to meet properly is Courtney and she’s a mighty strange character all round, as is the Doctor’s reaction to her. She introduces herself to him, not knowing he’s a time travelling alien with the fact she’s always called ‘disruptive influence’ at school. That should make her top of the Doctor’s ally list, but instead he shoos her away, only later changing his mind and revealing who he is and taking her for a spin in space because he has a ‘vacancy’, to which she’s promptly sick on the Tardis floor. It wasn’t so very long ago the Doctor kept the secret of who he was to himself at all times but here he’s actively breaking cover and interrupting Clara’s lessons to debate the accuracy of Jane Austen’s life from personal experience even though he knows it could undermine his job undercover at the school, never mind his friendship with Clara (and as much as he’s oblivious to her feelings most of the time as it is, he’s still practically begging her to travel with him in this story and doesn’t want her to quit for good). The fact that we’re in the setting of the first Dr Who story, when the 1st Doctor took off with Ian and Barbara aboard and risked their lives just in case they dared breath a word about what they saw to anybody, only rubs the point in more: when did the Doctor become such a blabbermouth? He doesn’t even warn Courtney about the consequences if she tells anyone. The schoolgirl’s response to time travel, meanwhile, is nonchalance even after seeing the Tardis interior. You’d expect it to be all over her facebook page at the very least (and yes absolutely she’s the sort of person to have one, at least in 2014 before everybody’s parent joined in and Nick Clegg took over and it stopped being the cool thing to do). Normally I’d dismiss this as a writer not quite getting children (a lot of adults don’t) but Gareth Roberts is one of the best child-friendly writers the series ever had: he’s particularly strong at the teenage fear of the ‘crossover’ into being adults, of responsibilities to others when you’re still learning to look after yourself and wanting to do your best to different and often conflicting people you feel loyalty to in his Sarah Jane stories, where the characters never seemed more real than when speaking his words. Courtney, though, doesn’t seem real at all (Susan wouldn’t stand out at all this lot are all so strange and un-childreny) and the school in general feels more like a dysfunctional half-memory of Grange Hill rather than an actual proper place (disappointing spin-off series ‘Class’, which it was hoped would cash in on this kind of setup, was nearly unwatchable because that feels even less like a ‘real’ school), although it’s nice to see Coal Hill as an actual establishment this time rather than just a place where Clara chats up teachers. 

 The scifi element very much takes a back seat this week too, the ordinary: extraordinary quota more balanced in favour of the former than arguably at any other time in the show’s history. The Skovox Blitzer, a cross between a gremlin a mountain bike and Robocop, feels like an afterthought put together out of all the spare bits in the Dr Who costume box they hadn’t used for a while. It doesn’t get much of a back story or a sense of motivation and it feels more as if it turned out the way it did because it looked as if it would make a good Dr Who toy as much as anything else (there was indeed a 4” model of it. Then again pretty much everything in the series up to 2014 had been a model, including the Abzorbaloff and a bust Cassandra. Even in the 1980s you could collect no less than two slightly differently dressed Bonnie Langfords!) Ironically for such an otherwise child-friendly story there’s very little of the sort of thing that would traditionally keep them watching, the monsters and the explosions (there’s only one of each, both interrupted by Danny suddenly walking in on the action and getting in the way without realising as Clara’s two worlds she’s kept separate for so long finally collide); by contrast wondering whether two teachers will get it on or not is hardly a priority of the under-12s market. Perhaps that’s just as well: this story marked the start of a move to a transmission time of 8.30pm following the start of that year’s ‘Strictly Come Dancing’ in the slot before it (a most bonkers series which always reminds me of the celestial Toymaker’s cursed ballerina toys who can’t stop dancing or stop smiling even though they’re clearly in pain), the latest Dr Who has ever been transmitted to date. 

 If all that sounds as of ‘The Caretaker’ is an unwatchable mess, it really isn’t. This is a particularly sharp and funny script with some great one-liners sprinkled throughout. It’s long overdue that Clara’s double life should catch up with her sometime and the scene of her, having run a mile from marauding aliens and looking for a quiet time at work only to be invited out for a jog by Danny and collapsing, exhausted on her sofa, is one of the show’s funniest. Peter Capaldi, despite coming to fame in shouty angry roles like ‘The Thick Of it’, is a lot more comfortable with comedy than he is with angst and gives one of his best performances. Jenna Coleman continues to be one of the unsung heroes of this era, pushing Clara into new areas as her traditionally unruffled up-for-anything persona a gets a real whallop this week. The scenes of the Doctor causing casual mayhem in a school setting and oblivious to the damage he’s causing are great fun. It’s the perfect setting for a different kind of a story though, one where the invading monsters are the focal point the way they were in Roberts’ all-round similar but superior ‘School Reunion’ and all the emotional stuff is a colour in the background, not an illuminated light in the foreground. You could argue that this is the sort of experiment Dr Who like all long running series needed to do as a change, but you're also glad we didn't get week in week out as, to be honest, one story feels more than enough – which makes it mildly disappointing Dr Who and a rotten soap opera (whose whole point is to make you care enough to reel you in for more episodes regularly). Besides, everything in this story becomes null and void in a few episodes’ time when (spoilers) Danny snuffs it anyway – and it’s a sign of how little this story managed to do its main job of making Danny a fully living breathing character that you don’t really feel you know him enough to care all that much at series’ end. Had this story appeared as a comic strip or a Big Finish audio or a Viewmaster collection of holo-photos then I’d be all over it as a nice bit of extra detail to add to what we already knew. But as a whole story in its own right it’s a bit empty and ‘The Caretaker’ is a story that feels a bit hurried, ironically enough as if more care needed to be taken over it. B- Could do better. See me after class. 

 POSITIVES + The Dr Who community has pretty much agreed to have collective amnesia regarding writer Gareth Roberts these days after some J K Rowling style commentary on the Trans community, a group who've traditionally had more of a safe space with Whovians than in most places in this troubled angry world (and even more so since this review’s first draft thanks to ‘The Star Beast’). You can see why this was his last role with the series given the outrage his comments caused and rightly so. There was a time though, in the days before Russell T got fully involved with DW, when Gareth was the single best writer we had with a number of excellent books in the 'New' and 'Missing' adventures series, so much so that I’d really hoped that he’d take over from Russell as showrunner over Steven Moffat. In his TV episodes too for me nobody had a better grasp of dialogue and comedy except Russell himself. This is the last and in many ways the least of Gareth’s five DW scripts but it still sparkles with witty dialogue, nuance and character with just enough action to keep things moving. Steven Moffat gets a co-credit too, presumably for all the re-writing needing to fit this into the Clara-Danny story arc. 

 NEGATIVES - The whole invisibility thing is annoying because it comes out of nowhere, merely to solve a plot point that isn’t strictly necessary. The Doctor uses it to go undercover – then runs around like a mad thing after the alien anyway in his usual style (and besides, he never stops to find out what it’s eye spectrum is: for all we know Blitzer can see the Doctor better when the light refracts off him using his fancy technology). Clara then uses invisibility because she wants Danny to hear that she’s ‘no different’ when she’s with the Doctor, only for this potentially interesting moment to be cut short by the Doctor realising Danny’s there and being snarky all over again, while Danny is smart enough to guess that the Doctor knows, a conversation they could have had much easier somewhere else. The only time the invisibility is really useful is when Danny rushes in to help Clara at the end, worrying that she was in danger, and frankly he could have done that by hiding behind a pillar. The Doctor’s never shown this ability to turn himself invisible before and never will again – it’s all a bit too ‘Harry Potter’ for a show sort-of vaguely based round science like Dr Who and we never do get a sensible comment on the science behind it all. Just think too how many other Dr Who plots would be solved episodes early and the millions of lives that would be better off if the Doctor really could make himself or his companions invisible at will.

 BEST QUOTE: ‘You’re a space woman. You said you were from Blackpool!’