Closing Time: Ranking - 95

 Closing Time

(Series 6, Dr 11 with Amy and Rory, 24/9/2011, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Gareth Roberts, director: Steve Hughes) 

Rank: 95

In an emoji: 💓

  'Huh, you think you're good at games Celestial Toymaker, I once sold 879 toy airplanes at a toyshop in Colchester on my first day at work. Not to mention a Myrka rocking horse, a Slitheen farting cushion, a Captain Jack In A Box and a pink insect Zarbi-Barbie hybrid!'

‘Closing Time’ and its precursor ‘The Lodger’ are big success stories for the 11th Doctor era of the show, popular episodes that do things a bit differently by having the Doctor get roots on Earth in ways beyond having in-laws or being the scientific advisor to an army. However it’s a success story that, uniquely for the show till ‘The Star Beast’ came along in 2023, had already been a proven success in comic form. Dr Who Magazine, which had been running in some form since 1979 and still runs today, was regenerated alongside the new-look show in 2005 and found a whole new audience eager to learn about the series’ past. It is another of the unexpected unsung success stories of the Dr Who franchise, the first time that publishers Marvel decided to create a magazine to a single franchise at the peak of the Tom Baker years and a gamble many assumed would never pay off but it ended up the longest running monthly (first weekly) magazine dedicated to a TV series and by some margin. Even the cancellation of the show in 1989 barely hit the sales figures. One of the most popular long-running features of the magazine was a comic strip which for the most part was bonkers: freed of budget, continuity or indeed sense it features everything from the Doctor falling into a meta world where he talks in the styles of other comics (including Rupert The Bear) and where he has a whifferdill shapeshifter as a companion who happens to get stuck into the shape of a penguin. A lot of artists who became famous in other Marvel franchises cut their teeth here, on a series that Marvel knew had a passionate fanbase who would give anything a try: Alan Moore (‘V For Vendetta’ ‘The Ballad Of Halo Jones’ ‘Watchmen’), Dave Gibbons (‘Superman’ ‘2000AD’), Mike McMahon (‘Judge Dredd’ ‘The Last American’) and John Ridgeway (‘Hellblazer’). It got so that, for a time, a lot of people who were into comics but had no interest in Who (or had never heard of it, if they were American) were buying the magazine anyway just for the comic strip and who the next ‘breakout’ star might be. Russell T Davies, a longtime DWM subscriber himself, worked closely to breathe new life into the magazine when he took over the show and give the comic strip greater symmetry with the series than it had ever had in the 1980s (when – as a general rule - Tom and Colin Baker were both more traditional goody heroes, the plots revolved round Peter Davison’s Doctor rather than just dropping him in them, Sylvester McCoy’s Dr was re-written as a darker Batman type figure and Paul McGann’s Doctor got to do things way deeper and darker and deeper than anything in his one and only episode). Officially ‘The Star Beast’ is the first ‘adaptation’ of a comic strip in the series (the second ever one, back when men were men, Beeps were Meeps and the 4th Doctor travelled alone). However the first sort-of crossover was ‘The Lodger’, a Gareth Roberts comic strip that told what happened to the 10th Doctor when he was stranded on Earth and tried to ‘fit in’ with humanity, to mixed results, published in 2006. Mostly though he bothers Mickey by getting under his feet after his Tardis jumps a time track for a few days and he’s looking for Rose. The idea of the Doctor experiencing life at ‘our’ level, though, instead of us trying to cope at his, for a change, was revolutionary for the time and a whole new slant the series had never done before in any format. One fan was Steven Moffat who, five years later, asked Gareth to reprise it and no wonder: The 11th Dr was tailor-made for the format, being that bit more eccentric and childlike and impractical than his predecessor and that story was a big success too – so much so that it got this sequel featuring most of the same characters as last time. 

 Here, though, the mood is different in many ways. In some respects its darker: Moffat gave Roberts the last slot in the series before the Doctor goes to his ‘death’ at Lake Silencio (the overall story arc that’s been around since ‘The Impossible Astronaut’ months earlier) and told him to make it one last hurrah, the Doctor calling on an old friend (just like the 10th Doctor did when he knew he was dying in ‘The End Of Time’) that also ends up a summary of every other time the Doctor’s saved the Earth. In some respects though its lighter: the Doctor is no longer a stranger in town trying to act normal (and failing) but calling on a friend. Thanks to the Doctor’s interference last time Craig is now happily married with a baby, the sort of contented family man that other people are jealous of after a lifetime of watching other people get everything he wants and it’s a huge change considering its not been that long since we last saw him (though there’s no mention of Craig’s job in this story – and whether or not the Doctor got him the sack in the end after all). Instead it’s the Doctor who gets the job, picking up on fluctuating anomalies in the electricity in Colchester and a run on missing people that he pinpoints them to a department store where he goes undercover (and no sadly, given what’s about to happen, it isn’t Cyber(Top)Man’ or ‘River (Song)Island). Cue some of modern Who’s funniest scenes as the Doctor becomes either the best or worst shop assistant ever (depending how you think about it) flying model aeroplanes, telling his childish customers the prices are a bit too steep (though ‘your parents will only spend it on boring things like lamps and vegetables’) and generally making a mess. It’s an even better setting for Matt Smith’s madcap Doctor to be let loose in than Craig’s IT job last time out and all the best scenes in this story are the Doctor being basically a big kid, seeing the world through eyes that have long gone by the time most people become grown-up, the ordinariness of shopping turned extraordinary in this series’ hands. It works as a metaphor too: this is the Doctor, wondering around the planet he’s saved so many times realising he might not be able to save it in the future, telling us ‘I’m here to help’. 

 All the more surprise, then, that the shop element was the last thing to come together. Knowing that he needed to make the story different to last time Roberts wanted to set the story away from a house but in an everyday environment everyone knew. He first thought of a hospital but word came back that ‘The Curse Of The Black Spot’ had taken that setting already. Then a police station, but trying to make Craig get arrested too with it still being funny rather than sad was a tough ask. Then it was a supermarket, till executive producer Marcus Wilson pointed out that covering up all the brand names (which you’re not allowed to show on the commercially neutral BBC) was going to be an absolute nightmare. Briefly it was a market, till it was pointed out that outside filming could be erratic weather-wise. The shop idea stuck, though, so it ended up more of a toyshop by default, filmed for real in the Cardiff shop Howells (which has since been bought up and become a branch of House Of Fraser if you want to go location-spotting) at night when the shop was shut (over five days, the longest set of night shoots the series ever had, which left the team exhausted despite the sheer fun of the setting. James Corden, who became a dad for real just days after filming finished, used the time to pick up childcare tips off the people on the team who’d had babies and being teased for moaning about the lack of sleep during night shoots with the comment ‘just you wait till the baby arrives!’) even though the name of the store is the made-up ‘Sanderson and Grainger’ (Sanderson being a character in a book Roberts had just finished reading – he’s never actually said which but my guess is Luke Sanderson from Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Haunting Of Hill House’, a ghost story from 1959 which seems like exactly the sort of thing he would read, big on jumpscares and gags, and ‘Grainger’ from his favourite primary school teacher who encouraged his writing). In the first draft the disappearances happened in the dame areas in cycles every few years (much like ‘Knock Knock’),with mysterious graffiti arriving everywhere based around a ‘foundation stone’ laid in the market/supermarket/shop that turned out to be part of a Cyber spaceship where a lone scout from a mission to earth had crashed and was slowly replacing parts with human limbs whenever they wore out. The Cybermen had scouts of his own, cybermats explained away by the Doctor as ‘a promotion for Moon Chocolates’, a brand he made up on the spot, who were trying to track down more dormant Cybermen who happened to be underground. Craig became roped in when trying to buy a new buggy for his little one, having been ticked off royally by Sophie for being a cheap shoddy one off a man down the pub that fel apart and ‘not taking fatherhood’ seriously’. The story then ends, as all previous cyber stories seemed to do, with the Doctor using the humanity of the people converted to make the Cybermen explode, but only after Craig uses his football skills to kick the Cyberman’s head off and send it to the Doctor so he can do something clever and spacey with it. 

 Most of the final draft is better and more natural in every way (except the changed title: I so wish they’d kept ‘Three Cybermen And A Baby’, dropped when the Cybermen went from three to six, which would have been my favourite Dr Who story title ever!) The emphasis in this final version has been moved firmly away from the Cybermen (who don’t even get a line till 31 minutes in, just like the old days of the 1960s) and onto what it is to be Human. The action we get feels far more natural, growing organically from the Doctor calling on an old friend and just happening to notice the sort of anomalies no one else would (‘It’s the council digging something mucking around with the lights…isn’t it?’) The idea of the Cybermen having taken over a shop ‘feels’ right in a very Dr Whoy way though and is a neat mirror with ‘Rose’, the first Earth invasion of the modern series, given that this story is constantly shown to us as the potential ‘last fight’ of the Doctor’s life. Craig’s worries about whether he’ll be a good dad or not, replacing his worries about being a good boyfriend or not, seem a natural progression for the character and just as ‘The Lodger’ reflected the lives of many of the fans who had been children when they started watching the Who comeback in 2005, so this story follows that journey a little further. Craig is, once again, all of us: a little hopeless, watching people we think have got their act together and wondering how they do it while struggling to swim in big life changes and there are some nice bits of character before an ending (spoilers) that proves Craig’s love for his newborn is deep down there after all. While the ending, that the in-human unfeeling Cybermen were defeated with ‘pure love’ is incredibly tacky and one of the most saccharine scenes in all of Who, with too much sugar for even The Kandy Man (the only time Dr Who has ever done anything this cheesy was when umm, Jo defeated the Devil with love in ‘The Daemons’. OK, actually that one was worse), contrasting Craig’s bumbling but loving attempts at fatherhood, teaching his child how to cope with new things with the Cybermen (who clone their ‘children’ and take them through pain Cybermen and get given memory imprints to keep them up to date) makes this in that sense a very worthy Cyber story and gives the story a reason to have Craig front and centre rather than simply being an exercise in nostalgia trying to repeat a success story. As cold and callous as Craig fears he’s being to his offspring, the Cybermen show what being cold and callous is really like: Craig’s still trying his best, even if none of this parenthood part comes naturally to someone who still hasn’t learned how to look after themselves yet. Perhaps the cleverest line in the story: Craig wishing the baby had an ‘off-switch’ to turn its crying (and thus is its emotion) off before we see what that would really be like as a Cybermen looms on screen. 

 What doesn’t change is the ‘buddy’ relationship between Craig and the Doctor that makes a refreshing change from the darker stories of series 6, with Matt Smith just as funny as the straight-faced comic to James Corden’s giggling straight-man, back in the days when he was genuinely funny too (before he moved to Hollywood and started voicing psychopathic rabbits and egocentric Cats for a living and generally getting grumpier and grumpier if the stories about him from my American friends are anything to go by – in contrast I’ve never heard anyone who worked with the actor on Who have a bad word to say about him). This scenario of doing human things badly is born for this Doctor, whose so delightfully out of his depth and deeply weird even when he thinks he’s trying to act normal and Matt Smith is never funnier than in his trio of Earth-bound stories. I could happily watch him do this sort of thing all day in a spin-off show if the roles ever stop coming for Matt and Russell T needs ideas for his planned series of spin-off shows. As usual in a Roberts script there is some cracking dialogue too and barely a line is wasted the whole story: just a few particular classics include the classic ‘you’ve redecorated – I don’t like it!’ line from The Three/Five Doctors (wth the best punchline: Craig’s in an entirely new house), the Doctor being pleased at having his own name badge ‘so kind because they think I’ll forget my own name! Which sometimes does happen to be fair…’, commenting that the robo-Dog ‘isn’t as fun as I remember’ in reference to K9, Craig shushing the Doctr using his sonic screwdriver and making a noise (‘It’s sonic, it works by sound waves, the clue’s in the name!’) and the final joke that ‘even with time-travel it’s difficult getting glaziers on a Sunday’ (though two of my favourite gags were cut from the original script: the psychic paper giving the Doctor a CV that included working as a pa to Anne of Cleves and a lie that all babies have names like ‘Stormageddon’ with the Doctor commenting to Craig ‘You should eavesdrop on a nursery some time. It’s like a hell’s angel convention!’) Minute per minute this story makes me laugh more than almost any other Dr Who story, except perhaps ‘The Lodger’ or ‘The Power Of Three’, stories similar in every way. 

 What ‘Closing Time’ doesn’t have compared to those other two is a plot that flows as well – instead this one feels forced, even after the changes above. The fact that Craig and Sophie happen to have moved near yet another invasion of earth by chance seems a coincidence too far even for this series, as is the fact that – having already said goodbye to keep Craig and baby Alfie safe – they just happen to walk in on the Doctor in the very store he’s working at. Even more of a coincidence is that Amy and Rory walk in for a really unnecessary cameo, presumably there just so Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill can still get co-billing – what are they doing in Colchester? This rather odd scene, where the Doctor doesn’t even go to say hello, was added by Steven Moffat and you can tell: it just doesn’t fit and seems very clumsy, tugging at our emotions before the big fight’ in a very manipulative way. Not does the idea that Amy, whose already had quite the fairytale life, is a famous glamour model now selling a perfume (and in case you were wondering, yes the manufacturer name ‘Petrichor’ does have meaning as all these seemingly throwaway words do in Dr Who: in Latin it means ‘the smell of wet dust’, one of the ‘sensations’ which Amy used to telepathically connect with the Tardis and open its doors in ‘The Doctor’s Wife’. The slogan, meanwhile, calls her ‘The Girl Who Waited’, the story being made back to back with this one. Though what exactly is she waiting for? It’s perfume. Can she not get the bottle open or something?) 

 Moffat is also responsible for the equally odd closing scenes, where Craig randomly gives the Doctor a Stetson hat as a leaving present (because he said he’s going to America…But America’s a big place and only 1/50ths or so wear Stetson hats and then as a cliché – nobody does in real life) just so the Doctor can be wearing one in ‘The Impossible Astronaut’. Had they made this a plot point in the script I’d have been very pleased at the effort of continuity but the way it’s done on screen makes no sense (far better to have the Doctor stepping off on his journey ne last time to buy one from one of his beloved gift shops). The very closing scene, of the Doctor saying goodbye to three random children in the street (who remember him enough to be eyewitnesses decades later, rather than putting him down as a nutter and forgetting about him) doesn’t make much more sense, while the scenes of Madame Kovarian coming for River and putting her in a spacesuit, like a lot of the ‘final scene cutaways’ in series 6, just spoil the mood and would work better unseen. I mean, it’s not like River to have her guard down and she doesn’t fight back or look surprised. Moffat’s also responsible for the silliest aspect of this story, that the Doctor can now speak baby and little Alfie wishes to be known as ‘Stormageddon’ (a plot point Moffat had written into ‘A Good Man Goes To War’ which Roberts seized on to re-use here; it would have speeded the plot of ‘Delta and The Bannermen’ and ‘Remembrance Of The Daleks’ both up a bit if the 7th Doctor could do it too, to name just two stories). ‘Closing Time’ suffers, too, from the fact that Sophie is only there in the opening scenes, with Daisy Haggard a big part of why ‘The Lodger’ was such a success the first time round (she was busy headlining as the title character in the play ‘Becky Shaw’ in the West End – the little filming of her we did get was during a snatched weekend off, a sign of how much fun she’d had doing the first story given the trouble she went to). To some extent her role is replaced by Val, the good-natured shop assistant who knows all the gossip and is everyone’s friend, effortlessly natural in a way that the socially awkward Craig can only dream of. Lynda Baron is excellent casting and completes one of the longest ‘trios appearances in Dr Who that stretches back nearly fifty years (this was nearly her last telly; her first was singing ‘The Ballad Of The Last Chance Saloon’ in ‘The Gunfighters’ while she steals the show as pirate Queen Wrack in ‘Enlightenment’. Non-fans, of course, will know her better as Nurse Gladys Emmanuel from ‘Open All Hours’ – I’ve always presumed the rather odd title of this story, a last minute suggestion by Clayton Hickman, is a reference to that). Alas the story doesn’t use her nearly enough: she has two scenes giving exposition, an awkward with a gag about thinking Craig and the Doctor are a gay couple which never quote comes off, and that’s it. A waste of her considerable talents and comic timing really. To be honest none of the doom and gloom works in this story, especially now that we know (spoilers, not that you really need them) that the Doctor isn’t really going to his death at all and its all just another trick. None of these things ruin the story, but they do seem weird and out of kilter and prevent it being truly top tier Who or even as good as ‘The Lodger’ (the top 100 are all so good that on such fine margins are my rankings built).

Truly, too, we could have had more Cybermen. Series 6 is unique in modern Who standards in that it was built round a mystery involving new monsters rather than a finale featuring an old one. This is the only time all year we got to see a returning foe and shunting them up in an attic for half an hour doesn’t give them a chance to be at their scheming conniving best. In fact, in keeping with their other appearances in new-Who, where they’re the most badly served of all the returning monsters, The Cybermen get defeated almost as soon as we meet them – a far cry from the days of ‘The Tenth Planet’ and ‘The Invasion’ when they truly seemed unstoppable. Keeping the Doctor separate from them for so long also means three things – one, that the Doctor discovers the mystery and walks away early on to solve it later (which might well be the single most un-characteristic thing the 11th Doctor ever does); two that we never get the proper cyber-back story for why they ended up here at all (why are they lurking in a shop? That’s one of the plot strands that got lost from the first draft); three that for half a story we get the newly reconditioned cybermats as the main threat instead and compared to the threat the Cybermen possesses they’re not much at all really. The reconditioned cybermats, too, are on the silly side. I’m a big fan of the originals: they got Gerry Davis and Kit Pedler out of many a plothole when they needed a cliffhanger but didn’t want to unleash a full cyber threat just yet. Little robotic mites with teeth, they usually add a touch of the unknown to a scifi setting, the feeling that anything can happen – by contrast a toyshop on Earth is perhaps the one place in ‘our’ world they won’t seem stupidly out of place. Like the Cybermen they’ve been upgraded: makes sense given the way the Cybermen work, but like the Cybermen themselves the modern series has somehow made them worse, far more laughable than the creepy originals any 1960s model at least, maybe not so the 1970s or 1980s re-makes). They’ve been given actual teeth and red eyes and seem more animal than robot, perhaps inspired by Steven Moffat’s lifelong phobia with sharks, which takes them away from their original sleek metal design that worked so well 9especially when shot in black and white). There’s also not a lot for them to do: it just draws attention to the fact the Cybermen are around, which given that they’re a logical race they’d want to keep quiet and it doesn’t seem in character that they’d let them have the runaround just to stretch their wheels like little pets somehow. The scene of the Doctor and Craig being attacked and smashing Craig’s house up along the way is well staged and brings in action just as the story’s getting too talky though (even if it was prop suicide expecting an actor like Matt, notorious for breaking everything he touches, a cybermat to bash over the head with a frying pan: one of the reasons we never see them again in the series is that matt broke the model first time out and they never worked properly after repairs, while it cost too much to make a second!) Still Matt with cybermats, the most gangly and slapstick Doctor rolling around the floor with Dr Who’s silliest most slapstick creature: yes please! The detail of the Doctor calling it ‘bitey’ is also so bang-ojn for something this particular regeneration would do. Although I’m sad that they didn’t do the single most obvious thing and turn the cybermat into a real toy, maybe having people buy them in this shop (I so want one! Or three. Or fifty-seven…) 

 Don’t get me wrong though: these are little details that don’t quite work. For the most part this is a strong idea with enough differences to make doing a sequel worthwhile, with a writer at the top of his wise-cracking game and actors and a production team who are going the extra mile (and then some) to do this story justice. So many times across the making of this story they could have taken the easy route and relied on the goodwill that followed ‘The Lodger’ to cut corners, but instead we get night filming in an actual shop, more in an actual house (leant to the production team by a family in Cardiff who thought it would be a good exciting for their two children, which funnily enough happened to be in ‘Church Road’ just like future companion Ruby – why didn’t my parents ever do that?!), even the cyber conversion set is a good one (recycled from the cryogenic chamber in ‘A Christmas Carol’) a big action tour de force and lots of cracking dialogue. Some of the series 6 stories feel as if they’re going in slow motion, so keen are they to give you intense scares and cerebral ideas at the expense of action, but this one rattles along at top speed with jokes a plenty with a plot that hangs together just about well enough and a manner doesn’t take itself seriously enough for you to care about plot points. Not enough fans talk about just how funny a show Dr Who can be and along with ‘The Romans’ ‘Power Of Three’ ‘City Of Death’ ‘The Pirate Planet’ Shada’ and indeed ‘The Lodger’ this is Who at its funniest, a worthy sequel that repeats all the things ‘The Lodger’ got right but with enough new things to say and its only the slightly tacked on ending that stops it being just as good. Arguably the last time to date Dr Who was pure fun (despite the occasional forced scene of melancholy) and its the light touch you remember, far more than all the slightly forced references to the Doctor’s impending doom. Gloriously funny, well written and acted, its one of the strongest stories from Matt Smith’s patchy middle year and would have been a welcome last hurrah for the Doctor if, indeed, it had ever really been a last hurrah. 

 POSITIVES + That said, beneath the larks is a brave statement: a father’s struggle to bond with his newborn son. For once the ordinary thing of our world Dr Who turns extraordinary is having babies – with the twist that having babies is the most extraordinary thing a human can do. As timeless as this idea is (and it’s a surprise no one had tried anything similar earlier contrasting family life with the forever lonely Cybermen) it’s also the single most 2011 thing they could have done This is the era when dramas about new mums with post-natal depression were ‘in’, the same way that dramas about well-mannered conmen seem to be ‘in’ now: it really is remarkable how many TV channels all feel something in the air and commission something similar all at the same time without knowing what their rivals are up to. There were lots of shows on at the time about mums struggling to bond with their babies and feeling as if their usefulness was over once they’d gone from being pregnant to sharing parental responsibilities. I don’t remember any doing the same for fathers though (indeed, the closest is Dr Who comedian Toby Hadoke struggling to bond with his son – until the Dr Who revival gives them something to share – in the excellent stage show ‘Moths Ate My Dr Who Scarf’, though even that show is about father-son bonding at a much older age). ‘Closing Time’ is really kind of pioneering in that aspect and doesn’t get enough credit, for its a tricky thing to get right. After all, the script is keen to show that Craig is far from being distant or nasty from his child, he’s just clueless and a bit overwhelmed by how fast his life has changed, something made worse by how natural his wife is at being a mother (jealousy is Craig’s least endearing but most understandable trait). Even in a largely jokey episode this is Who breaking new ground in a serious territory and even if the ending, that being in danger suddenly makes Craig realise how much he cares for his baby and the lengths he’s prepared to go to in order to protect his son, seems unlikely it makes a satisfying end to Craig’s story without just being crass or sudden. Once again the Doctor makes the people around him be better simply by being around him and realising how much the danger he inadvertently puts them in makes them realise what they care about most. 

 NEGATIVES - The Cybermen’s latest scheme is particularly daft. A department store is not the most obvious place to launch a mass cyber-conversion of the human race. It’s not even Christmas, when they’re likely to be at their busiest. And if they needed energy for their spaceship then surely there are better places even in Colchester (plus I’m sure cyber technology could cobble up something that would take energy from the rift in Cardiff). This cyber army feels like a particularly ‘junior’ one, as if they’re only organising their first invasion, which would suit the story’s theme of dictator babies but does make them seem a bit of a pushover. I mean, they’re basically defeated by being tricked by the power of love, which ought to be rule one of the cyber ‘things to look out for when invading humans’ rulebook (let’s hope they got together with Azal from ‘The Daemons’ and talk through their issues about the ignominy of being a creature of hate defeated by something as puerile as love – and no that ending didn’t make much sense in 1971 when they tried it either). 

 BEST QUOTES: Craig on The Doctor: ‘I did exactly what you would have done – and I nearly got arrested!’ 

PREQUELS/SEQUELS 

:‘Up All Night’ is the last of five DVD extras from the series 6 DVD and blu-ray and is a prequel to this story (it’s the only one separate from the others, on disc five). Craig is horrified at being a new dad (‘Who allowed this? …What if I break it!...When I look into his eyes I see everything I’m going to do wrong for the next sixty years and it terrifies me!’) while Sophie is more practical (‘It’s his bath time’ ‘We literally did that yesterday!’) before reading up on mysterious disappearances in the local paper. A cute but short scene setter, it’s a welcome chance to see more Craig-Sophie banter before the Doctor turns up. Though credited to Steven Moffat on the episode itself it’s actually written by Tom McCrae (as confirmed by the DVD booklet); it’s not as subtle as Gareth Roberts’ writing but still funny and instantly recognisable to the growing number of new series Whovians who grew up in the Russell T Davies years who are now off and having mini-Whovians of their own. Previous ‘The God Complex’ next ‘The Wedding Of River Song’