The Lodger: Ranking - 90

                                          The Lodger

(Series 5, Dr 11 with Amy, 12/6/2010, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Gareth Roberts, director: Catherine Morshead)

Rank: 90

      'Welcome to the Dr Who flatshare! I'm having a bit of problem with the Tardis at the moment - or should that be Tardii? - typical isn't it, that we got stranded at the same time in all thirteen incarnations. Dr 1 has just been sacked from his job as the department store Santa. He accidentally-on-purpose said one of the children looked like a Sensorite, while he's still having flashbacks about half-human people at the South Pole. Dr 2 has joined a travelling band where he gets to play the recorder all day. Dr 3 is the new presenter of 'Top Gear'. Dr 4 is working in a sweetshop. Dr 5 is playing cricket for the well-over-11s. Dr 6 is giving a poetry recital at the local library in between bouts of fishing. Nobody turned up. No fish either. Dr 7 wanted to play the spoons with Dr 2 but split after 'musical differences' (one o them’s musical, one of them’s, ah, different) and is now holed up in his room practicing chess. Dr 8 keeps hanging round the local hospital chatting up the nurses in between going to the opera. Dr 9 keeps looking at himself in the mirror and complaining about his ears. Dr 10 is alternating between going out on dates and endless existential crisis. Dr 12 tried to play guitar in Dr 2's band but got sacked (for very musical and lots of other differences) and is now sulking and tweezing his eyebrows in the bathroom. Dr 13 is working for The Samaritans, only she won't keep quiet for long enough for anyone else to speak. And me? Old Dr 11? I got sick of the lot of them and moved back in with Craig and Sophie. Then they got sick of me and moved in with the other Drs!  Geronimo…'   

‘

‘The Lodger’ would be unique in Dr Who if not for its close sequel ‘Closing Time’ as it’s the one story where instead of watching the extraordinary of his world hit our mere mortal Human one dead on and turn it upside down, instead he’s trapped in our world. It’s a hugely clever idea that the Russell T Davies idea had played with (including a mind-wiped 10^th Doctor in ‘Human Nature’, a Human 10^th Doctor left behind with Rose in ‘The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End’ and the 10^th Doctor facing life in the ‘slow lane’ in ‘The Girl In the Fireplace’) but which had never been fully exploited before: how would someone with the ability to travel across time and space cope when trapped in our world, living like us, for so long? It was a story inspired by a six year old (or thereabouts) Gareth Roberts sitting down to watch what was already his favourite programme (the 3^rd Doctor in his final days, when he was exiled to Earth but cocooned by UNIT) and wondering what would happen if this eccentric man had to wander into the shops to buy some milk. He’d probably do something silly, like get the amount wrong and buy a quadzillion pints, or pay with an intergalactic credit card by mistake (‘Quarkley’s Bank, dominating fiscal policy since the 374^th century!’), or ask if they had Skarasen or Myrka milk or something. After all, if even Earth politicians could - and did – lose their careers by looking out of touch when asked about the price of milk and not having a clue then what hope did an alien possibly have at doing something so simple and so Human? When Gareth grew up and became a Dr Who writer (yes, you can do both – sometimes) the thought still whirred at the back of his mind and inspired a fun one-off comic strip for Dr Who Magazine in 2006, with the Doctor stranded on Earth and became Mickey’s flatshare from hell: beating him at everything he held dear and accidentally messing up his lovelife.  The strip was a hugely popular one that had many fans but one of the biggest was Steven Moffat who emailed his friend to praise him, telling him ‘that’s so an episode, that would just be so brilliant, it’s funny, it’s charming, it’s heart-warming!’ (as much as people like to portray the Dr Who writers as being at each other’s throats all the time – the ending of ‘Twice Upon A Time’ is written to reflect that exactly – for the most part they really are like members of a football team, cheering on each other’s successes. Which is quite apt given this story…) Zoom forward to 2010 and Moffat is now showrunner with fourteen slots to fill (including the Christmas special) and he needs experienced Who writers with quirky ideas. And so it came to pass that, for sort-of only the second time, a Dr Who comic strip becomes a full TV story (after Gareth adopted his comic strip ‘A Groatsworth Of Wit’ sort-of for ‘The Shakespeare Code’ in 2007).

It’s an inspired idea that unites two of Dr Who’s biggest and most consistent themes, of the ordinary world of ours and the extraordinary universe of the Doctor’s hitting each other head on, while imploring the audience to make the most of their life instead of wasting it. The story has the Tardis undergoing yet another fault and leaving Amy stranded while the Doctor is stuck, trying to find the interference on Earth and tracing it to a London flat owned by Craig and his not-quite-girlfriend Sophie, the Doctor’s polar opposite in so many ways. Their cosy safe little world of 9-5 jobs pizza in front of the TV and repetition day to day is the antithesis of the Doctor and his adventures where nothing is the same one minute to the next. Craig is deliberately made to be the most average and ‘normal’ person in Who: he’s brave when he needs to be but is mostly scared of real life to the point of staying put and ignoring it; he’s not like say Rose who wants to see the universe, Martha who wants to  help save it, Donna who wants to shout at it or Adam who wanted to exploit it: he doesn’t even know it’s there and isn’t quite sure what to do with it when he finds out. he’s the sort of person who can only see in front of him as far as the weekend off doing normal things like playing footy and pizza delivery, oblivious to the world out there on Earth never mind the universe.  He’s just stumbling along, doing the best he can, not quite getting it together with Sophie because to speak his love out loud would be to do something brave and risk losing what little he has (she’s more ambitious than he is but it’s such a big step she can’t do it either). The Doctor, of course, loves throwing himself into danger and doing new things every five minutes: it’s boredom and routine that scare him. Craig is everything the Doctor isn’t: easily scared, decidedly un-curious, a homebody, set in his ways and content to drift through life, an over-thinker who thinks himself out of any trouble. The Doctor, of course, lives off trouble: he’s easily bored and happy to throw himself into certain destruction whole yelling ‘geronimo’ – Craig, by contrast, is more likely to shout ‘woah!’ Craig’s really jealous of this Doctor though who impresses people without even trying and does everything he secretly wants to do and doesn’t have the courage to, but better, particularly when the Dr goes to his workplace and puts in a shift on his behalf (surprisingly, he’s a big hit and all Craig’s work colleagues are his best mates in a matter of hours. Craig’s lucky it wasn’t Drs 6 or 12 or he’d surely have been sacked on the spot). Craig wants to be like the Doctor so much but is too afraid of being seen as weird, while the Doctor embraces weird. As happens in all the best Dr Who stories, though, just being around the Dr changes Craig’s personality and makes him ‘better’ – he gets the courage to ask out Sophie, the girl ‘friend’ whose secretly been dreaming of being more and ends the story heading out travelling to avoid ‘turning into his sofa’.

It’s like the odd couple, but in space as neither side understands the other and Craig gets resentful when the Doctor does what he always does and inspires Sophie to become the best version of herself, travelling and saving monkeys and yet there’s an underlying bond between them too: they’re both courageous kind tolerant people and by the second half you find yourself rooting for Craig lost in the Doctor’s world at the end as readily as you root for the Doctor trapped in ours. The best moments of the story by far are the Doctor trying to navigate our world and struggling, oblivious to Craig’s awkwardness, as he spices up his flat and boring omelettes with exotic food, rewires the electrics with a wave of his sonic screwdriver and creates a ginormous alien machines out of odds and ends in his bedroom. Usually in Dr Who it’s one thing that’s ordinary that’s turned extraordinary, be it plastic dummies coming to life, school dinners of chips or a simple screwdriver , but here it’s everything the Doctor touches, the story cleverly making us think about all the ordinary everyday things we do that we never think of and how daft our routines must seem to aliens. The juxtaposition of the alien plot (where the Doctor knows what’s going on but his new friend Craig is clueless) and the ordinary life plot (where Craig has been living this way all his life but the Doctor is clueless is the ultimate version of the idea that there is more to life than what we usually lead. The one thing in the series that always has to remain extraordinary is the Doctor himself and where the TV version of this story beats the comic strip version is that the 11^th Doctor is even more alien and eccentric and less able to fit in than the 10^th Doctor, while it’s fully in character that he’s totally oblivious to how odd he seems. The 11th Dr is the goofy kid of the Dr Whoniverse, the sort of child that’s such a fish out of water that you worry about how they can possibly cope in the real world as an adult and the episodes that exploit that (and better yet his sudden switches back into old man rage) rather than treating him as a Tennant clone who gets on with people (when they’re not shooting at him or his friends) are the best of his run. Matt Smith is never better than when given so much comedy to really get his teeth into and emphasise just how un-worldly the Doctor really is. Of all the Doctors in new-Who Matt is the one most comfortable with comedy (give or take Tennant’s pre-fame star turn in the superb ‘Taking Over The Asylum’ where he stole the show as a manic depressive DJ) and Matt’s Dr gets to do a lot of really funny things in this story, from misunderstandings to pure slapstick despite being better known pre-Who as a serious actor.

 By contrast James Corden as Craig was in 2011 at the peak of his fame as a comedian (I love the irony that they got one of the most recognisable faces of the time to play one of the most overtly ‘ordinary’ characters Who has ever had) but here gets to play Craig as the bewildered straightman, constantly exasperated and out of his depth. They make for a very funny pair of contrasts, never funnier than when the Doctor turns out to be intergalactic class at Craig’s speciality and that most ordinary of Earthly things, football, despite not really understanding it (one of his best lines is asking if ‘it’s the one with sticks’): a small plot point in the comic strip which becomes the crux of the story here and a happy coincidence given that all those shots of Matt playing brilliantly are real. For before he hurt his back in his late teens Matt Smith was a rising junior footballing star who had a genuine shot at the big time; he captained Leicester’s youth team for a while as well as playing for the junior teams at Northampton Town and Nottingham Forest. The idea of the Doctor being suddenly so effortlessly good at something as normal and human as football, oblivious to the shock of the Earthling wannabes around him (and showing up something Craig thinks he’s pretty good at), is so wrong that its somehow right and utterly in character for this Dr (it’s quite a mercy football doesn’t seem to have stretched to the rest of the universe, although it has and we just haven’t heard about it I’m putting money on Skaro FC to defeat Mondas United in a tense intergalactic cup final). By a fun coincidence ‘The Lodger’ went out right before a crucial football match in real life, when football fever was in the air: a 2010 FIFA world cup match of England versus America (which ended up a disappointing 1-1 draw. Then again there always seems to be a football match on telly somewhere in England every single flipping day). So, even in a format that’s incredibly elastic, ‘The Lodger’ turns out to be something unique: a scifi comedy based on ‘The Odd Couple’ involving sports. 

Most of all, though, in the world’s most elastic format, ‘The Lodger’ is Dr Who’s first romcom, where two shy lovers who’ve been stuck together for some time and got used to each other and muddling along suddenly realise how much they love each other due to circumstances, finally declaring their love in the denouement and living happily ever after (give or take Cybermen in the sequel). Like all ‘coms’ (sitcoms and romcoms) it’s about people being trapped and stuck in a place they hate and who feel unable to be themselves. Only, this being Dr Who, they’re literally trapped by the building they’re in (only Dr Who would ever make it about the evil building not the circumstance!) and can escape not by falling in love like most sitcoms (because Craig and Sophie are already, secretly) or by being ‘saved’ (like most scifi) but by realising that there’s more to life and saving themselves. This is all new: we hadn’t really had romance in the ‘classic’ series (unless you count Susan and David’s fish-slapping dance in ‘The Dalek Invasion Of Earth’). The stereotype of Dr Who fans, after all, is that they’re all loser nerds who can’t get girlfriends: not true(especially in the 21^st century when as many girls as boys love the series) but enough of a natural assumption to make archetype geek Rory end up with someone as sexy as Amy seem, well, a bit out of our league. How can the audience of Craigs watching at home possibly compare or be that brave at asking the Amys of our lives out? (or a couple of years earlier Donna asking boys out and hoping they don’t feed you to giant alien spiders if you’re of the other gender). This is also, after all, the peak era for ‘shipping’, a term usually reserved for American scifi series (it started with Star Trek) where fans write steamy erotic romantic fiction about the lead characters discovering their unspoken love for one another and getting it on. There are, after all, more Kirk/Spock stories out there than you might think (while if I read another story about Data getting feelings in his nether region bolts mine might close up for life). Dr Who was never immune, especially when the 8^th Doctor came along and his only character trait seemed to be kissing (although the scariest is the three/foursomes going on during the 5^th Doctor’s time in the Tardis – Adric, Nyssa and Tegan? Seriously? The only thing worse is, gulp, Nyssa, Tegan Turlough and Kamelion!) but it really took off during David Tennant’s run when the actor put the ‘sex’ into ‘Science Experiments’ and many fans got carried away writing more and more exotic scenarios (many of them ending with a panicked 10^th Doctor asking ‘what what whaaaaat?!?’ in the face of a mindprobe or similar). A lot of the more traditional Dr Who fans, who were brought up on John Nathan-Turner’s rule that ‘there should be no hanky-panky on the Tardis’ (despite then writing in the most revealing costumes for poor Nicola Bryant to wear), were shocked; ‘The lodger’ feels almost like a breath of normality, of how an awkward fumbling and very English sort of romance would really go (slowly, with backwards steps and lots of nights in eating pizza, in a way that couldn’t be less sexy).  

 

I wonder too if this story is a gentle spoof of the sort of thing Richard Curtis would normally write – yet didn’t, with his Dr Who episode ‘Vincent and the Doctor’ turning out to be far more serious than anyone quite expected (and almost a take on how Dr Who usually avoids dark subject matters like mental health and depression by being silly). Especially the ending, which is like all those ‘they suddenly realised they were in love after all’ moments, from ‘Four Weddings And A Funeral’ through to ‘Love Actually’, where the couple finally get it together (albeit in very weird scifi settings). Roberts, after all, would have known that Curtis was writing a script that year (the pre-publicity for series five was full of it) and ‘The Lodger’ was the last script of the season to be written after the first draft of ‘Vincent’ (after Neil Gaiman hit problems with ‘The Doctor’s Wife’, originally planned for the slot). As unlikely as it seems it kind of works too: we all know Craig and Sophie have the hots for each other and even to someone as oblivious as the Doctor it’s kind of obvious, but to make the next step they both have to be brave – and by naturally they aren’t. Another of the best storylines and one that’s surprisingly cutting for the series comes when Sophie talks about how 6 billion people out there are out there living ordinary lives and having babies while the Doctor stares and pointedly asks ‘watching you two I’m beginning to wonder where they all come from!’ The Doctor doesn’t do much match-making (he only ever really did it with his own grand-daughter and if anything gets in the way of other Tardis couples like Ian and Barbara, Ben and Polly or Amy and Rory) so that’s a nice twist on normal too, while you can’t get more ‘lovers trapped in a situation they can’t get out of’ than a house with an alien on the top floor who likes trapping people there’. A Dr Who romcom? That’s very definitely unique!

Look out, too, for the many in-jokes in this story such as the subtle references to ‘Vincent and the Doctor’ that ties into Curtis’ story and the pair’s shared themes of ordinary Humans who matter more than they realise: there’s proof that Van Gogh really does live on forever with an exhibit leaflet pinned to Craig and Sophie’s fridge and a rare Van Gogh print of a field of wheat in bloom (from a letter rather than a canvas painting) briefly seen on the wall in the Doctor’s room, something actually specified in Roberts’ script (alongside one for Jubilee Pizza, an in-joke from ‘Torchwood’ and the Big Finish audio story they kept nicking from, which now apparently has shops outside Wales). My favourite in-jokes though: The Doctor sings ‘La Donna E Mobile’ from Verdi’s Rigoletto’ in the shower, just as he did the only other time we saw him take one, in ‘Spearhead In Space’ – the first story that saw him exiled to Earth (perhaps soap works differently with timelords and he only needs to take one shower when exiled to our planet? This piece of music is not to be confused with ‘The Sontaron Stratagem’ featuring Donna’s mobile car; it actually means ‘women are fickle’. Which is actually the opposite message to this story). There’s also the case of the Doctor’s home made gadget involving cutlery and tea, just like the one in ‘The Time Monster’. After a brief change during the 3rd and 8^th Doctor years he also apparently hates alcohol: you can see him spitting wine back out into his glass (the 4^th Doctor was a similar teetotaller, while the 11^th Doctor will later complain how wine is a disappointment because he thought it would taste ‘more like wine gums’). The Doctor introduces himself to the Avatar as ‘Troy Tempest from International rescue’, confusing two Gerry Anderson series- the wonderful ‘Stingray’ and so-so ‘Thunderbirds’, with Dalek creator Terry Nation and first story editor David Whittaker having strong links with the series. The fake address for Craig’s flat (it’s actually on Westville Road, Cardiff, while the football match takes place in the nearby Victoria Park, already seen on Who in Dona’s fake life in ‘Silence In The Library/Forest Of the Dead’ and Sarah Jane Adventures’ episode ‘Mark Of The Beserker’) is ‘Aickman Road’ after the writer Robert Aickman, one of Roberts’ favourite, who wrote many supernatural ‘strange stories’ for science fiction magazines like this one. The 11^th Doctor also, rather sweetly, wears a football shirt with the number ‘11’ on the back!   

Ironically if there’s an area where ‘The Lodger’ messes up then it’s the genre it does every week, scifi. There just isn’t room for us to get to know Craig and Sophie well enough and have a carefully thought out alien invasion on top, with one of the sketchiest, least explained plots of all. It turns out that the upstairs of Craig’s house is really a damaged alien spaceship, with a being known as ‘The Avatar’ that’s been running on automatic and looking for suitable pilots, luring passers-by and then killing them when they’ve been rejected. While I like the symbolism (the ‘real’ monster is the feeling of doubt that keeps Craig and Sophie stuck in their lives) it’s badly underwritten on screen. We don’t know, at least during this story, what aliens created it or why – at the time the ‘perception filter’ it put round the house made it seem as if it was going to be linked to the crack in the wall that wiped people’s minds and had been running since the start of the year (when a similar thing happened in Amy’s house in ‘The Eleventh Hour’) but that’s not where the next story, the series finale ‘The Pandorica pens/The Big Bang’, went with it. The following year, series six, will give us a long-running arc with The Silence (starting with ‘The Impossible Astronaut’) and as it happens their technology recycles a lot from this story’s set, leading fans to assume that the Avatar spaceship is made by ‘The Silence’ too (remember them? Erm, except you don’t – that’s the point of them; after all, they’re exactly the sort of aliens who would use a perception filter): it’s as good a guess as any though never actually confirmed on-screen. It’s a sign, though, of what a rush-job the finale was: Roberts’ first draft has the unexpected return of the cactus from ‘Meglos’, only in female form (with the episode given the jokey working title ‘Mrs Meglos’ for a while), using the same ‘time corridors’ of the original 4^th Doctor story rather than a ‘perception filter’. The idea was dropped partly because Moffat wasn’t as keen on continuity references as his predecessor Russell had been and because it clashed a little too heavily with some other ideas used recently (like the prickly Vinvocci from ‘The End Of Time’ and the ‘disguised as OAPs’ element of ‘Amy’s Choice’). We’ve had obscurer monsters than that in Who before though (such as the Macra turning up in ‘Gridlock’) and writers trip over each other’s plotlines far more obviously than that (the parallel worlds of Davies’ ‘Turn Left’ and Moffat’s ‘Silence In The Library’ next to each other in series four) with nobody being terribly bothered. It’s a shame: while Meglos is far from the most rational and believable monster in Who history at least they have an easy enough back story (extinction by duplication) and a reason for attacking the Doctor and sending his Tardis haywire: The Avatar feels as if it’s never properly explained or rationalised and the ending raises so many questions that are never answered: Why does this ship need a pilot at all rather than running off a computer that’s clearly still working? What happened to the real pilot? What exactly is it looking for from the Humans it takes? Fair enough if it rejects the nearest, Craig, for being too ‘tied’ to one place so never bothers to lure him(though how does that work anyway in terms of the computer ‘s system?) but why has it never tried to lure Sophie before the big finale? How come it shows itself in mould (surely the ultimate – and silliest - example of the mundane becoming extraordinary in Dr Who!) And how come it’s defeated by something as dumb as ‘love’ (or at any rate Craig’s need to stay put by thinking of how much Sophie means to him). This is the one place where the similar sequel ‘Closing Time’ beats its predecessor as even if The Cybermen are also an afterthought that get very littler screentime at least we know their backstory – and if you can’t kill an emotionless cyborg with all removed feelings with love then what can you? The Avatar, though, is too sketched in for us to care. Then again, there’s no scene quite as hysterical as the toyshop one in ‘Closing Time’ so they almost cancel each other out, although the setup in ‘The Lodger’, of the Doctor thinking he’s successfully being ‘normal’, just pips it.

The other real downside is how much Amy is sidelined this week: the story might have been even funnier had Karen Gillan been coaching Matt Smith in how to be ‘human’ (let’s face it, Amy’s not your everyday mortal either) and there’s no real reason given for why the Doctor escapes the Tardis when she doesn’t. The story was written that way partly with an eye on giving Gillan a break, like the Russell T days when they were making more episodes a year than they could reasonably manage, but as it turned out the production schedule had been tweaked with the 2010 ‘year of specials’ that allowed everyone to catch up and so was completely unnecessary – it’s a shame she couldn’t have had some extra interaction with the main plot, even if it was sighing with Craig over how weird the Doctor can be. It slightly bothers me, too, that the Doctor seems unconcerned for the danger she’s in while he runs around being Human and playing footy: if he were on his own then his slow investigation would make sense but a companion’s in danger – it really shouldn’t take three days for him to work his way upstairs. I’m sad, too, that a planned scene, of the Doctor beating Craig’s high score in a pub quiz team, had to be dropped, especially as the Doctor starts off by chucking all sorts of alien names into the mix (it would have made one of Who’s funnier episodes funnier still). This story feels very much a product of its time too despite the timeless theme: there’s a particular look about this story, from the set to the costumes and look of the characters, that traps it to a particular point in time a year either side of 2011 (when a post-credit crunch slightly run down but making do cosmopolitan chic was all the vibe in Britain and everything looked like a Lidl own-brand version of ‘Friends’ without the glamour), while the story feels like a reply to the sort of rom-com ‘Will-they, won’t-they? Probably not’ trope that was big in 2011 and seemed to be in every drama, every comedy and every scifi show going. Which is no bad thing in and of itself (there are Dr Whos that scream ‘1967’ or ‘1976’ or even 2005 that are every bit as watchable), but this is a story that needs to feel contemporary to whenever you’re viewing it to make the most of it, as if the Tardis could materialise in your back garden tomorrow.

Even with all that, though, ‘The Lodger’ is an excellent story with a lot of clever witty lines and a strong message about how Humans, like spaceships, too often run on automatic pilot without quite realising what we’re doing. For me this series is at its best when it delivers a plot that the audience at home can relate to and which inspires us to make the most out of our lives, to get off our sofa and travel and help monkeys instead of living our lives the same way as before. It’s best as a character piece though, with easily Roberts’ strongest writing for the series and a very believable heterosexual romance between the characters (interesting in itself given that Roberts himself is gay and sadly more famous now in fan circles for being ‘our’ J K Rowling, a gay writer that makes comments that cause another minority group in the Trans community uncomfortable despite being on the receiving end of prejudice himself and knowing the harm it does in a ‘straight’ world; many wondered why he was even writing for ‘straight’ characters but then that’s writing for you: writers don’t have to write for characters who live the same lives as them or we’d never have timelords and Daleks at all). The everyman part of Craig could have fallen into the trap of being just an annoying list of clichés but there’s enough believability in the part to make Craig seem ‘real’. Comedian James Corden isn’t obvious casting (this isn’t the comedy part after all – that’s the Doctor’s) but against all the odds and expectations Corden turns in a really strong performance, a lovably flawed straightman to Smith’s whirling dervish comic (a surprise, given the rum unfunny things I’ve seen him in from Gavin and Stacey down – the only bigger shock I’ve had in Dr Who terms was finding out teen pop sensation Billie Piper could actually act). James and Matt got on really well in real life and their chemistry shines – the only thing funnier than this episode in the series five box set are the out-takes, when the pair should have been learning their lines but are too busy improvising their own episode (complete with Dr Who theme tune!) One of the reasons they bonded so quickly was their shared background: a similar age, they’d both got their big breaks in stage productions of ‘The History Boys’ (not as interesting as it sounds – its more schools than time travel and I thought it incredibly dull and over-written): Corden and Smith were playing the same roles either side of the Atlantic (Matt being mock outraged at being stuck in a lifeless hotel in Milton Keynes while his new friend was at the beach enjoying the sun between productions). This may well be the only time you find yourself cheering on the everyman (or James Corden), but you do - even with the unlikely ending. If anything Daisy Haggard is even better in her small part as Sophie, shortly before her ‘breakthrough’ role in the comedy ‘Episodes’, who secretly wants more out of life but is afraid of losing the little she has if she confesses her feelings and ambitions to her ‘friend’.  It’s also just dark enough to counteract the saccharine (a reason it’s not like your average Richard Curtis film): generally speaking we only see ‘average passer by’ characters in modern Who die because of some character flaw: their stupidity, ignorance, curiosity or the ease with which they’ve been manipulated. Here, though, we see two people die out of their kindness and willingness to put themselves out and step out of their comfort zone to help someone out: in some stories that might be too strong but it works in this one partly because the rest of the story is so light and fluffy and because it makes us sympathise with Craig and Sophie all the more: stepping out of your comfort zone and trusting your heart with someone else can be hard and can get you killed (at least symbolically). This episode could so easily have turned into a story that laughs at Craig and Sophie and the fact they haven’t been brave enough to speak out, but ‘The Lodger’ is too kind-hearted for that: it knows why Human beings are so naturally wary of one another, even people they love.

It’s also a relief to have people so ‘normal’ in Dr Who, who would do what we would do. As much as we at home watching want to be the Doctor we also know that compared to him we’re pretty rubbish and ordinary. Roberts is a writer who knows that and is both frustrated by and affectionate about that fact. After all , what with Russell T trying to make us better, Moffat (usually) trying to make us feel a bit thick and Chibnall lecturing us to do better it’s nice to find a pair of characters who are what we are (mostly): decent when given the chance but who mostly don’t understand that there even is a chance. As clever as the wordplay is, as brilliantly hysterical as Matt Smith’s clowning around is, as scary as the story is in parts, it’s that warm glow we get that makes this one special, of how you don’t have to be extraordinary to live an extraordinary life, you just need to be a tiny bit brave sometimes. This is the reason why Dr Who is so at odds with the current climate of superhot adventures (and why the one time it did do superhero adventures, with ‘The Return Of Dr Mysterioso’ , it went badly wrong): this is a universe where the ordinary is extraordinary and everyone has the potential to be a superhero (well, nearly) when the circumstances are right. Too much of the modern series gets lost in the mythology of Dr Who, of having him be an all conquering super being feared by the universe’s greatest armies, an ‘oncoming storm’ which knocks down everyone in his path but at its best this is a series of a flawed being trying to the best he can with the little extra his alien heritage gives him, inspiring other ordinary flawed beings to be great too. ‘The Lodger’ leaves you uplifted in a way that, say, other stories this year like ‘Vampires In Venice’ and ‘The Pandorica Opens’ never quite do. Because it’s happening to us, or people like us, that our small tiny lives matter and that we haven’t been left behind by the universe, we just feel that way because we’ve done it to ourselves. A worthy message in a story that just happens to be hysterically funny too. No ‘The Lodger’ is not the deepest episode of Dr Who, it’s not the sort to keep you up at night thinking about its main themes over and over and it’s not the most intelligent or likely plot the show’s ever had, but for all that the chance to see the Doctor out of his comfort zone and trapped in ours, even while he in turn takes our representative out of their comfort zone and makes them grow, is a charming notion excellently made that’s hard to resist. As Steven Moffat correctly predicted it is indeed brilliant, funny,  heartwarming and above all charming.

POSITIVES + If any writer of new Who could be said to have inherited Douglas Adams’ gifts for making the mundane hilarious then it was Gareth Roberts. It’s especially true of the witty wordplay: ‘Has anyone ever told you that you’re a bit weird?’ asks Craig The Doctor embracing it with ‘They never really stop’ is one of those Dr Who quotes that’s very dear to my heart. Not far behind is the Dr’s simple ‘what’s stopping you?’ whenever Craig or Sophie talk about their dreams and dismiss them with practical reasons they don’t really believe in is classic in its simplicity too as the pair don’t quite know what to say when things are put as bluntly as that – this is a Doctor who knows how precious and short human life is and who can’t understand their ideas of money and qualifications getting in the way. More gems come with the football match: the Doctor embarrasses Craig by French-kissing his hulky mates then answers the question about where he’s strongest with confusion (‘my arms’) before naming his position as ‘front, behind, sides’ and looking on with horror as Craig talks about ‘annihilating’ the other team by saying he doesn’t do violence (‘not today!’) To think that my fictional hero is as clueless about football as me! Most thoughtful joke: the Doctor’s comment that instead of the usual person letting rooms, he’s not a ‘young professional’ so much as ‘an ancient amateur’!

NEGATIVES - The spaceship that lives on the top floor of Craig’s house is perhaps a little too obviously CGId – not the worst candidate in Dr Who by any means but a minor problem for a story that till the end is almost completely devoid of special effects or ‘fakery’. It really stands out a mile as a model shot when it takes off at the end, leaving Craig’s house ‘ordinary’ again. Well, this was the ‘low budget money saver’ of the season – and it shows.

BEST QUOTE: Craig: ‘You’ve only been here for three days and they’ve been the weirdest three days of my life!’

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: As mentioned, ‘The Lodger’ is the first of only two Dr Who TV stories ever taken directly taken from the comic strips (the other being ‘The Star Beast’) and first appeared still called ‘The Lodger’, in the pages of Dr Who Magazine issue #368 (2006). Back then of course David Tennant was the Doctor (Tennant was a , well, tenant!) and he shares a flat not with Craig but with Mickey, hiding out in his flat after pressing a ‘wrong’ button on the Tardis that made it jump a time track of four days and leave him stranded in London. While waiting for it (and Rose) the Doctor pretends to be ‘normal’ for the day, much to Mickey’s exasperation. He’s not quite the fish out of water the 11^th Doctor is (the 10^th is less eccentric and more ‘human’ after all and happily fits in with Mickey’s life, outperforming him every step of the way) but he still causes lots of problems, such as Mickey mistaking the sonic screwdriver for his toothbrush (turns out that it can extract teeth – and luckily put them back in!) and the Doctor effortlessly beating Mickey’s high score on his favourite computer game without even trying (whilst simultaneously re-programming it to cut out the violence!) The comic has a very similar feel to the TV story, with many of the same gags and the same will-they won’t-they romance (Mickey trying to find a ‘Rose’ replacement in a girl named Gina – the Doctor splits them up at the end to save ‘inevitable heartbreak’), although the only parts that are lifted directly are the Doctor making a weird omelette and being really good at football although the tone is all comedy in the comic strip without being interspersed with serious bits as per TV. Oh and instead of a  crash-landed ship the Doctor defeats a fleet of Bandrigan spaceships without even leaving Mickey’s armchair. Like the episode itself Gareth Roberts’ strip is very funny and was immediately very popular with lots of fans, including showrunner Steven Moffat who remembered it once he took charge of the show. Included in the comic collection ‘The Betrothal Of Sontar’.

See also ‘Closing Time’, about as direct a sequel as any TV story in Dr Who as there has ever been.

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