New Who 5.11: The Lodger

[strange_complex]

The world which this story presented was very sweet. The Doctor out of his depth in the midst of normality is always good value, and I loved his incompetence with money, his description of Craig's kitchen-diner as a 'parlour', his cheek kisses, his guess that football is a game played with sticks, his emergency tea-making ("Reverse the enzyme decay! Excite the tannin molecules!"). Ten might have protested at the idea of Christmas dinner with Rose's mum - but actually, he fits in perfectly well once he accepts. We've seen him scoffing chips, drinking mugs of tea, sitting on a bus. Yes, he was alien when he needed to be - but he could be very human too. For all the time Eleven has spent on Earth this season, he has much less of that - and in that respect feels much closer to past Doctors (especially Four) than his most recent predecessor.

Injecting the Doctor into the story of Craig and Sophie worked nicely, too. I liked his obliviousness to Craig and Sophie's UST - even while picking up on the fact that she has two sets of keys for Craig's flat, one of which Craig has been fondling. And his needling of Sophie about why she doesn't just go off and see the orangutans; and the way he somehow does recognise, deep down, why neither of them really want to be anywhere other than suburban Colchester, with one another. It's interesting to note that the basic tension in their relationship is exactly the same as the one in Rory and Amy's. Craig is for booze + pizza + telly while Sophie is for crises and orang-u-tangs - except that really what both parties in both couples want most, and are failing to communicate, is each other. Maybe this is just a Moffatesque trope - people who paid more attention to Coupling than I ever did will have to let me know. But it feels in the current context like a microcosm of how Rory and Amy's storyline will pan out.

I thought at first that the story was going to be companion-lite, along the same lines as Ten's Midnight. It was a little lighter on Amy than most of the other episodes so far this season (perhaps excepting The Hungry Earth, where she gets captured early on), but it isn't properly 'lite' in the RTD sense of barely featuring one of the regular characters at all. Have we seen the last of this format, for either Doctor or companion? As far as single, stand-alone episodes go, it would appear so. But the BBC's synopsis for the last episode of the season suggests that Doctor-liteness will be an aspect of the finale.

I found the resolution pretty disappointing, though. Things started to go downhill for me at the point where the Doctor just conveyed everything Craig needed to know about him via a head-butt, rather than talking him round as he has done EVERY OTHER TIME he has needed to convince someone to go along with his plans FOR THE PAST 30 SEASONS. I don't want to be the annoying Old-School fan who insists that all continuity must be maintained at all costs - but when you literally have to jolt your plot along with a head-butt, you may have a problem.

As for the figure in the upstairs flat, it has been built up into something pretty scary by the time we climb the stairs with the Doctor. It was stopping the TARDIS from landing; it was causing hysteresis; it has something that looks awfully like a TARDIS of its own; it has a perception filter. There are some pretty big implications, there - what is this incredibly powerful being, and where has it come from? But as it turns out, we go from the shock realisation of OMG A TARDIS! right down to something vague about a crashed ship which can be defeated by a kiss in the space of about three minutes. I recognise that there is some possibility that we will find out more about this ship in the season finale, like who the original crew were and how they crashed. But in the context of this particular story, it felt weak and under-resolved.

Anyway, we have lots of Romans coming up next week! And the promise of resolution about River Song and the Time Crack - or at least the first half of a resolution, anyway. I'm pretty excited about that.

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Comments

[parrot-knight.livejournal.com]

At first I thought you'd typed "lots of Romanas" - yes, please...

I've not written my own response yet, but the head-butt reminded me of the 'contact' telepathic link between the Doctors in The Three Doctors - presumably the Doctor has to initiate this with unsympathetic humans physically. Or so my flaw-excusing brain decided.

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

I'm entirely sympathetic to your desire to excuse flaws, and I'm also happy enough with telepathy via physical contact - Moffat himself has done that before, of course, in Girl in the Fireplace. But there it's done because the Doctor needs to see what is inside Reinette's head, and it's also part of a growing intimacy between the two of them which is central to the story. Here, it felt very much like Gareth Roberts couldn't be bothered to come up with dialogue to get his characters where he wanted them to be, so he just head-butted straight through the problem instead. Definitely not a good thing.

[parrot-knight.livejournal.com]

I thought it was because the episode was running out of time, and needed to effect some urgency... but I do see your point, and to see the Doctor resorting to violence like this is uncomfortable.

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

Getting Craig on board could have been dealt with rapidly via other means, though - e.g. simply making him realise that Sophie was in danger upstairs earlier.

[surliminal.livejournal.com]

I thought it was just a (rather good) joke resting on the comparison the episode seemed to stress between Ten's relative urbanity/sophistication about everything from relationships to human pasttimes , and Eleven's near aspergism; Ten did a nice romantic Vulcan mind meld, Eleven does a Glasgow kiss. I thought in context it was great:-)

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

Ten did a nice romantic Vulcan mind meld, Eleven does a Glasgow kiss

Yes, I agree that the way in which it was executed fitted well with Eleven's character. But I would still have preferred not to see the script resorting to telepathy at all. The fact that it was done via a head-butt made the scripting short-circuit particularly obvious - but it was the fact that it was done at all, rather than the particular method, that really bothered me.

[rhube.livejournal.com]

I also felt it was a time issue (in fact, I felt the episode generally had time issues) and I wondered about telepathy, especially as the Doctor had been seen using it on the cat earlier. (And I quite like seeing Old Skool Doctor light telepathy powers, as opposed to RTD Messiah-like powers.) But even a sentence about how he's initiating telepathy the hard way, or... eh.