Doctor Who: Series 8, Episode 6 – “The Caretaker” (2014)

 

This episode totally and completely did not work for me – honestly, if I were making a list of worst Who stories, this one would probably be on it.  It doubles down on everything that’s been bugging me this season, it acts like having to show all this boring adventures-in-time-and-space stuff is an irritating chore, and after a couple episodes that seem to get the Doctor pretty right, he’s insufferable and dickish here. 

 

There’s something non-terrestrial and deadly lurking near Coal Hill School, so the Doctor goes undercover to investigate, posing as the school’s temporary caretaker.  Since Clara has been running herself ragged trying to balance her TARDIS life with her home life (particularly the dating-Danny part of it,) everything builds to an inevitable head when her two very different worlds come face-to-face with another.  A tag-team effort by Moffat and Gareth Roberts, this should have been in a similar vein as Roberts’ “The Lodger” and “Closing Time,” a.k.a. the Craig episodes.  “The Doctor, undercover, integrates himself into a 21^st-century Earth setting and badly tries to pass himself off as a human” fits seamlessly with those stories, but “The Caretaker” has none of the charm, fun, or heart of those earlier Roberts venture.  In fact, it hardly seems to have any interest in showing the undercover Doctor-plot, preferring to focus on Clara’s horrified reaction to having the Doctor in her workplace, meeting Danny, and doing goodness-knows-what while she frets worries about Danny discovering the secret of her other life.

 

The only bits from the episode that I really enjoy are a few moments that do focus on the Doctor’s interactions at the school.  There’s an amusing scene of him trying to correct something Clara tells her class about Jane Austen, and he has a couple of nice scenes with a flippant-but-curious “problem” student.  Like with “Into the Dalek,” I’m inclined to give Roberts the credit for these – the rest of the episode feels like an utter waste of his talents.

 

It’s not that I’m looking to blame Moffat for the things I didn’t like.  It’s just that my problems with the episode are so Moffaty that I can’t picture anyone else having written them.  Here, we have haphazard plotting, character consistency sacrificed for the sake of pithy lines, the Doctor criticizing Clara’s appearance, and the same jokes repeated over and over.  The Doctor comes off particularly bad in this episode.  He’s rude and ineffectual, and his prejudice against soldiers (and apparent inability to even process the idea that a former soldier could teach math rather than PE) goes way overboard.  It’s bad, Ten-telling-Jack-he’s-“wrong”-in-“Utopia” bad.  I don’t understand how anyone could think this is a Doctor people would want to travel with.  It’s seriously makes me feel sorry for Peter Capaldi, to get every Whovian’s dream come true and actually get to be the Doctor, and then to be saddled with such sorry writing. 

 

I don’t need the Doctor to be romantic or adorkable or young-looking.  I don’t need the Doctor to be infallible.  I actually like the idea of a more abrasive Doctor who’s removed in an alien way.  But when I see him, there really should be a sense that he’s bigger, that he walks in eternity and protects worlds and still savors the wonders of the universe.  His companions should grow as people during their time with him, and watching this show should make me want to do something outlandish and marvelous.  I know PC can play that, and I’ve seen enough glimpses that I know the show can portray that with Twelve, but episodes like this make me feel like the series is actively fighting against it, and I don’t know why it’s squandering so much potential.