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 21st-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.
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