TV Reviews - Doctor Who 0806: The Caretaker

It's Doctor Who night again, and this episode was really something special. Finally, finally, the Doctor meets Clara's boyfriend Danny Pink. I will admit that I wasn't really super excited to see this happen (I wanted to see it, but not, like, really badly or anything), I just wanted one of Moffat's new storylines to progress a little bit. Seeing as that's what I wanted out of this episode, I'd say I got what I wanted, though I'm on the fence as to whether or not that's a good thing.

This episode is another Moffat hybrid, this time with Gareth Roberts, a fantastic Who writer who has written some really good episodes such as The Shakespeare Code and The Unicorn and the Wasp, and some great episodes, like The Lodger, and Closing Time, as well as some really fun Who books and comics. And overall, this episode was really good. It felt pretty conventional in terms of an episode. Sort of like how the Cybermen were working out of the shop in Closing Time, this episode has a robotic creature this time in an abandoned building.

 

We start the episode with a montage of Clara running back and forth between her human life with teaching and Danny, and her life as a companion to the Doctor. She is overwhelmed, but she loves both lives so much that she is willing to deal, which really shows off a cool extra level of toughness to her character. Meanwhile the Doctor tells Clara one day that they are not going off on an adventure like they had planned, but instead he has something to take care of. He refuses to tell her what it is, and she presses. Despite his continued unwillingness to answer Clara's questions, he seems pretty confident that she will become involved anyway, even though he is going into "deep cover" somewhere on Earth, an idea which Clara finds funny. Eventually you realize that they have been teasing each other, which is pretty fun and gives some depth to their friendship. This new incarnation of the Doctor is often a little too serious, and though this scene was serious enough to make the audience wonder what is up, it still had a pretty lighthearted feel, and the dialogue and direction were really good.

 

So Clara leaves, only to learn the following day that the "deep cover" that the Doctor mentioned is nothing of the sort. It is within the staff at her school, and the Doctor is merely pretending to be the substitute caretaker (janitor/handyman) John Smith, who even "goes by" the Doctor. No wonder he expected Clara to find him out!

This is about when, chronologically, the robot, called a Skovox Blitzer, actually appears, killing a police officer. Meanwhile Clara confronts the Doctor about his presence at the school, and he explains that he detected the presence of the Blitzer: a machine so heavily armed that it could destroy the entire planet. He has a plan to displace it into the future a billion years, where it won't be able to harm anyone, but placing several specially calibrated devices all around the area, and then leading the Blitzer to the school at night, where no one will be around, where the devices will open a time vortex. That's why he's posting as the Caretaker: he needs to plant several of these devices in the school during the day, in plain sight, as his time is limited.

 

While in disguise, the Doctor meets Danny and learns that he is an ex-soldier. He takes issue with this and instantly dislikes Danny, obviously not making the connection between Danny and Orson from Listen. He misses the connection so badly that he even assumes that another teacher who resembles the eleventh Doctor is Clara's mysterious boyfriend. He tells Clara that he met her boyfriend and approves, and she is relieved. As she and Danny have a date scheduled, she leaves the Doctor to carry out his plan, which involves a kick butt invisibility watch and a lot of running and really poor aiming on the part of the Blitzer, which is really cool-looking for what ends up being a pretty generic excuse villain.

 

Danny, however, reschedules, and so Clara returns to the school to offer her help. Meanwhile Danny discovers one of the Doctor's devices and, remembering that the Doctor had one of the devices at the school, goes back to the school as well to confront him. We end up with all of the players in one place in time for Danny to see the monster and the vortex, to learn that the Doctor is more than he seems, and that Clara is connected to him. Meanwhile the Doctor to learns that soldier Danny is Clara's real boyfriend, that he moved one of the devices, which will push the Blitzer into the near future, rather than the far future, and for him to insult Danny just enough that Clara can be sure that he does, in fact, not approve. This kind of silly romantic comedy style misunderstanding/realization formula might be a little cliché, but it is handled well. Despite it being something that we have seen before in many other shows and movies, the scene is still shot well, exciting, and the dialogue, which is mostly the characters repeating exposition to each other, is interesting because of how the actors play off of one another.

 

There is more to the rest of the episode, but basically the Doctor has to come up with a new way to defeat the Blitzer when it returns, and Clara has to reassure Danny that there is nothing between herself and the Doctor, and even reveals that she loves Danny, which was actually a pretty cute reveal, as she doesn't mean to say it when she does, but it's obviously true. The Doctor isn't ready with his new plan when the Blitzer reappears, and Clara has to distract it. She and the Doctor are moments from failing, and the Earth is literally seconds from being blown to bits, when Danny shows up and buys them the time that they need. The Blitzer is shut down, and the day is saved. Danny reluctantly accepts that Clara loves going on adventures with the Doctor too much to stop, and the Doctor reluctantly admits that, soldier or not, Danny might be good enough for his friend. Oh, and a troublesome girl from Clara's class meets the Doctor and they strike up a friendship, which I think could have some fun consequences going forward, but I guess we'll see.

 

I really enjoyed this episode, with a minor exception that I will get to at the end of this thing. Anyway, between great sets, direction, a fantastic monster design, and actual progression of the overall Series 8 storyline, this episode was great. It was something special while still feeling like a regular Doctor Who adventure, which is something that most Moffat scripts tend not to be anymore lately. It's almost as if Moffat is always trying to outdo himself, with bigger action shots, more shocking moments, bigger reveals, and more memorable wham lines, and even more vague plot threads and hints than ever before! I appreciate this, I really do, but it's too much. This episode furthered things without going overboard, and I think it was much better for it.

 

Of all of the aspects of this episode, I feel that the dialogue is what was the best and stood out the most. It could be really fun and funny in a witty and subtle way, really telling in a subtle way, or both at the same time, and it wasn't overly bogged down with technobabble. It said what it needed to and moved on, while still managing to be fun and entertaining, and to sound natural. Not once did the dialogue in this episode feel as if it was there just to tell a story, to get you from A to B. It all felt real, especially in terms of the reactions of the three key characters, the Doctor, Clara and Danny, to each other in various situations. This episode wasn't blow your socks off amazing or anything, but it was certainly very good, and I hope we get more scripts from Mr. Roberts going forward, hopefully more often than we have in the past. However there was one scene at the end that I just didn't like.

 

Almost out of nowhere, at the very end of the episode, we suddenly see the officer who was killed by the Blitzer early in the episode sitting in a white room, talking to a man. After a moment or so we learn that the officer is dead, and that this man is taking down information on how the officer died before sending him on to his choice of one of several afterlives. Then we see Missy enter the room, looking like she's very busy, though she doesn't seem interested in the dead officer. And that's it. Just that. Don't get me wrong, this Missy subplot is a puzzle, and every scene with her is a new piece to add to the pile, but what was this episode supposed to tell us? Is there now a physical afterlife in the Whoniverse? Is Missy really a caretaker of one of these afterlives, hinting that there is a double meaning to the episode's title? If this is the case, I honestly don't know how I'm going to feel about this subplot in the end. The scene made practically no sense, barely fit into the episode, and didn't fit at all into the story of the episode, and simply served to break the flow of what was already a really good ending to a really good forty minutes of TV. It brought the episode down enough that I give it a lower than otherwise score of 7 out of 10.

 

What did you think of the episode? Did you like the Missy scene at the end? Did you catch something in it that I missed that might make me change my mind? Let me know in the comments, and come back next week for another review.