Doctor Who: The Lodger
This isn't the first incarnation of The Lodger - like Blink, Dalek and Human Nature/The Family of Blood (amongst others) it started out in a different format. Yes, once upon a time, The Lodger was a comic strip for the Doctor Who Magazine.
And it's worth pausing for a moment and looking at how this particular episode is different to the comic strip version. But first I'm going to make an assumption here - I reckon that many of the people reading this post won't remember (or even know of the existence of) a Doctor Who Magazine comic strip dating back to (if memory serves) Christmas 2005. So let me fill you in - the new Tenth Doctor (remember when David Tennant was new? My, how time has flown) gets separated from Rose and the TARDIS on Earth and ends up having to stay with Mickey Smith. The then new Doctor proves to be far more sociable than his predecessor - much to Mickey's annoyance, since this makes him even more attractive to Rose. Oh, and while he's staying with Mickey, the Doctor effortlessly saves the world. It's a slight story with clear similarities to the episode tonight. But there is one key difference - the character of the Doctor. The strip is set up to stress just how much more human the Tenth Doctor is than the Ninth Doctor, whereas the episode tonight is based on the idea of how detached the Eleventh Doctor is from normality, and therefore how awkwardly he comes across. As a result, the TV version of The Lodger is far funnier and far more entertaining than it's predecessor.
And I think it is time to come straight out and say it - the Eleventh Doctor is a far more successful creation and a far more successful Doctor (thus far) than the Tenth one.
That isn't too say that Matt Smith is a better actor than Tennant - I think history will show that Tennant is a versatile actor who can take on many different roles successfully while I fear that Smith will only truly be successful in quirky roles, like that of the Doctor. But no, this isn't based on the abilities of the actors - it's about how the characters of their Doctors are set up. The Tenth Doctor was very human in many ways - he liked being with humans, he could fall in love with them, he showed off to and sort the adulation of humans: he was one of the most human Doctors we've ever had. By contrast, the Eleventh Doctor is thinking about a million different things at once, and human beings are only one of them. He doesn't need or seek traditional friendship or human relationships. Even with his companion he still seems slightly disinterested - as evidenced by the fact he calls her Pond. The Eleventh Doctor is alien, and that makes his character more unpredictable and alien.
And this story could only really work with the Eleventh Doctor. The laugh out loud moments - such as the air-kissing, the massively over-the-top reaction to someone talking about "annihilating" another team at football, the wonderful rudeness to customers on the phone - wouldn't have worked with the Tenth Doctor. He'd have been match-making the two character who were clearly in love, he'd have excelled in the call centre, and he would have run around like a puppy seeking adoration.
But this episode worked not just because of the Eleventh Doctor, but because it managed to be spooky, funny and sweet all at the same time. The voice on the intercom and the doorway shrouded in darkness were all pure Steven Moffat - but unlike other attempts to replicate chief writer, the Gareth Roberts, author of tonight's episode, got it so right since his script - like the best work of his boss - was more than just quirky scares. There were realistic characters and a proper, rewarding story to this episode. What could have been a slight, quirky bit of filling before the two part season end instead stood up as a memorable, clever and rewarding episode in its own right. We've come a long way from Fear Her.
Barring the slip that was the Silurian return in The Hungry Earth and Cold Blood, we've been treated to an excellent season of Doctor Who. It has probably been the most consistently good series of stories since the show came back in 2005 - and that is no mean feat. Let's just hope that they can make the season finale live up to what has gone before. Because if they manage to pull it off, this will have been one of the best Doctor Who seasons in history. And given the show has been around for nearly fifty years, that would be really saying something...
Labels: Doctor Who, Reviews, TV
posted by The Nameless Libertarian @ 7:45 pm
8 Comments
8 Comments:
Hey you, get out of my head.
I was going to post on this episode and say exactly the same things except it would have been; shorter, less erudite and with perhaps some swearing.
I liked Tennant, they were fun , but it was only towards the end that he became my idea of The Doctor
Matt Smith and the writers seem to have the idea right, he is alien, he's 927 years old (personal time) subjective time, who knows ( all that back and forth through time, and reincarnations, who could keep track) Which lead to the gag about learning cooking in the 18th century and then trying to catch up on when he was.
I've said it before, but I think Matt Smith and this series may be the definitive Doctor for this new imagining (I'm still rooting for Chris E, but Matt is edging him)
P.S I know it's slap stick but the memory transfer via 'head butt' was pretty funny.
I’m genuinely puzzled by the reaction to this episode – so much so that I just watched it again in case I was missing something and doing it a disservice. But no, it was as bad as my first viewing… This series seems to be splitting fans right down the middle: normally I’d think that was a good thing. I like something with an edge. But unfortunately (for me) I’m on the side of those who are finding it mediocre at best, and I’m not enjoying that.
What I can’t fathom is why anyone would give this dire episode a thumbs-up. The only thing I gained from a repeat viewing was a greater awareness of the gaping plot-holes. To my mind, it was the worst episode so far.
Let’s see. The doctor moves in to a house with something horrible upstairs. The upstairs horribleness proceeds to murder people on a regular basis, a fact which the doctor ignores. Call me old-fashioned, but the humanitarian doctor I thought I knew – the doctor presented elsewhere in this series – would have been upstairs like a shot, saving lives even at the risk of his own. However, had he done so the episode would only have lasted five minutes: so in preference (and for no apparent reason) he plays football, takes a bath, annoys the residents, works in a call-centre and generally behaves in a comedic manner. It’s only when an actress with a major speaking role and who comprises half of the soppy sub-plot is finally threatened that he ceases behaving like an idiot, mysteriously turns into an immediate man of action, and saves the day in two minutes flat. The comparisons with ‘Fear Her’ (which I’d agree was a pretty bad episode) are apposite in a number of ways, but at least in that case the doctor’s character was consistent and the episode, although very average, made sense. This was simply baffling. Well, perhaps not baffling; perhaps just appalling writing.
Apart from being plainly ludicrous, there are two huge underlying problems with all of this. When Doctor Who starts to be primarily a comedy – and this episode was – there’s something very, very wrong. To be fair it was genuinely funny at times, a terribly well acted. I laughed. But then again I also laughed at some episodes of ‘Coupling’, which ‘The Lodger’ resembled much more closely than an episode of Doctor Who. Worse, the doctor’s ‘amusing’ behaviour was wholly irrelevant – except simply in order to try to be amusing. The events of this episode were not driven by the demands of logical plot-development, but rather by the writer’s desire to present a series of quirky comedic events. Any kind of logic came a very poor second. This was a thin idea padded out with ‘being funny’. This is also symptomatic of some of the worst episodes during the decline of the Classic series, a fact which I for one find very worrying for the future.
Sorry to be so negative about this episode (really, I am!) but I really think that this one was a new low. Hmmm, well at least this comment might stimulate some debate…! :D
Jim,
I'd have to say that I don't agree with your episode summary at all - to the extent where it almost looks as if we saw completely different things. The episode I saw involved:
The Doctor being trapped outside of the TARDIS, and then being sent to an address by a card in a shop window from Amy. There, he realises something very bad is going on, but he doesn't know exactly what (and we don't know that the thing upstairs is killing people for certain until right at the end of the episode). He also knows that the thing upstairs is so powerful that it can disrupt the TARDIS and therefore could kill him easily (and in doing so banish Amy into the vortex for all eternity). Therefore, he carries out a careful investigation but in order to do so, he needs to pretend to be human (hence the bathing/footballing etc). During his time in the flat, he also realises that his flatmate is in love with his work colleague. At the story's climax, the Doctor and his friend do burst into the flat to save his love - but, crucially, it isn't the Doctor who saves the day. He can't. It is only when the Doctor persuades Craig to close down the machine by giving it instructions to stay put (something the Doctor would not have been able to do had he not stayed in the flat and observe him) that the situation is resolved.
Which is very different to the plot summary you've given in your comment. I personally thought this episode was clever, well plotted, well written (the two are different things) and funny.
I'd agree that at times the comedy within Doctor Who can become too much, and I too prefer it when it has an edge. However, it is being broadcast on prime-time TV to a general audience of dedicated fans, committed followers and casual viewers. Therefore, it has to make compromises to all three. Hence the need to have stories that are sometimes light in tone, and unashamedly populist in the way they tell their stories.
And to dismiss this episode as a comedy is to miss the point that there were some very creepy moments in it. The voice on the intercom, the flashing light in the hall and the shadowy figure at the top of the stairs - all this is great stuff, and what the series (both old and new) has done at its best. So even among the amusing scenes of the Doctor trying to be human, we have dark scenes that are unsettling for most, and probably very scary for children. Compare this story with a Tom Baker story like The Horns of Nimon. They both have scenes that are played for laughs, but only The Lodger has scenes that are also creepy. And this was a "comedy" with a shot of a burnt out corpse on the floor. Coupling it ain't,
The new season has been a triumph for me since I believe the new production team has managed to wed the popular elements of the RTD era with the more popular elements of the old series. It has also been far more consistent in quality (barring the Silurian episodes, but even they had good moments) than the show has since the Fourth Doctor travelled with Sarah Jane Smith. Don't get me wrong, I could dissect each episode and point out bits that I don't like, but I also know that the series isn't tailored just for me - it is meant to be watched and to entertain millions of others. And the fact it does so is a triumph and a tribute to all those involved.
TNL
I enjoyed this episode a lot. I do see the point that Jim makes, however, though, I thought that the 'flaws' he mentions were deliberate. Ie; we don't know what's upstairs. The Dr does not know what's upstairs. The TARDIS and Amy are unable to help. The Dr knows that whatever is upstairs is affecting the TARDIS and therefore is dangerous to them all. No explanations are offered because there are none until the end.
Hmmm, it’s an interesting debate: I can see what you’re saying and I suspect that a lot of it might well boil down to simply what works for the individual viewer – for instance, what you’re seeing as creepy I’m tending to see (rightly or wrongly) as bordering on cliché, and in this episode, crucially, if one’s not feeling the creepy stuff, pretty much all that’s left is the comedy.
I’d agree that this has been a very consistent series, but where we differ is whether the quality has been consistently high or not. Maybe that’s again a question of personal taste, at least for the most part? If I look back over Tennant’s final series, it was very patchy with several serious duds, but I can count six episodes that for me were really excellent. So far with Series 5 I’m only counting two excellent episodes, but also a slightly lower out-and-out dud-count. To my mind it’s therefore been serviceable but mediocre (though to be fair we might be in for an excellent big finish which would take the average up a bit!). I’m missing the satisfying high-points.
About ‘The Lodger’ itself, if I try to leave personal taste aside, I take quite a lot of the points you’ve made (especially about the breadth of audience that Doctor Who has to serve) but I still maintain that, seen objectively, this particular episode featured a plot which was made to serve the script’s comedic intentions, rather than vice versa. That shouldn’t happen in any kind of drama, children’s or otherwise, and that’s why I’m seeing it as bad writing. I’ve no problem with light-hearted episodes per se, or delightful throwaways, as long as they’re well-written. I, ahem, really enjoyed ‘Love And Monsters’, even through it was a total throwaway and not exactly redolent with serious creepy threat. Hmmm, I’m not sure I should have admitted that… ;-) This one however – as I’m sure you can tell! – got thoroughly up my nose.
If I make the comparison with Troughton (as many others have, and probably rightly) I’m delighted to see Matt Smith infusing the doctor with his influence. Nice to see the alien genius back again rather than Tennant’s uber-human. However, the line between ‘eccentric genius’ and ‘rather silly man’ is a very fine one: Troughton was frequently hilarious, but at all times one was aware of his genius, which is a tribute to both his own acting ability and to the scripting. Matt Smith is, I suspect, a talented enough actor to pull this off, and still deserves more time to thoroughly bed into the part, but I have a slight worry that some of the scripting has a tendency to lose the genius and move into the merely silly. There was more than a touch of that in ‘The Lodger’, I felt. This was where my comparison with the decline of the classic series came from – too much there became self-consciously silly and illogical, and I felt that this episode had crossed that line.
Jim,
Inevitably it is a lot down to personal taste how you - or anyone - views this series or this episode in particular. One of the great things about Doctor Who is that someone can find, it in its long history, something to enjoy - and that they can be guaranteed that someone else did not enjoy it at all. I speak from experience here - I am a massive fan of Sylvester McCoy's final season, and not a lot of people would stand with me on that one!
I find it interesting that you mention Love and Monsters - it's a show I have developed a sneaking fondness for, and have recently watched again. I think that The Lodger is actually a lot like Love and Monsters but with a real sense of an unsettling threat that offsets the humour rather than a fat comedy monster.
Also, I'd agree with your comments about Smith and Troughton - the bow-tie is Smith's nod to Troughton, and word has it that he is a massive fan (and deservedly so) of Tomb of the Cybermen. But for me, Smith is probably closest to Tom Baker - he has the aura of weird, alien and utterly inhuman at times - but if he is given too much comedy he will play up to that. And that is the challenge facing Moffat and the production team for Smith's second season and onwards. Challenge Smith, and I believe that he will produce some of the best performances as the Doctor we have ever seen. However, if he is just allowed to be a little bit OTT, then he will reproduce the worst excesses of Tennant and both the Bakers.
TNL
Interesting that you mention Sylvester McCoy’s final season – funnily enough I was thinking about watching it again the other day. Maybe I will. By that stage I’d basically given up completely, so perhaps it’d due a fair-minded re-assessment on my telly – you’re certainly not alone in suggesting that McCoy had vastly improved and that he was cut off just as he came into his prime.
I’d totally agree about the potential of Smith’s doctor – that is, perhaps, the underlying problem that I’m personally having with this season? For me there’s a sense that it could be great, but for some reason it’s falling short, and very rarely scaling the heights that at could achieve. It’s as if they’ve mixed an excellent soufflé but for reasons unknown it’s failing to rise properly, just when you think it ought to some out of the oven perfect.
Apart from my ongoing gripe about some of the writing being clunky (for instance I still think that the crack feels unsubtly ‘tacked on’ in many episodes, and in a Moffatt-controlled world that surprises me because it’s not too difficult to avoid), I wonder if it miiiiiight be that the characterisation hasn’t yet settled properly? To the Troughton/Baker mix which you observed, I might well add a dash of Hartnell, who’s been face-checked a lot in this season. Hartnell had an edge of danger (one remembers him picking up a rock intending to quietly dispose of an inconvenient caveman in 100,000BC). Thinking about it (and I’m only speculating here) it’s possible that the character-mix is, as yet, a little unstable: there seem to be elements of extreme humanitarian, strange ‘otherworld’ alien and perhaps some Hartnell-esque detachment going on in there. That would be a difficult mix to pull off – an interesting mix, and not impossible if it was well enough written, but unless the writing gets it bang on it runs the risk of seeming oddly inconsistent. Perhaps a little inter-season streamlining is in order?
For myself, I’ve always thought that the doctor, having seen so much, surely has to be darkly aware of the ‘bigger picture’ and that such an awareness ought to make his actions quite detached (and ‘alien’) when necessary. Assuming here (just for the sake of argument) that the doctor did know that people were being lured to their deaths upstairs in ‘The Lodger’ (after all, this is a doctor who notices everything, as we know from The Eleventh Hour) I can easily imagine Hartnell regretting that he couldn’t yet intervene, but recognising that he had to wait and gather more information before taking action himself. He’d see the bigger picture, be quite explicit about that, and crucially, I don’t think his conscience would have bothered him very much. By contrast, Tennant’s über-humanitarian would have been up the stairs in three seconds, recklessly risking everything else to save one human life (although perhaps confident that RTD would produce another suitable deus-ex-machina just in time, but that’s another issue, ahem). Both are viable characters: personally I’d prefer the former, although in the context of a war-bruised doctor regaining his humanity after the time war, Tennant’s doctor makes sense. Hmmm, at the moment, I wonder if Smith’s doctor is perhaps currently written as to send out both signals? As I say, I’m speculating and just throwing the thought out there – I might be completely wrong. Funnily enough though, if I remember, one of the things that defined the later McCoy doctor was indeed that sense of dark knowledge and ‘higher purpose’, so perhaps this comment has just come full circle! :D
Jim,
If you like your Doctor edgy and dark, then McCoy's final season is the way to go. Sure, Battlefield is far too ambitious for its own good and suffers as a result, but the other stories are, well, proper stories - with plots, characters and even (with Ghost Light) the power to make you think. And I feel sorry for McCoy, I really do. The original Doctor Who jumped the shark with the Sixth Doctor, when they decided the Doctor should be a boorish arse dressed in off-cuts from a garish carpet factory. McCoy did a lot to make the character interesting again, even if he was hampered by a poor first season in the role and by having his episodes broadcast opposite Coronation Street. Season 25 and 26 have some of the best Doctor Who ever in them. Sadly, nothing's perfect - they also have Silver Nemesis.
As for Matt Smith - I see some similarities in his performance as in Tom Baker's performance in his first season as Doctor Who. Baker's first season saw some wonderful performances in stories like The Ark in Space and Genesis of the Daleks - and some far less convincing performances in Robot and Revenge of the Cybermen. Personally, I think that Matt Smith's performance has been strong throughout, but it has only really been outstanding in those episodes written by Moffat. And I think moving forward what the writers should agree on is what makes the Doctor so electric in those episodes, and then try to replicate that in every story. Consistency should be the name of the game.
TNL
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