You think it’s hard to balance a life as a mother and a businesswoman, or that of a governor and a single dad, how about alternating trying to cultivate a new relationship while you’re off saving the universe?  Clara Oswald has got this very problem.  Luckily she down’t have to deal with it alone, she’s got…

THE CARETAKER
By Gareth Roberts and Steven Moffat
Directed by Paul Murphy

After an exhausting montage of travels across the universe that need to end in tome for making dates with Danny Pink, The Doctor is pleased to let Clara know that she’ll be getting some time to herself.  He’s got a job he needs to handle on his own, and is somewhat vague when pressed for details.  She happily reports to Danny that while she has been distracted of late, she’ll be more centered on him for a bit. That bit ends quickly when it’s revealed that The Doctor has taken the role of caretaker at Coal Hill School.  He’s on the search for a Scovox Blitzer, a warrior robot who has taken up residence nearby the school.  His plan is to trap the robot in the empty school before it gets too curious about its surroundings.  The first attempt goes wrong when Danny Pink gets involved, thinking The Doctor is up to something nefarious, and suffice to say he and The Doctor do not get along,  When the Blitzer returns from his temporary prison, can the new triangle of The Doctor, Clara and Danny save the world without driving each other crazy?

A wonderful episode that really lets Capaldi and company have some fun. There’s been much more humor in this season so far – this episode could easily have sat in the position of directly preceding the season finale, where there’s usually both a funny and a cheap episode, the double-banked production that features less Doctor to make time for filming the Christmas story.  This episode is much more character-driven, as many of Gareth Roberts’ stories are.

GUEST STAR REPORT – Chris Addison (Seb) has arrived MUCH earlier than expected.  Chris is an established comedian and actor in Britain, but he’s best known for playing Oliver Reeder on The Thick of It, which starred a certain…Peter Capaldi.  He got his start on Lab Rats, a series for which he also wrote. He’s directed several episodes of Veep, the series starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus and created by Armando Ianucci, creator of The Thick of It.

Jimmy Vee (Scovox Blitzer) has played diminutive aliens throughout the new series.  He played the Moxx of Balhoon in The End of the World, various Graskes in both Who and Sarah Jane, and Banakaffalatta in Voyage of the Damned.

Gareth Roberts (writer) has made a name for himself on the show for writing the more light-hearted episodes.  He brought us Craig Owens, star of The Lodger and Closing Time, as well as The Shakespeare Code and The Unicorn and the Wasp.  He wrote several episodes of The Sarah Jane Adventures.  He delivers some solid and hilarious dialogue this time around, playing off a theme similar to that of The Lodger, of The Doctor having to spend time among normal folk.

THE MONSTER FILES – The Scovox Blitzer is the latest in a series of warrior robots we’ve seen The Doctor meet up with over the years.  from threats like the Mechanoids and the War Machines in the Hartnell era, the Raston Warrior Robot in The five Doctors, to the robot knights in Robot of Sherwood, they’re an easy foe – single-minded, hard to beat, and powerful.

BACKGROUND BITS AND BOBS –

WHEN WE LAST LEFT OUR HEROES – Neil Gaiman had the idea of starting an adventure with the tail end of another.  We’ve been seeing a bunch of mini-adventures since, tossed into the narrative like  cut-away jokes on Family Guy.

“I’m the caretaker” – The Doctor has played caretaker before, more notable in the Christmas episode, The Doctor, The Widow and the Wardrobe.  He’s also gone undercover at a school in School Reunion.  Jon Pertwee was pretty good at going undercover, wigs and makeup and all. Capaldi got the idea right perfectly when he observed that everyone was simply ignoring him, which was exactly his plan.

“Human beings are not otters!” – Go look up “Benedict Cumberbatch otter” and you’ll see arguments to the contrary.

“Courtney, you are big enough to look after yourself.” – Courtney Woods has been making background Vatican cameos in the season ever since Deep Breath. She was the student who challenged Clara to carry out her threat to expel the whole class, which gave Clara the idea to stand up to the head of the clockwork droids.  It’s neat that she and The Doctor got on so quickly, and equally fun that her tough exterior peeled away when exposed to the vacuum of space.

“I’ll tell the Headmaster” – I’ll lay odds he’ll be told it’s not a problem.  The Chairman of the Governors of Coal Hill School is listed as “I. Chesterton” as far back as the anniversary episode.  Ian Chesterton, with Barbara Wright, were The Doctor’s first on-screen human companions in the first episode of the series.  And as revealed on The Sarah Jane Adventures, when she did some research on The Doctor’s other companions, Ian and Barbara Chesterton (another happy change)…don’t age.

The current headmaster, W. Coburn, shares the name of Anthony Coburn, who wrote An Unearthly Child. Wendy Coburn was a student in Coal Hill in 1963, as revealed in the prose adventure Time and Relative. The Headmaster has not been seen on screen yet – it’d be fun it is were Wendy.

“Very qualified” – once again, the sound mixers are doing a bang up job in background comedy.  Hear that car alarm go off after The Doctor makes all the electrics spark?

“I’m a maths teacher” – After he retired from UNIT, The Brigadier taught mathematics, as The Doctor learned in Mawdryn Undead.

“What were they like?  The others, before me; did they let you get away with this sort of thing?” It’s rather amazing how little they spoke about past Companions in the original series.  Nowadays, it’s almost all they do, and not in a positive way. The Doctor is endlessly bemoaning the idea that all his old friends came to sad ends, and it’s simply not the case.  The modern series companions have all been much more active partcipants of the adventures, not just “someone to nod” as he put it in Listen.

“Atron emissions – you’ve had enough of them in this area over the years” – Considering Artron energy is generated by time travel, then yes, it’s safe to say the vicinity of Coal Hill School has seen its share.  The Doctor has returned to Coal Hill and its environs a number of times since that first adventure. The Imperial Daleks were attempting to find the Hand of Omega in the area in Remembrance of the Daleks. And indeed, the entire junk yard where The Doctor first set down was once the setting of a traveling time fair, run by fellow a Time Lord renegade named…I. M. Foreman, in the prose adventure Interference. (As I’ve said elsewhere, science fiction and comics does sometimes attempt to make everything a bit TOO connected.)

 “Possibly reminded me of a certain dashing young time-traveller” A classic Three’s Companyesque misunderstanding, The Doctor dow not recognize Danny Pink as the ancestor of Orson Pink, but notes that fellow teacher Adrian vaguely resembles his previous incarnation, notes that he and Clara talked to each other, and came to the perfectly pompous and self-aggrandizing conclusion that Clara was in love with someone who looked like he used to.

“Do you want to see the Thames frozen over? Ooh, those Frost Fairs…” – The Doctor has had a number of adventures at the Frost Fair.  He took River Song to one during one of her break-outs of Stormcage.  In the audio adventure Frostfire he fought the eponymous threat at what was called one of the last great Frost Fairs, an adventure where he was joined by…Jane Austen, albeit a few years after she wrote Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

BIG BAD WOLF REPORT – So apparently Heaven is not just for people who have died in actions directly connected to The Doctor.  Seb serves as a functionary it what he prefers to call “The Nethersphere” (first time we’ve heard that term on the show, though Missy has been referred to as “Gatekeeper of the Nethersphere” in the various PR releases after her casting.) He is seen processing the poor policeman, only on-camera victim of the Blitzer, though Seb says they’ve gotten a number of them lately, suggesting he wasn’t the only victim.  This is the first we’ve seen of anyone else in the running of this mysterious Promised Land, which certainly makes it look to be a bigger project.

“You’ve explained me to him – you haven’t explained him to me” – The real meat of this episode is The Doctor’s meeting and getting to know Danny Pink.  The Doctor’s dislike for soldiers is long standing, but the dislike has take a more extreme turn with this new regeneration.  He’s called many soldiers friends, mostly from the members of UNIT like The Brig and Mike Yates. At least one of his companions was a soldier, Steven Taylor, who served on a battleship before being downed over Mechanus and kept as a prisoner for two years.

It’s possible some of the dialogue from Listen may come back to fill that dislike in.  Clara overhears the conversation of the people caring for the child that will become The Doctor, people who may or many not be his parents – there’s mention of “the other boys”, not “your brothers”, suggesting it might have been a school of some type. The male voice makes the observation, “There’ll be no crying in the army”, and the woman makes it clear he’ll not be joining the army, implying the reason is well-known.  So his dislike for the military is long-standing.

“I was gonna say, I might have a thing…” – Moffat’s writing style (note that this is the first series so far where he’s written or co-writtern every episode so far) has us looking behind every corner for secrets, so everything Danny says is read into.  He may be honestly allowing Clara to skip their date by giving her an out, he may simply want the time to keep an eye on the new caretaker, or that “thing” might be a nefarious thing indeed.

“He’s an officer…That’s who he is” – And Danny’s dislike for The Doctor, or at least what he thinks The Doctor is, is most clear as well.  He sees The Doctor as a member of the upper class, revealed by his title of Time Lord.  He mocks The Doctor by acting all military and proper, much in the same way The Doctor will often mock members of the military.  But he realizes that his mocking description of an officer is more correct than he realized.  Like good officers, they make men stronger and braver, just as he sees Clara.  It all ties back to Dalek Caan’s accusation that he turns his friends “into weapons”, and Rory’s observation that people do amazing and brave things in The Doctor’s presence in an attempt to impress of please him.

“I just have to be good enough for you” – He gets Danny’s name wrong in the same dismissive way he’d get Mickey’s name wrong, the same way Endora would get Darren’s name wrong on Bewitched, and for exactly the same reason.  The Doctor is not jealous, he’s simply protective of his friends.

“If he ever pushes you too far, I want you to tell me” – Considering the swirling rumors that Jenna Coleman will be leaving the series at the Christmas episode, this relationship between Clara and Danny seems setting up precisely to giver her a reason to part company.  Many companion have left The Doctor for a true love, including Leela and Dodo, who more fell in love with a time period than a person.  The most thematically similar event is the first one, when Susan left.  Indeed, she’d fallen in love with a boy after The Dalek Invasion of Earth, but felt she had to stay with The Doctor to protect him.  He was the one who made the decision – he locked the door to the TARDIS, and told her that he’d be fine.  Considering the relationship here, I suspect a similar scenario may present itself come the Holidays.

“My God…”  “I’m afraid she’s a bit busy” – So apparently Missy goes by more than a few names.

NEXT TIME ON DOCTOR WHO – A difficult choice, a recurring spacesuit, and isn’t it interesting how much goes on a lifeless satellite? Kill the Moon, this Saturday