Tony Fyler brings rent.
Broadcast
12th June 2010
The Eleventh Doctor is the
most self-consciously ‘odd’ of the 21st century Doctors we’ve had so
far, and he was particularly angular and at odds with the world around him in
his first series, Matt Smith conscious of the need to differentiate his Doctor
from the worldly-wise chatterbox of David Tennant. So while both Ninth and
Tenth Doctors had opined on the fact that they ‘couldn’t’ live the day-to-day
life that most people were familiar with, it always sounded like they would
just go a bit mad if they tried. The Eleventh Doctor genuinely gave the
impression that he couldn’t do it, that it would not only drive him stark raving
mad – as it was later to do in The Power of Three – but that he was actually
missing some fundamental components in his psyche to allow him to understand
the hows, the whys and the one-foot-in-front-of-the-other necessities of living
a normal life. So there was a degree of inevitable charm and challenge in the
notion of making him do precisely that and seeing how he coped.
The Lodger, by Gareth
Roberts, delivers that challenge very neatly. If you’ve ever wanted a
masterclass in economic scriptwriting, watch the pre-credits sequence of The
Lodger. Within the space of five pre-credit minutes, it manages to separate the
Doctor and Amy, establish the really rather creepy notion of a flat that ‘eats
people,’ luring them in with their own compassion and turning them into a stain
on the ceiling of the flat below. It also establishes the hopelessness of Craig
and Sophie, who clearly love each other but are each terrified of being
rejected by the other and ruining their friendship. It brings Craig to the
point of declaring his love, only to declare it instead to his new lodger – the
Doctor.
Funny, creepy, and
covering a hell of a lot of ground, that opening sets the tone for everything
that’s to come. The Doctor as ‘a normal bloke’ is a bizarre concept at the best
of times, but never moreso than with the drunken giraffe Doctor in his first,
most extremely alien series.
His initial extreme
oddness in Craig’s life is offset by his very particular skills – he wings an
exquisite omelette and Craig lets him stay. Meanwhile Amy, stuck in the Tardis
and in danger of being flung off into the vortex forever each time the house
devours a new victim, urges him to go upstairs and ‘sort’ whatever is causing
the problem. And probably every other Doctor would. Roberts takes the
opportunity to add some definition to the Eleventh Doctor by making him display
that most unDoctorlike of characteristics – caution. A caution that is
ultimately both justified and rather pointless, as when someone’s in danger of
being killed and he knows it, he eventually goes haring up there anyway. You
can argue that this is merely to fill the length of an episode with incident,
and you wouldn’t be entirely wrong, but Roberts the craftsman makes the
direction he forces us down feel worth it by giving us an exploration in the
Doctor without the trappings and the techy point-and-solve options of the 21st
century Time Lord.
Even when he’s trying to
be ‘an ordinary bloke’ though, the Doctor can’t supress his fundamental nature.
Invited to play football, he plays with the same verve as though he were going
up against the Daleks – powerful, inventive and not particularly keen to share.
When awkwardly invited to stay in for the night with Craig and Sophie, he can’t
help but tackle the problem that exists in their proto-relationship, the lack
of certainty and motion. When Sophie hedges her bets about following her
dreams, he’s uniquely cruel about her place in the universe – but only as a way
of making her face the truth of her own ambitions and dreams. When Craig
touches the ‘rot’ which isn’t rot and falls sick as a result, he not only saves
his life, but goes to his meeting as his ‘representative’ and is an instant
hit, establishing the company of a much firmer pathway than it had been on.
Series 5 was supposed to be a timey-wimey fairy tale. When the Doctor goes to
stay with Craig Owens, he acts like his genie, fixing all the parts of his life
that are less than right – but irritating the bejeesus out of Craig in the
process. Better than him at football, convincing the girl he loves to go and work
with monkeys, stealing his place and dropping his clients in work, seen from
Craig’s point of view, it’s almost as though the Doctor is a demon come to
wreak havoc with his comfortable misery, rather than to give him three wishes.
Forced into a corner when
Craig tells him to leave, the Doctor employs a trick we’ve never seen before –
the Head-Butt of Knowledge Transfer, something as madly inventive and useful as
you could only legitimately expect of Gareth Roberts, and the story powers
quickly on to its conclusion: the crippled time-ship upstairs looking for a
pilot who desperately wants to get away, the whole ‘defeating it with love’
idea that would grow to its full flowering in Roberts’ sequel story, Closing
Time, and the happy-ever-after resolution of two people who’ve moved past the
fear of destroying their friendship for an uncertain reward.
There are holes in The
Lodger – the Doctor happening to have the earpiece with which he communicates
with Amy on the Tardis, the whole idea of being cautious about what’s upstairs
until exactly the right moment in the story, the defeat with love and the
desire to stay put (are we to believe none of the ship’s other victims were
perfectly happy staying at home?), the lack of adequate explanation of who the
hell the ship belonged to (though we eventually get the idea it was the
Silents…somehow) and so on – but it’s full of such inventive, fun dialogue and
joie de vivre that it’s impossible to do anything but love it. It shows the
Doctor both in genie-mode and learning to be ‘a normal bloke’ in his own,
Eleventh Doctor way, by no means conventional, but all the more effective for
that. It feels as though he genuinely has to overcome his own alien nature at
every turn in this story, but that he’s equal to the task of doing so, and he
reaps the rewards – friendship, success on the football pitch and in the
office, and ultimately, winning Craig’s trust enough to make the stay-at-home
bloke save his life.
Placed in a very
particular slot, it’s possibly the most standalone story in Series 5, with Amy
not having, or not remembering her connection to Rory at all, even when she
finds the ring in the Doctor’s pocket at the very end. As such, it’s allowed to
be something almost entirely apart from the series arc, while still exploring
fairy tale themes and delivering an intellectually interesting experiment on
the Doctor doing the things ‘ordinary blokes’ do. Along the way it gives us a
reminder that whatever the Doctor looks like, whatever people think of him, he
can actually do anything to which he sets his mind – ‘I could do those things.
I don’t, but I could’ – and that, if we only choose to embrace the whole ‘Bow
ties are cool’ self-possession of this particular version of our Time Lord, so
can any of us.
That’s what makes The
Lodger so eminently rewatchable. It’s essentially the fairy tale of The
Hopeless Lovers, who find the courage to embrace their potential through the
meddling, well-meaning, chaotic, bandy-legged intervention of their genie or
fairy godfather. It’s a story that can be watched by children of all ages, on
several levels, and still leave you feeling like you’ve had a proper adventure,
with a fairy tale ending that rarely fails to make the viewer smile.
Stick it in your player
again, and have a fun, oddball hour with the weirdest lodger you ever imagined.
Invite the Doctor round to stay again.
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