What They Say:
The terrifying Skovox Blitzer prepares to destroy mankind. Meanwhile, Danny Pink and the Doctor are on a course to meet.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Clara’s life as the Doctor’s companion is taking its toll on her as she attempts to also live the life of a teacher while juggling her courtship with a new co-worker. The Doctor doesn’t seem to be trying to help her out in the least either as his travels haven’t lessoned in the least as shown early on by the bouncing extremes of the pair going from being chained to poles in a desert on an alien world to the Doctor inviting Clara to experience the planet of the fish people (perhaps including one named Jim?). Despite the dangers Clara always has returned home but it seems she does so just in the nick of time to catch her dates with Danny Pink if not her breath between leaving the TARDIS and meeting up with him. While the timing gets her where she wants to be, these close shaves don’t allow her a chance to try hide the obvious results of them as she appears at one date with a deep suntan due to her sandy adventure and in a drenched dress complete with seaweed to another and she seems to be always apologizing about being late, often out of breath as Clara is starting to ponder just how long she can lead this double life.
Her latest trip to the TARDIS though seems to spell that there will be a bit of relief on the horizon as the Doctor is purposefully (and poorly) hiding his next endeavor from her and while this doesn’t sit well with her. Clara though sees a chance for a break to give her a period of a normal relationship with Danny where she isn’t starting every date attempting to deal with the remnants of the emotional rush that comes with her time spent at her side job, and so she leaves without putting up as much of a fight to know what is he is up to as she otherwise might as she is blinded by her chance to live a ‘normal’ life for a bit. The old joke about the light at the end of the tunnel possibly just being the headlight of an oncoming train looks to be the most apt description however as at the faculty meeting the next morning the headmaster announces that the school’s caretaker has taken ill and is being temporarily replaced with a new one who he introduces as “John Smith”…but the tall man with the wild eyebrows and Scottish accent tells everyone they can just call him The Doctor as he winks at a stunned Clara.
With almost any other being in the universe Clara’s assumption might jump to the idea that this sudden appearance may be an indicate that poorly disguised interloper is snooping out on the private life of his companion but Clara’s thoughts instantly drift to there being some hazard near the school that will be a danger to the students and she surmises that the Doctor is attempting to implement a plan that Clara would not approve of to deal with it. Unfortunately Clara knows The Doctor too well and her assumptions turn out to be correct, though she had underestimated the scale of things as the Doctor says the threat is a bit larger than just the school being in danger as the alien presence he is tracking down is a former soldier who has enough weaponry to destroy the Earth and he rationally explains that the school at night is the safest place in the city for him to confront the peril…and worse for Clara she finds she actually accepts this idea despite wishing not to.
Clara might be able to handle events if it were only planetary destruction on the horizon as that has become old hat but the Doctor wandering the halls (and everywhere else) of the school have her on edge and provide the Doctor far too many opportunities to mess up her personal life from him arguing with her in class as he works outside the window to him getting completely the wrong idea about who she is dating when he meets a bow tie wearing teacher that she is talking to who bears a bit of a resemblance to a face the Doctor had seen staring back at him from the mirror not too terribly long ago. It is the encounter with Danny Pink however that things go completely off kilter as the Doctor can’t see the man as a math teacher but only refers to him as “PE” as he treats the man with a great deal of animosity (even by the Doctor’s standards of general rudeness) which places Clara into a precipitous role when Danny accidently interferes with the Doctor’s trap and he is given a crash course into the unbelievable world that Clara also lives in and has been hiding from him.
With the two men in her life incredible at odds with everything about the other, is Clara going to find that an enraged and on guard alien threat with the power to wipe out all she knows is actually going to be easier than navigating between the two different parts of her life now that the two most important people in them have met in probably the almost worst way possible? And with all the drama going on is anyone going to have time to deal with the incredibly irate alien soldier that is now stomping around looking for an enemy to obliterate rather than spending its time hiding anymore?
The inevitable day of Danny Pink and the Doctor meeting has been brewing since Clara first took a bit of a shine to Danny as, despite Clara’s intelligence, she has constantly been leaving clues that something strange is up with her. Some of the subtle or less obvious indications might escape someone who is as stupid as the Doctor thinks most people are but which Danny’s keen eye can pick up even when it is as small as a slightly different wardrobe or a missing coat while the more obvious ones like Clara suddenly having a deep tan or being completely soaked with a piece of seaweed on her and always being out of breath would be obvious to anyone with an IQ over room temperature.
This situation helps to create some conflict between the courting pair as Clara uses some of the same type of lies that the Doctor does when he assumes that whoever he is talking to is stupid and it clearly is getting on Danny’s nerves and the situation is building to some sort of moment where this obvious cloud of untruths will have to be addressed if the two will continue as a pair. It isn’t just this growing issue that will need to be dealt with either as the entire episode seems to be one that revolves around lies of one form or another that are told and exposed as they are poorly kept or structured. Along with the obvious one already mentioned is the lie of omission that Danny and Clara have been attempting to hold up that they are just coworkers yet many of their students have picked up that there is more going on between them than just professional interactions and which helps to lay bare the idea that either Danny or Clara are particularly skilled at hiding things and that other people are more perceptive than they are often given credit for.
The most fascinating aspect of lies exposed here though revolve around the Doctor, first with the one where he tries to pass off as human by using the name “John Smith” and which is so spectacularly bad it is impossible to see it as anything other than humorous and it is only the rest of the staffs indifference to his position and they assumptions they make about a person in it that gives it any hope of being carried out effectively. And really, why shouldn’t the Doctor’s attempts to blend in be so poor, as he is a 2000 year old alien who by his own admission in the first episode of the series doesn’t really pay much attention to when others are talking as he is just waiting until he gets to talk again?
Combine that with the fact that he does tend to view many of the people around him as at least slow- if not actually too stupid to catch on to things- (perhaps best shown when he expresses amazement that Clara say through the Caretaker disguise where he invested so much effort into crafting by picking out a new coat and telling people at the school to call him the Doctor) and it is suddenly possible for this strange set of circumstances to be somewhat believable. The lack of care on the Doctor’s part shines through in other points like how he writes a poor sign to cover his work and he also goes to practically no real lengths to hide the TARDIS or come up with a plausible explanation for it when a student busts him which is a bit out of character as other incarnations that have at least attempted to conceal or lie slightly more convincingly about the TARDIS in the past.
The real meat of the story though is found in bringing the Doctor and Danny into conflict as the alien in the episode (other than the Doctor anyway) is at least as forgettable as any that has ever appeared in the series and it seems to exist simply as an excuse to get the two men in Clara’s life into the same room which is something Clara has obviously been trying to avoid, consciously or not. It isn’t hard to see why either as their interactions is one built on conflict as the Doctor only sees Danny as a soldier and as such he can’t accept that there might be more to the man beyond that former occupation while the Doctor’s arrogance reminds Danny of the worst elements of the aristocracy that he encountered while in the military and he worries about how such men’s ability to push people to a level they don’t think they can reach might negatively effect Clara in the future, if it hasn’t already.
It is here that the series has been laying a path to with the Doctor having had a number of chances to express his dislike of soldiers since his regeneration while Danny clearly carries some feelings that are less than all sunshine from his time in the service but he also doesn’t see it as the complete black hole of a species’ instincts that this Doctor clearly does. While the interactions largely work, the clash of the two still feels a bit rushed and forced with the final resolution (here anyway) feeling a bit emptier and open to interpretation than I imagine the writers intended.
While much of the episode is heavy with the impending buttressing of the two men’s feelings slamming into each other and Clara doing what she can to try to prevent this knowing that both are important to her but that the eventual meeting will go poorly (at best), the writers did a very good job of trying to inject some levity into the episode in a way that felt natural and served as a tension relief while also rewarding the viewers with call backs to the history of the series. Obviously the biggest call back (beyond the longer set up one of Clara teaching at Coal Hill) is the Doctor returning to use the alias of ‘John Smith’ which has been used by a number of the Doctors in a number of stories along his timeline. Also the throwaway line where the Doctor mentions a fight he once had with River helps to further cement that the current Doctor seems to have more than a little fondness for that previous self, something further highlighted when the Doctor sees a man with a bit of a resemblance to that incarnation’s face and he jumps to the conclusion that that must be who Clara is dating-which also plays into the ideas of lies as this jump allows the Doctor to lie to himself and ignore all the signs around him of just who Clara is really dating.
While my biggest problem with the episode was the rather over the top nature of the conflict between Danny and the Doctor that appeared to escalate a bit faster than had been set up previously as well as the shear disposable nature of the alien threat in the episode that purported to be the core behind the conflict of the episode there was another aspect that popped into the back of my mind but which I was able to perhaps rationalize away but noticed others on the internet that I talk with were not. It isn’t hard to- in fact it may be the easiest way in the culture climate of the United States- read the Doctor’s reaction to Danny as related to him being black. I guess for me the reason that this doesn’t seem to be a prominent thought is the situation seemed to have been mitigated by the previous episodes where the Doctor made his opinion about soldiers known so overwhelmingly that I interpreted his coldness due to that throughout, though there is also the subtext the Doctor has been broadcasting as well that he isn’t overly taken with humans period from some of his statements in general as well as specific ones directed toward Clara’s appearance. It also helped that I don’t think the show runner has a problem with race as before Matt Smith won the job of the Eleventh Doctor by blowing the production team away reports had them leaning strongly toward Patterson Joseph taking the role which would have made him the first black Doctor.
At the same time though I can’t discount how others viewed the same scenes (and from what I have casually observed it isn’t an opinion unique to the person I talked to either) and it helped to reinforce for me that the whole set up hasn’t been done as well as it should have to bring a full sense of weight to events and made the story’s direction more obvious. It also would be interesting for me to know how I might see these same scenes if I had been raised in the UK and knew all the cultural pieces that went into this background environment for the writers as the subject of race relations has a far different history despite the two countries former ties. Given that the Doctor does give one of the black students at the school a test run as a companion I think it is probably a sign that this Doctor isn’t racist when it comes to any shade that humans come in as opposed to just his general disdain for humans and on the production front I can’t see why the team would have hired the actor they did to play Danny Pink if on some level it was going to be a problem for the writers to respect him and not just make him a second class character and flaunt a possible bias in public that would certainly get them the wrong kind of press.
Overall The Caretaker is an episode of Doctor Who that I greatly enjoyed in concept and some of the brush strokes as it made the Doctor feel really alien in his inability to blend in which has kind of been missing for a while in the series while also showing off that he isn’t necessarily the only strong personality in the room when it comes to his feelings for Clara. I do kind of wish Clara had a bit more active role between the two men when they are fighting but her attempts to deescalate the interactions while also be the person she is when with each person felt realistic, though clearly this subplot is going to run through much of the season and frankly which I like more than the “Promise Land” one which peeked its head in again at the end of this episode though I do hope there is a great deal of more polish used to buff out the inconsistencies and flaws that I thought were present during the episode.
In Summary:
As Clara’s double life is really starting to catch up with her she leaps at the hope that the Doctor not needing her as he pursues his latest adventure will leave her with time to spend with Danny Pink, the other man in her life. When the caretaker takes ill and a very familiar face calling himself John Smith enters the picture Clara finds that her hopes are dashed and rather than trying to plan some quiet romantic time together she is going to be scrambling as fast as she ever has in order to juggle the two parts of her life that are now on a collision course that may be more destructive to her world than even a very armed and dangerous alien living in the near proximity that only has the ability to obliterate the planet. When these two meet is Clara going to be able to mediate a peace or is this event the signal for the start of the end of one of the aspects to her life that she finds so important?
Grade: A-
