Previously: We cried our way through a sad-romp with Vincent van Gogh.
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Marines: The TARDIS lands in a suburb somewhere. The Doctor peeks out long enough to realize they haven’t landed where he intended. Then, the force of a little explosion inside of the TARDIS pushes the Doctor out, and the TARDIS wooshes away without him. The Doctor calls out for Amy.
We cut to Amy inside of the TARDIS, holding on for dear life. She calls to the Doctor and tells him they are on Earth, in Essex. Things inside the TARDIS calm down, and she realizes the TARDIS has taken off without the Doctor. (K: Who is now stranded in Essex. LOOOOOOOOOOOOL.)
One day later. A guy walks down the street minding his own business when he hears a voice coming from the intercom of a nearby house. The voice asks for someone to please help him, and this blessed idiot decides that seems like a legit invitation. Things only get more creepy inside, complete with flickering murder lighting, and a backlit mysterious dude saying he needs some help. Blessed Idiot goes upstairs to “help” and the door closes creepily behind him.
K: Blessed Idiot has clearly never seen an episode of Supernatural or the flickering lighting would send him running. (D: I dunno, aren’t Sam & Dean the original Blessed Idiots?) Ohgod. I bet this episode is prime Superwholock fodder as a result… (Is that even still a thing? Has it died yet? Please tell me it died.) (D: hahaha, right.)
Mari: Downstairs, presumably, Daisy Haggard (who I mainly know from this most excellent adaptation of Sense and Sensibility) (K: I also know her from that, but IMDB just informed me that she’s also the voice of the lifts at the Ministry of Magic, which is SUPER COOL AND RANDOM) asks James Corden (Craig) what a strange stain on the ceiling is. Daisy Haggard asks who even lives upstairs and Craig is nonspecific. Just as they settle in for some “pizza, booze, telly” loud crashing noises come from upstairs. We cut to the hall and travel up the stairs, mostly to establish surges of electricity are still giving this hall a very manslaughter-y kind of feel.
Back with Craig and Daisy Haggard (Sophie), they awkwardly flirt around each other and establish that Craig’s looking for a roommate. She gets a phone call from another friend with some kind of crisis. Sophie says she should go, but is obviously fishing for an invitation to stay for their plans. Craig plays it too cool and tells her to go on ahead, no big deal.
K: This is the point at which I feel the need to mention that at this point, James Corden was basically known as Smithy from Gavin and Stacey, in which he was a DELIGHT. Actually, that show as a whole was a delight. I should rewatch it…
Mari: Out in the hall, Sophie sighs, clearly not loving how that all went down. Another bang from the upstairs apartment startles her. She’s got a sense of self-preservation, though, and clears it.
Back inside, Craig is trying to talk himself up to confessing his love for Sophie. (K: Fun throwback to the heartbreak of the previous episode? He has a flyer for a Van Gogh exhibition on his fridge above the picture of him and Sophie) (D: And I die of feels all over again.) The intercom buzzes and Craig realizes that Soph’s left her keys. He grabs them and heads to the door, repeating, “I love you, I love you, I love you,” but when he gets to the door, it’s the Doctor, wearing a Cyberman-like earpiece. He smirks and says that’s a good thing because he’s the new lodger.
Craig is confused because he just put up the advert and didn’t put his address down. The Doctor says he’s less of a young professional. More of an ancient amateur. Craig is very unsure about all of this, but then the Doctor tells him to have some rent and hands over a paper bag full of a lot of money.
K: Craig. Honey. Anyone who turns up with a paper bag of loose cash is shady af.
Dani: Sage advice. But also… *runs to put up advert*
Mari: Inside, the Doctor tells Craig not to spend it all on sweets, unless he likes sweets. Then he turns around and double air-kisses Craig, because he thinks that’s how people greet each other nowadays. He introduces himself as the Doctor, though he claims not to know why people call him that and also why he calls himself that. The murder lighting buzzes on. The Doctor notices and asks who lives upstairs. “Just some bloke,” Craig answers again.
The Doctor lets himself into the apartment while Craig follows behind, still not understanding who the f this stranger even is. Inside, the Doctor spots the stain on the ceiling. Craig says he can get it fixed, but the Doctor offers to fix it himself. He compliments the parlor and asks Craig if he can stay. Craig points out that the Doctor hasn’t even seen the room. The Doctor is like oh yeah.
Craig shows the Doctor the room and explains that it’s Mark’s old room. Mark owns the place, but moved out about a month ago after his uncle died and left him a ton of money. The Doctor calls that convenient.
From upstairs, more banging and electrical surges. The Doctor says he has no time to lose. He’ll take it. Then he whips out his psychic paper and flashes it a few times in front of Craig for his national insurance number, NHS number, and references, including one from the Archbishop of Canterbury.
K: In 2018, the idea of the Archbishop of Canterbury having a “special favourite” (as the Doctor refers to himself) is SUPER ICKY and it makes me very uncomfortable.
Dani: Oh man, my mind didn’t even go there, but now I’m super uncomfortable, too. THANKS A LOT, K!
Mari: The whirlwind continues as the Doctor announces that he’s hungry and heads to the kitchen. In a scene a little reminiscent of one of the few Eleven scenes I love, the Doctor is a mess in the kitchen as he makes an omelette. As he cooks, he asks Craig a bunch of questions. Craig explains that the girl in all those pictures on the fridge is his friend Sophie. They met at their job in a call center, but the business is going under. Craig knows how to fix it, but doesn’t think anyone will listen to him. He stops long enough to wonder why he’s even saying all of this to a stranger. The Doctor says he’s got one of those faces. People never stop blurting out their plans when he’s around. (lolz.)
K: Whereas I’d probably blurt out “WTF is your hair??”. It’s particularly… something… in this episode, and I dunno what the something is, but the result it unsettling
Dani: I’ma go with “unwashed.”
Mari: It does look rather unkempt.
Craig asks where the Doctor’s stuff is. (D: Can we make Craig an honorary Snark Lady for caring about the STUFF???) He vagues that it’ll materialize. Eventually. If all goes to plan.
Cut to the TARDIS trying to land again. Amy is running around inside asking, “why won’t you land?” We don’t know and the TARDIS fades out again.
We cut to the new roomies after having enjoyed the Doctor’s omelette. Craig asks where he learned to cook. The Doctor says Paris in the 18th century but then bumbles around that until he corrects to the 20th century.
We cut to the Doctor in his new room, using his earpiece to call Amy on the TARDIS. Amy hears him and shouts, “Doctor!” which causes a lot of feedback in the Doctor’s ear. Meanwhile, Craig is in his room on the phone with Sophie. Sophie thinks the bloke called the Doctor with a bag of money is a little suss. (K: Sophie is set to be this episode’s MVP.)
Outside, a woman walks by the house and she looks like she’s had a v bad night. She hears a man’s voice coming from the intercom, asking her for some help.
K: Ohhh, girl. Your night has already been v bad. Do not make it unredeemably terrible. WALK AWAAAAAAAY. Also, I call extreme bullshit on any woman hearing a mysterious man asking for help after dark and not immediately running away with her keys out and her finger over the Emergency Call button on her phone. Just saying.
Mari: Back with the Doctor, he asks Amy how the TARDIS is doing. Amy holds out her hand set so he can have a listen. The Doctor quickly diagnoses that the TARDIS is stuck in a materialization loop and can’t land. Amy says that whatever is stopping her from landing is upstairs in the murder flat, so the Doctor should sort that out ASAP.
And back outside, the voice on the intercom tells the woman that his daughter is hurt. The woman goes inside. Up at the top of the stairs this time is a young looking man. He asks her again for help and the Blessed Idiot 2 follows him up.
Craig and Sophie are still chatting, but Craig is distracted when he hears the Doctor’s voice. In his room, the Doctor tells Amy that he won’t go upstairs until he knows what he’s dealing with. And he can’t be discovered, which means no sonicking and no advanced technology. The only reason he can call her is because he’s using a scrambler. Anyone listening in will only hear gibberish. Cut to Craig, listening in, only hearing gibberish.
The Doctor says all he has to do is pass as human, which should be easy. Amy gives him a gentle PFFT. He asks for some tips. Amy tells him to get rid of the bow-tie, but that’s a no-go. So, she suggests telly, football and pubs. This is all interrupted by banging from upstairs. The TARDIS starts going wild again, and in the flat, all of the clocks starting spinning rapidly. It’s an localized time loop. Upstairs, Blessed Idiot 2 screams.
After it calms down, Amy asks if everything is okay. The Doctor unconvincingly says it’s fine, talks her through pulling a what-cha-ma-call-it on the TARDIS, and then says he has to go.
Later, the Doctor is taking a shower and singing loudly. Craig bangs on the door and asks how long he’s going to be. The Doctor says he likes a good soak. Lucky for him, Craig is distracted by more banging upstairs. He says he’s going to go check it out, but the Doctor doesn’t quite hear him.
Craig goes upstairs and an old man opens the door when he knocks. The Doctor gets out of the shower, slips and falls. He says he has no choice but to sonic now, but for some reason grabs an electric toothbrush instead. By the time the Doctor fumbles with his towel and makes it out to the hall, Creepy Upstairs Man has told Craig he doesn’t need any help, and Craig is headed back. The Doctor points the toothbrush upstairs and makes it whir. He asks Craig what the man upstairs looked like and Craig says more normal than the Doctor looks at the moment.
Mari: Craig goes back into the apartment. Sophie arrives and startles to see naked weird Doctor in the hall. He air kisses her, which he still thinks is a thing. Craig is on the phone about a football match. His team is down one, so he asks if the Doctor will play. Having received words of wisdom from Amy, the Doctor decides he should be totes normal and play football, because he should definitely be this confused about how to be “normal.” The Doctor asks if Sophie plays too, but Craig says she’s just his mascot. Ew. Sophie doesn’t like it either, and then they awkward around the fact that they are definitely not each other’s dates. The Doctor excuses himself because even he thinks this is weird. (D: At which point Sophie’s like, “you didn’t tell me he was gorgeous” and just GIRL NO.) He pops back out a second later though to ask how Sophie got in, if she left her keys here before, the keys Craig’s been fondling. Sophie says she has another set and the Doctor smirks. She has two sets of keys to someone else’s place, eh?
In his room, the Doctor gets dressed and tells Amy all about his footballing. Except he’s still way too confused about what he’s actually doing.
At the park, Craig doesn’t really want to introduce the Doctor as the Doctor to all his friends. The Doctor is like whatevs, and introduces himself as the Doctor to all of Craig’s friends, and everyone is chill about it. Not so chill about the air kisses, though. After introductions, there’s a bit more awkwardness over the Doctor not knowing football things, and then a super long montage of him either being naturally amazing at football or lying about having never played it. Both options are stupid.
K: A small stupid part of my brain was like “Wait, why are Matt Smith’s shorts like 3 inches shorter than everyone else’s shorts?” and now I can’t stop noticing how much more of Matt Smith’s pasty white legs we have to look at and UGH NO THANK YOU PLEASE PUT THEM AWAY.
Dani: And considering his uniform is supposedly a spare one of Craig’s, the fit is even more ridiculous.
Mari: Back at the flat, a woman walks by when a little girl’s voice calls for help from the intercom. Inside, the little girl is at the top of the steps, saying that she lost her mother. This is maybe the most understandable reason to help, but I’m still going to have to call this woman Blessed Idiot 3.
Dani: The Doctor having left the flat for football is SO annoying. When does he EVER wait to act until he knows what he’s dealing with, or care about avoiding detection? Granted, his carelessness often gets people killed, but they’re not framing his hesitation as “oh, he’s learned from his mistakes” so much as “hey, won’t it be funny to watch the Doctor pretend to be normal hahaha.” Meanwhile people are getting sucked into god-knows-what upstairs. DO. NOT. LIKE.
Mari: +1
After the game, one of the bros says the Doctor is officially on the team, and they are going to annihilate their opponent next week. The Doctor gets v serious about no violence ever because he is the oncoming storm, but then he realizes it was sports talk. Craig opens a drink and gets sprayed, but then it keeps happening. It’s another time loop. The Doctor, unaffected, runs away and calls Amy. She’s being thrown about, even worse this time, and the screens on the TARDIS are showing her a lot of ominous nines. The Doctor says that’s okay, but then Amy screams as she gets thrown to the ground. After a second, she says she’s fine, which is a relief because the Doctor thought she might’ve been thrown into the time vortex. Amy doesn’t seem happy to know that is a possibility. The time loop stops, the TARDIS calms, and the Doctor tells Amy to hang out. (K: As if she can do anything else??)
Flat. Craig knocks on the Doctor’s room door and tells him that Sophie is coming over, so maybe he can make himself scarce? The Doctor promises to lay low.
Once Sophie arrives, she notes that the water-stain-mold-thing on the ceiling has gotten bigger. They decide to stick around the flat for pizza booze telly. Then Craig gets pretty serious and it seems like he might finally confess his feelings and it seems that Sophie is receptive to it, but then the Doctor pops up to be, what the youth in my day would’ve called, a cockblock. He’s messing with a bunch of wires and is holding up a regular screwdriver, asking how you turn it on. Sophie invites him to stay for a drink, if Craig doesn’t mind. Craig doesn’t mind if the Doctor doesn’t mind. The Doctor doesn’t mind. And so, nobody uses their words. (K: -___-)
Later, Sophie is spilling her guts about how pointless and cyclical life feels, with six billion people on the planet all pretty much doing the same things. The Doctor wonders at how humans managed to reach those numbers, if they all go about coupling the way Craig and Sophie are. They don’t get what he means, so he quickly changes the subject, and asks what Sophie would really like to do. She wants to work with animals, but thinks she’ll fail, a stance Craig is happy to encourage because he doesn’t want her to leave. The Doctor manages to goad her into admitting that she can do anything she wants.
When Sophie leaves, Craig asks if she’s really off to see the world and work with monkeys. Sophie asks what’s keeping her here. Craig says nothing and they hug sadly. (K: USE YOUR WOOOOOOOOOOOORDS, YOU AWKWARD DOOFUSES.)
In the Doctor’s room, we see that he’s built a weird looking giant doohickey, complete with a lampshade, a rake and a broom. The Doctor starts it up and is surprised to find that he’s not picking up anything unusual. It’s almost too normal. Amy suggests just going upstairs, but for some reason, diving into the deep end of danger isn’t an option in THIS episode. Instead, he decides to recruit a spy.
In the living room, Craig is tidying up. He sees the water-mold stain and decides to touch it? It hisses and causes him pain.
The next morning, the Doctor finds Craig sick in bed with a weird looking rot creeping up his arm. The Doctor runs to the kitchen and stuffs a bunch of teabags into what looks like some kind of commemorative tea pot. (K: It’s 100% a Charles and Di commemorative teapot.) He runs back to Craig and pours the tea directly into his mouth.
Craig rushes into the call center with a ton of apologies, only to find that the Doctor is at his desk, talking to his clients, Sophie bringing him cookies, his boss piling compliments on the Doctor. Craig is so distraught that when Sophie brings up leaving to volunteer with the monkeys, Craig dismissively tells her to go do it. The Doctor in turn dismissively tells Craig to go back home and rest.
Craig sneaks into the Doctor’s room and sees his weird contraption. When the Doctor gets home, he spots a cat on the stairs leading upstairs. He starts asking the cat questions about what’s going on upstairs. Craig hears the Doctor’s voice and goes out to investigate. Craig hands the Doctor back his bag of money and says the Doctor has to go because he talks to cats and is better at football and has Sophie talking about monkeys. The Doctor says he can’t go as things will get even weirder if he goes. Craig won’t back down, so the Doctor… headbutts some memories into him? Yep. He headbutts a bunch of info into Craig’s head so that now Craig knows who the Doctor is and what he’s up to.
K: This is possibly the stupidest plot device in the whole of Doctor Who ever. Possibly.
D: I mean… there’s some pretty stiff competition, but yeah.
Mari: Sophie enters the building and sees the little girl on the stairs asking for help. Sophie becomes Blessed Idiot 4.
The Doctor calls Amy to tell her that he’s worked everything out by way of psychic help from a cat (K: LOL WHUT). There is a time engine upstairs and someone is trying to use innocent people to launch it. He’s burning those people up, hence the icky stain on the ceiling. Another time loop starts up, which means that it’s happening again right now. Outside, they spot Sophie’s pink key ring. Craig runs upstairs to save her with the Doctor following. Amy asks the Doctor if he’s upstairs because he can’t be. She’s found the building plans and there is no second floor. The Doctor quickly realizes that it’s a perception filter.
Sophie screams and they see that she is being pulled toward the center of the alien ship. We quickly establish that nothing can be done to stop it, and then suddenly the ship lets Sophie go. A man appears and the Doctor tells us that this is the emergency crash hologram. It’s been luring people as potential pilots here, but humans are puny and awful, so he just keeps killing people and trying again. While this is all going on, Sophie is asking a lot of important questions, and the Doctor is rude. (K: Just for a change…)
The Hologram announces that the correct pilot has now been found, but apparently the Doctor is tooooo powerful for the ship, and if he touches the panel, the entire solar system will blow up. Because of reasons. (D: And because my eyes hadn’t rolled hard enough yet.) The Doctor starts doing his talking quickly through things thing, trying to figure out how the hologram is choosing pilots, even though it also just insinuated it was going to go through all six billion people to find the right pilot. But alas, the answer is that the hologram is choosing people who want to leave, like Sophie and her monkey love, vs not choosing Craig because he’s “Mister Sofa Man.”
K: Ugh. Look, Doctor, you condescending asshat, some of us like our sofas. STFU.
Mari: The Doctor decides that if Craig puts his hand on the panel and thinks of all the reasons why he wants to stay, it will solve their problems. The Doctor isn’t sure, but Craig’s in! He yells “geronimo!” (D: so glad the Headbutt of Stupidity transferred the racist micro-aggression bits, too) and puts his hand on the panel, which releases the Doctor. Amy is being tossed around the TARDIS and she just yells “Doctor!” a lot during this scene. The Doctor, meanwhile, asks Craig why he wants to stay. Craig blurts that he wants to stay for Sophie because he loves Sophie. Sophie is like “really?” and they start trying to really make sure they love each other, but there’s no time. Amy and the Doctor both yell at Craig to kiss the girl.
Mari: They kiss and Craig is released from the panel and the TARDIS stops shaking. There is a brief moment of celebration, but then the hologram starts repeating “help me, help me” and the Doctor recognizes this as an emergency shutdown. They all run quickly out of the flat out to the street and then watch as the top floor becomes a ship and flies away, even though I thought the whole point was that the ship couldn’t fly away. (D: And since when does a perception filter include an actual staircase you can run up and down? Oops, I forgot I’m not supposed to think about stuff like this.)
We cut to later, back in the flat. Craig and Sophie are kissing and cuddling. The Doctor spots them on his way out, and decides to leave them to it and sneak out quickly. They still notice him, though, and stop kissing long enough to say goodbye. Craig tells the Doctor to keep his keys to the flat. Even though Craig knows he’ll probably never come back, he still wants the Doctor to have them. They say goodbye and as the Doctor leaves, we focus on a picture of him in his football uniform on the fridge. And behind that is the crack in the wall.
Back on the TARDIS, the Doctor says Amy now has to leave him the note that will lead the Doctor to Craig’s flat in the first place. They mentioned this note earlier, but I skipped it lol. Amy goes looking for a pen in the Doctor’s jacket and instead finds a red ring box with her engagement ring inside. She has a flashback to the crack and the episode ends.
K: I have mixed feelings about this episode. On the one hand, I love James Corden, so I’m obviously on board with him guest starring in this. And I like episodes where the Doctor has to pretend to be human and sort of muddle through without all his usual gadgets. But I feel like so much time was devoted to the set up and the time loops and the people who kept foolishly wandering upstairs that the big reveal and conclusion happened almost as an afterthought.
That said, IMDB has informed me that this episode actually came from a Doctor Who comic featuring Ten, Rose and Mickey, which… yeah. Would have required a lot less set up than this did. So my feelings are kind of summed up as “good guest stars, mediocre otherwise, could have done with less fat jokes and telling people their lives are shit.”
Dani: I love James Corden in this episode, and I like that they gave us a sweet romance we could actually root for, rather than the Doctor/Amy/Rory triangle. There were still irritating bits (and the plot was basically just: sense this doesn’t any make), but it seemed like the Doctor spent significantly less time condescending to and shouting at women this episode? Or has the bar for decency in 2018 sunken so low that not-yelling-at-women feels like YAY WIN! to me???
Next time on Doctor Who: The Doctor’s friends unite to send him some bad news in S05 E12 – The Pandorica Opens.
I'm a 30-something south Floridan who loves the beach but cannot swim. Such is my life, full of small contradictions and little trivialities. My main life goals are never to take life too seriously, but to do everything I attempt seriously well. After that, my life goals devolve into things like not wearing pants and eating all of the Zebra Cakes in the world. THE WORLD.
I'm a 30-something librarian and I still live with my parents because I'm super broke. Leader of Team Heartless Cow. I have an inexplicable love for 90s television, eat too much chocolate, and read more than is good for me.
Writer, YouTuber, musician, pretentious idiot, swarm of angry bees in a human suit. Queer in every sense of the word, and not quiet about it. Several years into a plot to take over the BBC so I can become the new Doctor Who showrunner and fix all the problems.
I’m a serial procrastinator and a genuinely terrible singer, and if anyone knows how to monetize either of these skills please hit me up. In my spare time, I like to study Dutch painters, Italian architecture, and Canadian bacon.