Review - The Caretaker

Clara's two worlds combine as The Doctor does a bit of moonlighting at the Coal Hill School in The Caretaker.

Season 8, Episode 6 - The Caretaker

This episode begins with a montage showing Clara struggling to live two lives at once, her "normal" life as a teacher with Danny Pink, and her life adventuring in time and space as The Doctor's Companion. This whole montage draws the parallel of a woman cheating on her partner, and in that it succeeds reasonably well. We get the distinct impression that something's going to give pretty soon.

After The Doctor leaves Clara behind to go "Undercover" She appears to have time to focus on Danny, but naturally The Doctor is going undercover at Coal Hill School as John Smith, the temporary replacement Caretaker. Hilarity ensues.

I love a comedy dust-coat

The Threat of the Skovox Blitzer is fairly minor, which is fine, because The Doctor straight up tells us he can handle it easily. There is no discovery of the threat, as The Doctor already knows about it. There is no investigation, as The Doctor already has a plan, and even when that goes wrong he seems to figure out a fall-back plan with minimal fuss. Sadly, if the majority of screen time doesn't even involve the monster of the week in any way, the focus of this episode becomes Danny's discovery of Clara's life with The Doctor.

Pictured: minor sub-plot

This all puts the episode squarely in the category of The Companion Show Featuring The Doctor. In retrospect this has been a bit of a trend throughout the season, particularly in Listen, but so far it's not taken up the majority of an episode. I thought (or hoped) we'd gotten past this issue once Clara stopped being The Most Important Person In The Universe™. Once the mystery of her origin was solved, she could become just another travelling companion for The Doctor. Hopefully the resolution of the Danny situation will reduce the focus on Clara and allow The Doctor more time in the limelight.

The scene with The Doctor mistaking Adrian for Clara's boyfriend was strange and has left me feeling a bit annoyed. There's two ways to take this. One, general arrogance from The Doctor that Clara would want someone who looked like he did, because that means she still wants him; or two, a fairly obscure kind of paternal feeling where The Doctor would only approve of someone who was somehow like him. I'd like to think it was meant to be option two, but something tells me that's not really what they were going for here.

The Doctor's irrational hatred of soldiers outlined in Into The Dalek was clearly designed to work with this episode, but despite this not fitting with established canon (The Doctor has been friends with several soldiers), Danny's response to The Doctor was actually pretty awesome.

Yet again we are treated to a scene in the Nethersphere, but this time Missy seems to have her cranky pants on and is reportedly "too busy" to deal with the poor dead policeman. For the first time since the Promised Land arc began, I am actually intrigued. I still don't really care who Missy is, but my interest is piqued as to why she would be annoyed.

Maybe ask for that raise another time

Overall, this is a pretty nothing episode. It does well enough considering it's entire point is to get The Doctor and Danny introduced to each other, it's just I like my light science fiction show about aliens and time travel to focus a bit less on a single character's love life and more on, you know, the aliens and time travel.

6/10

Can we fix it?

I wouldn't go so far as to say it was impossible to fix this one, but it would take a lot. The threat of the Skovox Blitzer would need to be somewhat enhanced to start with. More needs to be made of The Doctor discovering it and deciding to get the job at Coal Hill. It would also be good to find a way of pushing the Clara / Danny thing to the background a bit.

First up, The Doctor would not refuse Clara's help. She would refuse to help him. The Doctor discovers the Skovox is around, and comes to Clara asking for help. Before he is able to explain the threat or how she is needed, Clara refuses on the grounds she needs to concentrate more on Danny, telling The Doctor she's sure he can handle this one alone.

What we don't learn immediately is that The Doctor wanted Clara's help to place the devices around Coal Hill, which he has determined is the best place to displace the time vortex because of a weakness in the space / time etc. When Clara refuses to even listen, he is forced to assume the position of Caretaker in order to follow through with his plan.

When Clara berates him and he reveals what the threat is, The Doctor can then throw Clara's own words back at her, telling her he can handle it himself. This would also add another dimension to the negativity towards Danny. The Doctor is jealous, but not in a romantic way, just that Clara's attention is elsewhere. Why is spending time with him more important that fighting alien robots? The Doctor could even specifically ask her that, only to be answered with Clara's revelation that she loves Danny. There's really not much you can come back with at that point.

So in true Doctor fashion, he just throws a tantrum at Danny and blames him for the failure of Plan A. The rest would probably have to play out in a similar manner, except have Parent Teacher Night held in the same hall the Time Vortex is set to appear in, increasing the threat to innocent bystanders. They think things will be okay, but when the Vortex begins to appear earlier than The Doctor calculated, they resort to pulling a fire alarm or something to get everyone out.

It wouldn't be great, and would still suffer from being focussed too much on Clara's relationships, but it would have a more solid set-up and make slightly better use of a deadly alien robot.