Closing Time: Stormageddon, a Department Store and a Cybermat

A man who knows exactly when he’s going to die spends one of his last free afternoons working in a department store and handing out advice about nappies. That’s the whole trick of Closing Time, a broad, affectionate comedy sequel with a countdown humming underneath every scene, and the countdown’s the only reason the comedy lands as well as it does. It’s a slight episode, I’ll say that straight away. But it’s also, in places, unexpectedly moving, and it’s got the best thing anyone’s done with the Eleventh Doctor’s loneliness all year. There’s not much plot to it and I don’t think it needs much. So I came out of it liking it more than I’d rate it, if that makes sense.

The setup is simple enough. The Doctor turns up on the doorstep of Craig Owens, last seen being an extremely ordinary man in The Lodger, and finds him with a house, Sophie, and a baby called Alfie. Sophie’s away for the weekend and Craig’s told everybody he knows he doesn’t need any help, which is exactly the moment the lights start flickering in the shop up the road and people start going missing. James Corden and Matt Smith have an easy, unforced double act and the show’s smart enough to know that’s the asset, so it mostly just puts the two of them in rooms together and lets them go. I liked that it doesn’t try to be anything bigger than that until the very end. And it’s the second-last episode of the series, sitting right before the finale, which makes the decision to go small feel almost cheeky.

Stormageddon, Dark Lord of All

Craig’s convinced he’s bad at being a dad, jumping at every noise the baby makes, and the Doctor, who speaks baby and treats this as completely unremarkable, reports that the child’s actual name is Stormageddon, Dark Lord of All, and that he refers to Craig as “Not-Mum”. It’s a very good joke, and it does real work, because Alfie’s imperious contempt for the adults around him is funny for a while and then it quietly isn’t only funny. The Doctor gets Craig a papoose because Alfie wants his dad attached to him, since he’s far too slow when he’s summoned. Craig asks when the baby’s going to stop giving him marks, and the Doctor says never, that’s parenthood. And all the time you’re aware that the man doling out this advice has decided he won’t be around to see this kid grow up, or anyone’s kid for that matter.

The shop’s a lot of fun too. The Doctor gets himself a job on the toy floor at Sanderson and Grainger, complete with a name badge in case he forgets who he is, and Smith’s very funny playing a man performing normality badly. There’s Yappy the robot dog, not as fun as he remembers, and a shop assistant played by Lynda Baron who assumes he and Craig are a couple. None of it’s important. It’s just nice to watch, and after the last few weeks of rooms full of fears and abandoned wives behind doors I didn’t mind an episode that wanted to be a sitcom for a bit. The Doctor’s delight at having a job, any job, says a lot about how much he’s trying to keep busy.

Saying goodbye without saying it

That’s the mood the whole episode’s playing in, and it handles it with more restraint than the material suggests. The Doctor isn’t travelling with anyone now, having left Amy and Rory at the kerb with a set of house keys at the end of The God Complex, and he’s got a date at Lake Silencio coming up that he’s got no intention of missing. So he’s saying goodbye to people one at a time without telling any of them that’s what he’s doing. He keeps insisting he’s only popped in socially, and he keeps noticing things that are wrong. When Craig, who isn’t a clever man but is a perceptive one, asks him straight out what’s going on, the Doctor tells him the truth in a flat, cheerful voice and immediately changes the subject.

There’s a lovely small scene where Amy turns up in the shop, now a model, the face of a perfume called Petrichor, with Rory beside her. He watches them and doesn’t go over. He’s spent a whole season being the reason things happen to those two, and the kindest thing he can do now is stand behind a display and let them shop. It’s played for about two seconds and it’s one of my favourite moments of the year. And the loneliness keeps coming up through the comedy as well, which is the smartest thing the script does, because this is a man whose defining habit is performing for an audience, working without one, by choice, since he’s decided everyone who might have watched is safer somewhere else. I found that really sad, more than I expected to from a James Corden episode, honestly.

The Cybermen, wasted again

The plot, such as it is, involves people vanishing from the store, a Cyber-ship that crashed centuries ago in the tunnels below, and a Cybermat scuttling about the stockroom. The Cybermat’s a genuine pleasure, a wicked little chrome piranha with teeth, and easily the most fun anyone’s had with the design this year. The Cybermen themselves are, once again, badly served. There are only a handful of them, they’re in poor repair, they stand in a dimly lit room saying they’ll convert humanity, and they’re dealt with in about two minutes. It’s a pattern by now, the show’s second most famous monsters wheeled out as generic robots with a good silhouette, and nothing here comes close to the body horror the idea deserves, or to what Rise of the Cybermen managed when it actually got into what conversion means.

The resolution’s the episode’s real failure, and it’s a shame, because everything around it is fine. Craig gets captured and put in the conversion chair, and the conversion doesn’t take, because he hears Alfie crying and his love for his son creates enough emotional feedback to blow up the whole Cyber-unit. It’s not that the sentiment’s wrong, since the episode’s earned Craig’s terror of being a bad father, and having that exact fear turn out to be the thing that saves him is a decent shape. But the show just asserts it. The Cybermen’s whole identity is the surgical removal of emotion, and beating them with he loved his baby a lot is the kind of ending that works in a fairy tale and evaporates the second you look at it, and it’s the same trick The Lodger used on the thing upstairs as well. Craig deserved better, and so did the monsters.

Tick tock

And then the coda, which is the best two minutes in the episode. The Doctor helps himself to a stack of Sophie’s blue envelopes, the ones that’ll bring Amy, Rory and River to a beach in Utah in The Impossible Astronaut, calmly, having decided. Craig gives him a Stetson as a parting gift, and it’s the hat he’ll be wearing when he dies, a small, horrible detail delivered completely without comment. Then the scene changes to River Song, years earlier, a student at Luna University, taken by Madame Kovarian, the eyepatch woman from A Good Man Goes to War, and the Silence, and forced into the spacesuit at the bottom of a lake. She struggles, and she doesn’t get out. Kovarian recites the nursery rhyme over her, tick tock goes the clock, while they seal her in.

It squares with the end of Let’s Kill Hitler too, where she’d gone off to study archaeology, so she’s barely started that new life before they take it off her, and that bit really got to me. It’s genuinely chilling, and it does what a second-last episode should, taking the thing the season opened with and showing you the other side of it, so the astronaut on the beach was never a monster, it was a young woman who was put there.

Rating: 3/5. It was ok, warm and well-judged in its sadness, and I’d happily watch the two of them in a shop again, but it’s slight, and it knows it.

Did Craig’s love for Alfie beating the Cybermen work for you, or did it fall apart the second you thought about it? Tell me in the comments.