Craig Owens

A man who knows exactly when he is going to die spends one of his final free afternoons working the till in a department store, giving unsolicited advice to a friend 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 is the only reason the comedy lands as well as it does. It is a slight episode. It is also, in places, unexpectedly moving, and it contains the best thing anyone has done with the Eleventh Doctor’s loneliness all year.

The Doctor drops in on Craig Owens, last seen being an extremely ordinary man in The Lodger, and finds him with a mortgage, a partner and a baby. James Corden and Matt Smith have an easy, unforced double act and the show is smart enough to know that’s the asset. Craig is alone for the weekend, convinced he is bad at fatherhood, jumping at every noise the baby makes, and the Doctor, who speaks baby and treats this as entirely unremarkable, reports that the child’s actual name is Stormageddon, Dark Lord of All, and that he refers to Craig exclusively as “Not Mum.” It’s a very good joke and it does real work. Alfie’s imperious contempt for the adults around him is funny for a while, and then the Doctor mentions, in passing and without emphasis, that the boy will stop being frightened of everything eventually, and you remember that the man saying this has decided he won’t be around to see it.

That’s the mood the whole episode is playing in, and Gareth Roberts handles it with more restraint than the material suggests. The Doctor is not 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 has a date at Lake Silencio in a few days that he has 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. He keeps noticing things that are wrong. And when Craig, who is not a clever man but is a perceptive one, asks him directly 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 is glimpsed across the shop floor, now a model, an advertising face for a perfume called Petrichor, with Rory beside her. He watches them and doesn’t go over. He has spent an entire season being the reason things happen to those two, and the kindest thing available to him is to stand behind a display and let them shop. The loneliness surfaces in the comedy too, which is the smartest thing the script does: halfway through a stockroom investigation he catches himself being brilliant out loud to an empty room, stops, and complains that there is nobody there to look impressed, and it’s played as a gag for about a second and a half before it stops being one. This is a man whose defining habit is performing for an audience, currently working without one, by choice, because he has decided everyone who might have watched is safer somewhere else.

Closing Time: He Was Handed the Hat He'd Die In - Doctor Who episode still

The Cybermen, wasted again

The plot, such as it is, involves people vanishing from Sanderson & Grainger department store, a crashed Cyber-ship in the tunnels below, and a Cybermat scuttling about the stockroom. The Cybermat is a genuine pleasure, a wicked little chrome piranha with teeth, easily the most fun the design team have had this year. The Cybermen themselves are, once again, badly served. There are about six of them, they are in poor repair, they stand in a dimly lit room saying they will convert humanity, and they are dealt with in roughly two minutes. This is now a pattern: the show’s second-most-famous monsters have spent the revived era being wheeled out as generic robots with a good silhouette, and nothing here comes close to the body horror the concept deserves, or to what Rise of the Cybermen managed when it actually engaged with what conversion means. The shop setting is fun, mind, and the Doctor working in menswear, being mistaken for Craig’s partner, using the sonic on a rack of trousers, is a good sandbox for Smith, who is very funny playing a man performing normality badly.

The resolution is the episode’s real failure and it’s a shame, because everything around it is fine. Craig is captured and converted, and the conversion doesn’t take, because he hears Alfie crying and his love for his son generates enough emotional feedback to blow up the entire Cyber-unit. It’s not that the sentiment is wrong, since the episode has genuinely earned Craig’s terror of being a bad father and paying it off by having that exact fear turn out to be the thing that saves him is a decent shape. But the show simply 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 resolution that works in a fairy tale and evaporates the second you look at it, and even the Doctor’s explanation amounts to a shrug and a change of subject. 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 writes the blue envelopes, the invitations that will bring Amy, Rory and River to a beach in Utah in The Impossible Astronaut, and posts them, calmly, having decided. Craig gives him a Stetson as a parting gift, and the hat is the one he will be wearing when he dies, which is a small, horrible detail delivered entirely without comment. Then the scene changes: River Song, years earlier, a promising student at Luna University, taken by Madame Kovarian and the Silence and forced into the spacesuit at the bottom of a lake. She struggles. She does not get out. And Kovarian recites the nursery rhyme over her, tick tock goes the clock, while they seal her in. It’s genuinely chilling, and it does what a penultimate episode should, taking the thing the season opened with and showing you the other side of it. The astronaut on the beach was never a monster. It was a young woman who was put there.

Rating: 3/5. Warm, funny and well-judged in its melancholy, with a double act worth the return trip and a closing sequence that genuinely lands. It’s badly let down by another wasted outing for the Cybermen and by a resolution that solves a monster with a feeling and hopes you won’t ask. Slight, but the sadness under it is real. He put on the hat, posted the letters, and went to keep an appointment.

The week before a finale is usually where a season parks something cheap and quiet. “The Lodger” is cheap and quiet and also one of the funniest things Doctor Who has ever made — a flat-share sitcom with a horror story bolted onto the ceiling, carried almost entirely by Matt Smith being catastrophically bad at pretending to be a person. After the emotional flattening of Vincent and the Doctor, it’s exactly the palate cleanser the run needed.

The Worst Flatmate in the World

The setup is efficient: something in a house in Colchester is stopping the TARDIS from landing, the Doctor gets thrown clear, and Amy is left trapped in the ship as it lurches about in orbit. So the Doctor does the only sensible thing available to him and answers an advert for a room.

Amy’s part in all this is mostly a voice in an earpiece, which is a slight waste of Karen Gillan, but the show extracts one reliable running joke from it: her increasingly incredulous commentary on the Doctor’s attempts at ordinary human life, delivered from inside a ship that keeps violently trying to shake her off. She is, at least, having a considerably worse day than he is.

What follows is essentially a character comedy, and it’s superb. Matt Smith plays the Doctor’s impression of a normal human being as a man working from a badly translated instruction manual — the air kiss, the wad of banknotes produced from nowhere, the earnest declaration that he is “normal,” the toothbrush in the mouth mid-conversation. He makes an omelette with the intensity of a man defusing something. He wins a football match by being an alien, then delivers a genuinely rousing team talk while having no idea what any of the rules are.

The football sequence in particular is a small masterpiece of character economy. He turns up not knowing what the game is, works it out in roughly ninety seconds, becomes instantly and unfairly brilliant at it, and then cannot for the life of him understand why his new teammates find that irritating rather than delightful. It’s the entire Doctor in miniature — the alien who is better at your life than you are, and who genuinely doesn’t grasp why that might sting a bit.

It could easily be too broad, and it mostly isn’t, because Smith commits to it completely and because James Corden gives him something to bounce off. Craig Owens is an ordinary, likeable, slightly stuck bloke, and the episode is fond of him rather than contemptuous — which matters, because the whole resolution turns on taking his ordinary life seriously.

Craig and Sophie

The human story is the standard one — Craig loves his friend Sophie, Sophie loves Craig, and neither of them will say so — and the episode gets a lot of mileage out of the Doctor blundering into it. He’s oblivious for a while, then briskly diagnostic, and his solution to their romantic stalemate is about as tactful as you’d expect.

But there’s a better idea underneath. Sophie is stuck too: she talks about travelling, about working with animals, about doing something with her life, and never does any of it. And when the Doctor asks her why not, it lands as a genuine question rather than a lecture. The episode is interested in the gap between the life people say they want and the one they’re actually living, which turns out to be exactly what the plot is about.

There Is No Upstairs

The horror thread is properly good. Somebody upstairs keeps calling for help through the door, and people who go up never come back down. There’s a spreading damp stain on Craig’s ceiling and an awful noise through the floorboards, and the show doles it out in exactly the right increments.

Then the reveal, which is the best gag and the best idea in the episode simultaneously: there is no upstairs. The building is a one-storey house. Everyone who has climbed those stairs for generations has been walking into something that isn’t part of the building at all — an emergency temporal engine, crashed and buried, trying to build itself a pilot out of whoever it can lure in, and burning them out one at a time.

The design of the thing is nicely wrong as well — a grubby, humming, half-organic console room glimpsed through a doorway that has no right to be there, all pulsing panels and the residue of everyone it has already used up. And its presence is quietly doing arc work: this is the second time this season a piece of broken time technology has turned up somewhere it has absolutely no business being, after the crack tore its way through the Byzantium in Flesh and Stone. Something, somewhere, is shaking things loose.

It’s a lovely piece of misdirection, and the moment the Doctor points at the outside of the house and you realise you’ve been looking at the answer in every establishing shot is genuinely satisfying.

The Off Switch

The resolution is where the episode justifies its whole shape.

The ship needs a pilot who wants to leave. That’s the requirement — someone with the desire to go somewhere else, badly enough to power it. And it has spent decades grabbing people and finding them wanting.

Craig Owens is the one person it cannot use, because Craig doesn’t want to go anywhere. He wants to stay in Colchester, in this house, with Sophie, and when he says so — when the two of them finally admit what they want and it turns out to be each other and a flat in Essex — the machine has nothing to work with and shuts down.

That’s a much better ending than “love saves the day,” which is what it superficially resembles. The point isn’t that love is magic; it’s that wanting your own small life, sincerely, is a real and powerful thing, and the episode has spent forty minutes making sure you believe Craig means it. Coming from a show built entirely on the romance of running away, it’s a surprisingly generous argument for staying put.

The Ring

And then the coda pulls the rug out. Amy, rummaging in the TARDIS, finds a jacket, and in the pocket there’s an engagement ring. She has no idea whose it is. She turns it over, puzzled, and puts it down.

It’s Rory’s. She drove a van into a wall for him in Amy’s Choice and she has been crying without knowing why ever since the crack took him, and now she’s holding the ring he bought her and feeling nothing at all. It’s a horrible little scene, played completely flat, and it’s far more effective for it.

The last shot is the crack, opening on Craig’s kitchen wall.

What The Lodger Leaves Us With

Small, funny, and cleverer than it looks. Here’s what it plants:

Matt Smith doing comedy. The single best showcase for this Doctor yet — physical, strange, and very funny without ever tipping into stupid.
A reveal hiding in plain sight. There is no upstairs. It’s been in every exterior shot of the house since the teaser.
An argument for staying. The ship needs someone who wants to leave, and is defeated by a man who is happy where he is. From this show, that’s a genuinely unexpected note.
Craig, treated kindly. The episode likes its ordinary bloke, and the ending only works because it does.
The ring. Amy holding the proof of a man she can’t remember, feeling nothing. The arc is closing in.

Rating: 4/5 — A brilliantly funny character piece with a strong central twist and a resolution that means something. It’s slight by design, and the alien plot exists mostly to give the comedy a spine, but the whole thing is a delight.

A terrible flatmate, a football match won by cheating, a staircase that isn’t there, and an engagement ring in an empty pocket. Whatever’s coming, it’s very nearly here.

Closing Time: He Was Handed the Hat He’d Die In