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.
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.