The Lodger: The Doctor Rents a Room in Colchester

The episode before a finale is usually where a series 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 the week before, The Lodger was exactly the palate cleanser I needed.

The worst flatmate in the world

The setup is quick. Something in a house in Colchester keeps stopping the TARDIS from landing, the Doctor gets thrown out, and Amy is left stuck in the ship as it lurches about unable to materialise. 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 his ear, which is a bit of a waste of Karen Gillan, but the show gets one reliable running joke out of it, her increasingly incredulous commentary on his attempts at ordinary human life, delivered from inside a ship that keeps trying to shake her off. She’s having a considerably worse day than he is, put it that way.

What follows is basically a character comedy, and it’s superb. Matt Smith plays the Doctor’s idea of a normal human being like a man working from a badly translated instruction manual: the weird air kiss on the doorstep, the money produced from nowhere, the earnest insistence that he’s completely normal, the toothbrush stuck in his mouth mid-conversation. He makes an omelette like he’s defusing a bomb. He was already eating fish fingers and custard out of a bowl in The Eleventh Hour, so we knew this Doctor was odd, but this is the first time an episode has just let him loose in a normal house and watched what happens, and it’s the best showcase for him yet.

The football is my favourite bit. He turns up not knowing what the game is, works it out in about ninety seconds, becomes instantly and unfairly brilliant at it, and then can’t for the life of him understand why his new teammates find that irritating rather than delightful. He even gives them a proper rousing team talk while clearly having no idea what the rules are. He’s wearing the number 11 shirt, too, which made me grin. And Smith can actually play, he was in the youth setup at Leicester City before a back injury ended that, so when he’s skipping past people it isn’t all clever editing, which helps the joke land a lot. It’s the whole Doctor in miniature, really, the alien who’s better at your life than you are and genuinely doesn’t get why that might sting a bit, and it’s very funny without ever tipping into stupid, which is harder than it looks.

Craig and Sophie

It could easily have been too broad, and mostly it 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 sneering at him. Cultbox picked up on the same thing, saying the chemistry between Smith and Corden gives the whole thing genuine heart, and I’d agree with that. That fondness matters a lot, because the whole ending turns on taking Craig’s small ordinary life seriously, and if you’d spent forty minutes laughing at him it wouldn’t work.

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 out of the Doctor blundering into the middle of it. He’s oblivious for a while, then briskly diagnostic about it, and his solution to their romantic stalemate is about as tactful as you’d expect from a man who just tried to air kiss his landlord.

But there’s a better idea under it. Daisy Haggard is lovely as Sophie, warm and a bit wistful, and you can completely see why Craig’s never managed to say anything to her. Sophie is stuck too. She talks about going abroad to work with orangutans, about doing something with her life, and never does any of it, and when the Doctor asks her why not it lands as a real 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, and that turns out to be exactly what the plot is about, though you don’t see it until the end.

What's upstairs

The horror thread is properly good. Somebody upstairs keeps calling people up for help, and the people who go up never come back down. There’s a spreading damp stain on Craig’s ceiling and an awful noise coming through it, and the show doles it out in exactly the right amounts, a little bit creepier every time it cuts back to the stairs. Meanwhile the Doctor is building a scanner out of whatever junk he can find in Craig’s flat and hiding it in his bedroom, which of course looks exactly like what Craig fears it is, a strange man doing something dodgy in the spare room. For a comedy episode it’s surprisingly unsettling, the shadow at the top of the landing especially.

Then the reveal, which is the best gag and the best idea in the episode at the same time: there is no upstairs. It’s a one-storey house. Everyone who’s climbed those stairs has been walking into something that isn’t part of the building at all, a crashed ship disguised as a flat, trying to build itself a pilot out of whoever it can lure in and burning them out one at a time. 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 design of the thing is nicely wrong as well, a grubby, humming, half-organic control room glimpsed through a door that has no right to be there, all pulsing panels and the leftovers of everyone it’s used up. And I can’t help wondering what a ship like that is doing parked in Colchester at all. Broken time machinery keeps turning up this series where it has no business being, the crack in the Byzantium in Flesh and Stone being the obvious one, and it feels like something somewhere is shaking things loose.

Staying put, and a ring in a pocket

The ending is where the whole episode earns its shape. The ship needs a pilot who wants to leave, someone who wants to go somewhere else badly enough to power it, and it’s spent years grabbing people and finding them wanting. Craig is the one person it can’t use, because Craig doesn’t want to go anywhere. He wants to stay in Colchester, in this flat, with Sophie, and 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 itself down. That’s a much better ending than “love saves the day”, which is what it looks like on the surface. The point isn’t that love is magic, it’s that wanting your own small life, really meaning it, is a powerful thing, and coming from a show built entirely on the romance of running away it’s a surprisingly generous argument for staying put.

And then the coda pulls the rug out. Amy, poking about the TARDIS, finds a ring box in one of the Doctor’s jacket pockets. It’s an engagement ring. She has no idea whose it is, 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, she’s 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 that. Then the last shot is the crack again, sitting on the wall of Craig’s flat like it’s been there all along. After forty minutes of omelettes and football it’s quite a thing to be left with.

Rating: 4/5. Brilliantly funny, with a strong central twist and an ending that actually means something. It’s slight by design, and the alien plot is mostly there to give the comedy a spine, but the whole thing is a delight.