![]() ![]() He makes friends easily with everyone in the shop for instance. But he’s no Time Lord version of Sheldon Cooper. ![]() The Doctor has his eccentricities dialled up a little for this story, emphasising his awkwardness in social situations (he can’t, for instance, work out how to make a social call on someone). It’s not just mateship which is on display in Closing Time but also maleness. I’ve been through it twice, Craig, so here’s my advice: buy a tumble dryer, a pair of ear plugs, a bottle of whisky and try to keep up.) Craig’s at least is a little less angsty – just the familiar haplessness of a new Dad. And interestingly in all of them – Captain Avery, Jimmy, Alex and Craig – are all worried about their adequacy as Dads. So many stories this season of fathers and the lengths they’ll go to for their kids. (We’re back to parenthood again, by the way, that particular obsession of Series Six. Human relationships being a mystery to the Doctor, he couldn’t have pulled off that trick. “He blows up the Cybermen with love,” writer Gareth Roberts said on Doctor Who Confidential. He might stuff up his attempt to rescue the Doctor from the Cybermen with a barcode scanner and thus end up encased in a Cyber carapace, but he saves the day when his paternal instincts kick in at the sound of his baby’s cries. So that imbalance between Craig and the Doctor rings true. We’re all Craig to someone else’s Doctor. Blokes, don’t we all have that friend who’s smarter, better looking, altogether more impressive than us? And yet we still like to hang out together. Or to put it another way, no two mates are born equal. Imbalance is an essential by-product of mateship. This is kind of how it works in real life. I suppose we might also consider the third Doctor’s friendship with the Brigadier, but that feels more like a professional relationship than two mates hanging out together for laughs.) (An honourable exception here may be the first Doctor and Steven, but they were not buddies in the way 11/Craig and 2/Jamie were. Yes, he has had other male companions, but in every case they have been adjuncts to the Doctor’s relationship with a female companion. It still holds true, because these are the only instances of the Doctor having a genuine male friendship. When I talked about The Lodger, I drew the comparison between the eleventh Doctor and Craig combo, and the second Doctor and Jamie. The Doctor being involved in male friendship is surprisingly rare in Doctor Who. This imbalance is interesting because the Doctor and Craig’s relationship is about mateship. Everything about their relationship is about how one of them is better than the other. “I bet you excrete some sort of gas that makes people love you,” grumbles Craig. For instance, Craig can’t emulate the Doctor’s effortless ability to get people to like him and share information with him. Crucially, he’s brilliant at the things Craig is not. So the Doctor is presented as this contradictory mix hopeless at some mundane everyday tasks, but brilliant at others. He can project a starscape onto a ceiling, proving that his sonic screwdriver comes with After Effects installed. He speaks baby and can stop a baby crying with a look (“Can you teach me to do that?” Craig says, echoing new parents everywhere). Naturally, the Doctor is better at this than him. This time, he’s struggling with being a new Dad (it’s The Lodger, but with a baby). Last time we saw him, Craig was struggling to make it with a girl. ![]() The other element repeated from The Lodger is bumbling everyman Craig (James Corden) and his natural inferiority to the Doctor, in all things. This fits Matt Smith’s Doctor like a glove, as he frequently demonstrates his childlike enthusiasm for having fun, despite the growing chaos around him. In Closing Time, he’s employed (briefly) by a department store to fool around in the toy department, amusing children. ![]() All three involve, to lesser or greater extents, the Doctor getting a job. He often talks of his affection for it, and Closing Time and later The Caretaker are attempts to replicate its breezy comic charm.īoth of those later stories seek to eke more mileage out of the Doctor’s clumsy but endearing attempts to fit into modern life as we know it. Or remake The Time Monsterwith… nah, let’s never do that.įor a light-hearted, late season cheapie episode, The Lodger looms large over Steven Moffat’s tenure on Doctor Who. Actually, why stop there? Let’s remake Black Orchid with Cybermen. As a one sentence pitch, “ The Lodger, but with Cybermen” is pretty good. ![]()
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