Good grief! For all my prattling on about The Time Meddler in my hyper-extended reviews of The War Games and "Amy's Choice" (or rather, my one-second blurb about "Amy's Choice" at the beginning of my "The Hungry Earth" review), I did not expect the twist at the end of "The Lodger."
Now, in my defense, there was a terrible bit of mis-casting going on here. The second incarnation of the Pilot looked an awful lot like the first victim. So I thought we were looking at a rip-off of that one early Angel episode where the killer takes over the body of its latest victim. That's entirely in line with what I expected from the guy who brought us gas-mask zombies and piranha shadows.
Okay, bits that worked: sidelining the compaion and the TARDIS and very nicely forcing the Doctor to work without his sonic screwdriver for one (again). I even forgot, until this episode, that each of the regulars has to miss one episode a year. This was a great way to write Amy out for a little while, and the parts with the Doctor trying to be a normal person were easily this episode's greatest selling point.
Bits that didn't: there's no nice way to get around this. This is a story where two people manage to realize that they're in love with each other (and thus conveniently save the planet), but even though the Doctor figures this out in no time, he's still overly obsessed with trying to solve the mystery. The Doctor being Mr. Awesome Football/Soccer player was, er, well...
...and here's the other problem with the story. It forces the Doctor to be a lot thicker about Humanity than he's been in the past. He's way off on their customs, even though Tennant et al never really had this problem. And yet, this is yet another episode, along with "The Eleventh Hour," "Vampires of Venice," and "Vincent and the Doctor," that goes to extreme lengths to assure us that yes, this is the same show that once starred William Hartnell back in the Beatles' heyday.
My complaints about this episode, then, are basically my same complaints for the entire season so far: Moffat and co. are too comfortable to sit tight in areas they should be branching out, too continuity-minded (and here an absolutely grisly thought crosses my mind, because continuity-obsessed JNT was rather good in his first few seasons too)... and yet they don't seem to be entirely sure who the Doctor is. The best episode so far this season ("Cold Blood," in case you needed to be told) was nearly wrecked because the Silurian leader was so unlike any reptile ever seen before on the show. Here is the paradox: on the one hand, they're determined to remind us that this is Doctor Who we're watching, and on the other hand, they're trying to change it. They should be trying harder.
Look. We understand that change happens. This is a program that thrives on it. When the original star became too sick to work, he was written out. When the color budget wouldn't let them go to a new planet every month, the show was grounded on Earth for three years. In fact, some of the worst bits of the show (Pertwee's last year, Tom Baker's last few years, the last few years of Classic Who) are bad because important people (Letts, Dicks, Pertwee, Baker, Nathan-Turner) were too set in their ways. Steven Moffat is not RTD, nor is he JNT, Graham Williams, Phillip Hinchcliffe, Barry Letts, Derrick Sherwin, Peter Bryant, Innes Lloyd, John Wiles, or Verity Lambert. It's time he embraced that.
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