Doctor Who: The Lodger
(1 episode, s05e11, 2010)

The Odd Couple and Three’s Company meet a blender.

The TARDIS lands in Colchester, which is far from the intended destination of the Fifth Moon of Sinda Callista. The Doctor is somehow shoved out of the TARDIS as it dematerializes with Amy still inside.

The next day, a young man passes a house where an old man is calling for help. He climbs the staircase and the door closes. Downstairs, Craig Owens and his friend Sophie question a spot of rot on the ceiling and ponder their activities for the night. Sophie gets called away to console her friend and Craig buckles down for a night alone with “pizza, booze, and telly.”

Craig berates himself for not expressing his true feelings for Sophie. The doorbell rings and Craig, noticing that Sophie has forgotten her keys, thinks that this is his big chance. Unfortunately for him, it’s the Doctor answering the advertisement for a roommate with a three thousand pound deposit.

The Doctor invites himself inside and analyzes the spot of rot before taking a look at his new room. After a quick check of psychic paper references, the Doctor starts making dinner as Craig talks about his feelings and lays the ground rules. Meanwhile, the TARDIS continues to phase in and out despite Amy’s best efforts.

That night, the Doctor contacts Amy through an scrambled earpiece that he’s wearing. They reason that the TARDIS cannot land due to the upstairs tenant’s actions, but the Doctor is unsure about what to do. After all, he can’t disclose who he is so he has to act like a normal human.

As another victim stumbles into the house, the Doctor and Amy note a localized time loop. The Doctor pops out for a few items to build a scanner. The next morning, the Doctor takes his time in the shower so Craig checks on the upstairs tenant. The Doctor rushes to the rescue with a towel and electronic toothbrush, but Craig is already safe. The Doctor meets Sophie and agrees to play football while hinting at Craig’s feelings.

It turns out that the Doctor, despite not knowing what football is at first, is a natural. Which does not please Craig at all.

The team celebrates their win and “The Oncoming Storm” agrees to play again in the future. Another localized time loop heralds another victim claimed by the upstairs tenant. The Doctor expresses a need to work faster on his scanner before Amy and the TARDIS are lost to the time vortex forever.

Craig and Sophie have a date night. While Craig tries to tell Sophie how he feels, the Doctor tries to figure out how to turn on a normal screwdriver. Sophie invites the Time Lord to join them, and the Doctor uses reverse psychology to inspire Sophie to aim higher in life than a call center job. Craig bids Sophie goodnight without making his move.

The Doctor fires up his scanner while Amy researches the history of the residence. Meanwhile, Craig fiddles with the spot of rot and ends up poisoned. The Doctor whips up a remedy and Craig sleeps while the Doctor substitutes for him at the call center. He rushes to work to find that the Doctor has pretty much taken over, so he heads back home. Also, Sophie plans to leave.

The Doctor returns to the house and gets some valuable intelligence from a cat. Craig confronts him over the last three days, so the Doctor gives him the telepathic primer on who he is and what he’s doing there. The Doctor knew to come to this house based on a note from Amy that she hasn’t written yet.

The cat reveals that the upstairs tenant has a time engine and is using humans to fuel it. Sophie is the current victim but the Doctor and Craig save her. They discover that the house never had a second story. The top floor is an alien spaceship shrouded in a perception filter and the artificial intelligence in charge chooses the Doctor as a suitable pilot.

Craig saves the Doctor by grabbing the activation control. He survives by focusing on what’s keeping him here, and when he reveals his feelings, Sophie joins him on the controls. They kiss as the ship initiates an emergency shutdown and implodes as Sophie, Craig, and the Doctor rush out.

The house is restored, the spot of rot is gone, and Craig and Sophie are hitting it off in grand fashion. The Doctor tries to sneak away, but the lovebirds catch him and offer him a permanent set of keys. As he wanders off, a crack in time manifests behind the fridge.

As the Doctor pilots the TARDIS back in time so Amy can leave her note, Amy searches his jacket for a red pen. Instead, she finds Rory’s wedding ring.

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This companion-lite episode truly is filler. Don’t get me wrong, the episode is very funny and offers the not oft-repeated trope of the Doctor using native technology to solve the problem, but the stride forward in the Steven Moffat orchestrated story arc could have been made at the end of Vincent and the Doctor.

This episode does make a few callbacks, from the Van Gogh nods to the previous adventure to singing in the shower, Verdi’s La donna è mobile, The Oncoming Storm (a purely revival era construct seen thus far in The Parting of the Ways, The Girl in the Fireplace, Journey’s End, and Amy’s Choice), a fondness for cats last seen in the Sixth Doctor‘s persona, a surprising talent for sports, and a look-alike for the Eighth Doctor’s console room.

But, yeah, overall this is a humorous throwaway to lead us into the finale.

Rating: 3/5 – “Reverse the polarity of the neutron flow.”

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UP NEXT – Doctor Who: The Pandorica Opens and Doctor Who: The Big Bang

The Timestamps Project is an adventure through the televised universe of Doctor Who, story by story, from the beginning of the franchise. For more reviews like this one, please visit the project’s page at Creative Criticality.