"The Caretaker"

It seems that every time the Doctor has to go undercover as a normal person, Gareth Roberts is the man brought in to draft the job. However, if there’s one thing his scripts for the Moffat era have shown, he is excellent at those little moments of human drama and comedy. The normality of the story is further emphasised by the fact that (apart from the frenetic pre-credits sequence and the coda) it is mounted like a normal drama set in a school, which just happens, one day, to have an alien killing machine rampaging through the set. We even have a seemingly normal (albeit very funny) parents’ evening. Although the script contains a wealth of laughs, ranking as one of Roberts’s funniest, the core of the story is more ambitious. Again, the alien threat is not placed in the foreground, for this is the story of Danny finding out the truth about Clara. Roberts’s writing here is superlative, dealing with Danny’s need to establish trust and Clara’s managing both the emotional and temporal disarray that travelling with the Doctor causes to meet that trust.

However, the programme is still called Doctor Who and our hero is by no means in the background. As the monster is of reduced importance plotwise, it is has very basic motivations and is dealt with logically, which works perfectly with the type of story that this is. This leaves the Doctor in the role of concerned father figure, trying to figure out what to make of Clara’s new beau. The difference between this Doctor and his predecessor is immediately obvious - ‘deep cover’ means putting on a brown coat, rather than making any behavioural effort to fit in. Capaldi is unique, but I like to think that his portrayal in this story is what Hartnell would have been like had he been 50 years younger – high praise, indeed. Jenna Coleman is a delight, being a charismatict teacher, loving partner and time and space traveller and all of these colliding abruptly. However, the performance of Samuel Anderson as Danny is key. The scene where Danny and the Doctor have their face-off in the TARDIS is brilliantly written and performed giving the viewer a fresh insight on the effect the Doctor has on people, but Anderson’s soulful performance gives it an extra resonance – clearly this confrontation will have repercussions.

Paul Murphy is well up to making the story work with all its changes in mood and genre. The school sequences are perfectly paced, yet the sequences with the Skovox are shot and edited with great urgency – despite the monster’s comparatively small role and the unshowy effects work to realise it, the sheer force of its presence is memorable and the scene where Danny vaults over it is fantastic. Apart from the regulars, none of the supporting characters are that important, but they are all well played, especially young Ellis George as the bratty, yet strangely likeable Courtney Woods.

"The Caretaker" is a seemingly inconsequential story that manages to accomplish so much more than it promises.

NEXT: "Kill the Moon"