Story 212 - The Lodger

In which the TARDIS becomes erratic. The Doctor materialises the ship and steps outside in search of the cause - only for it to dematerialise without him. Amy is still on board. Some time later, a young man is walking past No.79 Aikman Road, Colchester, when he hears a call for assistance coming from the door's intercom. The front door is open. He goes inside and an elderly man asks him to come upstairs to help him. Once inside the flat, he is attacked. His downstairs neighbour - Craig Owens - hears a thud, and notices that the strange damp patch on his living room ceiling appears to be getting worse. Craig is living on his own at the moment, his flatmate having just inherited a lot of money from an unknown relative. He has a friend named Sophie who visits regularly, and he wants her to be his girlfriend - but is too nervous to ask. She suggests that he advertise for a lodger. The next morning the doorbell rings and Craig finds the Doctor on his doorstep. The TARDIS had landed in a nearby park before dematerialising without him, and he has traced the cause to 79 Aikman Road. The Doctor gives Craig a large sum of money for rent and announces himself as his new lodger. Craig is unsure at first, but the Doctor soon wins him over. He is quite looking forward to living in a house, for a time at least. He is in contact with Amy in the TARDIS, and asks her to do some research on the house. She, meanwhile, wants to know how he will cope passing himself off as an ordinary bloke.

The Doctor sets out to find various items which he can use to build a scanner device. He does not want to alert the upstairs neighbour, so is unable to use any advanced technology in case it is detected. More people are lured into the house by the person upstairs - though the mysterious neighbour appears in different forms. To one person it is a younger man and to someone else it is a young girl. After each enters the flat, the TARDIS goes wildly out of control - and the stain on Craig's ceiling grows. The Doctor fails to catch Craig's hints about being left alone with Sophie when she visits. He quickly spots that her desire to go travelling, but doesn't do anything about it, is a sign that she would prefer to stay with Craig were he to ask her. The next day, the Doctor agrees to play football with Craig and his friends. He annoys Craig by being much better than him, single-handedly winning the game. After the match, the Doctor witnesses a temporal distortion, and Amy confirms that the TARDIS has gone out of control again. Another person has been lured to the upstairs flat whilst they are out. Despite the Doctor's warnings not to touch it, curiosity gets the better of Craig and he touches the ceiling stain. He falls ill and can't get to work the next day, despite an important presentation needing to be delivered. The Doctor tends to his illness. Craig wakes that afternoon and rushes to work - only to find the Doctor has taken his place and proven to be a huge success with his colleagues.

That evening, Craig decides to loo in the Doctor's room to see what he has been up to, and discovers a large apparatus made out of junk in the middle of the bed. He decides to ask the Doctor to leave, as he is fed up of him being more popular than he is, with Sophie, his colleagues and with his football mates. The Doctor decides to tell him the truth of why he is here, using telepathy to instantly update him. They hear someone else going upstairs, and Craig is horrified to discover that it is Sophie. They rush up to the flat and discover that there is an advanced spacecraft inside. Amy confirms that 79 Aikman Road is supposed to be a bungalow - with no upper floor. The people seen on the stairs are merely computer generated avatars, created by the ship whose pilots are missing. The vessel needs someone to take over - and only someone who desperately wants to travel will suffice. The avatar has recognised this in Sophie, but now that the Doctor is here he will make a much better pilot. Craig finally declares his love for Sophie, and she is released as she now prefers to stay with him. The Doctor also manages to break free and they rush outside. They see the upper floor disappear, to be replaced by the ship, which the Doctor has identified as a time-ship with a camouflage capacity - just like the TARDIS. This is what had been preventing the TARDIS from materialising in the same location. The time-ship vanishes.
After the TARDIS has safely arrived in Colchester, the Doctor then uses it to go back in time and set up his rental of Craig's spare room. Whilst she was alone in the ship, Amy has found an engagement ring in the Doctor's pocket - little realising that it is her own...

The Lodger was written by Gareth Roberts, and was first broadcast on 12th June, 2010. It was based on Roberts' comic strip of the same name for Doctor Who Magazine 368. This had featured the Tenth Doctor being temporarily stuck on Earth, waiting for Rose in the TARDIS to catch up with him, and having to share with Mickey Smith. In both cases the Doctor plays football and is much better than his flatmate, who comes to regret having him stay. In the comic strip Mickey mistakes the sonic screwdriver for a toothbrush, whilst in the TV version the Doctor grabs a toothbrush instead of his screwdriver.
This is therefore only the second Doctor Who TV story to be lifted wholesale from another medium - the first being the Human Nature two-parter which came from one of the New Adventures novels. Elements of two Big Finish audio adventures had also offered tenuous inspiration for other stories - Dalek / Jubilee and Rise of the Cybermen / Spare Parts.
The story is notable also for being an Amy-lite one. She does appear throughout, but is confined to the TARDIS control room and only appears briefly each time the Doctor calls her on his radio.

The main guest artists are James Corden, as Craig, and Daisy Haggard, as Sophie. Corden had shot to fame through his appearances in The History Boys, on stage and in the movie version, before co-creating and appearing in Gavin and Stacy with Ruth Jones. The National Theatre stage show One Man, Two Guvnors went to Broadway and this led to him moving to the USA where he currently hosts a popular chat show - The Late Late Show. Haggard had appeared in a wide variety of British TV roles, from sketch shows to Jane Austen.
Both Craig and Sophie will return to the series in the next season.

The last episode was light on story arc elements, but they are back this week.
The time-ship's origins are never explained, but we will see the vessel again in the next series, when its creators will be revealed.
Craig has a postcard for a Van Gogh exhibition on his fridge, and behind the fridge there lurks the crack in space and time.
Overall, a lightweight episode, played mainly for laughs with the fish-out-of-water Doctor trying to adjust to conventional living. Hardly deserving of a sequel, however. One thing I was really unhappy about was the use of not one but two head butts when the Doctor makes telepathic contact with Craig - a totally stupid and unnecessary thing to do in a show watched by children.
Things you might like to know:

• This was a late replacement for what would have been Neil Gaiman's The Doctor's Wife, which was deferred to the following year on budgetary grounds. Many fans were confused when the Blue Peter design-a-TARDIS-console competition winner failed to appear in Series 5.
• Roberts later claimed that this story was going to feature the return of Meglos, the villain of the story of the same name from Season 18.
• One of the potential story titles was "Something at the Top of the Stairs", which is probably a play on "Nothing at the End of the Lane" - an early title for Doctor Who's first ever episode.
• Before becoming an actor Matt Smith had his sights set on becoming a professional footballer. An injury caused him to change career plans, but he continues to love the game (as does Mr Corden). The football match sequence was pretty much designed to allow Smith to show off his talents. Naturally, the Doctor wears a number 11 shirt.
• Daisy Haggard is the great-great-great niece of She and King Solomon's Mines author H Rider Haggard.
• The Doctor cooks Craig an omelette. This would be a reference to Gavin and Stacy, in which Stacy's mother only ever cooks omelettes.
• The Doctor cures Craig using tea - just as that drink had revived the Tenth Doctor from his post-regeneration coma. Tea leaves were also an integral part of the Time Flow Analogue device which the Third Doctor put together from odds and ends in The Time Monster. The Eleventh Doctor builds a similar Heath Robinson machine here. In both instances, the Doctor creates the device because of a nearby enemy time machine.
• The Doctor sings La donna e mobile in the shower - just as the Third Doctor did in Spearhead from Space.
• The one big mystery about this episode which was never explained: just what on Earth was that picture in the hall all about?