Jammy Lodgers

Doctor Who: The Lodger

Airdate: June 12th 2010. UK. BBC1

Hooray again! Another good one. That's two in a row... but first a word from our sponsors at Pandorica...

Three weeks ago I’d written on my Doctor Who review for the first Silurian episode that I had been carrying around a burden of spoilers for a little while now and that I was finding it hard to keep it to myself. Once week ago... in my Starry, Starry Pandorica Rising post I decided to let loose with one of those spoilers but I didn’t want to make it easy (although it pretty much was) for people so I used my equivalent of a low level perception filter and hid something in a very strange paragraph which I decided to dedicate to a loyal reader, Flaysomewench (check out her blog here... it’s cool). The secrets of that paragraph will be in my next post which will hopefully hit less than an hour after this one publishes.

Okay! Onto my review. Going to go back in time now and restart this post again but split it off into a different timeline which will ignore the last paragraph.

Hooray again. Another good one. That’s two in a row. Gosh, I feel really great now. I even liked that Cordon fellow in this one.

See, this is the kind of thing that Doctor Who and science-fiction in general does best. Takes an everyday story... in this case a gentle will they or won’t they love story, and pushes the boundaries in which you are able to explore those ideas by wrapping them up in a sci-fi plot and opening out the full range of speculative ideas to explore your milieu in. Works beautifully and this episode proves it.

First things first though... was that a sketch of El Santo or one of his ilk hanging on one of the walls of the flat? Nice one beeb!

So anyway... not a whole lot to say about this one. Vincent Van Gogh references littlered throughout (keep an eye on that Pandorica people) and a pseudo-TARDIS which belongs to... well I think we really would have liked to know that information. Hope the fact that it wasn revealed is because it links in to the next two episodes.

Amy and the Doctor in separate places talking across space and time (he is stranded on earth, she is stranded in the TARDIS) and the usual cultural jokes one would expect in the “craziness and hijinks” which ensue... okay so craziness in hijinks should have been highlighted in my special “this is sarcasm people filter” but I haven had time to invent one yet.

All in all a great episode and I was really hoping that the Coming Soon at the end would at least reveal a little of what I know about the last episodes so that I can reveal last weeks unburdening paragraph to you all in it’s true colours. It revealed at least what I put in that paragraph... albeit only as a voice over... so I can come clean with some of my secrets in my very next post... which I am hoping will hit here in less than an hour...