The Caretaker: The Doctor Goes Undercover at Coal Hill School

Clara is starting to have trouble juggling her double life at Coal Hill School and in the TARDIS, especially now that she is dating Danny. She gets let off the hook when the Doctor announces he’s going “deep cover” and tells Danny that she wants to spend more time with him. Unfortunately, the Doctor’s undercover operation is at Coal Hill itself, where he’s the new caretaker. He’s using the job to track a killer robot patrolling the area called the Skovox Blitzer, which he plans to jettison a billion years into the future with a set of time vortex manipulators.

The Doctor meets Danny but doesn’t clock him as Clara’s boyfriend, and instead suspects the English teacher Adrian, who bears an uncanny resemblance to his previous incarnation. Danny is immediately suspicious of the Doctor and barges in on his trap, accidentally sending the Blitzer only a few days forward instead of a billion years. Danny finds out about the Doctor, Clara and the TARDIS, and later saves them both from the robot when it returns. Meanwhile the Doctor takes the disruptive student Courtney Woods up in the TARDIS, and she throws up. Danny tells Clara to let him know when the Doctor has gone too far.

A Sitcom Hour at Coal Hill

After the monster of the week in Time Heist and the horror of Into the Dalek, where Danny first turned up as the maths teacher with a soldier’s past, it’s a relief to get something this domestic. The Caretaker is a story about a man trying to hide a spaceship from his companion’s boyfriend, and it plays that for laughs from the first scene to the last. Whether or not you think it’s worth spending a whole episode on Danny finding out that Clara is a time traveller, it’s hard to deny that this episode knows exactly what it wants to be.

That’s down to the writers. Gareth Roberts and Steven Moffat, who began his TV showrunner career on the school comedy Chalk, know exactly how to pull off this kind of sitcom-style Doctor Who story. Roberts has a long record of writing the Doctor into everyday settings, and you can feel both of them enjoying the idea of the Doctor failing at ordinary life. He’s rude to the pupils, baffled by the staffroom and convinced that nobody can see through a man in a donkey jacket carrying a mop, and the script lets him be wrong about all of it.

Perhaps it’s because Coal Hill School has played such a defining role in Doctor Who since the very first episode that we don’t much mind stopping there for a while. Or it could be the fact that the programme is always better when it feeds off relatable experiences. However, the secondary school setting isn’t used as well as in the 2006 episode School Reunion, where it actually mattered that it was a school under attack. It’s also surprising that there isn’t much teaching going on given the abundance of teachers, students and classrooms, and Doctor Who‘s origins as an educational programme.

Danny Finds Out

As there’s not much of a story in the Blitzer’s attack on the school, most of the episode is about how Danny and Clara’s relationship changes once he finds out she’s travelling with the Doctor. It’s rare to see a companion’s partner get this much room, and rarer still not to see a companion immediately rushing off in the TARDIS. Samuel Anderson is good at making Danny’s suspicion read as protectiveness rather than jealousy, and the TARDIS scene, where he refuses to be impressed, is the best scene of the episode.

We also get to see how the Doctor reacts to Danny’s history as a soldier, which is funny because he can’t think of him as anything but a P.E. teacher. Danny’s impression of the Doctor as an upper-class commanding officer is a totally new spin on the Time Lord, and it ties back to the army background that came up on Clara’s date in Listen. The jokes land because both men are right about each other. The Doctor does give orders and expect them to be followed, and Danny does flinch when he hears it.

The references to Matt Smith are both good and bad for the programme. On the one hand it’s a great visual gag, and no memory of Smith can be a bad one, but I can’t help feeling that nostalgia like that holds me back from completely embracing Capaldi as the new Doctor. It also revives the romantic attachment between the Doctor and Clara, which I’d hoped we’d left behind. If this Doctor is going to be a harder, odder character, I’d rather the show let him get on with it than keep reminding us who he used to be.

Courtney Woods is the other half of the school story, and the Doctor taking her into the TARDIS only to have her throw up is a small joke that does a lot of work. It reminds you that Clara’s double life is a juggling act she’s been managing for weeks, and that the Doctor, for all his talk of going deep cover, has no idea what it’s like to live in two places at once. Clara spends most of the hour apologising to one man for the other, and that’s where the episode finds its real drama.

It’s also where the episode is at its most grown-up. Danny’s last line to Clara, asking her to tell him when the Doctor has gone too far, is the one moment where the comedy stops and something more serious sits in the room. I’d have been happy for the whole forty-five minutes to be more of that and less mop-and-bucket farce, but it’s the right note to leave things on.

A Robot Who Never Gets a Chance

To say that the Skovox Blitzer isn’t developed enough for a Doctor Who villain is an understatement, but it’s made pretty clear that the robot isn’t the focus of the episode. Still, the Blitzer is pretty campy and dated-looking, even by Doctor Who‘s standards, a walking pile of silver armour with a glowing eye that shows up when the plot needs a threat and disappears when the characters need to talk. The Doctor’s plan for dealing with it, a billion years in the future with a time vortex manipulator, is so small a part of the story that the robot never feels like it’s in the way of anything.

I’m clearly not the only one who finds it a bit thin. The reaction from other Doctor Who fans was warm about the character comedy and lukewarm about the monster, and that sounds about right to me. What I’d have liked is one scene where the robot actually did something to the school itself. A classroom turned into a trap, a lesson interrupted, a corridor full of pupils who have to be moved in a hurry. Anything that made Coal Hill feel like the place being protected rather than just a backdrop for the jokes.

A Holiday Halfway Through the Season

The season arc with Missy is fleshed out some more, as we witness a police officer arrive in the Nethersphere and start to see “Heaven” as possibly more corporate than we previously imagined. It’s a short scene dropped into the end of a comedy episode, and it works better for the contrast than it would have in a darker one. After an hour of jokes about caretakers and detention, a woman greeting the dead with a tablet and a cup of tea is properly unsettling.

I much prefer these sustained comic episodes of Doctor Who to putting laboured comedy routines in episodes where they don’t belong, especially when they’re as well written as The Caretaker. But it is fair to say this is one of the blandest stories you’ll see this season, especially the science-fiction aspects. Character development is the key here, and there’s plenty of time left over for that, but in a programme aimed partly at children you do expect it to do something more with the idea of a secondary school than a few homework clichés. Halfway through the season it feels like a bit of a holiday, but one you do something worthwhile with. The caretaker is actually a good metaphor for the episode, since its job is to clear up the mess created by previous episodes and keep Doctor Who ticking along in preparation for the second half of the season.

Would you have spotted the Doctor as the caretaker, and what would your cover job have been? Tell me in the comments.