The Lodger - Gaz

I was right last week, The Lodger was Doctor Who meets Spaced... via Cold Feet, Couplings, Gavin and Stacey and that crappy show with the bloke from Doc Martin and the awful one who now voices Bob The Builder! It was also brilliant, very funny, tense, wacky and kinda scary.

One of the strengths of Doctor Who, not just since the show was relaunched, but also in it's many year run was to allow actors and into guest spot roles that were usually outside of their norm, so we have seen soapy actors as comics, wimps as heroes, villains in a sympathetic light and some people just become plain scary. The guests who stepped up to the plate this week were James Corden and Daisy Haggard (who coincidently I'd swear I saw doing stand-up in a pub in London back in the late 1990's, and from my hazy memory, she was quite good), as the pair of timid, not quite there yet lovers, Craig and Sophie.

Then into their well-in-the-groove-life arrives The Doctor, possibly the oddest flatmate in the world.

The plot was great this week, The Doctor is dumped from the TARDIS investigating a localised disruption in time and to find out what's going on, he has to abandon his usual approach along with his reliance on technology. Unlike Being Human, he does not have to re-arrange his DNA and become a human being, he's just got to pass himself off and being like the rest of us... more or less.

It worked really well, and had some nice touches to previous episodes, such as when he looked for food from the fridge, flashed his psychic paper and assembled a scanning device made of kerbside rubbish. I also liked the paper bag full of money, conversations with the cat and when he filled in for Craig at his job, how often have you wanted to put someone on hold just to eat your biscuit? I know it's something I'd love to do.

Meanwhile just to show he's not entirely out of touch, he very quickly realises the key to resolving to localised time problem lies with Sophie and Craig and the fact that there is a time-machine upstairs, not really another flat.

The episode worked really well, it was about sharing your heart, even if you happen to have two.

I liked:

Crazy wacky flatmate Doctor

Craig and Sophie, they are kinda sweet

I disliked:

There was a shiny new time-machine above Craig's flat and The Doctor was not curious at all about who it belonged to and how it got there? C'mon normally in the show this is BIG STUFF

I need to be convinced:

Amy has learnt a lot about running the TARDIS... way more than anyone else has ever!

Next week, River Song returns and the Pandorica opens, also it looks like they have brought a big bunch of villains from the past, is this what the timey-whimy-crack'n'space'n'timey is, a intergalactic-pan-dimensional rubbish bin of The Doctors past... where all vanquished monsters go to hang out?