Review: The Lodger

I'll freely admit it, when I first saw the trailer for The Lodger, I saw James Corden and automatically thought: "This will be shit."  I hate Gavin and Stacey and I just thought it was a stunt casting in what looked to be a filler episode.  I will also freely admit I was pleasantly surprised.



For a start, this was way more than just a filler episode.  From the birdsong when the Doctor gets kicked out of the TARDIS to the crack appearing at the end, this was full of series arc hints and also introduced another element of mystery to the proceedings; namely, who is that who is building a TARDIS and willfully sacrificing innocent human beings to achieve it?

And oh yes, there was more birdsong.  I find that if you look back through all the episodes in this series, it's a recurring theme, only gaining significance after Amy's Choice, when it signalled the switch between realities.  It's very unobtrusive and you only tend to notice it if you look for it.  It's there in The Eleventh Hour.  It's there in The Lodger.  It's apparently also in The Pandorica Opens, underground and at night.  Are we going to discover next week that the Doctor and Amy have been flitting between realities all series?

There are many similarities between Amy's house and Craig's house.  Empty rooms.  Empty rooms with perception filters.  Craig's house has a ship masquerading as a second floor.  Many people have pointed out that from the outside, Amy's house has only two floors, yet there's a third flight of stairs.  Does it simply lead to her attic or is something similar hiding there?  The Doctor seems to think so, but I'll get to that in my The Pandorica Opens review!

I'm personally wondering who Mark's (the flat's owner) uncle was.  You know, the one who died and left him a fortune so that Mark would move out when this nameless entity moved in and changed the house's whole appearance.  Even the Doctor points out that this is "very convenient."  But then nothing more is made of it!

After watching The Pandorica Opens (I really shouldn't have watched it before writing this, but I'm a terrible person), I'm not too hot on the whole Amy = River thing anymore.  Even though in this episode we see the Doctor teaching her to pilot the TARDIS, something that River can do because the Doctor taught her.  Ooh.

So, this episode raises a lot of questions:  Who or what is building a TARDIS?  For what purpose?  Why couldn't the TARDIS land around it?  Why was only the Doctor kicked out and not Amy too?  Why wasn't Matt Smith on the England team last Friday night?

This episode had the misfortune to follow a truly spectacular one, and obviously I can't help but compare the two!  But taken on its own merits, this was a really enjoyable episode, funny, touching, inspiring, adding more to the story and once more introducing us to brilliant secondary characters.  James Corden, I apologise!