Season 8, episode 6 – The Caretaker

If you would live two parallel lives, but very different, would you like them to meet each other? How people around you would react when they would find out the the person they thought to know does other things they had no idea about, things so amazing they could hardly believe they were true? Amalia (Amy) Pond and Rory Williams’ friends started asking themselves why they were getting old so fast, completely unwit that in the few minutes in the next room they had lived a few months of adventures in time and space with the Doctor, the last of the Time Lords alive (meanwhile that story changed also, but that’s another story). The the sixth episode of the 8 series the moment Danny Pink meets the Doctor arrived, with the initial shock (and what a shock it was!) and the following scandal.

After a period of adventures in time and space with the Doctor and dates with Danny Pink Clara takes a break from her double life in order to dedicate a dew days to school and her boyfriend. The Doctor asked her that: he had a special mission, undercover, and he had to infiltrate alone, with no outside help. A Skovox Blitzer, one of the most formidable military killing machine, was on Earth, and the Doctor wanted to send it into a distant future where (probably) it could do no damage. If the killing machine would hid any other place other than near Coal Hill highschool from East London, where Clara and Danny were teachers, the story would be very different, and Clara would not be so surprised and worried about the Doctor’s appearance as caretaker, temporary hired in the school. The Time Lord’s plane were blown away by suspicious Danny, whos’ instincts put him on caretaker’s tracks because we was behaving a little strange. And the three of them found themselves in an empty room, disarranged by the attack of the robot and the time vortex that sent him away.

Some would say that the motive Danny and the Doctor does not put up with each other is their great resemblance: Danny is the common soldier, the footman that gets you out from the line of the fire, while the Doctor is the aristocrat, the officer with the “lighter” (but the Doctor’s sonic screwdriver have a lot of other use) that starts the fire. Maybe this is the reason the Time Lord does not like the military: they remind him too much about his decisions in the past, some very unpleasant, and his own behavior, or the training in the Academy. But I’ll let you discover yourselves how the trio Doctor-Clara-Danny succeeds in solving their problems (at least for now) and the way they succeed in eliminating the Skovox Blitzer. The episode contains romance and love story, fun, but also fire arms.

Is the Doctor preparing to replace Clara? Even if Courtney’s travel in the TARDIS was very short (at least from the viewer point of view), she was surely wanting for more travels through time and space. Missy appears again in this episode, even if only passing by (less than you may expect from the previous episodes). Her helps, anyway, work hard welcoming the victims from Doctor’s life in the Nethersphere, or Heaven, or call it how you want.

Writer Gareth Roberts and Steven Moffat, director Paul Murphy, producer Nikki Wilson, executive producers Brian Minchin and Steven Moffat. Cast: Peter Capaldi (The Doctor), Jenna Coleman (Clara), Samuel Anderson (Danny Pink), Ellis George (Courtney Woods), Edward Harrison (Adrian), Nigel Betts (Mr Armitage), Andy Gillies (CSO Matthew), Nanya Campbell (Noah), Joshua Warner-Campbell (Yashe), Oliver Barry-Brook (Kelvin), Ramone Morgan (Tobias), Winston Ellis (Mr Woods), Gracy Goldman (Mrs Woods), Diana Katis (Mrs Christopholou), Jimmy Vee (Skovox Blitzer), Chris Addison (Seb).

The next episode on Doctor Who is Kill the Moon, the seventh episode of series 8, written by Peter Harness. In the near future the Doctor and Clara find themselves on a space shuttle making a suicide mission to the Moon. They crash-landed on the lunar surface and they find a mining base full of corpses, vicious spider-like creatures poised to attack, and a terrible dilemma. When Clara turns to the Doctor for help, she gets the shock of her life.