Episode #257 : The Caretaker

"You want to know what's in that box? I'll tell you what's in that box! It's a Time Machine! It also travels in space! And it usually contains a man who just wants to get on with his work of preventing the end of the world — but keeps on getting interrupted by boring little humans!"

Episode #257:      The Caretaker.
Companions:        The 12th Doctor and Clara Oswald.

Air Date:              27th September 2014.

The Doctor's decision to use Clara's school as the centre of a trap for a wild Skovox Blitzer results in revelations in her personal life. Meanwhile, the Doctor's mechanical quarry, which has enough firepower to decimate entire planets, is running amok in the halls of Coal Hill.

The Caretaker is one of those episodes where I can't help but think that the writing team were running out of ideas. It is a story that makes minimal sense and does little but be a progression from one scene to another with no real plot behind it. Essentially the Doctor disguises himself as a janitor at Coal Hill school in order to locate and deal with an alien robot monster capable of destroying everything. By itself this is a fair premise but we get no real explaination as to how the robot got there or why it was drawn here. Instead we get nearly an hour of the Doctor being a grumpy old so an so, shouting at or being rude to Danny Pink and not all that nice to Clara either. We get it. The Doctor doesn't like soldiers but Danny isn't a soldier anymore. The episode feels like a family squabble with a side plot of a killer alien robot.

That being said, I just don't find this a very good episode. It has some funny moments but not enough. There is too much of the Doctor being a big old grump and it gets old fast. It isn't the worst by far but  A better way of handling the episode would have been to have the Doctor and Clara arrive at the school that find that something was up, team up with Danny and the school girl, and they have a chase/fight encounter through the school on parent teacher night. What we got was a wasted potential and a bit of a mess.

It is episodes like The Caretaker that make me so hearken back to the good old days of classic Who. I am sorry to say it but from here on, it feels like New Who has lost it's way somewhat.