The Caretaker is a good demonstration of how important the pre-title sequence is. It's a teaser for the whole episode, it sets up the situation and may introduce key characters, and it can signpost the problems that the Doctor is about to be faced with. It's these first few minutes that can determine a viewer's expectations and colour their judgement of the whole episode. Sadly, on this occasion it was a bad opener for me. Writer Gareth Roberts has now brought us six episodes and they are a slightly mixed bag. More importantly he has been responsible for seventeen episodes of "Sarah Jane Adventures" and four for its replacement "Wizards vs. Aliens" (though they are two part stories) so it is maybe not surprising to see him writing a school oriented episode that feels a bit cut down. With that in mind, it's an OK episode and if it's the season's worst then I'll not be complaining. However, my opinion was led astray by the opening... The first scene sees the Doctor and Clara in some alien desert tied up against a pair of pillars, exchanging desperate banter about their predicament. Cut to a shot of Danny as Clara meets him for another date... this looks like it will be a flashback and the episode will some how play out to reveal how they came to be tied up, but it is in fact the opposite and Danny remarks about the excessive tan that Clara has suddenly gained... we then see her arriving soaking wet, then exhausted after running down corridors (that look too much like TARDIS corridors when they are looking for the TARDIS itself). We are seeing Clara balancing her normal life with unseen adventures with the Doctor - my two pet hates! Maybe I'm a traditionalist, but I don't like companions to be tied to a normal life that they can dip in and out of and the Doctor should not be having adventures that we don't see. I was immediately, reminded of The Power Of Three and feeling let down and ready to be disappointed. On second viewing however, knowing what to expect, it wasn't so bad...
There's a little gag about the TARDIS arriving and Clara hopping in asking where they are off to this time and the Doctor hiding his screens from her and opening the doors with a click of his fingers, Clara responds with a click of her own fingers to close them again because he can't go without her - cute, but silly. The point is, the Doctor is going undercover and doesn't need Clara... a point that she later turns back on him when she doesn't understand, because she doesn't know what he's doing because he won't tell her, which means she wouldn't approve... it's banter and plot purely for the sake of it and the episode would have been less silly (and shorter) without it. Similarly silly is the way the Doctor introduces himself. He is undercover at Coal Hill, disguised as a caretaker and on meeting the teachers says "John Smith's the name, but you know, here's the thing, most people just call me the Doctor." It's part of a gag set up about him not being able to go undercover convincingly, but again it sounds silly and against character - if the Doctor uses the 'John Smith' alias, he doesn't negate it with 'the Doctor', though he was known as the Doctor when he worked in an apartment store in Closing Time but that was another Gareth Roberts story! My frustration continued. Further annoyances came in the form of funky rotated camera angles that needlessly put things on an angle and inappropriate music. Since the show was revived in 2005 Murray Gold has provided all the music, taking him beyond Dudley Simpson's 62 episode dominance (actually trouncing the record since modern episodes are twice as long and have far more music) and he has composed some real gems like Rose's Theme, the Doctor's action music (you know, the one that sounds like it's calling "Doctor! Doctor, the Doctor!") and most recently the beautiful theme for Clara. I think there has only been one instance where I wasn't keen on the music but I can't remember when it was... until now. I also think that he has been poorly directed on this occasion because the music itself is fine, it's just wrong for the scene it's used in. Clara is desperately running around the school to find Danny, presumably to talk to him about the Doctor, but she keeps getting stopped by pupils and other teachers. It's maybe not a dramatic sequence or a particularly dramatic time, but her intentions and frustrations give it importance, yet the music is all jolly and playful and completely tramples on her desperation. Similarly, there are unnecessarily silly moments between the Doctor and Danny with a running gag that the Doctor refuses to accept the fact that Danny is a maths teacher and is convinced he is a PE teacher because he's a soldier. Plus the fact that he doesn't recognise him from his encounter with Orson Pink in Listen "I suppose he looks a bit like him" to which Clara, naturaly, replies "He looks exactly like him!" The Doctor also identifies another teacher as being Clara's boyfriend... one who wears a bow-tie and has floppy hair and quite a jaw - this joke's actually not too bad but the actor's likeness to Matt Smith wasn't good enough to work on it own and needed to be pointed out with more deliberate camera work (or maybe I was drifting, because I also missed the "Ozzie loves the squaddie" graffiti)
All this silliness does little for the plot and I suspect there is a sizeable amount of Steven Moffat's input here to pad out the main story. Sadly, it is reminiscent of "Windfall", an episode of "Press Gang" that centred on two secondary characters that didn't belong together and was essentially a collection of implausible silliness that had no real baring on the normal show. The normal "Doctor Who" thread of the episode centres around the Skovox Blitzer, a mechanical creature from another world that has apparently been drawn to the school due to artron energy (as the Doctor points out, there has been plenty of that at Coal Hill over the years), but it is largely lost among the silliness. It's a well built spider like robot that has a peculiar may of speaking, strangely reminiscent of the Mechanoids in The Chase, but it is only featured briefly and left me with a sense that it's deadly but easily beaten and not really worth thinking about - which really means it wasn't given a suitable plot and may have given too many production problems.
The episode is saved by some really clever banter and nice special effects. There is some relevant plot development with regards to the Doctor accepting Danny, but I can't help feeling the episode is a bit of a mess over all. I'd like to share some of the better quotes, but I don't want to spoil the better parts of the episode. The Doctor has an invisibility watch which has a greater use than his intention to attract the Blitzer's attention, the Doctor could easily have used his sonic screwdriver for that purpose (alien technology that doesn't belong) and there is a truly uncomfortable scene with Danny in the TARDIS acting like a dick because he sees the Doctor an an Officer type. Then a remarkably good somersault that isn't even referenced as he saves the day.
Finally, going back to the music, there is a scene later on where it sounds very similar to music used in the Doctor Puppet animations. That must be quite a complement to their composer but it highlights another of the episode's failings. The music feels like it is there to tell us how to feel, what to think, what is going on. On something like the Doctor Puppet animations that's fine because there is no dialogue and only rare pieces of voice over, but a show like Doctor Who shouldn't need it. Mark Ayers makes reference to this when talking about his music for Ghostlight, he did what he could with it but it was never going to be able to tell the story or explain the confusion and the end result was a serial who's music almost drowned out parts of the dialogue and contributed to its unintelligibility.
Bringing us back to normality, the closing scene shows a policeman, who was killed by the Skovox Blitzer early in the episode, being interviewed in a large white hall and being told that Missie (though she isn't named specifically) is busy today and that there have been quite a few people coming in from the Blitzer. When the policeman asks where he is he is told it has many names such as the afterlife, promised land, neverspace... the mystery continues...
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