After last week’s fairly heavy piece, this week brought us a lighter-hearted episode, as the Doctor finds himself stuck on Earth, living as a lodger in a house where the upstairs has something in it that causes people to vanish, and blocks the TARDIS from landing.

This was a really enjoyable episode.  Played mainly for laughs, Smith’s Doctor is the most alien he’s been.   Completely out of his depth having to live life as a human there’s a lot of broad laughs from the Doctor’s inability to fit in.  Despite the story’s origins as a Doctor Who Magazine comic strip, its still hard to imagine this story working with the 10th Doctor, who seemed so much more human by comparison.

In fact, in some ways, the  idea that this is the same Doctor who had Christmas dinner with the Tylers, and spent years exiled to Earth perhaps jars with the humour, but then it is pretty consistent for Smith’s Doctor, remembering his reaction to Amy’s pregnancy a few weeks ago.  Whereas the nineth to tenth Doctors saw a shift from a Doctor who barely tolerated other humans most of the time and loathed social interaction to one much more comfortable with it, the Doctor’s personality has now veered even further off in the other direction and he’s genuinely puzzled by it.

That being said, he’s not as entirely out of his depth as he looks.  He twigs to the feelings Craig and Sophie have for each other pretty quickly, and he’s certainly a dab hand at football (playing nicely to Matt Smith’s previous career).  I have to wonder how much of his dizziness is an act for other’s benefits.   Perhaps its not so much that this incarnation is worse at these interactions, perhaps he just finds playing up his alien-ness amusing?

James Corden is someone who’s on TV a lot these days, although I must admit I’ve only seen him in a few things.  Gavin and Stacey pretty much completely passed me by and I only caught the first episode of the much-maligned Horne and Corden sketch show.  Here though he was very much the straight man to the Doctor’s antics and I thought he came out of it brilliantly.   Corden’s relied very much on his comedic roles lately, so to see him playing a role straight was nice and underlined that he’s actually a good actor.

If I had one complaint though, it was mainly that I felt the script was much too heavy handed with the romance being Corden’s character of Craig and his friend Sophie.  As the episode went on, I started to find myself getting pulled out of it during these scenes, thinking to myself “Yes! We get it! They both fancy each other but are too scared to make the first move”.  That was probably the only bum note I really had with the story though.

The central threat to the episode was well done too.  The changing image of the figure beckoning people upstairs was creepy, and the reveal of the threat as an alien attempt at a TARDIS was fascinating.  Its perhaps a shame that it was so throwaway though.  This is the first time we’ve seen such a craft in the new series outside of the TARDIS, and even in the classic stories, the only race that came close to making a TARDIS were the Daleks (waaaay back in The Chase).    The fact a race has created something so very close, using the perception filter as a makeshift chameleon circuit, and even borrowing the central console design strikes me as worth a story in itself, rather than just a throwaway menace.

That being said, the alien TARDIS was a really nice piece of design.  And I loved how it echoed the McGann console room (my favourite) with the pillars that curved in towards the console.

The lightweight nature of the story probably means that it won’t be one of the standouts of the series.  Highlights like the Eleventh Hour, Time of Angels and last week’s Vincent and the Doctor perhaps draw attention away from this episode, but it was none-the-less a really enjoyable, fun story.   No doubt to give us a slight respite before we plough straight into the first part of the finale on Saturday, which if the teaser is anything to go by, looks very, very epic.