DW: The Caretaker - A Necessary Evil

"Doctor Who" has been mostly been increasing in quality as the current season has passed by, unfortunately tonight's episode is a bump down on the same graph.

In this week's episode the Doctor goes deep undercover at Clara's school, Coal Hill, as the caretaker. He's learned there's an alien killer robot hiding somewhere close by and he needs the school to trap and get rid of it. The story itself is no doubt a "Doctor Who" story. It's wacky, it's sci-fi, it's got the world by a thread, and only the Doctor can save it. But it still falls short of being an actual good episode.

First of all, the alien robot suffers from some of the weakest effects the show has had since the early days of the relaunch in 2005. They decided to go for special effects as they tend to do with most robots and aliens on "Doctor Who", but they didn't get it right. The robot never looked like an actual robot, it looked like a toy, like someone's plaything, it was hard to find it as menacing as it was supposed to be. Even when it started shooting deadly plasma beams all over the place I found myself not even flinching at its sight. We know the special effects team on "Doctor Who" can do good stuff. Just look at the Silence for example. They're just humans with a big mask and long-fingered gloves, but they still manage to be scary. This time they dropped the ball big time, hopefully it's due to them saving their production budget for something grander.

Secondly the sub-plot is tiring. It's once again centered around Clara and Danny and their relationship, making it absolutely cemented that Danny is going to stick around for a while. This episode marks the half-way point in the current season and despite Danny's promised big role the character is still rather unfamiliar, almost a stranger still. That's where the best thing about this episode comes into play. We absolutely need this episode if Danny's story arc is to lead to anything significant, or just long-standing, at all. We get to know Danny a lot more than we did before. We get to look more into his relationship with Clara, and we get glimpses of what the Doctor thinks of him. Hopefully this will mean there can be less get-to-know-Danny episodes in the future, and we can instead focus on the things that seems to be the main arcs of the coming seasons. Mainly the one about Heaven.