One of the great things about Doctor Who is that it can be a very different show from one week to the next (admittedly it’s often the same, but the potential is there), so where last week’s episode was a big, emotional one covering, in its own way, the purpose of art, this week’s was a minor comedy focused on the mundane, and was none the worse for it – well it wasn’t quite as good as last week’s in my opinion, but it was still very enjoyable.

With the episode clearly being one produced due to filming constraints (I wouldn’t be surprised if we have an Amy-heavy penultimate episode or finale, considering the minimal amount of screen time she had in this story), the Doctor Who team were free to tell a low-key everyday story and I think they did a rather fine job, even with James Corden in a starring role as Craig, call centre worker, Sunday league football player and generally a bit of a loser, hopelessly pining after his best friend and quite happy to sit back on his sofa and let life pass him by. I could easily fill up this review with an anti-James Corden diatribe, but I won’t, not least as this was the first thing I’ve found him likeable in for a very long time (thankfully Doctor Who is aimed at a family audience, otherwise we probably would have had to put up with his usual fat/gay jokes). Not that he was brilliant, just a toned down version of the bloke-ish slobby character that he now tends to play.

So, the episode was essentially a pleasant little romantic comedy taking place between a couple of friends in Colchester (I promise that I won’t make any jokes about the inhabitants of Essex), with a 900-odd year old alien thrown in as a flatmate. Needless to say that the Doctor’s presence brought the couple together, as it so usually does (it seems to be either that or the characters he meets come to a sticky end – so it’s probably close to evening out at zero). In a way it was a shame that this was yet another case of a slobby guy ending up with a much prettier girl – admittedly there is something a bit odd and kooky about Daisy Haggard, who played Craig’s crush Sophie, probably because of her regularly playing psychotic characters in Man Stroke Woman, but I would still say she’s out of the league of a guy like Craig.

Really the sci-fi stuff isn’t worth mentioning in much detail, mainly because it was a mix of the unsurprising and kind-of nonsensical. The Doctor was stuck there on his own as the Tardis was unable to land due to a time loop, and there was something sinister going on in the flat upstairs – shadowy figures (including a creepy looking girl, probably down to the pigtails – they always look creepy) asked passers-by to help them out, only for these passers-by to never be seen again. There was also a rapidly spreading patch of sinister looking dry rot on the flat downstairs ceiling, which according to the Doctor was far more dangerous than the average dry rot. It turned out that the shadowy figures looked like that as they actually didn’t have any more detail to them, what with them being only computer simulations of people, the dry rot was the nasty remnants of what had been going on, and in fact there wasn’t an upstairs flat at all – the reality filter that we also saw in episode one made another appearance, this time disguising an alien spaceship that had been abandoned on top of Craig’s flat. The creepy figures being the ship’s computer trying to find a suitable pilot, not realising that humans couldn’t physically handle the exertion, although unfortunately it then decided that the Doctor would be the perfect candidate, which according to the Doctor would have catastrophic consequences – if he came into contact with the ship’s power source it would cause a reaction so powerful that it would be the end of the world (something that was really only just thrown in right at the last minute to create a bit of tension). But it was ok in the end as Craig, with his lack of desire to go anywhere managed to pass his general apathy onto the ship by touching it, which might very well by the strangest way in which someone’s saved the day in an episode of Doctor Who.

I wasn’t entirely sure about the part where the Doctor filled Craig in on who he was, both from a character viewpoint (as the Doctor doesn’t normally go about announcing his full history to ordinary people, even his companions have to coax it out of him gradually), and the method in which he did it, via headbutt – has the show featured this skill before, or was it just another example of it being a useful plot device introduced with no foreshadowing? I’ll be happy to admit my error if someone can remember this from an earlier episode, but I honestly can’t. Plus, judging by how sniffy the BBFC are about showing head-butts on film in case they be copied by impressionable viewers, I’m surprised that the BBC felt that it was a good idea to feature it in a family drama. Not that I’m actually complaining about this really, as it was an amusing way of moving the story along.

Really, the sci-fi parts of the plotline don’t stand up to close scrutiny, so it’s probably best to leave it there for them, and focus on the best aspect of the episode, which was seeing the Doctor react to everyday things in his usual quirky way, such as his keenness to find out if he was good at football or not on being drafted into Craig’s pub team, his getting filled in on what was going on by a cat, or his joyful yet disruptive embracing of Craig’s job when Craig was laid up with the after effects of touching the suspicious dry rot (although, I can believe many ludicrous things in Doctor Who, but a call centre that relaxed and pleasant to work in is not one of them). And of course, as if to cement Matt Smith’s unusual heart-throb status further, we were also treated to a sight of him wearing only a towel.

And well, that’s about it for this week, it’s the first part of the finale next week so I’m sure there’ll be lots of write about there (although it looks like a fair amount of that will be me going on about how it was a bad idea that they’ve brought the Cybermen, Daleks, etc etc back again). Coincidentally it looks like Corden’s Gavin and Stacey co-star Joanna Page is in next week’s story, I’m keeping my fingers crossed that Matthew Horne never steps foot on a Doctor Who set though.