The Lodger (Doctor Who)
The episode features the Eleventh Doctor (Matt Smith) stranded on Earth and separated from his companion Amy Pond (Karen Gillan), when an unknown force prevents his time travelling spaceship, the TARDIS, from landing.
Showrunner Steven Moffat was a fan of Roberts' original comic strip and enthused him to adapt it into an episode for the series.
The Doctor opts to take a room for rent offered by the downstairs tenant, Craig Owens, in order to determine what is present on the upstairs flat without alerting whatever it is to his alien technology.
Amy is shown leaving the note in the series finale, "The Big Bang", when the Doctor's timeline rewinds and he revisits points in his past.
[4][5] Corden returned to play Craig in the episode "Closing Time" of the next series, Gareth Roberts' sequel to this story.
However, this sequel idea would later be dropped due to several concepts within it having already been utilized in multiple other Doctor Who episodes written around the same time; Meglos' cactus-like appearance was deemed to be far too similar to the Vinvocci aliens featured in "The End of Time", and the idea of aliens disguising themselves as elderly people had already been written into "Amy's Choice".
[10] Elements of the comic's story carry over into the episode, such as his confusion between a sonic screwdriver and a toothbrush, and the Doctor's aptitude at football.
[11] However, Roberts said that the episode was "a completely different situation" from the comic strip, as the Doctor did not know Craig as he did Mickey, and there was the added enemy of the upstairs apartment.
[9] When Roberts began writing for the episode, he knew the series' overarching plot but was not aware who was to be cast as the Eleventh Doctor.
[21] In the UK, overnight figures for the episode were 4.6 million, facing competition from the build-up to England's opening match in the 2010 FIFA World Cup.
He was not engaged by the upstairs villain, wished for more "laugh-out-loud moments than good-humoured banter" and disliked that the Doctor seemed "diminished" when thrown into the everyday atmosphere.
[27] In a review for IGN, Matt Wales rated it 7 out of 10 and referred to it as "one of the fluffier episodes" in terms of plot, but he said it was an "enjoyable little duck-out-of-water adventure".
However, he criticised the "more traditional Who elements", such as the alien threat that the directing left "devoid of almost all tension", Amy's occasional appearances that did not seem to gel with the rest of the story, and the short resolution, where "the whole thing collapsed into an incomprehensible muddle".
[28] SFX magazine's Russell Lewin gave "The Lodger" three and a half out of five stars, saying it was "brimming with witty dialogue" and was a "pleasant diversion" before the finale.
Club graded it an A−, saying it was a "funny outing" that allowed Smith to show comic depth as the Doctor, as well as praising the guest stars.
Though he referred to the alien up the stairs as a "pretty standard-issue", he liked it for being a metaphor of "the trap of complacency and the ways staying in a rut can lead to safety, stagnancy, and ignorance of the peril encroaching just outside one's four walls".
[29] A Region 2 DVD and Blu-ray containing the episode together with "Vincent and the Doctor", "The Pandorica Opens" and "The Big Bang" was released on 6 September 2010.
