This weekend’s episode of Doctor Who, “The Lodger”, may not have been the tribute to David Bowie’s seminal 1979 collaboration with Brian Eno that I wanted it to be – That’s next week, apparently – but it was another hour for me to realize that I really, really prefer Matt Smith as the Doctor to David Tennant’s Time Lord.
Maybe it’s because Smith’s Doctor was, in this episode, the closest he’s been to Tennant’s Doctor – there was less of his irascibility, and more of the sheer glee that Tennant’s Time Lord seemed to bring to every single situation – but I couldn’t help but compare the two portrayals this week, watching the temporarily abandoned Doctor try to solve a mystery in time and space without his trusty sonic screwdriver or TARDIS while also trying to fit in as a regular person (It might have been because “The Lodger” – adapted from a comic written for Tennant’s Doctor – felt like something from the Russell T Davies era, more working class sitcom than fairytale, romanticizing the everyday as much as the magical), and realize just how much I preferred Smith.
The key to my preference, you see, is that Smith’s joy at finding out that he’s good at football or whatever mundane, everyday thing he’s discovering for the first time, is tempered with an edge, a sense that the character really is alien. Tennant – and, before him, Christopher Eccleston, which leads me to believe that it was then-showrunner Davies’ decision – played the Doctor as something else, someone who may have been a bit “weird” but was just like us, really; Smith, in contrast, always manages to seem just slightly… off, in a way that’s impossible to describe – It’s not menacing, exactly, but he retains a sense of “other” no matter what he’s doing, something that makes even his moments of glee and surprise come across as something more complex than what, by the end of Tennant’s run, had devolved into something approaching smugness and pantomime.
Storywise, “The Lodger” was this season’s budget-saving episode – Amy was barely in it, and it was also light on special effects and spectacle – and, while it didn’t measure up to “Blink” or “Turn Left” in terms of suspense or importance to continuity, there was something enjoyable about enjoying the breather before next weekend’s beginning of the season finale two-parter… teased this week by Amy discovering an engagement ring that, by all rights, shouldn’t exist if Rory has really been wiped from space and time. But then, I still think there’s more to that than meets the eye.
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