Episode Report Card Tippi Blevins: B+ | 1 USERS: A- YOU GRADE IT The Doctor's Farewell Reunion Tour
By Tippi Blevins | Season 6 | Episode 12 | Aired on 09.24.2011
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.The Doctor's saying his goodbyes as he expects to die the following day in Utah. Luckily this means once again seeing Craig, his adorable roommate from last season's "The Lodger." By now, Craig and his girlfriend Sophie have had a baby boy. Craig is utterly baffled by all things baby, but doing his best to hold it together when Sophie leaves them for a weekend with friends. When the Doctor arrives, hijinks soon ensue. (The Doctor, who speaks the language of larval humans, says the tyke's preferred name is "Stormageddon," for example.) The Doctor's plan is to simply stop in for a quick hello-and-goodbye, but he can't help but notice something is a little weird. People have been disappearing from a local department store, the place is troubled by random power fluctuations and a metallic, ratlike "Cybermat" is on the loose.
Despite his best efforts to ignore the problem, he gets himself a job at the store and gets down to investigating. It turns out that a Cyberman ship crashed to Earth long ago and lay dead and buried until the store was built. The Cybermat began siphoning power for the Cybermen, who then abducted humans to turn into their own kind. When Craig and baby join him in the hunt, people assume they're gay dads, what with words like "partner" and "companion" being tossed about. Plus, they're just cute together. When the Cybermen capture Craig, it's the sound of his baby crying that allows him to not only fight them off but destroy them with an emotional feedback loop. Or something.
Craig becomes a more confident dad and the Doctor is off to America for his date with death. The last thing in the episode is Madame Kovarian tracking down River Song on the day she gets her doctorate. River is forced into that 1960s astronaut suit and dropped to the bottom of Lake Silencio. Dun, dun, DUN! Stay tuned for the full weecap.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!Welcome to the penultimate weecap of the season! To start things off, we visit Sanderson & Grainger, a new-looking department store that's just closing up for the night. The lights fizz and flicker. If you've watched anything in the supernatural or science fiction genres, you know that this is a harbinger of Very Bad Things. Two ladies working in the lingerie department express annoyance at the electrical problems. One of them, Shona, heads into the dressing room to clean up. While she's doing that, we drop in on Craig and Sophie from last season's "The Lodger." Their lights are flickering, too. Sophie's heading out for a few days, but not before she runs down a list of instructions (the food is numbered in the fridge) and warnings (her mum and his might call). "I can cope on my own," he assures her. They hug and kiss goodbye. Moments later, when he's alone and the place already kind of looks like a sty, he's getting a bit exasperated with his mother on the phone. "Craig Owens can do it on his own!" he insists. "No one is coming to help me!"
Cue the Doctor knocking on the door. "Hello, Craig, I'm back!" Craig thinks Sophie has somehow phoned the Doctor and asked him for help, but the Doctor insists it's just a social call. He doesn't like their new house. (It's a huge improvement over the last one.) The Doctor fully intends to leave after a quick greeting, but he notices the lights flickering just as he starts to walk away. He whips out the sonic screwdriver and bounds inside. "Something's wrong," he says. He picks up "increased sulfur emissions" and notices the place is a mess. He surmises that Craig is not alone. Craig runs after him, shushing him as best he can, but to no avail. The Doctor bursts into Craig's upstairs room and finds a baby. He is Craig and Sophie's son. At the same time, Shona is realizing one of the dressing rooms is occupied. The lights flicker. She pulls back a curtain, revealing a grungy Cyberman. She screams us into the opening credits.
By the time we get back to Craig's house, he's given up the thin veneer of self-sufficiency and admitted he can't cope, after all. He paces in his kitchen, utterly baffled by his son, who cries all the time. "Do they have 'off' switches?" Craig asks, near crying himself. "No, but sometimes this works," says the Doctor, who raises a finger to his lips with a "shh!" The baby, named Alfie, immediately settles down. Also, the baby prefers to be called Stormageddon, says the Doctor, once again displaying his fluency in Baby. After a bit more paternal exasperation, Craig changes the subject. He thinks something must be going on for the Doctor to have shown up. The Doctor insists it's just a "farewell tour" and nothing's going on. Nothing at all. He means to go off to see some spectacular alignment of galaxies, but then he picks up a newspaper on the table. Something catches his eye. He tries to ignore it, but Craig notices and starts panicking. The Doctor also tries to ignore the light that flickers above the table. "I've given all that up!" the Doctor insists. Alfie starts crying again. "Can you do the shushing thing?" Craig asks the Doctor. "No, it only works once and only on lifeforms with underdeveloped brains." As the Doctor turns to go, Craig picks up on something the Doctor said earlier about that farewell tour. He asks about him, but the Doctor shushes him and he falls mute. Heh.