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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.
The Doctor marches off toward the TARDIS, arguing with himself, trying to make himself not notice the flickering streetlights. "Am I noticing? No. And what I'm not doing is scanning for electrical fluctuations!" Naturally, he's got the sonic screwdriver out at this point and is waving it around at the street. "I'm going," he says. "I am through saving them! I'm going away now!" Even he doesn't really seem to believe himself.
Bright and early the morning, he's at the department store, demonstrating a toy airplane for a gaggle of utterly rapt children. He accidentally steers it into Craig, who's pushing Alfie around in a stroller. Craig is stunned to see him. The Doctor gleefully tells him he's working there now and shows off the name tag pinned to his suspenders. Appropriately, it reads "The Doctor: Here to help." Craig is too exhausted from baby duty to question the Doctor too much, although he does mention the Doctor is missing that galactic alignment. Craig is evidently a good listener. Good catch, Sophie. The Doctor plays with a robot dog for a bit -- even though it's not as fun as his last one -- then sees a little silvery gizmo darting across the floor. Craig pleads with the Doctor to tell him what's going on. His son lives here, he says. He needs to know if there's anything dangerous. So the Doctor fesses up and tells him three people have gone missing from the shop in the last few days. Also, there's that whole thing with the power fluctuations.
Craig thinks that's just the new cabling going in, so the Doctor latches onto that as a way to get them out of harm's way. He wheels Alfie toward an elevator that's been cordoned off with a big old "DANGER!" sign, fixes it with a wave of the screwdriver and ushers the Owens men inside. Then, because he can't quite help himself, he throws his hands up in the air and admits there's more going on. They all get into the elevator as the Doctor explains someone's been using a teleporter there in the shop. Craig makes the requisite Star Trek reference. "It could be disguised as anything," the Doctor says as they stand in an elevator that looks an awful lot like a Star Trek teleporter pad.
The lights flicker and suddenly they're all standing in a darkened room. Craig, focused on the Doctor, hasn't quite noticed the change of scenery yet. When he starts to look around, the Doctor grabs him and tries to distract him with confessions of the heart. (Or hearts.) "I love you! Craig, it's always been you!" The Doctor wraps his arms around Craig's shoulders while surreptitiously sonicking their environs. "Are you going to kiss me?" Craig asks a bit weakly. "Would you like that?" the Doctor asks in his best attempt at being seductive. He puckers his lips like a fish and makes "mm-mm!" sounds. He appears to be as awkward kissing boys as he is girls. Finally, Craig protests: "Doctor, I can't! I'm taken!" Otherwise, he seems kind of game. As he tries to wrest himself from the Doctor's embrace, he gets a good look at the dungeon-like room into which they've been teleported. He screams. A Cyberman clatters toward them out of the shadows. The Doctor sonics the teleporter, zapping them back into the elevator. He says he's fused the teleporter so the Cybermen will be stuck on their ship now, at least for a while.
Craig wonders why they haven't invaded by now, if they're so evil. The Doctor hasn't figured that out yet. He tries to get him to take Alfie home, but Craig is determined to stick with him. Being with the Doctor is the safest bet, he says. "You always win!" he says. "You always survive!" The Doctor gives him a sad smile, but can't refuse him. They split up to go investigate the shop, but not before the Doctor gives Craig an affectionate hug. A saleswoman at the jewelry counter sees this and gives them a big smile. "I hope you don't mind my saying, Doctor, but you look ever so sweet with your partner and the baby." The Doctor thinks about this. "'Partner,' I like it," he says. "But is it better than 'companion?'" She thinks that sounds too old-fashioned. He eventually gets around to asking her if she's seen anything unusual around the shop lately and she mentions the "silver rat thing." Meanwhile, Craig heads off to the lingerie department to ask Shona's former coworker some questions. He unintentionally comes off like a perv, things go downhill quickly and a security guard is called over. Craig tries to beat a hasty retreat, but knocks over a stand of delicates. The Doctor comes bounding over to help. The employees, clearly enamored of the Doctor after just his short time working there, back off when he identifies Craig as his friend. A bit of talking and they find out this is where Shona disappeared.
The Doctor and the Owens men head back to the dressing rooms. Craig grumps the Doctor must have some magical alien "gas" that makes people love him. He even gestures at the Doctor's butt as he says this. Alfie (via the Doctor) tells his father he should believe in himself more. Not finding anything, they head back out onto the store floor. The Doctor thinks out loud. The silver gizmo-rat -- properly known as a cybermat, he says -- has been collecting power for the Cybermen. But why in a shop and not at a power plant? They bicker about the baby needing his diaper changed and Craig takes his son away in a huff. The saleswoman from earlier gives the lovebirds a worried look. The Doctor shouts after Craig, but stops when he sees Rory and Amy shopping. A little girl asks Amy for her autograph. The Doctor wants very much to say something to them, but makes himself hide behind a rack. Eventually he notices the big poster behind him, advertising a perfume called Petrichor. Amy is the spokesmodel. I think she's supposed to look mysterious, but she looks a little bit scared. "For the girl who's tired of waiting," reads the slogan.
As the store closes up for the night, the Doctor and Craig start skulking around in search of the cybermat. Alfie comes along via a papoose the Doctor gives Craig. They soon capture the cybermat, which seems kind of cute until it bares its rows of sharp metal teeth. Craig shrieks and has a bit of a freakout. At the same time, the security guard has just been attacked by a Cyberman and lets out an agonized scream. The Doctor bolts and finds him lying unconscious in the basement. The Cyberman knocks the Doctor clean out and the thing he sees is Craig's worried face staring down at him. The Doctor gets up and stumbles around a bit, confused because the Cybermen shouldn't have been able to use the sonic-fused teleporter. Also, one of its arms was old and rusty. They've been abducting people and turning them into Cybermen with spare parts, but they didn't take the Doctor because he isn't "compatible."
They head back to Craig's place to plan their move. Craig pops out for some milk, leaving the Doctor to entertain Stormageddon. The baby cries and cries. "Stop crying," the Doctor says with a gentle smile. "You've got a lot to look forward to, you know... Mortgage repayments; the 9-to-5; a persistent, nagging sense of spiritual emptiness..." He got that from Sesame Street. It was that episode with "X is for Xanax!" He sonics the kid's lamp to make it reflect a panoply of stars on the ceiling. He waxes nostalgic about walking among the stars and hopes Alfie has as much fun as he did. It's pretty sad, actually. Hopefully Alfie doesn't speak Adult or he'll be a basket case before he's even walking. By then, the cybermat has come back to life and tracked the Doctor down. It gnashes its teeth at him. He runs with Alfie out of the house, dropping his screwdriver and locking himself out in the process.
Craig returns home and is attacked by the cybermat. The Doctor stashes Alfie in a swing, then crashes through a glass door to Craig's rescue. Danger and hilarity ensue! They take turns wrestling with this tiny metallic thing until the Doctor finally sonics it with the right frequency. The Doctor congratulates Craig, who also looks quite pleased with himself. Later, they all have a sit-down in the living room while the Doctor reprograms the cybermat's brain and tries to figure out why the Cybermen need it to harvest power for them. "Do you still feel safe with me?" the Doctor asks. He calls himself a "stupid, selfish man" and blames himself for putting people in danger. Craig sensibly tells him not to blame himself. "If it weren't for you, this whole planet would be in absolute ruin." But the Doctor is feeling morose, what with his impending death and all. He confesses that he'll die tomorrow. "I can't put it off anymore," he says. "Tomorrow" seems like a fluid thing to a time traveler. Couldn't you flit about the universe for a thousand years and still make it on time? But Craig, exhausted, has fallen asleep with Alfie on his chest. The Doctor tenderly covers them both with a blankie.
The morning, the Doctor heads back to the department store to hunt down the Cybermen. As soon as Craig wakes up, he realizes what's going on and straps Alfie into the papoose, determined to help the Doctor. "He needs someone," Craig says. "He always needs someone, he just can't admit it." Aw. Craig would make such an awesome Companion. The Doctor could just pick him up from a pre-Alfie point in the timestream, right? Right!
The Doctor wanders around the dressing room, mumbling to himself about what complicated transport the Cybermen must be using, when it turns out to be a hole in the wall behind one of the mirrors. "So, they didn't teleport down, they climbed up," he muses. He inches through a narrow, rough-hewn tunnel in the rock. He emerges in a vast, underground cavern. Part of a Cyber ship is visible, protruding through the rock. Once he makes his way into the ship, he finds a dilapidated sort of workshop with bits of Cybermen and wires everywhere.
Craig comes tearing into the store and hands Alfie to the nice saleswoman from earlier. "The Doctor needs me!" he says. "I understand," she says. "You two need time alone!"
Back on the Cyber ship, a Cyberman has joined the Doctor. He doesn't seem especially worried. He just goes on with his usual exposition, talking out loud about how the ship crashed there centuries ago and was dormant until the store put in new wiring. Then they started abducting people to convert. Once they have the force to emerge, they'll have the whole planet converted. He gives the Cybermen a choice as he always does: "Deactivate yourself or I deactivate you." Does that ever work? It doesn't work this time, because another Cyberman joins the party and grabs the Doctor. His hearts and brain are incompatible, they say, but: "Other body parts will be of use." I hope one of those parts is the hair. A whole race of Cybermen with that swoopy mop! Imagine it!
Craig comes running into the room, wielding a handheld scanner he's picked up from the dressing room. He waves it around, pretending it's a weapon and demanding the Doctor's release. The Cybermen are impressed by Craig's intelligence and decide he'll be their new leader. "Do not be afraid," they say. "We will take your fear from you." They stuff him into a Cyberman-o-Matic. Metallic armor clamps down over his body. The Doctor tries to activate the reprogrammed cybermat, but one of the Cybermen just squashes it underfoot. They begin to wipe Craig's brain of all emotion. The Doctor tells him to fight it. "Think of Sophie! Think of Alfie! Don't let them take it all away." The Doctor screams and struggles, but it all seems for naught as the metallic shield closes seamlessly over Craig's face.
Alfie begins to cry up in the store. A monitor in the Cyber ship picks it up. Craig's emotions start coming back. The Cybermen are confused, as this should be impossible. Electricity crackles over Craig's new Cyber face. The Doctor latches onto this iota of hope. "Craig! You wanted a chance to prove you're a dad! You are never gonna get a better one than this!" The metal mask splits open, revealing Craig's human face. The machinery clanks to a halt, releasing him. The Cybermen stumble around. The Doctor exposits something about emotional feedback loops. The Cybermen's heads explode and their ship is soon to follow. The Doctor and Craig teleport back up into the elevator, clutching at each other for dear life.
They reunite with Alfie and it's all hugs and kisses. Well, for Alfie and his dad, anyway. "I blew them up with love!" Craig says. The Doctor tries to explain that it was technically something else that's very complicated and scientific, but then finally gives up and lets Craig have his moment.
Later, Craig has found a fresh shirt he'd like to buy. The saleswoman would like to give Craig the Doctor's employee discount. "Are you two married?" she asks. "Oh, no, we talked about it," Craig says. "It's just a piece of paper, isn't it?" He's referring to himself and Sophie but this kindly lady still has the wrong end of the stick. "It's nice for babies to have two daddies who love each other," she says. Craig finally catches on and has a good laugh. He starts to explain, but the Doctor has vanished.
Craig returns home, feeling sad until he realizes the house is immaculate. The Doctor is there waiting for him, having gone back in time a bit to get things fixed up. Craig is touched. The Doctor gave up his galactic alignment for him. As another gift, the Doctor tells him that Alfie is very proud of his dad. With that, he's ready to head off to America. He borrows a handful of blue envelopes and a Stetson, leaving just before Sophie returns home. She's thrilled, if a little puzzled, to find the house spotless and Craig being a more confident dad. Craig tries to act innocent, but then Alfie burbles out "Doctor" and gives the game away.
The Doctor pauses outside the TARDIS and watches three children playing ball. "Hey, I'm the Doctor," he says. "I was here to help, and you are very, very welcome." He tips his hat to them. In voice-over, the grown-up versions of the children recount their meeting with the Doctor. One girl notes he was happy and sad all at once. The boy thought he was a cowboy on his way to a gunfight. The other girl liked his hat.
In some far future, River Song is reading through a folder marked "Eye Witness Accounts." The children's stories are among them. River consults her TARDIS diary and notes the Lake Silencio appointment. She's in the library at Luna University, wearing her graduation robe. "Ticktock goes the clock," says Madame Kovarian from the shadows. She recites more of it and says, "Such a lovely old song. But is it about him?" River is excited to meet someone who might know of the Doctor. To explain why River doesn't remember Kovarian, two of those Silence gentlemen emerge from the shadows. River gasps. "What are those things?" she asks. "Your owners," Kovarian says. The moment River turns away from them, she forgets them. Today was the day River became Doctor Song. It's also the day she becomes the Impossible Astronaut. Two men in military uniform march into the room, sedate her and force her into that 1960s spacesuit we've been waiting to see again. The time she opens her eyes, River is at the bottom of Lake Silencio. The creepy doll voices from "Night Terrors" sing: "Ticktock goes the clock till River kills the Doctor." So even though this "lovely old song" spells out exactly what happens, it somehow still comes as a surprise to most of the involved parties. Stay tuned for the final weecap of the season week!
Tippi Blevins is a recapper traveling slowly forward in time. Email her at b_tippi@yahoo.com, or find her on Twitter.