Closing Time is a sequel to the season five episode The Lodger and again features James Cordon as Craig Owens an ordinary man drawn into a very unordinary adventure. Craig now no longer lives in the same house as he did in the lodger and now also has a son named Alfie (or Stormageddon, Dark Lord of All as he likes to be called) but the Doctor is back and that can only mean one thing, that things are not going to be straightforward.
Closing Time is one of those episodes which in parts does not feel like Doctor Who at all but in other parts seems to be very typically Doctor Who. For instance the fact that a lot of the story takes place in a department store seems a little bit odd (but then again there was a story idea called The Big Store back in the sixties that never actually got made, so perhaps it is not as odd as it might initially sound) but the fact that the department store is in fact the starting point for an alien invasion makes it also very typically Doctor Who.
The Cybermen appear in this story, although it could be argued that it really could have been any alien race as they didn’t really do a great deal and they were actually barely in the episode at all (a bit like The Wheel in Space in fact).
The Cybermats made a welcome reappearance in this story and were much better used than they were in Revenge of the Cybermen (and a bit less rubbish looking) and they featured in one of the best scenes in the entire episode when it attacked first the Doctor and then Craig before they despatched it with a frying pan, which is a very funny scene indeed!
Once again James Corden and Matt Smith were great in the double act that is Craig and the Doctor which never fails to amuse and proves that James Corden is more than just Smithy which you never really think about when watching him in this (well I don’t anyway).
If anything the potential invasion by the Cybermen was the b plot to the story with the main story being Craig’s bonding with his son (which is a not very usual Doctor Who storyline) which is where much of the humour and the emotional weight of the story come from.
This is the sort of episode which I think will divide opinion, but it is one that I could watch over and over again and would be an episode that I would choose to watch if I was feeling a little bit down as it would definitely cheer me up.
