ABSTRACT
Magic-realism meets comedy as The Lodger opens. Sophie wonders if Craig has placed an ad for the lodger. In both The Lodger and Closing Time, “dodgy” electrical connections stand as a ready metaphor for broken links and damaged connections. The Lodger, finds Craig and Sophie trapped in a continual present, with the narrative progress of their relationship stalled by circumstance. As the episode begins Sophie and Craig are somehow too close to come together, to become “close”. Craig offers the Doctor some keys, a token perhaps signalling his intuition of the Doctor’s sometime-wish for “home” and friendship. The Doctor’s relationship to time in The Lodger is also interesting. The Lodger, ostensibly about a house, is in many ways a story about relationships, mental space, and time. A very different seeming episode, The Doctor’s Wife, shares some common preoccupations with The Lodger.
