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There are a lot of fathers and sons in this year's Doctor Who.

We had Henry Avery being redeemed (sort of) by his son Toby back The Curse of the Black Spot, we had Jimmy's son acting as a tipping point for the side his Ganger ultimately picked in The Almost People and then in both Night Terrors and now Closing Time we've had the day being saved by a father's love for his son. Obviously, given the whole season arc is about Amy and Rory's daughter, it's a fair bet that parenthood is supposed to be a theme, though at this level of pegging major story beats to parent/child relationships it seems a little facile. It would also be nice to see a few mothers and daughters aside from Amy and River who, let's face it, don't exactly have a typical mother/daughter relationship.

Leaving aside the whole father and son thing, I'm quite glad that I haven't the faintest clue who James Corden is. I think he worked well here, better than in The Lodger, where his rivalry with the Doctor and his hopelessness with Sophie edged the Craig character towards dislikable. Here, with a friendship established, the slightly screwball `two men and a baby take on the cybermen' had the necessary lightness of touch to trip along nicely for the requisite forty-five minutes of entertainment. It's never going to be one of the great classics of the show but it never had any pretensions to be and it delivered its own story with a good deal of success. The cybermen were perhaps a little underused and almost entirely without menace, but the story wasn't about them. I can see very little to criticise here unless you believe that this sort of light comedy has no place in Doctor Who.

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purplecat

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