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One of the refreshing things about this series of Doctor Who has been the way in which Steven Moffat and his writers have focused primarily on developing the relationship between Clara and the new Doctor. Previous series have done that as well, but they've usually mixed the growth of a new (or, given the overlap between Doctors and Companions, new-ish) friendship with plotlines that try to involve the Companions' families, most notably in the case of Rose's boyfriend Mickey and her mother Jackie. That divided focus made for some great episodes (particularly the heartbreaking "Father's Day", in which Rose got the opportunity to meet the father who had died before she was born) but more often than not it felt like baggage that was unnecessarily added on.

This year, the show has gone a little more slowly when it comes to fleshing out Clara's home life. They dispensed with the two kids that she used to nanny for, but they've also gradually introduced Danny Pink (Samuel Anderson) and established that their relationship may prove to be important - to the extent that we were introduced to one of their potential descendants in "Listen" - but it's been primarily in the background. That we're nearly halfway through the season and we're only just now getting to the point where the show deals directly with the effect of time travel on human relationships speaks volumes about the different tack that the creative team has taken this year.

Yet, taking it slowly prior to "The Caretaker" doesn't mean that the episode itself is deliberate in its approach. If anything, delaying dealing with the Clara-Danny aspect of the show seems to have led to a pent up desire to really get to grips with the difficulty of unwittingly dating a time traveler. That desire is explored in a couple of minutes during the frenetically paced opening montage, during which Clara has to juggle the two halves of her life with varying degrees of success. She's initially shown chained to a pillar on a desert planet with The Doctor, awaiting the arrival of Sand Piranhas waiting to finish them off, then the show immediately cuts to her meeting Danny for a date while sporting a tan that can only be described as teak in colour. In one of the best bits of editing in the episode, she runs into the TARDIS, then immediately jumps into a cab with Danny. (This also makes for one of the best exchanges in the episode: DANNY: You're soaking wet. CLARA: Freak shower. DANNY: Is that seaweed? CLARA: I said “freak.”)

Apart from the distressingly wacky music, which suggests that the sequence is going to end with Clara having to run between two dates at two different restaurants on the same night (though one will probably be with The Face of Bo or something), it's an effective and swift bit of filmmaking that condenses the sort of storytelling that Doctor Who would have previously spent episode after episode (or series after series, in the case of Amy and Rory) exploring into a couple of minutes.

The show realises that we as an audience have seen enough to know that it's hard for the Companions to lead a secret life and to keep The Doctor from destroying their lives on Earth. Rather than belabor the point, it gets all of that out of the way before the credits have even rolled, though not before having The Doctor take a job as a caretaker at Clara's school in order to try and track down a killer robot named Skovox Blitzer who kind of looks like a more murderous version of the owl from Clash of the Titans.

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