WHO REVIEW: 2024 Christmas Special - "Joy to the World"

 

Christmastime again already. After a hell of a year, it's nice to sit down and enjoy the traditional Doctor Who extravaganza. It's our first sober Christmas and our first with a child who can actually talk and demand things, so new experiences all round. She'd worn herself out by the time Who was on (probably all that boisterous shouting of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”) so we were able to enjoy this fairly unharrassed.

Some firsts on-screen, too: this is the first Christmas special not written by the showrunner, as RTD was too busy with Season Two/Series 15. Moffat therefore remains ahead in the number of Christmas specials he's helmed. It's the first time Gatwa leads an episode without Millie Gibson at his side (although she gets a cameo, naturally) and therefore his first episode with a one-off companion (although what constitutes a companion these days is highly debatable).

Behind-the-scenes info suggests this one went through a few wildly different drafts, and you can tell. There are plenty of great ideas, but they're a bit haphazardly thrown together. Nonetheless, it works. This episode is, if you'll pardon the pun (intended, always intended) a joy to watch. It's fun, silly, moving when it needs to be. Gatwa is superb throughout, leading one of the best guest casts we've had in a long time, even if not everyone gets as much focus as they deserve. It's very Moffat as well, full of the timey-wimey stuff and heavy-handed emotional beats we've come to expect from him, but toned down for a potentially less involved Christmas Day audience.

The cold open was rather spoiled by being over-played months before the event, which made more of the jumping between timezones than we actually got (an element that was reportedly more significant in an earlier draft), but it works well when it's actually attached to something. I can't help but want to see more of the old couple in Blitzed London (the gent maybe implies he knew Vastra and Jenny) and Niamh Smith's wonderfully intriguing lady on the train (called Sylvia Trench in the credits, after the very first Bond girl).

The opening was essentially a series of loosely linked vignettes, and that's pretty much the case for the whole plot. The Time Hotel is a wonderful idea, and it's one that allows for this approach, dropping the Doctor in an array of different times and places (although that's also the basic concept of the series as a whole, to be fair). Unlike “Boom,” Moffat is really writing for Gatwa's Doctor here. I can easily enough imagine “Boom” as an Eleventh or Twelfth Doctor story with little in the way of changes, but “Joy to the World” simply wouldn't work the same way. Sure, the plot itself could stay the same, but the delivery would be different with any Doctor but Fifteen. Gatwa walks into a hotel in his dressing gown, nicks their coffee, and immediately owns the situation through sheer charisma. I loved the “what did I notice?” scene, as he finds himself preparing for investigation subconsciously. Again, it's easy to imagine other Doctors doing this, but the delivery would be so entirely different. Gatwa sells the allure of adventure with one broad smile.

The story is full of characters I want to see more of. At just under an hour, there isn't time to give them all due attention, yet while they're sketched in, the sketches are beautiful. Joel Fry is wonderfully watchable as the adorable, inept Trev, while Jonathan Aris makes his Silurian hotel manager both endearing and classy. Both are killed off far too soon, yet while it should be too soon to have formed a real attachment, both deaths hurt, thanks to slick characterisation by both writer and actor. Yes, they each get a moment as the interface for the starseed, but even that is fleeting.

The standout of the episode is Steph de Whalley as Anita. Unflappable and professional, she's a very real character amongst a larger than life cast. Her initial moments are just for scene-setting and comedy, and she excels at the latter in particular, but the sideplot of her and the Doctor living and working together for a year is the highlight of the whole story. The Doctor actually spending an extended period without access to time travel, with no further alien invasions of world-threatening schemes to occupy him, is remarkably new to the TV series. It casts a whole new light on the Fifteenth Doctor and the Doctor in general, forcing him into domesticity and a straightforward friendship based on simply liking someone's company, not on their shared adventure or esprit du corp.

And yet it's entirely unnecessary. There's no need for the bootstrap paradox to have a whole year's duration; it could have been a week, a day, or an hour. It also makes a mockery of the Fourteenth Doctor's ongoing rehabilitation. We don't actually get to see him live out a normal(ish) linear life, we only hear it's happening in passing. This plot thread honestly makes the two contemporaneous Doctors harder to swallow as a concept; not only could Fifteen pop over to his earlier self's house and borrow his TARDIS, sidestepping the entire problem (barring technobabble about a TARDIS trip not allowing for the paradox to work) but his clear psychological problems on display give lie to the idea that Fifteen is a clean slate after Fourteen's years of recuperation. Not that this is a bad thing, nor is it unfeasible that wounds have been reopened for the Doctor lately. It does, however, make the bi-generation look increasingly silly.

The big problem with the episode, though, is how it handles Joy. After Nicola Coughlan's character was built up over half a year, the episode named after her, and her prominence in promo images, she's scarcely in it. Part of this is the result of the changes in focus in the drafts and the last-minute name changes – working titles being “The Time Hotel” and “Christmas Everywhere All at Once” - which place more emphasis on Joy than she actually achieves in the story. After her arrival, she more-or-less disappears until the second half, so her story is rushed. Coughlan and Gatwa share some great chemistry, but there isn't enough time to show it off. It also makes it hard to accept how quickly Joy forgives the Doctor's outright cruelty to her, in spite of the justification of saving her life. I love it when the Doctor's a bastard – and again, it hits differently with Fifteen, who's otherwise so relentlessly charming and generally nice to be around – but there isn't time for Joy to go from reluctantly accepting his explanation for his behaviour, and endearingly calling him her “funny little Doctor.” He and Anita had a year, even if we only saw bits of it over ten minutes. He and Joy had ten minutes.

Yet, it gives us the absolutely blistering scene where Joy, rightly, tears into the Doctor, and into the bastards who abused their positions in the pandemic. That came out of nowhere and stung, and it stung so much because so many of us were affected like that. For me, that was about my Nan, and millions of viewers will have someone dear to them to suffered or died alone because of rules that were flouted by those who should have known best. I hope Boris Johnson sat down to watch this with whoever he's currently cheating on his wife with and choked on his overpriced champagne, the platinum ballbag.

It's the scolding burn of this that let's the episode get away with its ludicrously saccharine ending, just as the successes of the episode let it get away with its flaws. The use of Villengard is always going to be topical, sadly, but they remain a defeated enemy and are barely an enemy at all here (another shadow of multiple rewrites – Moffat has said that in the first couple of drafts there was no villain at all). Making Joy the Star of Bethlehem will no doubt piss off some hardcore Christian viewers, assuming any hardcore Christians even watch Doctor Who, but it's pretty harmless (it took me a stupidly long time to realise that's where they were going). It could have been made more of, though. I get that it's Christmas, so you can get away with a fluffy story that doesn't quite hold together. But when the enemy is a rapacious arms company with no concern for human life, and the episode ends on Bethlehem, a town that has now been reduced virtually to rubble by military-backed settler violence, there was an opportunity to really say something.

Still. That would be a bit much to hope for, at Christmas and on the BBC, and we should grateful they even let the level of political commentary we got be broadcast. Overall, “Joy to the World,” for all its flaws, works. It's a bit of a mess, the timing's all over the place and it ends with too much sweet stuff. The Doctor Who equivalent of a Christmas dinner, and exactly what we need on Christmas day.

Settings: The Time Hotel, London, 4202; the Sandringham Hotel, London, 2024-25; briefly, London in the 1940s, Mount Everest, a train journey in the 1920s, and somewhere at the end of the Cretaceous, c. 65 million BC.

Historical context: I love it when the importance of a line changes between filming and broadcast. A month ago, very few of us would have had a favourite assassination.

Prehistorical context: I'm enjoying the recent series' tendency to throw dinosaurs into the mix for no particular reason other than because they can.

Maketh the Man: The Doctor's main outfit is his brown leather hero coat over a yellow striped top and brown checked trews held up by some chunky braces. We also get to see him in a very Arthur Dent dressing gown, and during his year working at the Sandringham Gatwa gets to show off his arms and nips in a tight blue T-shirt.

Down on Festive Road: Mr Benn has an outlet at the Time Hotel. A cute reference, but does this shop just sell historically-appropriate outfits? Or is the Hotel's time-door technology based on Mr Benn's original miraculous shop? 

The Name Game: For that matter, how is Anita linked to this? According to the credits, her surname is Benn. The credits also confirm that Joy's surname is Almondo, so I will assume the very blonde, Irish woman either has an Italian male-line ancestor a long way back, or got it from her stepfather.

Real-life links: The sherpa on Everest, Tenzing Norgay, is played by Samuel Sherpa-Moore, his real life grand-newphew.

Flood Warning: The missus is convinced Anita is Mrs Flood, and I think she might have something there. Steph de Walley and Anita Dobson look alike enough for it to convince, and now Anita has access to time travel it opens all sorts of options.