Joy to the World Review
First off, I want to note that technically Penn’s and my Patreon is well short of where it should be for me to be doing this. I ain’t no grinch, and so I’m posting publicly anyway, but seriously, it’s a pretty sizeable shortfall in our monthly budgeting. I’m currently finishing up the epic Neil Gaiman section of Last War in Albion over on the Patreon, which you’ll see here in a few months, and I’ve also finally started work on my inevitable Blake book, so it’s an exciting time. And besides. Next episode isn’t at Christmas and I can grinch it up as much as I want.
Right. On to the fun stuff, or at least this curious little thing we’re calling the Gatwa era, and may someday find out if we’ll be calling it that for more than another eight episodes. Let’s start with the obvious: this is loads of fun, in a big dumb Christmassy way. Yes, obviously this is not my favorite mode of Moffat because I’m a basic bitch who prefers dark and epic Doctor Who to comedy. But it’s still Moffat, with all his weird little idiosyncrasies, which at this point feel like pulling your favorite jacket off the rack and slipping it on. I in no way hope he takes over again after Davies (though I suspect I’d be hard-pressed to actually be unhappy if it happened), but this is always going to be the most straightforwardly “my Doctor Who” there is. The bit at the start where the Doctor realizes he’s seen something because he’s suiting up—nobody else writes that particular Doctor, and I just plain vibe.
This one even avoids Moffat’s standard tics more than Boom did. There’s a bootstrap paradox and a long way around, and there’s not a single other writer who would have done that Christmas farce cold open, but this isn’t a “play the hits” episode in the same way. In some ways it’s much closer to “play the misses”—I remember seeing the AV Club’s review drop a few days ago and being utterly bemused at its longing for the classic Moffat specials of yesteryear like The Doctor, the Widow, and the Wardrobe and The Return of Doctor Mysterio, which this was apparently not as good as, and feeling like I should quickly Google how The Berenstain Bears are spelled to make sure I was still in the correct reality.
Mostly, though, this feels like its own thing. Boom came early enough in the Gatwa era that everything was up in the air, such that it felt like Gatwa doing a Moffat episode as part of the work of establishing himself and figuring out what this show is. This, on the other hand, feels like Moffat doing a Gatwa episode, which is to say that it feels like Gatwa-era Doctor Who is a defined enough thing to riff upon. The death of the hotel manager is a good example—Gatwa’s Doctor simply handles that emotional beat differently than Smith or Capaldi would have, and Moffat writes it accordingly.
This has one major problem, which is the Gatwa era’s strangely categorical problem with endings. Seriously, why are they always rushed? Since Church on Ruby Road, which still feels like part of the second Tennant era in my head (I was confused and amused when Disney+ wanted to call this “Special 5”) I think only Dot and Bubble has felt straightforwardly like it wasn’t tripping over itself to resolve, although I may be doing Rogue dirty there—I’ve not rewatched it since June. Here, once we come around to having to break into the shrine, all sense of pacing goes out the window in favor of Joy’s far from straightforwardly earned suicide by ascension. While I’m sure Jane was absolutely loving the further development of the chair agenda here, it’s hard for me to call it a well-earned beat, and the soaring Murray Gold score as she blasts off to be the Star of Bethlehem ends up being one of the single most perverse scoring choices in the modern series.
I suspect the root cause here is not even the ending so much as the first half, which curiously barely features Joy. It tosses her into the cold open, then she doesn’t show up for ten minutes whilst the episode catches up to itself, gets a five minute sequence in which there’s absolutely scads of other stuff going on, and then exits for another ten minutes, at which point she has less than twenty minutes of episode before it’s time for her to go become a star. This is not setting her up for success. Her entire function as a character ends up hinging on the elevator/dinosaur room scene, which is obviously absolutely spectacular because Gatwa and Coughlan are brilliant and Moffat writes the shit out of it, but yeesh.
On the other hand, the bit you’d cut to fix that is the ten minute sequence of the Doctor working in a hotel and befriending Anita, and that’s plainly the best part of the episode. It’s completely unnecessary padding—the episode could completely do without it, given that its eventual “how does the Doctor get the code” reveal is a bootstrap paradox. But it absolutely sings. What’s interesting about it, I think, is that it breaks the standard format of this sort of beat, which we’ve seen oodles of time. The Doctor should be bored, or fitting in appallingly, or getting into ludicrous trouble and adventures. But nah. Gatwa’s Doctor kicks up his feet, has a lovely year with his friend, and gets on with it. It’s something we’ve never seen before. And at the end of the day, that’s still all I want out of this show.
- The real way you can tell this isn’t the Moffat era is that there’s no Christmas effects on the title sequence.
- Decadent use of Disney money in a whole new Silurian design for a minor character that in no way needed to be a Silurian except inasmuch as they needed to establish that the Time Hotel hires people from all over time.
- Amusing use of Disney money, meanwhile, on a T-Rex that looks like the same basic design as the one in Deep Breath. Though if I’m being honest, I remember the Marcelo Camargo version better than the actual one, so maybe there’s more improvements than I think.
- Speaking of the Time Hotel, ever since that name got announced I’ve had the opening two lines of “The Heart’s Filthy Lesson” stuck in my head.
- That cut to the COVID ward is shockingly raw—a real “oh fuck, are we actually going there” moment. Did nothing to help the bizarre tone of the ending, but kudos to Moffat for confronting those emotions.
- Hands up. Who thought of Chain Chomps with the briefcase handcuff? Nerds.
- I like that Moffat has now spent nearly twenty years making fun of the premise of the Weeping Angels, a joke I believe he got started with on the commentary track for Blink and has never looked back on.
- I love that I still have absolutely zero guesses on whether “mavity” is going anywhere.
- Interesting that this Doctor does not make any kind of River Song reference about being married. Perfectly reasonable—it’d be a bad idea to make that reference forever, frankly. But it does draw an interesting and tacit line between Gatwa and the old new series. This show has such an utterly weird relationship with its own past these days.
- For the best though. River’s clearly a top, and has no use for a man who’s very good with rope.
- OK. It’s Christmas, and I’m calling my workday at the 1300 word mark. Thank you everyone who still stops by blogs and reads text in the year of our lord 2024. Thank you everyone who supports keeping weirdo trans artists housed and thriving in an era that wants us dead. Thank you for commenting, thank you for lurking, thank you for everything. Merry Christmas, happy New Year, and I’ll see you in a few months. Until then, I hope you’re checking out Christine’s great survey of Terry Gilliam, keeping an eye on whatever Penn is cooking, and most of all taking care of yourselves. Until then,
Ranking
- Joy to the World
December 25, 2024 @ 6:34 pm
Oh dear, not the “what seasons do Christmas specials count as part of” debate again… Call me biased, but I did hope to see you rank it relative to Season 1/Series 4/[???].
December 25, 2024 @ 6:39 pm
(Drat, that was meant to be Series 14, of course. Or 15 if Fourteennant’s specials are the tiniest season ever… Hmm…)
December 25, 2024 @ 6:51 pm
“Boom came early enough in the Gatwa era that everything was up in the air, such that it felt like Gatwa doing a Moffat episode as part of the work of establishing himself and figuring out what this show is.”
If I remember rightly (which I probably don’t), Boom was the first episode Gatwa filmed? So that would definitely make a ton of sense.
The section with Anita was really great. Both with the Doctor enjoying his enforced downtime with his friend rather than fighting his fate, and then Anita being aware there was always something else on his mind, but not pressing him about it. It felt effortless in making them friends, rather than playing on tension like it could easily have done. And, crucially, it just felt nice, and we can all do with that at times.
December 29, 2024 @ 4:46 am
You don’t remember rightly, I’m afraid. Boom was in Gatwa’s third block, filmed alongside Space Babies, which makes it the fifth or sixth episode filmed in which he features (although that count includes The Giggle, 73 Yards and Dot and Bubble, which are all less Gatwa-centric, so you could knock that down to second or third if you wished.
January 3, 2025 @ 8:15 am
Thank you! God only knows where I got that from, then 🙂
December 25, 2024 @ 6:58 pm
I mostly really enjoyed this – recognisably Moffat without feeling like his usual stuff. How bizarre that Nicola Coughlan is barely in her own episode though – and the best part of the story is just watching the Doctor hanging out in a completely different narrative. The Gatwa era still seems shockingly hard to pin down in terms of what it’s doing – I’ve had a good time with it but I have no idea how I’ll feel come the end.
December 25, 2024 @ 7:33 pm
The whole Ark in Space riff leading up to the covid reveal was phenomenal – but again, felt like we needed more time with Joy in order for it to land more
December 25, 2024 @ 7:54 pm
You’d think the Doctor would want to poke around Bethlehem a bit. Ah well. I enjoyed the COVID ward bit, even if, yeah, it felt kind of intense in a way I didn’t expect for a Christmas story.
December 25, 2024 @ 7:58 pm
Really enjoying the increased presence of Villengard in these more recent Moffat scripts. An aeons-spanning arms-dealing corporation is a perfect Doctor Who villain. I especially enjoy that despite two appearances this year we’re yet to meet an actual Villengard employee (though this episode demonstrates they consistently use the dead as their own mouthpieces, which is deliciously ghoulish). The complete lack of material connection to the company beyond its name and products is a really smart way to reject the narrative of individual bad actors being the problem as there’s no one to blame aside from a huge, amorphous megacorp- just like in real life! Plus it’s a great way for Moffat to balance his “villains that aren’t” tendency against the need for a straightforward antagonist, such that he’s having his Christmas pudding and eating it too. It’s almost a pity he didn’t explore it sooner, though I suppose the sporadic references across the last 20(!) years lends it a staying power that will extend beyond his own contributions.
Also, Merry Christmas to all you folks reading on the 25th, you beautiful wonderful weirdos.
December 25, 2024 @ 9:30 pm
Merry Christmas!
“the soaring Murray Gold score as she blasts off to be the Star of Bethlehem ends up being one of the single most perverse scoring choices in the modern series.”
Yes – very weird. At the moment I’m landing on ‘didn’t work, all of God’s worst impulses, miscommunicates the scene and so demonstrates the muddled narrative’ but I’m hoping that in another viewing it gets to ‘intriguingly dissonant’
Thought we didn’t actually need the scene in the covid ward. Joy’s initial speech about that was great and powerful and a brilliant bit of cutting through the expected emotional content of Christmas stuff. But I couldn’t help but feel that actually going there later on, and altering her death, cheapenend it. Though that’s a first response and maybe I’ll shift. Hope is important and it’s certainly interesting how this episode interacts with Boom’s stuff about faith. But as no one who lost people in like conditions gets to go back and change those moments, the balance felt a bit off to me.
I was watching with family in the room who were talking intermittently so it’s possible I missed the crucial lines, but it felt like the narrative was a couple of lines of dialogue away from hanging together. It felt like they’d been there in an earlier version of the script, but we’re missing here. Namely:
Establishing that it was an evil corporation. The Dr is all “and if it’s an evil corporation they always have ebranding, aha! Villengarde.” But the step of actually establishing that it was likely a nefarious corporation seemed skipped?
Then, more significantly, at the end, the shift in the meaning of Joy’s death, and the star seed no longer being a threat seemed missing? I know the avatars said that they’d fly off elsewhere. Was the idea that it was the combined force of wills of the hosts who had shunted it away from being a weapon and were stealing themselves away? Or was the star seed always going to end up that way becasue of what stars are? It’s not that the specific mechanics themselves are important, but it felt a bit muddied here to me? Maybe I’m just missing really obvious things on this.
Nevertheless – it’s great fun.
It certainly feels like the Gatwa era is now definitely a specific thing, even if I don’t yet know how to describe it.
January 16, 2025 @ 3:40 pm
His Doctor hasn’t failed yet in a special, I’ll give it that. Definitely feels more specific.
December 25, 2024 @ 9:34 pm
Yeah, I had a big smile on my face the whole time watching this. Pretty much every named character lights up the screen with a comedy beat at some point – I haven’t seen Trev mentioned in these comments yet, who consistently had me doing ugly laughs. Totally agree about the rushed ending, though, and how it’s hard to know what to cut to let it breathe. Both Davies and Moffat have years of experience on Doctor Who and other shows, and so I’m inclined to think if they’re having such a consistent problem ending episodes it must be something specific to this last season – I mean, is it possible that 50 minutes is harder to write than 45? Well, anyway, Merry Christmas – I think I first learned about you from a mutual friend near the end of last year, and it’s been only a pleasure. I’ll look forward to next year’s projects.
December 25, 2024 @ 11:14 pm
Not as good as Joel Fry’s other work of science fiction this year, but still quite charming.
December 25, 2024 @ 11:53 pm
Long time lurker first time commenting
Thank you so much for posting today
This show is the only thing my teenager will watch with us these days (we’ve been watching together since they were little) so it felt like a real gift to sit down together and enjoy it
And then I found your post and it was like another little gift to see you’d enjoyed it as much as I did (and to learn, as I always do, from your analysis)
Happy holidays and joy to your world, El
Likewise to all other Tardis Eruditirom fans
December 26, 2024 @ 8:06 am
Happy Boxing Day!
Regarding both how undercooked Joy is and how great the Anita scenes are, I find it interesting that all the comments I’ve seen about “It’s such a shame she’s not going to be the proper companion” aren’t about the actual Temporary Companion.
December 26, 2024 @ 8:19 am
I think it was a great episode, a lot of fun.
Though I do feel, perhaps controversially that joy, whose character arc essentially boils down to young white girl commits suicide to save the world, should’ve been written out.
I’m not sure how becoming a star will solve her loneliness problem.
To be honest, I’m getting tired of the companion role in the show, I think we’ve definitely reached a point where we don’t need a long-term companion for the doctor, just people who he meets on occasion who can do the necessary question asking should we need it, it would be interesting to have a season without a companion just to see what it would be like.
December 26, 2024 @ 7:40 pm
That would be an interesting change-up for the series, and Gatwa’s Doctor feels like he would be the perfect first go at it, he’s already displayed a knack for easily making friends and less of the awkwardness or spikiness that a lot of Doctors have had.
December 27, 2024 @ 8:55 am
It’s definitely an intriguing idea but I fear it’s unsustainable in practice, simply because less people would keep watching a show like that, where there’s less familiar faces week after week. But it’s a cool idea!
December 27, 2024 @ 8:55 am
Fewer people! Gah.
December 26, 2024 @ 10:45 am
I loved every second but I’m a big sap and Moffat plays my heart like a fiddle every single time so take that with a grain of salt I suppose 😅
December 26, 2024 @ 2:09 pm
Every story set on Earth beyond a certain point should just have Silurians tbh, I like the subtle implication it would give that at some point we solved it and they are now just part of society
December 26, 2024 @ 4:46 pm
I thought he said he came from the original Silurian society millions of years ago and just accidentally ended up in the Time Hotel.
December 26, 2024 @ 4:44 pm
I thought it was very interesting that the show finally acknowledged COVID when the episodes that actually took place in 2020/2021 didn’t. I remember an XKCD cartoon where he mused that media from the pandemic is going to be very weird in retrospect as we try to guess whether it is set in an alternate non-pandemic timeline or if all these maskless, not distancing people are just very reckless.
The ending fell flat for me. First, I never really like when the Doctor’s presence has no impact on the outcome. Seems like the same thing would have happened if he had never shown up. (In fact, Joy might have survived and the Silurian might have been the final host since he had the master key that they needed.) I also don’t know if we’re supposed to feel good about Joy becoming a cheap power source for an evil weapons manufacturer. Presumably, the “Star of Bethlehem” will soon be surrounded by a Dyson sphere and Joy, Trev, Suit Guy, and the hotel manager will be trapped in there together for millions of years, while countless innocents suffer and die thanks to the energy provided to Villengard. Happy Crimbo!!
December 27, 2024 @ 8:58 am
I feel like the implication was that whatever Joy and the other people did meant the star is no longer under Villengard’s control and so they can’t use its energy. But it definitely wasn’t explained properly.
December 26, 2024 @ 10:01 pm
One thing I thought was amusing was that with the inclusion of the Sylvia Trench character, Doctor Who has now officially annexed the James Bond universe.
December 29, 2024 @ 10:28 pm
Thank you for pointing that out – I love it!
December 26, 2024 @ 11:37 pm
So along with the first mention of covid, first trip to the Nativity, and first New Zealander, is this the first episode where a for-profit corporation invents a science fiction concept and the Doctor is consistently positive about it? The Time Hotel itself, I mean.
December 27, 2024 @ 3:49 am
Perhaps it’s clarified in a line of dialogue somewhere, but I didn’t get the impression that the corporation invented the hotel but just that they were using it for their own nefarious purposes.
The doctor seems incredibly blasé about the existence of the Time hotel, I guess he realise he would be an incredible hypocrite to criticise changing the past, when he does it every day.
It’d be interesting if one of the meta narratives of the show ends up being the doctor realising that neither he nor the time Lords have any right to restrict other species from time travel, and that there is no natural order to history which needs to be protected.
December 27, 2024 @ 4:19 am
I mean the Time Hotel is its own corporation, unrelated to the Villengard. Technically we don’t know whether it’s run for profit, but we can assume so. I don’t think there’s any other example of a for-profit company creating a bizarre sci-fi thing in Doctor Who and not being evil.
January 16, 2025 @ 3:44 pm
Time Agents, could be argued. Part of history and so on.
December 27, 2024 @ 12:04 am
Doctor Who: the New Anita Adventures
December 27, 2024 @ 3:14 am
Please Don’tGive give big finish ideas, as it is will be lucky if we don’t get six box sets of the 15th doctor and Anita in 2025, with the inevitable cameo from Jackie Tyler.
December 27, 2024 @ 12:36 am
I wondered, possibly foolishly, if Joy had any actual chance seeing her Mum in the hospital. A lot of emphasis was placed on her following the rules. Could she realistically have defied them?
December 28, 2024 @ 11:56 am
Realistically? No chance whatsoever. In her head while grieving? Absolutely possible! Our “if onlys” are not bound by the same constraints as our actions, and it was the world in her head the Doctor was prodding while trying to save her, so those are the only rules that matter.
December 28, 2024 @ 7:48 pm
I wonder if Moffat resisted the temptation to have Joy travel back and see her mum face-to-face via the Time Hotel because that would have tipped the COVID plot-line from “angry at difficult but ultimately necessary rules because the people who created them were flagrantly ignoring them” dangerously close to anti-lockdown COVID conspiracy rhetoric
December 27, 2024 @ 5:06 am
The idea that some people think this is worse than “The Doctor, the Widow, and the Wardrobe” or “The Return of Doctor Mysterio” honestly baffles me. This has to be one of my favourite Moffat-penned Christmas specials. Not flawless – as Jesse S points out it doesn’t seem like the Doctor meaningfully affects the outcome of the plot – but at the same time a rather fun bit of Christmas entertainment. The Anita stuff is absolutely the best part of the episode, felt very of a part with the Seventh Doctor spending time working in a hospice in “Return of the Living Dad.”
(Though why are we banging the “Doctor needs to change/open up/slow down” drum again already? Surely that’s what the whole bigeneration thing was meant to solve that?)
Always nice to see Moffat baring his teeth, so I appreciated the actual engagement with the Tories’ appalling behaviour during Covid. And perverse though Gold’s score for the scene is, the hospital scene did actually get me and my partner to well up.
And incidentally, a belated happy Christmas to all of you at home!
December 27, 2024 @ 5:55 am
Yeah didn’t expect the episode to basically be about Partygate and I wonder how non-Brits took it
December 29, 2024 @ 3:57 am
I’m not British and I completely missed the Partygate reference.
January 13, 2025 @ 9:44 am
Not British but tuned in to British politics enough that I recognized immediately what Moffat was getting at. My family, who I was watching it with, could tell it was about COVID but I had to explain it was specifically about Partygate and to remind them what that was.
December 27, 2024 @ 9:07 am
Thanks for the great review. Absolutely loved this mess of an episode even though I agree with everything you said about the ending being unearned. Moffat, you bastard, you did it again.
I loved the subplot of 15 learning how to just slow down, breathe and connect with people, even though he knows he’ll have to leave them eventually. It felt like an important lesson for this particular Doctor to learn, one so eager to just run away from things, to charge headfirst into the next adventure the first chance he gets. I hope he gets some chairs for the TARDIS now. And I like to imagine that he’ll take breaks like that now from time to time, just putting any given adventure on hold to chill out and spend time with people. We all need that in our lives.
December 28, 2024 @ 8:06 pm
Joy’s sacrifice was almost off-puttingly unearned. Something a little ghoulish about seeing the Doctor gleefully beaming as an innocent person – for seemingly no reason – commits suicide in front of his eyes. At the very least, throw in a few seconds of build-up. Intercut between scenes of the Doctor getting held up on the train, struggling with the rope, and Joy nervously looking between a ticking clock and the star, the realisation that he’s not going to make it back in time and she’ll have to deal with it herself slowly dawning on her.
With another minor adjustment, it could’ve completed her “always follows the rules” character arc too, by breaking the Doctor’s rule of waiting for him!
Oh well. At least Moffat’s back.
(Although, the bizarre and unprecedented novelty of having new Moffat-penned episodes under RTD’s stewardship almost 20 years after The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances has, sadly, not been as impactful as one would hope. With this and Boom, I can’t help but feel like we’re getting mid-Moffat. Calmly confident, perfectly-serviceable episodes, and nothing more.)
January 16, 2025 @ 3:47 pm
Yeah!
December 29, 2024 @ 5:40 am
Agreed about the AV Club, I read that early and was expecting to be disappointed but was not – what were they on about? This was pretty watchable fun.
Was Joy really committing suicide at the end, or via the star seed rising to some “higher plane” where she could be with her mom via the magical time something-or-other? Something like a Bill Potts thing where the physical form my be gone but the spirit can live on transhumanisticly (which is probably not a word)? Maybe I missed a line or two, I’ll have to rewatch.
Belated Merry Christmas to you and everyone as well!
January 2, 2025 @ 6:57 pm
Well, setting aside the “suicide” question when it’s a character willingly sacrificing their life to save others (Rogin in Ark in Space, for example), in the framework of Jesus’ birth, the idea of someone dying but ascending in order to save other people seems on the nose, if anything, but not clearly inscribed as an act of suicide.
Amusingly, one of the controversial elements of this special was that it was a Christmas special that appears to endorse the existence of Christ. (I know, the holiday and the religious holiday aren’t the same any more, and this episode doesn’t have anything interesting to say about the differences, but it’s still kind of amusing.)
January 6, 2025 @ 3:31 am
I’m not trying to quibble over “suicide vs. sacrifice” or anything, she herself says that she’s not dying.
December 29, 2024 @ 8:30 am
i think the idea here was that she dies, but her consciousness lives on with the other victims of the star and her mum via science-fictional means – an interesting attempt to combine the spritual belief in the afterlife and the materialist, transhumanistic vision which tries to supplant it.
December 29, 2024 @ 7:10 pm
Thank you for this. It is appreciated, especially the fact it’s free.
December 30, 2024 @ 3:24 pm
I’m not sure I buy the assertion that this isn’t a play-the-hits episode: the central conceit of both the Time Hotel itself and 15’s journey through the plot are both broadly revamps of “The Girl in the Fireplace.” Which… okay fine, it’s been roughly eighteen years (!!) since TGitF aired so there’s an entire generation of fans for whom it’s something their parents recall seeing.
December 30, 2024 @ 10:46 pm
My three thoughts: I agree that the Anita sequence is the high point, the song stuck in MY head is X’s cover of Willie Nelson’s “Home Motel,” and I’m not sure how I feel about the fact that my joke about how this episode would end is, in fact, how it ended.
January 1, 2025 @ 1:34 pm
Got to this late, now firing off a disjointed string of points…
Like most other people, I found this great fun and quite touching, while thinking the resolution was rather rushed and undercooked, thought Joy was a bit underdeveloped but I wouldn’t want to lose the lovely stuff with Anita etc. There were a bunch of ingredients put into the mix that could help account for the seizure of the means of production by its forced labourers, the personalities stolen by the corporate AI (a whole chilling concept, building on the previous Villengard outing, casually thrown in there in classic Moffat fashion). Joy, of course, having been connected to the system but freed from it, Trev’s resolve not to let the Doctor down, even the Doctor’s intervention with the manager, and the potential political resonances of the implication that they worked together to overcome the system, but it wasn’t quite worked through.
I also felt vaguely pedantic about the physics of the star being far away but its light being immediately visible – while armed with prior speculation about the star-seed and Bethlehem, I had assumed the location for the denouement was deeper into the past to allow for the light to arrive at the appropriate moment. Though clearly there’s magical logic in play here and I’m not actually fussing about it really.
While obviously apt to the quoted title, the loud play with Joy’s name at the climax felt a little off-kilter, since what the starlight mostly seemed to inspire was not so much joy as hope.
On which note, it seems notable that two of the briefly sampled “rooms” were enlisted to help with the practicalities of the plot resolution, but not the third, perhaps implicitly pointing to its presence being more thematically focused. Which makes sense, it being the one with obvious political dimensions. “Democracy itself will fall” seems perhaps a slightly odd way for someone in 1940 to express the stakes of the war, but makes more sense in expressing the moment’s contemporary resonance.
Really my main difficulty with the story is the Covid business – not that I imagine ill-intent or dispute that one can extract a reading of it in which What It’s Saying Is Fine Actually, just that I’m pretty sure that to an awful lot of people watching what will come across from it is not that carefully evaluated reading but “We were very foolish to obey all those rules and should certainly do nothing of the kind again if a similar situation should arise in future”. [checks latest news on H5N1]
Moffat’s still great at those discreet little crystalline lines that speak volumes, like the whole life-story in “This is going to be the least I’ve ever let anybody down”. One I particularly enjoyed for its efficiency was “I’m not the future – he’s the past”, both crisply conveying “You’re coming with me, you’re on my timeline now” and expressing the Doctor’s perennial need to assert dominance over himself.
And of course at the formal games and meta gags, as with the tyrannosaurus bit so blatantly designed for the trailer, not only as a brief outburst of lush CGI spectacle but for incorporating a cliffhanger which is immediately resolved with a perfunctoriness to rival anything in Classic Who the moment the cut is made for the trailer excerpt.
Speaking of meta, the Remembrance-level “Doctor Who exists in Doctor Who” conceit of the abundant toy police boxes was also cute.
January 5, 2025 @ 10:28 pm
I believe that’s there to establish that the Time Hotel has a link to 65 million years ago: the Doctor says to the briefcase that they don’t have enough time because all of human history isn’t old enough, before they see the T. Rex confirming that they’re 65 million years in the past. They have that because of the Silurians (though why the Doctor doesn’t realize this, given that he met a Silurian who had access to the Time Hotel, is anyone’s guess).
January 7, 2025 @ 5:57 pm
I suppose its possible that the Silurian was from a future where their species has integrated with humanity. (Some of the virgin NA books hinted at this)
January 7, 2025 @ 6:07 pm
Watching this post Christmas and while suffering from jetlag and norovirus does the episode no great favours. I’ll have to try again in a few days. This is enjoyable stuff I guess and Moff is a reliable pen. But I’m still struggling to see any emerging Gatwa themes that make the era hang together.
The plunger gag was class, though.
January 14, 2025 @ 4:51 am
So it turns out ‘Robot of Sherwood’ was a slow burning fuse. Having established there that the Doctor is able to meet fictionalised versions of characters who may or may not have historical veracity, a Christmas episode can now include Jesus as canon in the Whoniverse. Cheeky old Moffat. Do we have to reconsider that Noddy Venn diagram now? Can we look forward to the Doctor meeting Moses, Buddha and Mohammed?
Pedantry section. Apart from poetic license How could the star of Bethlehem be seen in 0AD Bethlehem and in 2020 London Hope Hospital and in WWII Manchester but not by anyone else ever? I don’t recall if it was seen on 1953 Mount Everest and the 1962 Orient Express too. If so why?
Did I miss some explanation for why the Time Hotel is linked to the Sandringham Hotel in 2024 in the first place?
January 16, 2025 @ 3:34 pm
This one was a bit like Stranded to me. Specifically Stranded 4 in comparison with the early sets. Probably just the staying in one place bit and the Covid and The Doctor being in the 2020s. Still, while watching, I couldn’t not reference it. From a character point of view, I’m considering starting to argue that the 2020s might be nostalgic for The Doctor now, considering that they’ve already spent most of the year living it linearly, from a weird “Time Lord essence scanner pointed from the Moon by some outside observer” perspective. I’ve consistently appreciated Gatwa’s Doctor in the Christmas episodes, which is nice.
January 16, 2025 @ 3:38 pm
Anyway, my real gripe is that Harmony Shoal haven’t shown up in years. Who knows, maybe they’ll be in a Big Finish specialised series or something. But yes, episode was alright. Nice.
January 20, 2025 @ 10:57 pm
I’m a Moffat fan and would much rather see him play his hits than see RTD do his. But as I noted in the semi-resurgent AV Club comments section (woo hoo, Disqus is back! Disqus FOREVER!!!), this bordered on having too many recycled Moffat-era concepts even for me, with the (admittedly lovely) Anita year seeming like a combination of “The Lodger” and previous “long way ’round” bits like the ones in “Blink.”
At least seeing a dinosaur swallow an evil suitcase that possesses people was kinda new? But they didn’t do anything with that. Moffat could’ve maybe swiped something from “Dinosaurs on a Spaceship” here to spruce it up a little more (as I suspect he did uncredited rewrites on that one, or otherwise Chibnall was just having an unusually good few days when he coughed up that one, IMHO the highlight of Chib’s entire DW CV).
The ending really bothered me — the worst perfunctory-ending instincts of RTD combined with the repeating theme of the guest protagonist dying in a transhumanist way and beating the bad guys in the process (usually in a schmaltzy way) which was even just used in the previous Moffat script, “Boom” (its weakest element). Though it’s certainly come up in several other Moffat entries like “Dark Water”/”Death in Heaven” and “Silence in the Library”/”Forest of the Dead.”
At least this started strong and had fun moments. It wasn’t one of his better scripts, but among Moffat Xmas specials, it was less corny than “The Return of Doctor Mysterio”, a bit less schmaltzy than “The Doctor, the Widow, and the Wardrobe”, and less perfunctory than “Twice Upon a Time.” But it couldn’t measure up to “A Christmas Carol” or “The Husbands of River Song.”