Doctor Who unexpectedly puts the Christ back into Christmas Special.
Of all the showrunners since Doctor Who returned twenty years ago, Steven Moffat has proved to be the most adept at weaving together the whimsical magic of the festive season with the science fantasy of Whovian adventure. Davies became too enamoured of the Doctor himself (in the form of David Tennant) to allow the season to overshadow the series’ star and Chris Chibnall didn’t even bother trying but this time, even Moffat seems to be struggling to properly anchor the action to Advent and reaches – improbably – for the so-called “reason for the season” himself to give Joy To The World its Christmas credentials.
While, in December 2024 Joy Almondo (Nicola Coughlan) checks in to the shabby Sandringham Hotel in central London, The Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) arrives, very Arthur Dent style, at The Time Hotel in 4202, an interdimensional crossroads where portals link to various points in history – and beyond (as we’ll get to later). Distracted from his quest for milk, the Doctor ends up following a suspicious-looking briefcase which leads him to an encounter with Joy, whose ill-timed assertiveness locks her into a plot by the sinister Villengard Corporation to create a limitless source of cheap energy for their various nefarious enterprises. But before he can unravel the plot, the Doctor finds himself separated from Joy and stranded in the year 2024 with only the Sandringham Hotel’s manager Anita (Stephanie de Whalley) for company.
The Time Hotel itself is a classic Moffat confection, positively brimming with story potential and absolutely begging to become a spin-off in Davies’ sputtering Whoniverse plans, but that potential barely gets tapped in this adventure that’s more concerned with character than chaotic adventure. For all its high concept trimmings, the main course of Joy to the World is an introverted character study as Moffat returns to one of his perennial themes: what does the Doctor do when they’re alone? The deployment of a brazen bootstrap paradox – not the first time Moffat’s used such a storytelling device – ushers in a surprisingly low-voltage middle act where the Doctor is forced (but let’s face it – chooses) to live a linear life for a whole year, a gimmick explored multiple times in Doctor Who novels such as The Crystal Bucephalus but arguably more comprehensively in the classic series seasons 7 through 9). When we do get to the timey-wimey hijinks of the Time Hotel, there are plenty of fun nods and easter eggs. We get brief visits to Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay at Everest basecamp and an unexpected visit with early Bond movie mainstay Sylvia Trench on the Orient Express plus a tantalising glimpse of a hotel door that apparently leads to Hobbiton in the background (a nod to the near-miss of a Peter Jackson-directed episode during the Capaldi era) and, of course, the incongruous nod to the Nativity as an actual historical event to name but a few although perhaps the best gag of the entire show is the Time Hotel’s costume rental store being named “Mr Benn’s Any Era Clothes”, an acknowledgement if ever there was one of the real inspiration behind the whole episode.
Of course, whenever we get an adventure for the Doctor set significantly in the present day, the ghost of just-before-Christmas past looms large, in the form of the domesticated 14th Doctor and his duplicate TARDIS, as absent from the action here as they were during the entirety of last season’s universe-threatening cataclysms. This exploration of the 15th Doctor living a linear life for a year becomes the heart of the story, overshadowing the Villengard suitcase MacGuffin and lending the episode a slightly disjointed, hastily rewritten feeling as if something grander might have been planned but budgetary constraints forced some narrative economising during production. There are some poignant moments in the Doctor living his life one day at a time and the relationship that develops with Anita is another addition to Moffat’s tally of almost-but-not-quite companions but it’s slightly undermined by the brevity of the exile. To an entity as old as The Doctor, an Earth year would pass in the blink of an eye and it could be argued the time spent exploring the Doctor’s time as a janitor and handyman (unbelievably, another Moffat trope) could have been better spent with Joy, so as to avoid the explosive expository infodump that we end up getting. You know, the one that’ll upset those folk who decry Doctor Who getting “too political”, as if that’s not been the series’ nature since day one.
As ever, Gatwa brings a buoyant energy to his Doctor and to the episode, balancing charm and wisdom in equal measure and his chemistry with Coughlan’s Joy are a delight as the two performers fill their characters to bursting with emotion. Coughlan’s performance especially captures both the humour and heart of her character, elevating what could have been a disposable guest role into something memorable and the strength of her bond with Gatwa’s Doctor glosses over the somewhat ramshackle and flimsy main narrative.
The Villengard plot never feels like it gets fully articulated, nor the quintessentially Moffat “nobody ever really dies” way that it’s thwarted, and although Joy To The World doesn’t seem connected in any meaningful way to the ongoing storylines of the 15th Doctor’s era, it does build on the growing sense that there’s a distinct lack of mavitas to everything that happens. Perhaps it’s the cavalier approach to whether canon really matters – which is evidently a feature and not a bug of the RTD2 era, or the fact the Disney+ money has ushered in a reliance on style over substance that Doctor Who traditionally epitomised the antithesis of but there’s a corrosive effect from all the easy, trite or convenient resolutions that have been piling up since Capaldi regenerated into Whittaker. Doctor Who has a growing consequentiality problem and whatever season 15 brings it needs to bring some weight back to events.
