What’s The Episode? The Christmas 2024 special, “Joy To The World”.
What’s It All About, JG? The Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) arrives at a Time Hotel where a briefcase with ideas above its station is possessing then killing the wearer as it upgrades it access. He nips into one of the rooms in the Time Hotel which leads to a 21st century Earth hotel room and Joy (Nicola Coughlan), who’s alone on Christmas. In attempting to rescue her, he gets stuck on Earth for a year living a normal life with unflappable hotel owner Anita (Steph de Whalley). Once the plot resumes, he discovers that the suitcase houses a star seed from Big Evil Arms Corp Villengard. The plan is to use the Time Hotel to detonate it in the past, give it time to grown, and sell it as an unlimited power source. The Doctor stops this – well, Joy does really, by allowing herself to take the star seed into her, be killed, also somehow save the other people we’ve seen the briefcase kill and her Mum as well, who died in hospital (implicitly of Covid but certainly during the time of Covid at least). And the star’s detonation happened over Bethlehem in the year 0001, in what we are assured is a “twist”.
Is It Any Good? You know how, when we talk about Doctor Who Christmas specials, there’s always a certain… leniency built into the discussion that wouldn’t normally be there? The reason for that is that nobody expects too much from a Christmas special, what with them being aimed at a more general audience than usual, being designed to be shown in the UK where everyone’s stuffed to the gullet with food and booze, and where demands on one’s attention span aren’t going to be too great. The Christmas specials are “forgiven” in advance of their broadcast, in other words, on the understanding that if they’re not spectacular – and they almost never are – that’s OK because, eh, it’s Christmas, nobody’s that bothered anyway. “Joy To The World” needs all of that forgiveness and then some because mostly it’s not terribly good.
That’s not to say it’s a complete disaster. Indeed, it’s actually been half a decade since we’ve even had a Christmas special. The Chibnall era got rid of them for more general end-of-year/New Year runabouts and this was to the benefit of the show. The Christmas specials were exhausted and almost entirely played out by the time his era rolled round and resting them for a while so they could come back refreshed is another one of the worthwhile-in-theory innovations of his era that was actually worth doing (whether you think what replaced them was good enough is another question entirely).
So with that in mind, yes, there is some good stuff here, not least of which is that the Christmas aspect of it is largely relegated to set-dressing rather than invoking a full-on Christmas engagement. Well, other than that last scene, which we’ll get to. That’s quite refreshing and works well. We’ve got Christmas tress in the background, snow imported from a couple of locations in the Time Hotel (the Orient Express and the Everest base camp), but it’s all left pleasingly in the background for the most part. That’s a nice approach.
Also pleasing is the year where the Doctor gets to life his life one day at a time. Indeed, this is easily the best segment of “Joy To The World”, where the Doctor just has a mundane job in a hotel, spending evenings with games nights and generally making a largely-platonic friendship with stand-in companion Anita. These sequences are great and really show off a more relaxed charm in Gatwa’s performance rather than the big over-the-top antics he more commonly goes for. While “the long way round” is just one of a series of many, many familiar Moffat beats in this episode, it does really land here and Gatwa and Steph de Whalley function really well here as two people who are mostly just friends (despite a brief lapse into probably unrequited love by the end on behalf of Anita).
Anita herself is a great would-be companion. Her bracing unflappability when a Silurian appears in her room or when there’s time-travel shenanigans going on looks like it’s being played for a few laughs, which is briefly is, until we realise this accepting side of her personality is who she is. It lets her accept the Doctor and, crucially, accept his departure and the accepting nature of her personality makes her both incredibly likable and plausibly someone the Doctor would actually choose to spend a year of his life with.
Which is just as well, since the nominal companion, Joy, make virtually no impact at all in the episode. Part of the problem is that we just don’t get to spend any time with Joy for anything that happens to her to register. We meet her in a hotel room, then she’s possessed by the briefcase, then she’s off-screen during the Doctor’s enforced year on Earth, then she’s still possessed, then the Doctor makes her angry to detach her from the suitcase, then we get a little time with Actual Joy, then she’s a star. Though only in a literal sense.
There’s just not much time spent with the real character for us to case about whether she sacrificed herself to be with her Mum or whatever. And in truth, while never bad, Nicola Coughlan just doesn’t make that much of an impression. She’s perfectly OK but never really registers beyond the fact that we need to have some kind of companion so here she is. Gatwa’s Doctor has much more rapport with Anita, not least because we get to spend some actual time with her and it’s hard to shake the idea that the episode should have picked either Joy or Anita as the stand-in companion and just left it at that – we don’t need two cluttering up the episode.
And the difference between these two characters highlights a big issue for the episode, which is the pacing. Because it’s terribly badly judged. The pre-credits opening is written and delivered in a sort of hyper-Tennant style, with the Doctor popping into various locations which are eventually revealed to be places accessible via the Time Hotel. But Gatwa’s Doctor isn’t Tennant’s and it doesn’t really come off – it’s smug and pompous rather than fast-paced and frenetic. Then we get to the Time Hotel – a concept the Doctor seems strangely uncurious about, given his normal reaction to discovering time travel in the wild – and things just hit a fairly tepid pace and pretty much just stay there. In short, this is kind of boring and the pacing is a big part of that.
And there’s just so many clichés in play here. We get the usual, “this is the one adventure I never get to have, one day after the other” rubbish during the year on Earth that quietly ignores… well, the majority of the Pertwee era, “The Power of Three”, “The Time of the Doctor” and so on. A fan of Moffat’s level really ought to know better than to keep trotting this old saw out, even if the script is being angled towards new Disney viewers. But the thing is, this does work here – better than it did in “Time of the Doctor”, that’s for sure – but that pacing isn’t what’s needed for the rest of the episode, even though that’s pretty much what we get. By the time we get to a dinosaur swallowing the MacGuffin briefcase, things should feel a bit more exciting but they don’t. Not that the dinosaur isn’t welcome – it definitely is and looks great – but things don’t really pick up pace so much as continue to a conclusion that… well, it definitely wasn’t expected, that’s for sure.
So if there’s a central flaw here – and there is – it’s that repetition. We’ve had the long route before. We’ve had bootstrap paradoxes before (deployed here in a way that’s either amusingly self-aware or breathtakingly contemptuous, depending on your point of view). We’ve had dinosaurs before. We’ve had companions making the ultimate sacrifice so the Doctor doesn’t have to before. We’ve had the Doctor manipulate a companion for the “greater good” before. We’ve had… well, practically all of it really. Even the way the Orient Express is used to open the tomb to (finally) retrieve the sodding briefcase is just a retread of Mickey opening the TARDIS console with a VW Beetle back in (one of the) Season 1(‘s). And the way Moffat constructs a joke, like Trevor not having come up with a type of casual stroll yet, feels like it’s just been plugged into an AI that’s been told, “construct a joke in the style of Stephen Moffat”. And there it is. A joke. In the style of Stephen Moffat. Never quite feels like an actual joke, though.
Just like this doesn’t really feel like it earns the word “special” at any point.
Would You Recommend It? I mean, it would be nice to say yes, wouldn’t it? But no, I can’t in good conscience recommend it. It’s not the worst Christmas/Festive Period special there’s even been – that’s probably still “The Next Doctor” or possibly “The Doctor, The Widow and the Wardrobe” – but it’s nowhere near the best either. There’s a tossed-off feeling to the whole enterprise here, a that’ll-do attitude that really leans way to hard on the whole, “it’s Christmas, nobody has to try too hard” approach.
The money can’t quite bridge the gap either. This is visibly an expensive production and, even putting the dinosaur to one side, all those sets in the Time Hotel have real cash spent on them. The whole Orient Express sequence, which mostly seems to exist to do the open-the-tomb sequence, manages to look lush and luxurious (also, maybe I’m dumb but was the woman in the carriage meant to be someone we should recognize?) and convinces as a location. As do all of them. I’m still not wild about that TARDIS interior but they went to the bother of putting it together when they really didn’t need to for the sake one one brief scene. So if the story falls flat, it’s nice that we’re at least gifted with something that looks visually sumptuous.
Right, so it’s been put off long enough – let’s talk about that ending. Whereby Joy becomes the Star of Bethlehem and the whole scene is set in the year 0001 CE. Eesh. First things first – it’s a bit odd to do a Christmas special then end it on the idea that the whole reason Christmas exists is your own show. I mean, this doesn’t explicitly reject the idea of the Christian myth of the birth of Jesus is a Real Thing but it also sort of does. Doctor Who has traditionally been very critical of the idea of gods of any description, from Sutekh to Ragnarok to more recent versions like the return of the Toymaker (and it’ll be interesting to see where that all goes in the next season) but it’s rare that the show is quite so blunt as it is here.
And honestly, it’s just rubbish. It’s desperately reaching for something that the writing just doesn’t deliver on. What are we supposed to take from this? Joy made her sacrifice and was able to save everyone the Briefcase of Doom killed during the episode but also including her Mum – somehow, don’t think about it too hard – which is nice but it doesn’t connect with anything. It certainly doesn’t parallel Christian myth beyond “well, guess there’s two births”, which is weak at best. It basically looks like an attempt to be really clever and get the audience to go, “ohh, that’s smart!” but it falls short because, well, it isn’t. It’s just smugly self-important and doesn’t land at all. The problem isn’t that the show tried to engage with that kind of mythology, it’s that it’s done it in such a pointlessly tossed-off way. There’s no actual material connection with anything, it’s just a writer trying to be clever and then not being.
Then there’s the whole Covid thing. Engaging with recent history is certainly no bad thing and being furious at how Covid played out in the UK is a perfectly good angle to take. And certainly the acknowledgement of what the population suffered though while contemptuous Tories partied in Downing Street is perfectly in line with both Doctor Who‘s broader politics and a point worth reiterating. The issue here is how little time is spent on this. Given that we’ve already established how little time we get to spend with Joy as a character, trying to then hang this kind of emotional hook on her just isn’t going to work. It all just feels incredibly tokenistic. A Doctor Who story that engaged with Covid and that couple of years of history is a fantastic idea but that’s not even close to what we get here. “It’s bad that politicians did one thing while everyone else did something else” is a perfectly valid point but it’s also a pretty banal one to be making in 2024 without more time spent going into it. A real missed opportunity, then.
And beyond that, there’s such a limited amount to recommend here. I’d love to be able to forgive this story as an easy-to-enjoy Christmas bash but it’s just too plodding and difficult to care about to be able to do that. I’d love to be able to say that the plot is interesting but the plot is mostly just chasing a MacGuffin for most of the run-time and a tacked-on ending that doesn’t work. Gatwa’s more low-key performance during the year on Earth is worthy of praise and opens up some really interesting places for the character to go so that’s at least something worthwhile. Indeed, the lower-key performance makes Gatwa feel so much more like the Doctor than he did during his first season that it’s kind of disappointing when he goes back to his more typically hyper performance once he gets back to the Time Hotel. He’s relaxed, approachable, yet still has enough of an alien edge to him to really work and more of this kind of characterization would be greatly welcome.
But in the end, that’s one moment of quality in a sea of whatever. Not being the worst Doctor Who Christmas special is a low bar but this doesn’t even seem to aspire to be better than filling an hour, which is precisely what it achieves. It simply exists.
Scores On The Doors? 5/10
JG Judgementally Comments... 