"Joy To The World”(15th Dr, 2024)
(Christmas Special, Dr 15,
25/12/2024, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writer: Steven Moffat, executive
producers: Steven Moffat, Julie Gardner, Jane Trantor, Joel Collins and Phil
Collinson, director: Alex Sanjiv Pillai)
Ranking: N/A (#170-ish)
reviewed 26/12/2024
O Little town of Bethlehem
How still we see thee lie
Until connected to the time hotel
When the starseed will bloom and the flesh will rise
Yet in thy darkest streets shineth
And everlasting blue light
As the Tardis tears through all the years
And comes to set things right
Lo! The sages rise
At a signal from the skies
You’re in hotel room 1305
As Joy is all left to arise
Brighter than the brightest gem
Bringing joy unto all Silurians and to all men
In a past we won’t have back again
As in the skies we have a friend
(You don’t get this on Dragon’s Den!)
‘Tis the star of…Bethlehem
Well, I haven’t written one of these reviews in a while. Six months ago in fact, when ‘Empire Of Death’ went out, which already seems like a whole epoch ago in this fast-changing modern world we live in: multiple wars, shock election announcements and real (maybe) alien drones in the sky ago in fact (my guess is that they’re aliens recording our disintegration in real time and al previous ufo sightings were them recording our important moments. Which hopefully means they also recorded the missing episodes of ‘The Daleks’ Masterplan’ and episode four of ‘The Tenth Planet’). Last Christmas seems like even longer ago as indeed does ‘Last Christmas’ and all the other Steven Moffat-written festive episodes out there. It must have seemed even longer for Steven Moffat, whose back in the writer’s seat on a Christmas special for the first time since handing up his sonic screwdriver as showrunner at the end of 2017 and yet it’s as if he’s never been away. ‘Joy To The World’ is as Moffaty as Christmas stories come, with all the hallmarks of his era good and bad – some fantastically imaginative ideas, a brilliant use of time as an ‘extra character’ and lots of the underlying melancholy that lies underneath the Christmas season as we remember all the things we were going to do, all the people we were going to be and all the people we lost along the way. In a way the second of the Disney-era Christmas specials is a lot more traditional than the first, ‘The Church On Ruby Road’ (no singing goblins for starters) – and yet in other ways it’s also a rather controversial story that takes unnecessary risks (two big ones), is often clumsily paced with the actions kept for the beginning and ending, which raises big questions it doesn’t have time or space to truly explore and which throws in a schmaltzy ending that undoes much of its good work. Just like old times in fact.
Seeing as it’s Christmas let’s start with what this story got right: the idea of a time hotel, with different eras hidden behind different doors, is exquisite and so very Dr Whoy. It’s actually an idea that had been created years earlier in the first Russell T Davies era but one which was dropped for being too similar to other ideas (my guess is the ‘parallel universe’ strand that weaves its way through Rose and Donna’s story arcs both). Moffat always liked the idea and wanted to write it, but never got round to doing it in his era (not least because Toby Whitworth came up with a similar idea independently, which became the fears-behind-hotel-rooms ‘The God Complex’ in series six in 2011). When Russell tried to revive the script for series fifteen/Disney 1A (or whatever we’re calling the Ncuti era now) he became stuck, though, and sensibly got in touch with his old friend and asked if he wanted a bash: after all a time hotel is such a Moffaty idea everyone would just have accused Russell of trying to be like his successor anyway (there are similar idea from the ‘wilderness years’ too of course - notably the missing story ‘The Crystal Bucephalus’ where a space restaurant has different courses in different timezones, but few Dr Who stories are 100% original and there are so many spin-off books and audios almost everything feels as if it’s been done by someone, even a little bit. Besides, recycling at Christmas is normal or we’d never fit in our houses come Boxing Day).
What Moffat brought to the table was the very Dr Whoy sense that another more brilliant, magical, scary and big universe exists just outside our peripheral vision if only we’d learn to look up and away from our little lives. The idea of something as mundane and ordinary as a hotel containing extraordinary gateways to different eras is totally Dr Who in every way, while the impossibly mind-bogglingly long time it takes to ‘cook’ a star is the blink of an eye for a story that deals in time and space readily. The idea of a real life ‘mystery’ that can be solved by something Dr Whoy also reaches a hilarious peak with the fact that hotel rooms so often have locked doors: in reality of course it’s because rich guests can buy more than one room and the doors separating the suites can be unlocked to give them double the space nd then locked up to suit more individual paying guests, but Moffat’s timey wimey explanation works just as well in context as an ‘alternative’ reason and helps root the story in the real world with something the audience can see for themselves quite easily and be scared by (just like a gargoyle becomes a weeping angel statue or a library is full of creepy shadows and ‘things that hide in books, with an alien version of silverfish). The idea of reducing something as glorious as all of Human history to a package tour for aliens (shades of ‘Delta and the Bannermen’ there too) is a great riff on doing this in reverse too, of how something big and monumental for us becomes just another holiday event for extra-terrestrials. It leads to several brilliant sight gags easy to take in even between nattering relations and getting up to check on the Christmas lunch: the stone door for the stone-age, the elaborate one for Mesopotamia and the leaning door of Pisa (presumably there are iron doors for the iron age and bronze doors for the bronze age too!) We don’t get to see many of these doors in action but we get just enough to make us feel that there are other worlds out there just a door away – the building of an elaborate set for the Orient Express and the snow-capped peaks of Everest might not be the best or most frugal use of the extra Disney budget but they do lend a sense of scale and scope that’s been missing from a lot of the recent stories. The dinosaur towards the end too is a great Dr Whoy surprise, as a possessed Joy finally tracks down the ‘right’ room which turns out to be from 65 million years ago and even though it’s screen time is all too brief (far briefer than it seemed from the ‘Children In Need’ preview a month ago when it was hinted the T Rex would be a major part of the story) it’s well handled, with some of the best CGI work in the series to date (in fact it makes the already pretty decent one in ‘Deep Breath’ from a decade ago look like the rubber models in ‘Invasion Of The Dinosaurs’ by comparison). Few writers can juggle as many ideas from different timezones as Moffat can and even though the idea might have been Russell’s the execution is pure Steven. If this does end up being Moffat’s last script (which he says it will be – although I remember him saying that before. At least twice) then it’s another really great way to go out, another summary of his time on the show only a smidgeon behind ‘World Enough and Time/The Doctor Falls’ (and less messy than ‘Twice Upon A Time’).
Moffat, too, benefits from the guiding helping hand of his old friend, with an opening ten minutes that has Russell’s fingerprints all over it, a character piece about lovable loser Joy, a part custom made for actress Nicola Coughlan fresh from one of Davies’ current favourite shows Brigerton. What seems written as a deliberately different part (gone are the ballgowns and lushness and grace and poise; in are the seedy hotel background and the sense of loneliness and isolation) is still plainly written for her and within seconds she feels like a fully-drawn out character. Joy’s awkward misunderstanding at the reception desk (‘Single?’ asks Anita. ‘Does it show?’ Joy says, aghast, her bubbly demeanour giving way to embarrassment before Anita follows up with ‘no I meant your room?’) is pure RTD, giving us character and back story in the form of a revealing gag and making us feel for Joy already before we properly know who she is yet. The curious decision to release the first five minutes from this episode as a ‘trailer’ straight after ‘Empire Of Death’ six months early (by far the longest we’ve had to wait between extract and episode) fools you into thinking we’re going to get a very different (and frankly better) episode to the one we did get, a ‘Runaway Bride’ style episode about a standalone companion being totally out of their depth full of jokes about them being in the wrong place at the wrong time, the dazzling Whoniverse reduced to a single hotel room. The opening with Joy feels the most ‘alive’ and well thought out part of the story by far, an every woman alone at Christmas far away from everyone so she can hide from…something. What’s interesting about that, though, is that for the longest time it was meant to be Ruby in the hotel room: that’s how she stayed for Russell’s half-draft and Moffat says that’s the way she stayed for half the episode of his first draft too, before getting the news Millie Gibson had left the series and had to be written out (in what seems like a suspiciously hurried manner after just nine episodes).
Once Moffat takes over, though, he treats this part of the story as a brief ‘episode one’ which he just has to change in ‘episode two’, the way he always did in two-parters of old, turning everything we thought we knew on its head. Joy, a character with such promise, is largely sidelined till the big finale, possessed by the Villengard military outfit and press-ganged into searching for their hidden star with the very ruthless baddy idea of being blown up to hide the evidence of the nasty little scheme if she fails to find it in time. Joy doesn’t speak ‘normally’ again until the Doctor prods her to make her angry (the same way the 7th Doctor used to do to Ace, only it doesn’t work as well because Ncuti is a happy charismatic friendly kind of a Doctor, with a burning anger he does well but none of the ruthlessness and hidden layers of his younger self). By which time the story’s too late: Joy sacrifices herself in a hideously shamaltzy ending where she effectively becomes a star to be with her dead mum and, despite the strong work of the first few minutes, we simply don’t know her well enough to care (was this the original plan for writing Ruby out? The pay-off after ten episodes would be a lot stronger than having her run off to be with her own mum – weird how mothers has ended up being a big thing in this era - and killing the elder Sunday off at the hands of Sutekh would have made the end of ‘Empire Of Death’ a lot more powerful too). Having the big ol’ star turn out to be the Star of Bethlehem which kick-started 2000 years of Christianity is also so obvious an idea it’s one of those things you wish they hadn’t gone for (it also doesn’t make a lot of sense when you sit down and think about it: the room Ruby was left in is an Aztec-style South American temple that clearly post-dates the birth of Jesus by more than a few centuries. Equally why is there a balcony 65 million years ago? Is there a dinosaur equivalent of ‘Bob The Builder’ out there? ‘Bob the Brachiosaur’ maybe?)
It also leads to two, shall we say…questionable decisions we haven’t had the likes of since ‘Dark Water/Death In Heaven’ turned the Brigadier’s corpse into a Cyberman and told the nation’s kiddies their dead loved ones who chose cremation are all screaming in agony in some afterlife. Few Dr Who stories dare go near religion, the one great no-go area where censorship has actually become tighter in the 21st century rather than looser (you wouldn’t get The Master conjuring up the devil today the way he did in ‘The Daemons’ although ‘The Impossible Planet’ had a good try). Even stories set in a past when lives fully revolved around Christianity tend to see it as a background detail if it’s mentioned at all (‘The Time Warrior’ ‘Masque of Mandragora’ ‘The Shakespeare Code’ ‘The Haunting Of Villa Diaodati’ to name just four of many). ‘Joy To The World’ doesn’t skirt around the issue at all but gives us a great big whacking ending that involves the Whoniverse directly with the Bible, saying that the star that brought the three magi out to see the infant Jesus wasn’t the creation of God but the side effect of a failed military takeover by an alien life-form turned sentient by a 21st century woman mourning her mum. It doesn’t quite come out and say the two can’t co-exist but clearly if the wise men were inspired by something other than divine intervention alone that does raise some rather awkward questions (particularly for an episode that goes out on Jesus’ birthday). I’m kind of surprised there hasn’t been more fuss about it to be honest. Oh well, Christianity survived intact enough for Christmas telly to dominate the TV schedules so I doubt it’s going to fall just because of a throwaway reference at the end of a Dr Who story somehow.
More worrying is the ongoing discussion of the still ongoing covid pandemic. I’m sure you all thought I was daft banging on about it across most of my reviews of the 2024 series but it’s truly unavoidable here and the writers of the new series are clearly still working through the after-effects of the biggest plague in a century. The first ‘actual’ mention of lockdown in the series (though a few of the Chibnall era stories hinted at it) comes when Joy breaks down at the end of the story as the Doctor gets her mad: she spends her yuletide holidays alone in an anonymous hotel room because she lost her mum on Christmas Day during the pandemic and just can’t cope with all the memories alongside other people (would she have been home alone anyway? She doesn’t mention a single outside character besides her mum no friends family or work colleagues who would miss her when she turns into a celestial entity at the end). Joy’s angry that the draconian rules of lockdown meant she couldn’t say goodbye to her mum in person and still (rightly) incandescent with rage at Boris Johnson and his cabinet’s lockdown parties that broke all the rules of distancing they themselves set. So far so good: that’s enough to put anyone off Christmas. But it’s the way it’s handled and the language used that worries me. For a start we were never actually in full lockdown in Christmas 2020 and in fact weren’t in full lockdown past the start of July that year despite the way people bang on about it now: worried that they weren’t selling enough papers the Murdoch media empire leaned heavily on the government not to cancel Christmas and whipped up a frenzy about ‘government interference’ with their readers that still lingers to this day, whilst the business deals the politicians had cooking on the side meant they were afraid of losing money if people couldn’t meet up and buy presents. So instead there was a flimsy rule reducing meeting up in crowds with police encouraged to look the other way for the most part anyway for ‘morale’. But morale matters nothing if it’s to keep people safe and tens of thousands of people died because of that decision in this country alone, while many more remain sick with long covid after catching it during those holidays, possibly permanently (while others, who either thought they got away lightly or were asymptomatic, continue to be sick, unaware of the damage covid does to your insides. Seriously think to yourself how many times you’ve been sick with anything since 2021 compared to pre-pandemic years. That’s not normal or because of three months using masks but evidence that a known dangerous disease has weakened your immune system). There’s been a pushback the past few years that the lockdowns were over-zealous (they didn’t go far enough back when covid was new and at its deadliest), that covid is just a cold (it’s the biggest killer of humanity in one go in a century, since the Spanish flu) and that the rules were a ‘nonsense’, a word that keeps coming up time and time again. Joy even says that word here (though it’s ambiguous whether she means ‘nonsense’ in the colloquial sense that covid means everything is all a bit of a mess and topsy turvy).
The thing is though that while covid isn’t as deadly anymore, thanks to a vaccine (that reduces the symptoms but doesn’t cure them – it can’t yet, until we have time to catch up, as covid mutates too quickly to fully get a hold of yet by the time vaccines can be made en masse) and those months of lockdown early on, it still kills: it’s thought 11,000 Britons died of it in 2024 and the last few figures of the year aren’t even in yet – this despite the fact so many doctors are reluctant to diagnose it and that covid exacerbated existing conditions that people would have lived with happily for years or decades without it and yet which tended to be the ‘main cause’ that went down on existing death certificates. As with ‘Boom’ I can’t help but feel that Moffat and Davies have different views of covid: in that story Moffat laughed at the idea of humans being treated as if they were a bomb about to go off and he mostly does the same here, with the lines about the Doctor making Joy angry ‘because that’s the way you wake up’ (language used by many a lockdown and vaccine sceptic who resented government interference on principle, even when it was genuinely keeping them safe and every other government round the world was doing the same, bar a couple whose death rates exploded without restrictions in place) and the idea that it’s the past and we need to move on and we should stop isolating in our rooms and ‘go and find a friend’ particularly…difficult to take for someone still forced to isolate because I’m statistically first in the queue to die from covid next.
Joy being yelled at by The Doctor for ‘following the rules’, even in an attempt to wake her up from her conditioning, also feels way too harsh in context: it wasn’t the rules that were the problem – they clearly saved thousands of lives whichever way you look at it, even with suicide figures and people who missed cancer screenings and operations taken into account – it was the fact the people who set them couldn’t take them seriously that caused the problems and led to the majority of the population collectively shrugging and ignoring them. Lockdown was always a good solution, the only solution in so many ways and the caring compassionate Doctor I know would have been all for it. After all it’s all very well Joy symbolically sacrificing herself so she can die and be reunited with her mum so that ‘others might live’ and that she’d have been happy to die from infection and seen her mum on her deathbed, but the emphasis on how this is a ‘noble’ choice skirts dangerously close to the idea that ‘some sacrifices were worth it if life returns to normal’. I for one would still quite like to stay alive and be there to see and review any and all future Dr Who stories thankyouverymuch (and besides it wouldn’t take much to stop covid without the need for another lockdown now we know how it spreads: putting air filters in all public buildings would do so much good for such little effort). There’s also the carefully interwoven idea about how we have to keep moving on and not look back to our past which works in the context of grief and Joy not being able to move forward, but not in the context of a deadly epidemic (all those lives saved in lockdown are for nothing if we put ourselves in danger needlessly). However thankfully that’s not the whole story. Russell has always been of the other extreme when it comes to covid. Watch any ‘Unleashed’ episode of the making of series one (though not this episode interestingly) and you can see that everyone involved in TV production under Russell is still masking, long after every the industry (except the ones where millionaires gather) gave up, whilst his stories that touch on covid (notably ’73 Yards’) are much softer in that regard, with covid a shared trauma to process rather than something to move on from. I could well be wrong here but I sense his calming presence in the Doctor’s line that being stuck in a hotel room in isolation for a year ‘wasn’t really so bad’ if it meant that lives were saved and that ‘there’s no bad way to save a life’ (though admittedly for all I know it’s the other way around and it was Moffat’s influence that changed Russell’s ideas on his own scripts).
However this is still very much Moffat’s story and in more ways than might be apparent. Back when he was showrunner and writing his own Christmas specials he got into the habit of holing himself up in a hotel room around Spring-Summertime, hanging up some bits of tinsel and decorations and playing some Christmas Carols to get in the mood. Even if he didn’t actually do that this time around (he no longer has to travel to conventions as the ‘current showrunner’ and live out of a suitcase) it’s easy to see why after so many years of working that way hotels would become associated with Christmas in his mind. You can just imagine Moffat’s attention being interrupted from his work by the mystery of a locked door right next to his computer and his subconscious brain working overtime: how come he’s in yet another hotel room next to yet another locked door?... As for the plot it’s a direct steal from the traditional carol ‘Star Of Bethlehem’ (not ‘O Little Town Of Bethlehem’ or ‘The Star Carol’ but another far more obscure one that features the line ‘joyful let us quickly rise, still the signal in the skies’; the episode title then refers to a direct carol altogether!) as if Moffat got the idea after paying close attention to one carol in particular. Despite all that, though, ‘Joy To The World’ is still oddly un-Christmassy as Dr who festive specials go. Sure it’s set on not one but two Christmas Days (possibly three with the 4202 dating at the start that kicks everything off: note that it’s ‘2024’ in reverse) and ends with the nativity star on or at least around the very first Christmas Day, but it’s an unusual episode in that it features very little else in terms of festive trimmings: no Slade for once or indeed any Christmas music at all, no references to the date in the dialogue beyond Joy’s memory of her mum dying, no killer snowmen or robo Santas or even snow (I could be wrong but am I right in thinking this is this the first ever Who Xmas special without snow in there somewhere?!) What’s odd is that it would be easy enough to add, especially with the Disney budget: the dinosaur could easily have been in snow, or they could have out the Silurian in a Christmas hat or filled the time hotel full to bursting with festive decorations. Apparently this story started life as just another series episode before the two writers saw the ‘potential’ of having this as a Christmas story but in that case, why? What about this plot screamed Christmas to them?
The links to the writer himself don’t just end there though. A lot of this story is about loss and grief, a theme that ran through so much of Moffat’s work from the 11th Doctor losing Amy and Rory to the 12th forgetting Clara to the death of Danny Pink. Many characters in Moffat’s work across all series have their lives shapes by death and have to learn to adjust to a life that’s different to the one they thought they were going to live, something that allows him to weave his theme of time travel in quite cleverly. Many of his characters remain stuck in the past by choice, unwilling to move on into a scary future, while nothing alters your scale of time more than grief when usual routines don’t help and none of the old stuff you used to do seems to matter anymore. Steven lost his mum late on in his run as showrunner (oddly like Russell’s partner getting sick at the end of series four actually), revealing after leaving the show that he was writing his first draft of what was his eventual last story as showrunner ‘Twice Upon A Time’ at her bedside (and regretting not being able to give it his full attention – one of the reasons he’s come back for his two story ‘coda’). Christmas is a time that accentuates your life circumstances, making good times better and hard times sadder and this is a rare Christmas special brave enough to admit that not everyone enjoys the holidays. That line from The Doctor about how mums never stop saving you ‘even when they’re gone’ feels like a last rueful tribute, as Joy losing her mum gives the end of the story the drama it needs to get out of a plothole and on to the big finale. Even The Doctor is feeling being alone again, with a melancholy we haven’t seen this regeneration wear before which works up to a point but does seem to come a little out of nowhere (the two Ncutis yelling insults at each other that ‘this is why nobody likes you’ feels forced, especially as the ‘older’ Doctor has had a year off to calm down and begin to move on from Ruby who after all is still alive and could be picked up in her future anytime they liked (again was the original plan to kill her off?); also the line about how the Tardis ‘never has chairs’ is a particularly dumb thing to say the same week as the colourised version of ‘The War Games’ went out, showing Patrick Troughton regenerate into Jon Pertwee while sitting in one!)
One of the best aspects of the story, even though it glossed over it too quick, was the idea of The Doctor being stuck in the hotel living ‘the long way round’, a hallmark of the Moffat era when it happened three times (which The Doctor seems to have forgotten: ‘The Lodger’ ‘Closing Time’ and ‘The Power Of Three’), as well as other examples (the 1st Doctor and Susan have been hanging round Coal Hill School for some time in the very first story ‘An Unearthly Child’, the 8th Doctor series ‘Stranded’ has lasted for multiple series and Big Finish are still making them, not forgetting the entire exiled-UNIT era of the 3rd Doctor. Listening to Dr 15 talk here you’d think he’d never ever done it before, which is a bit odd, rather than simply groaning ‘oh no not again!’ We know from his days as the increasingly grumpy wing-clipped 3rd Doctor how much it kills this timelord – and probably this exuberant enthusiastic ‘Tigger’ regeneration more than most – to be stuck in one place, so that sacrifice of staying put on Earth for a year is a big one and it’s wasted by turning all of that frustration into one brief scene about ‘waiting’. The way the Doctor fills the time in is sweet though and leads to some more great sight gags as The Doctor becomes a hotel employee (the mops working on their own, the oven that he makes ‘bigger on the inside’, the satnav that like the Tardis ‘takes you where you need to go, not where you want to go’, the ’accidental’ mind-reading of pudding for a guest whose on a diet) which are all some of the funniest things seen on the show in years. The simple friendship with employee Anita, as they do such Earthly things as play board games and natter while looking at the stars, is very movingly done too. Christmas isn’t just a time of meeting with friends who are there and mourning those who are dead but thinking about the ones lost along the way, who are no longer in our lives regularly for whatever reason (bit who we still appreciate enough to send Christmas cards to every year) and Moffat gets that melancholy feeling of ships that pass in the night well. Anita herself is a great character, totally unruffled even when she walks in on a Silurian in a hotel room, the perfect unruffled shrug of a retail worker who always sees odd things happen in the shifts before Christmas and finds it best not to draw attention to them.
More than just a great idea, though, I think the idea of the Doctor being stuck in the mundane world, while knowing that the extraordinary one is taking place just tantalisingly out of sight, is a neat metaphor for being a retired showrunner. There he is, living one day after another in order, back in everyday life where the wonders of time and space are the playground for someone else, the exact same way Moffat has had to do since 2017. Just look at the way the Doctor has little models of the Tardis lying around (‘because there’s a lot of them for sale online for some reason’ – a knowing postmodernist wink to camera), little reminders of the life he used to lead now that he’s in the ‘slow lane’ (we know that Davies has a whole room full of models after putting it into his BBC contract in 2005 that he got a copy of ‘all of them’, little knowing what a success the franchise was going to be and how much they were going to take over his house; maybe Moffat does too?) A lot is spoken about how hard it is for actors (and actress) to adjust after being The Doctor, because whatever they do for the rest of their lives the first line of their obituary is already written and whatever they job it could never ever possibly be as wide and varied and let’s face it as brilliant as the one they’ve just left, but that goes extra for the writers, producers and showrunners who carry so many of these worlds in their head, part of their subconscious attuned to thinking up stories all the time. You can’t just turn that part of your creative brain off and the hurt frustrated look on The Doctor’s face, as he effectively passes the story on to another ‘future’ version and had to get on with making money and paying bills and gets left behind, is a neat metaphor for adjusting to life post-Who. Moffat has said that this is absolutely definitely his final episode this time and he’s not coming back, honest and I do believe he means it – now. But you and I know that time is relative, dear readers, and it wouldn’t surprise me at all to see him back again in the years to come, as this is a job that never ever lets you go even when you think you’ve moved on from it and want your life back (In fact breaking news: the latest interview from Boxing Day has Moffat saying that while he’s not involved in series two and has no plans to come back in the future ‘you never know’. Which in Dr Who terms basically means yes. Assuming the series itself is safe past a second series of course; Disney still haven’t said if it’s been commissioned either way and if we’re going to get a third series without a gap in transmission they really need to start recording it now).
Assuming for now it is goodbye, though - for the writer not the series that is - Moffat neatly bookends his career again and throws in yet more references to where he began in ‘The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances’ with the throwaway reference to the Villengard, the military regime who were further explored in his first story as showrunner to be filmed ‘Time Of The Angels/Flesh and Stone’, plus his ‘last’ goodbye ‘Twice Upon A Time’ and in much more detail at last in ‘Boom’ (and if you doubted that dig at Christianity was intendtional just look at that story where in the future the military have merged with the Church because they’re more or less the same thing!) This time around the Villengard are back to being noises off though and we never actually get to meet any of them, just their victims – the poor Silurian trapped into holding their boobytrapped starcase up the hotel staircases and Joy who takes the case from him (are there more casualties that happened before The Doctor arrived?) Alas this leads to a bit of a muddle that’s never properly explained: just why are the Villengard growing a star? How did the rather rundown organisation we saw in ‘Boom’ ever end up that clever? And why have they chosen Earth to grow it on rather than a dead planet where they’d raise less suspicion? As with a lot of Moffat stories we’re encouraged just to run with it and not ask too many questions, even though it leads to what’s a fairly botched ending. The same goes for Joy’s decision to ‘enter’ the star and be absorbed too: why would that stop the explosion at all, as a ruthless people like the Villengard would surely have set up a second defence for such an event? Plus how does that even work? Joy spreading hope through to all of us because we’re all ’starseeds’ is typical ‘deux ex machina’ we-need-an-ending nonsense (to be fair more a hallmark of Davies’ era usually than Moffat’s): we aren’t all seeds of that particular star and how can that possibly work when stars and atoms don’t have feelings? Surely even in a universe with so much empty space in it moving a star and putting it somewhere would cause repercussions (the gravitational field on the Earth as it’s moved out of orbit would have caused Biblical scale floods inevitably too? Now there’s an idea for a sequel...) Plus much as Joy’s name offers the suitably Christmas cracker pun in the episode title, wouldn’t it have worked best if she was called Hope rather than Joy? She doesn’t make people happy after all, just gives them hope in new tomorrows when they’ve felt like giving up. Alas the final rather laboured quarter of the story can’t cash in all the great ideas that have come before it, so that we never fully get the most of all those great ideas. Once again, it’s as if Moffat had never been away, with several rich cheques that were simply never cashed.
Oh well, it is only a Christmas episode and the usual rules of the series don’t apply: this is a story to get lost in and go with the flow, for new or one-time viewers to enjoy without complicated backstory, to go ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ at over the turkey rather than dissect with the magnifying glass of usual. On that score ‘Joy To the World’ works well with lots of brilliant individual moments: the Doctor’s repeated silly attempted deliveries of a ‘ham and cheese toastie and a spiced pumpkin latte’ (destined to rank alongside fish fingers and custard in fan affections) to lots of inappropriate places, the opening scene of the Tardis arriving and The Doctor walking out to the buffet breakfast table in his ‘Arthur Dent’ dressing gown like every other guest, the larks with Joy early on, the dinosaur cameo, the Doctor ‘working’ at the hotel and the fun and oh so Moffaty gag of having the abstract concept of different timezones behind different doors linked by something as basic and simple as rope (something that also pays off what appeared to be a brief gag about Everest early on with customary neatness). Along the way there are some good characters (Trev was a decent support too, played with customary sleepiness by ‘White Van Man’ actor Joel Fry), a great central conceit and another strong performance by Ncuti who, for the second time in a row in Moffat’s episodes, dominates the running time and spends quite a bit of this story alone. Best of all are the varied gags which have some of the highest hit rate of any of the modern stories and are scattered liberally throughout from Joy’s exasperation at not being the ‘main character’ even in her own hotel room, to The Doctor’s quip that she’s being ‘mansplained by a talking briefcase’ to the sarcastic comment that ‘evil must logo’ to the laugh out loud line about ‘liking it when the clocks go forward’ (why has no writer thought up that one in sixty years?!) to the pithy line that ‘hotel rooms are you without the makeup’ shaped by what meagre possessions you own and the classic timey wimey ‘Sorry for the delay’ ‘But we haven’t ordered yet!’ which joins the great pantheon of classic Moffat dialogue. So yes, while this story features all of Moffat’s old traditionally irritating trademarks and is even bittier than usual it also features nuggets of pure gold rattling around in there too, his dialogue as sharp as ever and his ideas every bit as big and bold and imaginative as any seen in the series. Not a great episode by any means but one with lots of great bits in it, this special didn’t quite bring joy to my entire world exactly but was a good way to spend fifty-five minutes (an awkward running time that, longer than your average episode and a bit short for a Christmas one) and raised a lot of smiles along the way. Above all else, though, ‘Joy’ offered things you simply don’t get anywhere else: what other series would give you the sight of a Silurian in a hotel room being threatened with a hairdryer before an ordinary human gets turned into a star? That’s proper Dr Who that is. And what better praise could you give any Dr Who story than that?
POSITIVES + The sets are amazing! There really do seem to be rows upon rows of doorways that stretch out just like a ‘real’ hotel, only more futuristic and interesting with rounded doors that aren’t like any hotel I’ve ever been in.
NEGATIVES – Moffat is back to his old tricks again of never getting to the end of one thing before jumping straight into another and there are enough ideas for a full series, each one only lasting for a scene or two. We needed more of Joy’s amiable hopelessness and the line Moffat said was his favourite (that she’s the sort of person whose smile was ‘the lid on a burning pot’) is doing a lot of the heavy lifting for her character. The Doctor stuck in one place for a year could easily have been the focus of the episode, but instead it’s a ‘hello’ scene, a ‘goodbye’ scene and a montage; there’ no sense of him being stretched to breaking point twiddling his thumbs or his relief at finally growing into the ‘future’ self who gets to run off with Joy anew. The poor Silurian snuffs it far too quickly and while it’s totally in keeping with this incarnation of The Doctor who has a big heart that cares for everyone his scene of mourning is far too long for a character who was barely on screen three minutes. The Villengard get pushed to the side too (most olden stories would have added a postscript of The Doctor running off to tick them off). Also the dinosaurs existed for millions of years. The scene with the T Rex only lasts seconds – even allowing for the expense of CGI there’s so much more they could have done with that.
BEST QUOTE: ‘The starseed will bloom and the flesh shall rise’ (an impenetrable catchphrase which is to 21st century Who what ‘The Quest Is The Quest’ and ‘Eldrad Must Live!’ are to 20th Century Who!)
Seeing as it’s Christmas let’s start with what this story got right: the idea of a time hotel, with different eras hidden behind different doors, is exquisite and so very Dr Whoy. It’s actually an idea that had been created years earlier in the first Russell T Davies era but one which was dropped for being too similar to other ideas (my guess is the ‘parallel universe’ strand that weaves its way through Rose and Donna’s story arcs both). Moffat always liked the idea and wanted to write it, but never got round to doing it in his era (not least because Toby Whitworth came up with a similar idea independently, which became the fears-behind-hotel-rooms ‘The God Complex’ in series six in 2011). When Russell tried to revive the script for series fifteen/Disney 1A (or whatever we’re calling the Ncuti era now) he became stuck, though, and sensibly got in touch with his old friend and asked if he wanted a bash: after all a time hotel is such a Moffaty idea everyone would just have accused Russell of trying to be like his successor anyway (there are similar idea from the ‘wilderness years’ too of course - notably the missing story ‘The Crystal Bucephalus’ where a space restaurant has different courses in different timezones, but few Dr Who stories are 100% original and there are so many spin-off books and audios almost everything feels as if it’s been done by someone, even a little bit. Besides, recycling at Christmas is normal or we’d never fit in our houses come Boxing Day).
What Moffat brought to the table was the very Dr Whoy sense that another more brilliant, magical, scary and big universe exists just outside our peripheral vision if only we’d learn to look up and away from our little lives. The idea of something as mundane and ordinary as a hotel containing extraordinary gateways to different eras is totally Dr Who in every way, while the impossibly mind-bogglingly long time it takes to ‘cook’ a star is the blink of an eye for a story that deals in time and space readily. The idea of a real life ‘mystery’ that can be solved by something Dr Whoy also reaches a hilarious peak with the fact that hotel rooms so often have locked doors: in reality of course it’s because rich guests can buy more than one room and the doors separating the suites can be unlocked to give them double the space nd then locked up to suit more individual paying guests, but Moffat’s timey wimey explanation works just as well in context as an ‘alternative’ reason and helps root the story in the real world with something the audience can see for themselves quite easily and be scared by (just like a gargoyle becomes a weeping angel statue or a library is full of creepy shadows and ‘things that hide in books, with an alien version of silverfish). The idea of reducing something as glorious as all of Human history to a package tour for aliens (shades of ‘Delta and the Bannermen’ there too) is a great riff on doing this in reverse too, of how something big and monumental for us becomes just another holiday event for extra-terrestrials. It leads to several brilliant sight gags easy to take in even between nattering relations and getting up to check on the Christmas lunch: the stone door for the stone-age, the elaborate one for Mesopotamia and the leaning door of Pisa (presumably there are iron doors for the iron age and bronze doors for the bronze age too!) We don’t get to see many of these doors in action but we get just enough to make us feel that there are other worlds out there just a door away – the building of an elaborate set for the Orient Express and the snow-capped peaks of Everest might not be the best or most frugal use of the extra Disney budget but they do lend a sense of scale and scope that’s been missing from a lot of the recent stories. The dinosaur towards the end too is a great Dr Whoy surprise, as a possessed Joy finally tracks down the ‘right’ room which turns out to be from 65 million years ago and even though it’s screen time is all too brief (far briefer than it seemed from the ‘Children In Need’ preview a month ago when it was hinted the T Rex would be a major part of the story) it’s well handled, with some of the best CGI work in the series to date (in fact it makes the already pretty decent one in ‘Deep Breath’ from a decade ago look like the rubber models in ‘Invasion Of The Dinosaurs’ by comparison). Few writers can juggle as many ideas from different timezones as Moffat can and even though the idea might have been Russell’s the execution is pure Steven. If this does end up being Moffat’s last script (which he says it will be – although I remember him saying that before. At least twice) then it’s another really great way to go out, another summary of his time on the show only a smidgeon behind ‘World Enough and Time/The Doctor Falls’ (and less messy than ‘Twice Upon A Time’).
Moffat, too, benefits from the guiding helping hand of his old friend, with an opening ten minutes that has Russell’s fingerprints all over it, a character piece about lovable loser Joy, a part custom made for actress Nicola Coughlan fresh from one of Davies’ current favourite shows Brigerton. What seems written as a deliberately different part (gone are the ballgowns and lushness and grace and poise; in are the seedy hotel background and the sense of loneliness and isolation) is still plainly written for her and within seconds she feels like a fully-drawn out character. Joy’s awkward misunderstanding at the reception desk (‘Single?’ asks Anita. ‘Does it show?’ Joy says, aghast, her bubbly demeanour giving way to embarrassment before Anita follows up with ‘no I meant your room?’) is pure RTD, giving us character and back story in the form of a revealing gag and making us feel for Joy already before we properly know who she is yet. The curious decision to release the first five minutes from this episode as a ‘trailer’ straight after ‘Empire Of Death’ six months early (by far the longest we’ve had to wait between extract and episode) fools you into thinking we’re going to get a very different (and frankly better) episode to the one we did get, a ‘Runaway Bride’ style episode about a standalone companion being totally out of their depth full of jokes about them being in the wrong place at the wrong time, the dazzling Whoniverse reduced to a single hotel room. The opening with Joy feels the most ‘alive’ and well thought out part of the story by far, an every woman alone at Christmas far away from everyone so she can hide from…something. What’s interesting about that, though, is that for the longest time it was meant to be Ruby in the hotel room: that’s how she stayed for Russell’s half-draft and Moffat says that’s the way she stayed for half the episode of his first draft too, before getting the news Millie Gibson had left the series and had to be written out (in what seems like a suspiciously hurried manner after just nine episodes).
Once Moffat takes over, though, he treats this part of the story as a brief ‘episode one’ which he just has to change in ‘episode two’, the way he always did in two-parters of old, turning everything we thought we knew on its head. Joy, a character with such promise, is largely sidelined till the big finale, possessed by the Villengard military outfit and press-ganged into searching for their hidden star with the very ruthless baddy idea of being blown up to hide the evidence of the nasty little scheme if she fails to find it in time. Joy doesn’t speak ‘normally’ again until the Doctor prods her to make her angry (the same way the 7th Doctor used to do to Ace, only it doesn’t work as well because Ncuti is a happy charismatic friendly kind of a Doctor, with a burning anger he does well but none of the ruthlessness and hidden layers of his younger self). By which time the story’s too late: Joy sacrifices herself in a hideously shamaltzy ending where she effectively becomes a star to be with her dead mum and, despite the strong work of the first few minutes, we simply don’t know her well enough to care (was this the original plan for writing Ruby out? The pay-off after ten episodes would be a lot stronger than having her run off to be with her own mum – weird how mothers has ended up being a big thing in this era - and killing the elder Sunday off at the hands of Sutekh would have made the end of ‘Empire Of Death’ a lot more powerful too). Having the big ol’ star turn out to be the Star of Bethlehem which kick-started 2000 years of Christianity is also so obvious an idea it’s one of those things you wish they hadn’t gone for (it also doesn’t make a lot of sense when you sit down and think about it: the room Ruby was left in is an Aztec-style South American temple that clearly post-dates the birth of Jesus by more than a few centuries. Equally why is there a balcony 65 million years ago? Is there a dinosaur equivalent of ‘Bob The Builder’ out there? ‘Bob the Brachiosaur’ maybe?)
It also leads to two, shall we say…questionable decisions we haven’t had the likes of since ‘Dark Water/Death In Heaven’ turned the Brigadier’s corpse into a Cyberman and told the nation’s kiddies their dead loved ones who chose cremation are all screaming in agony in some afterlife. Few Dr Who stories dare go near religion, the one great no-go area where censorship has actually become tighter in the 21st century rather than looser (you wouldn’t get The Master conjuring up the devil today the way he did in ‘The Daemons’ although ‘The Impossible Planet’ had a good try). Even stories set in a past when lives fully revolved around Christianity tend to see it as a background detail if it’s mentioned at all (‘The Time Warrior’ ‘Masque of Mandragora’ ‘The Shakespeare Code’ ‘The Haunting Of Villa Diaodati’ to name just four of many). ‘Joy To The World’ doesn’t skirt around the issue at all but gives us a great big whacking ending that involves the Whoniverse directly with the Bible, saying that the star that brought the three magi out to see the infant Jesus wasn’t the creation of God but the side effect of a failed military takeover by an alien life-form turned sentient by a 21st century woman mourning her mum. It doesn’t quite come out and say the two can’t co-exist but clearly if the wise men were inspired by something other than divine intervention alone that does raise some rather awkward questions (particularly for an episode that goes out on Jesus’ birthday). I’m kind of surprised there hasn’t been more fuss about it to be honest. Oh well, Christianity survived intact enough for Christmas telly to dominate the TV schedules so I doubt it’s going to fall just because of a throwaway reference at the end of a Dr Who story somehow.
More worrying is the ongoing discussion of the still ongoing covid pandemic. I’m sure you all thought I was daft banging on about it across most of my reviews of the 2024 series but it’s truly unavoidable here and the writers of the new series are clearly still working through the after-effects of the biggest plague in a century. The first ‘actual’ mention of lockdown in the series (though a few of the Chibnall era stories hinted at it) comes when Joy breaks down at the end of the story as the Doctor gets her mad: she spends her yuletide holidays alone in an anonymous hotel room because she lost her mum on Christmas Day during the pandemic and just can’t cope with all the memories alongside other people (would she have been home alone anyway? She doesn’t mention a single outside character besides her mum no friends family or work colleagues who would miss her when she turns into a celestial entity at the end). Joy’s angry that the draconian rules of lockdown meant she couldn’t say goodbye to her mum in person and still (rightly) incandescent with rage at Boris Johnson and his cabinet’s lockdown parties that broke all the rules of distancing they themselves set. So far so good: that’s enough to put anyone off Christmas. But it’s the way it’s handled and the language used that worries me. For a start we were never actually in full lockdown in Christmas 2020 and in fact weren’t in full lockdown past the start of July that year despite the way people bang on about it now: worried that they weren’t selling enough papers the Murdoch media empire leaned heavily on the government not to cancel Christmas and whipped up a frenzy about ‘government interference’ with their readers that still lingers to this day, whilst the business deals the politicians had cooking on the side meant they were afraid of losing money if people couldn’t meet up and buy presents. So instead there was a flimsy rule reducing meeting up in crowds with police encouraged to look the other way for the most part anyway for ‘morale’. But morale matters nothing if it’s to keep people safe and tens of thousands of people died because of that decision in this country alone, while many more remain sick with long covid after catching it during those holidays, possibly permanently (while others, who either thought they got away lightly or were asymptomatic, continue to be sick, unaware of the damage covid does to your insides. Seriously think to yourself how many times you’ve been sick with anything since 2021 compared to pre-pandemic years. That’s not normal or because of three months using masks but evidence that a known dangerous disease has weakened your immune system). There’s been a pushback the past few years that the lockdowns were over-zealous (they didn’t go far enough back when covid was new and at its deadliest), that covid is just a cold (it’s the biggest killer of humanity in one go in a century, since the Spanish flu) and that the rules were a ‘nonsense’, a word that keeps coming up time and time again. Joy even says that word here (though it’s ambiguous whether she means ‘nonsense’ in the colloquial sense that covid means everything is all a bit of a mess and topsy turvy).
The thing is though that while covid isn’t as deadly anymore, thanks to a vaccine (that reduces the symptoms but doesn’t cure them – it can’t yet, until we have time to catch up, as covid mutates too quickly to fully get a hold of yet by the time vaccines can be made en masse) and those months of lockdown early on, it still kills: it’s thought 11,000 Britons died of it in 2024 and the last few figures of the year aren’t even in yet – this despite the fact so many doctors are reluctant to diagnose it and that covid exacerbated existing conditions that people would have lived with happily for years or decades without it and yet which tended to be the ‘main cause’ that went down on existing death certificates. As with ‘Boom’ I can’t help but feel that Moffat and Davies have different views of covid: in that story Moffat laughed at the idea of humans being treated as if they were a bomb about to go off and he mostly does the same here, with the lines about the Doctor making Joy angry ‘because that’s the way you wake up’ (language used by many a lockdown and vaccine sceptic who resented government interference on principle, even when it was genuinely keeping them safe and every other government round the world was doing the same, bar a couple whose death rates exploded without restrictions in place) and the idea that it’s the past and we need to move on and we should stop isolating in our rooms and ‘go and find a friend’ particularly…difficult to take for someone still forced to isolate because I’m statistically first in the queue to die from covid next.
Joy being yelled at by The Doctor for ‘following the rules’, even in an attempt to wake her up from her conditioning, also feels way too harsh in context: it wasn’t the rules that were the problem – they clearly saved thousands of lives whichever way you look at it, even with suicide figures and people who missed cancer screenings and operations taken into account – it was the fact the people who set them couldn’t take them seriously that caused the problems and led to the majority of the population collectively shrugging and ignoring them. Lockdown was always a good solution, the only solution in so many ways and the caring compassionate Doctor I know would have been all for it. After all it’s all very well Joy symbolically sacrificing herself so she can die and be reunited with her mum so that ‘others might live’ and that she’d have been happy to die from infection and seen her mum on her deathbed, but the emphasis on how this is a ‘noble’ choice skirts dangerously close to the idea that ‘some sacrifices were worth it if life returns to normal’. I for one would still quite like to stay alive and be there to see and review any and all future Dr Who stories thankyouverymuch (and besides it wouldn’t take much to stop covid without the need for another lockdown now we know how it spreads: putting air filters in all public buildings would do so much good for such little effort). There’s also the carefully interwoven idea about how we have to keep moving on and not look back to our past which works in the context of grief and Joy not being able to move forward, but not in the context of a deadly epidemic (all those lives saved in lockdown are for nothing if we put ourselves in danger needlessly). However thankfully that’s not the whole story. Russell has always been of the other extreme when it comes to covid. Watch any ‘Unleashed’ episode of the making of series one (though not this episode interestingly) and you can see that everyone involved in TV production under Russell is still masking, long after every the industry (except the ones where millionaires gather) gave up, whilst his stories that touch on covid (notably ’73 Yards’) are much softer in that regard, with covid a shared trauma to process rather than something to move on from. I could well be wrong here but I sense his calming presence in the Doctor’s line that being stuck in a hotel room in isolation for a year ‘wasn’t really so bad’ if it meant that lives were saved and that ‘there’s no bad way to save a life’ (though admittedly for all I know it’s the other way around and it was Moffat’s influence that changed Russell’s ideas on his own scripts).
However this is still very much Moffat’s story and in more ways than might be apparent. Back when he was showrunner and writing his own Christmas specials he got into the habit of holing himself up in a hotel room around Spring-Summertime, hanging up some bits of tinsel and decorations and playing some Christmas Carols to get in the mood. Even if he didn’t actually do that this time around (he no longer has to travel to conventions as the ‘current showrunner’ and live out of a suitcase) it’s easy to see why after so many years of working that way hotels would become associated with Christmas in his mind. You can just imagine Moffat’s attention being interrupted from his work by the mystery of a locked door right next to his computer and his subconscious brain working overtime: how come he’s in yet another hotel room next to yet another locked door?... As for the plot it’s a direct steal from the traditional carol ‘Star Of Bethlehem’ (not ‘O Little Town Of Bethlehem’ or ‘The Star Carol’ but another far more obscure one that features the line ‘joyful let us quickly rise, still the signal in the skies’; the episode title then refers to a direct carol altogether!) as if Moffat got the idea after paying close attention to one carol in particular. Despite all that, though, ‘Joy To The World’ is still oddly un-Christmassy as Dr who festive specials go. Sure it’s set on not one but two Christmas Days (possibly three with the 4202 dating at the start that kicks everything off: note that it’s ‘2024’ in reverse) and ends with the nativity star on or at least around the very first Christmas Day, but it’s an unusual episode in that it features very little else in terms of festive trimmings: no Slade for once or indeed any Christmas music at all, no references to the date in the dialogue beyond Joy’s memory of her mum dying, no killer snowmen or robo Santas or even snow (I could be wrong but am I right in thinking this is this the first ever Who Xmas special without snow in there somewhere?!) What’s odd is that it would be easy enough to add, especially with the Disney budget: the dinosaur could easily have been in snow, or they could have out the Silurian in a Christmas hat or filled the time hotel full to bursting with festive decorations. Apparently this story started life as just another series episode before the two writers saw the ‘potential’ of having this as a Christmas story but in that case, why? What about this plot screamed Christmas to them?
The links to the writer himself don’t just end there though. A lot of this story is about loss and grief, a theme that ran through so much of Moffat’s work from the 11th Doctor losing Amy and Rory to the 12th forgetting Clara to the death of Danny Pink. Many characters in Moffat’s work across all series have their lives shapes by death and have to learn to adjust to a life that’s different to the one they thought they were going to live, something that allows him to weave his theme of time travel in quite cleverly. Many of his characters remain stuck in the past by choice, unwilling to move on into a scary future, while nothing alters your scale of time more than grief when usual routines don’t help and none of the old stuff you used to do seems to matter anymore. Steven lost his mum late on in his run as showrunner (oddly like Russell’s partner getting sick at the end of series four actually), revealing after leaving the show that he was writing his first draft of what was his eventual last story as showrunner ‘Twice Upon A Time’ at her bedside (and regretting not being able to give it his full attention – one of the reasons he’s come back for his two story ‘coda’). Christmas is a time that accentuates your life circumstances, making good times better and hard times sadder and this is a rare Christmas special brave enough to admit that not everyone enjoys the holidays. That line from The Doctor about how mums never stop saving you ‘even when they’re gone’ feels like a last rueful tribute, as Joy losing her mum gives the end of the story the drama it needs to get out of a plothole and on to the big finale. Even The Doctor is feeling being alone again, with a melancholy we haven’t seen this regeneration wear before which works up to a point but does seem to come a little out of nowhere (the two Ncutis yelling insults at each other that ‘this is why nobody likes you’ feels forced, especially as the ‘older’ Doctor has had a year off to calm down and begin to move on from Ruby who after all is still alive and could be picked up in her future anytime they liked (again was the original plan to kill her off?); also the line about how the Tardis ‘never has chairs’ is a particularly dumb thing to say the same week as the colourised version of ‘The War Games’ went out, showing Patrick Troughton regenerate into Jon Pertwee while sitting in one!)
One of the best aspects of the story, even though it glossed over it too quick, was the idea of The Doctor being stuck in the hotel living ‘the long way round’, a hallmark of the Moffat era when it happened three times (which The Doctor seems to have forgotten: ‘The Lodger’ ‘Closing Time’ and ‘The Power Of Three’), as well as other examples (the 1st Doctor and Susan have been hanging round Coal Hill School for some time in the very first story ‘An Unearthly Child’, the 8th Doctor series ‘Stranded’ has lasted for multiple series and Big Finish are still making them, not forgetting the entire exiled-UNIT era of the 3rd Doctor. Listening to Dr 15 talk here you’d think he’d never ever done it before, which is a bit odd, rather than simply groaning ‘oh no not again!’ We know from his days as the increasingly grumpy wing-clipped 3rd Doctor how much it kills this timelord – and probably this exuberant enthusiastic ‘Tigger’ regeneration more than most – to be stuck in one place, so that sacrifice of staying put on Earth for a year is a big one and it’s wasted by turning all of that frustration into one brief scene about ‘waiting’. The way the Doctor fills the time in is sweet though and leads to some more great sight gags as The Doctor becomes a hotel employee (the mops working on their own, the oven that he makes ‘bigger on the inside’, the satnav that like the Tardis ‘takes you where you need to go, not where you want to go’, the ’accidental’ mind-reading of pudding for a guest whose on a diet) which are all some of the funniest things seen on the show in years. The simple friendship with employee Anita, as they do such Earthly things as play board games and natter while looking at the stars, is very movingly done too. Christmas isn’t just a time of meeting with friends who are there and mourning those who are dead but thinking about the ones lost along the way, who are no longer in our lives regularly for whatever reason (bit who we still appreciate enough to send Christmas cards to every year) and Moffat gets that melancholy feeling of ships that pass in the night well. Anita herself is a great character, totally unruffled even when she walks in on a Silurian in a hotel room, the perfect unruffled shrug of a retail worker who always sees odd things happen in the shifts before Christmas and finds it best not to draw attention to them.
More than just a great idea, though, I think the idea of the Doctor being stuck in the mundane world, while knowing that the extraordinary one is taking place just tantalisingly out of sight, is a neat metaphor for being a retired showrunner. There he is, living one day after another in order, back in everyday life where the wonders of time and space are the playground for someone else, the exact same way Moffat has had to do since 2017. Just look at the way the Doctor has little models of the Tardis lying around (‘because there’s a lot of them for sale online for some reason’ – a knowing postmodernist wink to camera), little reminders of the life he used to lead now that he’s in the ‘slow lane’ (we know that Davies has a whole room full of models after putting it into his BBC contract in 2005 that he got a copy of ‘all of them’, little knowing what a success the franchise was going to be and how much they were going to take over his house; maybe Moffat does too?) A lot is spoken about how hard it is for actors (and actress) to adjust after being The Doctor, because whatever they do for the rest of their lives the first line of their obituary is already written and whatever they job it could never ever possibly be as wide and varied and let’s face it as brilliant as the one they’ve just left, but that goes extra for the writers, producers and showrunners who carry so many of these worlds in their head, part of their subconscious attuned to thinking up stories all the time. You can’t just turn that part of your creative brain off and the hurt frustrated look on The Doctor’s face, as he effectively passes the story on to another ‘future’ version and had to get on with making money and paying bills and gets left behind, is a neat metaphor for adjusting to life post-Who. Moffat has said that this is absolutely definitely his final episode this time and he’s not coming back, honest and I do believe he means it – now. But you and I know that time is relative, dear readers, and it wouldn’t surprise me at all to see him back again in the years to come, as this is a job that never ever lets you go even when you think you’ve moved on from it and want your life back (In fact breaking news: the latest interview from Boxing Day has Moffat saying that while he’s not involved in series two and has no plans to come back in the future ‘you never know’. Which in Dr Who terms basically means yes. Assuming the series itself is safe past a second series of course; Disney still haven’t said if it’s been commissioned either way and if we’re going to get a third series without a gap in transmission they really need to start recording it now).
Assuming for now it is goodbye, though - for the writer not the series that is - Moffat neatly bookends his career again and throws in yet more references to where he began in ‘The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances’ with the throwaway reference to the Villengard, the military regime who were further explored in his first story as showrunner to be filmed ‘Time Of The Angels/Flesh and Stone’, plus his ‘last’ goodbye ‘Twice Upon A Time’ and in much more detail at last in ‘Boom’ (and if you doubted that dig at Christianity was intendtional just look at that story where in the future the military have merged with the Church because they’re more or less the same thing!) This time around the Villengard are back to being noises off though and we never actually get to meet any of them, just their victims – the poor Silurian trapped into holding their boobytrapped starcase up the hotel staircases and Joy who takes the case from him (are there more casualties that happened before The Doctor arrived?) Alas this leads to a bit of a muddle that’s never properly explained: just why are the Villengard growing a star? How did the rather rundown organisation we saw in ‘Boom’ ever end up that clever? And why have they chosen Earth to grow it on rather than a dead planet where they’d raise less suspicion? As with a lot of Moffat stories we’re encouraged just to run with it and not ask too many questions, even though it leads to what’s a fairly botched ending. The same goes for Joy’s decision to ‘enter’ the star and be absorbed too: why would that stop the explosion at all, as a ruthless people like the Villengard would surely have set up a second defence for such an event? Plus how does that even work? Joy spreading hope through to all of us because we’re all ’starseeds’ is typical ‘deux ex machina’ we-need-an-ending nonsense (to be fair more a hallmark of Davies’ era usually than Moffat’s): we aren’t all seeds of that particular star and how can that possibly work when stars and atoms don’t have feelings? Surely even in a universe with so much empty space in it moving a star and putting it somewhere would cause repercussions (the gravitational field on the Earth as it’s moved out of orbit would have caused Biblical scale floods inevitably too? Now there’s an idea for a sequel...) Plus much as Joy’s name offers the suitably Christmas cracker pun in the episode title, wouldn’t it have worked best if she was called Hope rather than Joy? She doesn’t make people happy after all, just gives them hope in new tomorrows when they’ve felt like giving up. Alas the final rather laboured quarter of the story can’t cash in all the great ideas that have come before it, so that we never fully get the most of all those great ideas. Once again, it’s as if Moffat had never been away, with several rich cheques that were simply never cashed.
Oh well, it is only a Christmas episode and the usual rules of the series don’t apply: this is a story to get lost in and go with the flow, for new or one-time viewers to enjoy without complicated backstory, to go ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ at over the turkey rather than dissect with the magnifying glass of usual. On that score ‘Joy To the World’ works well with lots of brilliant individual moments: the Doctor’s repeated silly attempted deliveries of a ‘ham and cheese toastie and a spiced pumpkin latte’ (destined to rank alongside fish fingers and custard in fan affections) to lots of inappropriate places, the opening scene of the Tardis arriving and The Doctor walking out to the buffet breakfast table in his ‘Arthur Dent’ dressing gown like every other guest, the larks with Joy early on, the dinosaur cameo, the Doctor ‘working’ at the hotel and the fun and oh so Moffaty gag of having the abstract concept of different timezones behind different doors linked by something as basic and simple as rope (something that also pays off what appeared to be a brief gag about Everest early on with customary neatness). Along the way there are some good characters (Trev was a decent support too, played with customary sleepiness by ‘White Van Man’ actor Joel Fry), a great central conceit and another strong performance by Ncuti who, for the second time in a row in Moffat’s episodes, dominates the running time and spends quite a bit of this story alone. Best of all are the varied gags which have some of the highest hit rate of any of the modern stories and are scattered liberally throughout from Joy’s exasperation at not being the ‘main character’ even in her own hotel room, to The Doctor’s quip that she’s being ‘mansplained by a talking briefcase’ to the sarcastic comment that ‘evil must logo’ to the laugh out loud line about ‘liking it when the clocks go forward’ (why has no writer thought up that one in sixty years?!) to the pithy line that ‘hotel rooms are you without the makeup’ shaped by what meagre possessions you own and the classic timey wimey ‘Sorry for the delay’ ‘But we haven’t ordered yet!’ which joins the great pantheon of classic Moffat dialogue. So yes, while this story features all of Moffat’s old traditionally irritating trademarks and is even bittier than usual it also features nuggets of pure gold rattling around in there too, his dialogue as sharp as ever and his ideas every bit as big and bold and imaginative as any seen in the series. Not a great episode by any means but one with lots of great bits in it, this special didn’t quite bring joy to my entire world exactly but was a good way to spend fifty-five minutes (an awkward running time that, longer than your average episode and a bit short for a Christmas one) and raised a lot of smiles along the way. Above all else, though, ‘Joy’ offered things you simply don’t get anywhere else: what other series would give you the sight of a Silurian in a hotel room being threatened with a hairdryer before an ordinary human gets turned into a star? That’s proper Dr Who that is. And what better praise could you give any Dr Who story than that?
POSITIVES + The sets are amazing! There really do seem to be rows upon rows of doorways that stretch out just like a ‘real’ hotel, only more futuristic and interesting with rounded doors that aren’t like any hotel I’ve ever been in.
NEGATIVES – Moffat is back to his old tricks again of never getting to the end of one thing before jumping straight into another and there are enough ideas for a full series, each one only lasting for a scene or two. We needed more of Joy’s amiable hopelessness and the line Moffat said was his favourite (that she’s the sort of person whose smile was ‘the lid on a burning pot’) is doing a lot of the heavy lifting for her character. The Doctor stuck in one place for a year could easily have been the focus of the episode, but instead it’s a ‘hello’ scene, a ‘goodbye’ scene and a montage; there’ no sense of him being stretched to breaking point twiddling his thumbs or his relief at finally growing into the ‘future’ self who gets to run off with Joy anew. The poor Silurian snuffs it far too quickly and while it’s totally in keeping with this incarnation of The Doctor who has a big heart that cares for everyone his scene of mourning is far too long for a character who was barely on screen three minutes. The Villengard get pushed to the side too (most olden stories would have added a postscript of The Doctor running off to tick them off). Also the dinosaurs existed for millions of years. The scene with the T Rex only lasts seconds – even allowing for the expense of CGI there’s so much more they could have done with that.
BEST QUOTE: ‘The starseed will bloom and the flesh shall rise’ (an impenetrable catchphrase which is to 21st century Who what ‘The Quest Is The Quest’ and ‘Eldrad Must Live!’ are to 20th Century Who!)
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Sunday/The Empire Of Death’ next
