The Doctor, The Widow and The Wardrobe: Rank - 300

 The Doctor, The Widow and The Wardrobe

(Xmas Special, Dr 11 Amy and Rory, 25/12/2011, producer/showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Steven Moffat, director: Farren Blackburn)

Rank: 300

In an emoji: 🚪🌳

‘So, Doctor, will you take the Turkish delight and believe in magic?’

‘Got any jelly babies? I prefer something a bit more…sugary!’

Or 'The Dying, the Rich and the War-Drones. Plus sentient trees!' to give it even more of a Narnia-name. Is this the weakest Christmas special? It's certainly the schmaltziest, the one with least understanding of how Dr Who and Christmas both work, as a light in darkness rather than a torch in bright sunshine. We forget nowadays when it’s such a Christmas institution but having festive specials wasn’t part of the original plan at all. Dr Who only ever had one Christmas episode in the 20th century (‘Feast Of Steven’, part of ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’) and that was viewed at the time as blasphemy, a nod to the viewers at home that this fictional yet plausible world wasn’t real at all. Christmas stories, then, weren’t the sort of thing the future showrunners practiced writing as children watching their favourite show the way they did their own Doctors, monsters, companions and story arcs, because the only one there’d been was so badly received. Nobody ever considered making them as part of the comeback either – it was only after the success of the 2005 comeback that the BBC, not quite understanding their new cash cow, said that a yuletide ratings winner would be nice and hinted loudly that the show would be safest if they got one ready for the big day. Luckily Russell T was the perfect Christmas writer: a decade of making children’s telly had taught him both the need to be restrained with the sour on big occasions when everyone was watching but that most children, when freed from the need to pretend to please their parents or siblings, get sick at too much sweetness. ‘The End Of Time Part One’ is a bit grim, but otherwise the Davies Christmas specials are perfectly poised between the light and the dark. Successor Steven Moffat is less sure-footed in that regard. While his stories are more intelligent than Russell’s and at their best have every bit as much heart he’s not quite as natural in shifting from one thing to another, so that his stories tend to be either mostly bleak or mostly happy. He had great writer’s block trying to write his first festive story and ‘A Christmas Carol’ worked partly because it borrowed from a Charles Dickens plot but also because it was exactly about that progression between light and dark and Kazran’s journey from skinflint to kind heart. For the next Christmas story Moffat reached out to another favourite source often linked to Christmas Day: C S Lewis’ Narnia books. 

 On the face of it they should be an obvious choice. Moffat spoke a lot in interviews about how he felt the same feeling of ‘magic’ from the books he did from both the Doctor and Father Christmas, that there were impossible beings looking over humanity saving us from ourselves. There’s even a much celebrated Christmas scene in the series’ most famous book ‘The Lion, The Witch and The wardrobe’ (which, if you hadn’t guessed from the rather clumsy title, is where this episode gets its name). Throw in the fact that Narnia is full of snow, walking talking fawns and children and the big budget Hollywood adaptations were back then on every Christmas and you look like you have a ratings winner (actually the franchise has just been cancelled after the underwhelming third film ‘Voyage Of The Dawntreader’ in 2010 but that wasn’t common knowledge in 2011). Moffat writes his most sugary story, one where if you wish really hard at Christmas impossible things can happen and the universe full of so many horrible things has a truce on this special day (even though its illogical: one of the big problems all Who showrunners have had since 2005 is that there’s no fundamental reason why another planet should have a Christmas, which does rather limit the range of stories you can have unless you’re prepared to make something up). 

 But that’s all a fundamental misunderstanding of the source material. The Narnia books are tough, amongst the toughest children’s books around of any era. Yes everyone thinks of the Pevensy children are cute and innocent and for about three chapters of the most famous book they are, but Lewis wrote his books as a practice run for adulthood, to give children a sneak peek into adult things like responsibility and temptation and how the decisions they make now can make or break them for life. It was originally meant to be a way for the pious writer to get children interested in going to Church, a cause for which the author, an Anglican theologian before he turned to writing, was passionate. If you didn’t know, or have forgotten, Narnia is Lewis’ idea of the afterlife, but not a chocolatey boxy version: yes Azlan (a sort of furry Jesus) oversees Narnia as a force for good but there are always ‘fallen angels’ trying to steal people away from ‘his’ path with their bad magic, from The White Witch to The Lady Of the Green Kite. We can’t ‘see’ Earth that clearly when we’re close up next to it, but when seen from Narnia it’s a series of traps and obstacles designed to throw us off the right path – and anyone who wanders off that risks dooming not only themselves but everyone around them (there’s a most harrowing scene where Azlan is crucified and the children are powerless to watch, horrified). There’s a reason these books are set in WW2, despite being written across the 1950s and 1960s: Lewis is convinced that Hitler had wobbled mankind off their axis and opened a door to cold heathen hearts that he wants to put right. The Narnia books may principally be about ‘magic’ but that’s not really how they work at all: it’s only by friendship, kindness, love and above all faith that things can be put right and then only usually once the children have been returned to their world to put these things into action. There’s no sense in this story of what was really going on outside: the miserable food and rationing, the evacuees taken fro their parents and the only home they’d ever known, the thought that they or their loved ones might die, that the war might be lost and the Nazis would run everything (see ‘Dalek Invasion Of earth’ for a real war baby’s phobias of the future). Lewis knows that children are tougher audiences than most children’s writers give them credit for and can take the hard stuff, as long there’s no blood, guts or gore (and Lewis is the last writer who would ever ever ever put swear words into his books). It’s as if Moffat saw rationing so decided to dump a war’s worth of sugar on these kids in one go. But the war wasn’t like that. These characters wouldn’t behave been like that.

 Moffat seems to have thumbed through a copy of ‘Lion’ and half-read it (or possibly half-remembered it from his own childhood, or the equally ‘wrong’ adaptations down the years: the Hollywood films don’t ‘get’ these books either which I’m convinced is why the audience fell away, while the low budget 1980s BBC version is hopeless in that sense being pitched at a much younger audience, albeit with some perfect guest casting: Tom Baker, for instance, is even more natural casting as a grumpy eccentric Marshwiggle than he was the 4th Doctor). He picks up on the idea that ‘if everyone wishes hard enough then miracles can happen’, but he doesn’t understand why. He remembers the war setting but doesn’t understand it’s significance (that wars are turning points when the badness in men get exaggerated and when the Devil has the best chance of stealing our souls and keeping us from our rightful salvation). He also picks up on the idea of a benevolent kind person stepping into help us when we get stuck and turning him into the Doctor, apparently forgetting both that Azlan is as fierce a benevolent ruler as we ever get in children’s literature (I mean, he’s a lion for a kick-off, not a pussy cat!) and his own recent stories where the Doctor’s darker side is pushed (such as ‘A Good Man Goes To War’). I suspect that, had he lived to see it, C S lewis would have been a huge Dr Who fan (actually he died the very day before the first episode of ‘An Unearthly Child’ went out): at it’s best the series shares Lewis’ moral outyrage, the need to stand up for the oppressed, to be the good moral person even on a planet where everyone seems to have evil intentions and to have the strength to be yourself in a world that would rather you weren’t. Admittedly he’d have hated bits of it – the hard science that wasn’t part of his books at all, the occasional episode where The Devil is real not fictional (‘The Daemons’ ‘Satan’s Pit’) and there are no aliens in his or other planets in his books (Narnia is less of a separate entity and more of a mirror of Earth), while he’d have been confused by the Tardis: you can never find your path to Narnia the same way twice, it finds you (everyone thinks the same wardrobe is an entrance in all the books, but it’s just the most famous one and turns back into an ordinary wardrobe at the end: other books have the children getting there through a painting, a gate and magic rings, although the important thing is to wish yourself there; Narnia comes to you when you need it and could benefit from a higher Christian perspective – you don’t have to search for it. However Lewis would have loved the Doctor, a flawed hero in the Azlan mode who tries to make everything better but often makes things worse, would have approved of the amount of tyrants and monsters in Dr Who that are undone by their own karma and greed and would have appreciated the idea of regeneration (although in his books you don’t get a new body as such, you just learn and grow and become a new person – which is kind of how ‘Planet Of The Spiders’ pitches the 3rd Doctor turning into the 4th). He would have loathed and detested this story and knowing him would have written several very lengthy letters pointing out in great detail everything Moffat misunderstood about his work. There’s no guts to this story, despite being set a time when humanity needed guts like few others, no darkness, no real peril except a bit of fake stuff you never seriously think is going to amount to anything. And you can’t preach about the goodness of the light if there’s no dark. 

Had Moffat understood the book’s fundamentals, had he reads the best book in the series the prequel ’The Magician’s Nephew’ (about how ‘Uncle Digby’ turned out the meanies he did – this story is set in ‘his’ house) we could have had a brilliant crossover. So many Dr Who stories are about the need to be kind to people and treat them the way you want to be treated yourself and how as an individual you can set the tone for your species. Yet more are about the balance in war, of the need to stand up for yourself and others but to never throw the first punch because war makes lives miserable for everyone. The best Dr Who stories do both (think of the 2nd Doctor risking his own freedom to help other people get back to their own time in ‘The War Games’ or the 10th Doctor ending a war by shouting ‘I never would!’ in ‘The Doctor’s Daughter’). Had Moffat channelled that, an element in more Who stories than it isn’t, then this could have been the perfect tribute. Instead it’s a schmaltzy, sugary, everything is going to be alright if we wish hard enough kind of adventure that lesser children’s write because they’re terrified that too much realism would destroy a child. Lewis knew that part of the job of a good children’s writer is to prepare children, to get them ready for the adult world to come by allowing them to see the repercussions of characters they identify with and how impossible magical situations have a root in the real world. Sydney Newman understood that when he commissioned Dr Who, he chose producer Verity Lambert to run it because he knew she got that too and the very vast majority of the people who’ve worked on Who since know that too (the jury’s still out on whether John Nathan-Turner thought that, but even he was brave enough to let his writers and script editors say something gritty and dark when they really wanted to). Moffat usually understands that better than anyone: though we start off as fairytales in ‘The Eleventh Hour’ his stories are some of the darkest – especially for the Doctor, whose pushed into more extremes and impossible situations with less happy endings than maybe anyone else outside the War Doctor (and guess what? Moffat created him too). Unfortunately, though, Moffat has a fatal hang-up about death. What other writers see as an inevitable part of life and drama is, for him, something to be avoided at all costs. He’ll tease with the idea of people dying, shown it on screen, even tease us for months with the thought that we’ve witnessed somebody die, but he can’t bring himself to bang the final nail in the coffin. And ‘Widow’ is the worst excesses of that in so many ways: it’s set in a war, an RAF pilot who didn’t have great odds to begin with is lost over a bombing raid for a long enough time for the military to send out an official telegram (which usually took weeks: how did daddy Reg not run out of fuel? And how come all the German planes don’t fly in and start bombing too?!)), life is cheap and death is the norm. But, like the last time Moffat wrote about the war in ‘The Empty Child’, this is a story where nobody dies. Because mum Madge wished hard enough. And because it’s Christmas. And this is a Dr Who Christmas special. Can’t have anything upsetting over Christmas Dinner. That’s the big difference between this episode and what it pinches from: for Moffat everybody lives, while for Lewis everybody dies – and all our life on Earth is a practice for what comes next. I mean, it must be the only children’s series in history where all the leading characters die horribly in a car crash (admittedly they wake up in Narnia straight after, but in pure physical bodily terms they’re as dead as a dodo a chapter or two into ‘The Last Battle’, the author’s take on Judgement Day).

 It doesn’t help that, instead of Narnia (which would maybe have been a crossover too far) we end up on Androzani Minor, the first time we’ve been back in the star system, since the celebrated 5th Doctor story ‘Caves Of Androzani’. One of the reasons that story is so universally loved is because of how real and gritty it is. Everything in that story hurts and, far from saving the day and putting things right, the Doctor can’t even save himself (waking up as Colin Baker instead). ‘Androzani’ would have been one of Lewis’ favourite stories. The Doctor dies a hero having done the right Christian thing, he defeats the horrifically mutated Sharaz Jek who was burned through his own greed and need for control and most everyone in the story learns through suffering. There’s no ‘magic’ in that story at all (unless you count the Tardis), no talking fawns, no snow, and yet in principle that’s as tough and extreme and heartfelt and Christian a work as any of the Narnia books with no sop to the idea that children might be watching. ‘Widow’ is the polar opposite to that. It’s a story where children have to be protected and mollycoddled at all times, where holding on for a miracle always comes right if you want it bad enough. Yes we see a plane in fog and a few angry trees, but that’s not much given that there’s a war on and the children in this story were suffering long before they (eventually) found out their dad was missing, certainly not compared to the pure hell (often literally) of the darkest passages in Lewis’ books. Moffat, not usually squeamish when it comes to his children’s audience, wraps them up in six blankets, mufflers and scarves and a whole pile of cotton wool before letting their imaginations play where he can see them and keep them safe. In a story that ends by telling us mum, whose been so distant and snappy all story, is really only trying to keep us safe and we should all be good little kiddies and be nice to her. Lewis, despite being from another earlier age, is much more likely to encourage his children to be naughty and have fun – just as long as they’re not evil. The irony is that this story even harks back to the single most Lewis-like story of them all ‘Kinda’, with its miners ‘hiding’ from pollution in their mining gear and being wrenched into a world where they have to grow and face the consequences of their actions, and then doesn’t do anything with it. 

 I'm not sure if even Narnia would have dared to include sentient trees, which Dr Who does on screen a second time and, oddly, far less successfully than in ‘The End Of The World’ six years earlier. Admittedly that was a story that was so deliberately expensive and show-offy, being the second ever episode in the ‘comeback’ series, that it all bur crashed the budget or the rest of the year while across 2011 Moffat has been trying to navigate his way through a middle line between really letting his imagination fly and coping with austerity measures and budget cuts at the BBC. Usually he’s so good and clever at this you can’t tell, but this story looks cheap perhaps because we usually get more money spent at Christmas not less. The trees are very wooden (pun intended) and we don’t really learn what they’re all about. They meant a lot to Moffat though: a nightmare from his childhood he still remembered was the Wooden King and Queen who lived at the end of his bed who’d ‘get’ him if he did something wrong; this phobia is best seen in ‘Press Gang’ episode ‘Going Back to Jasper Street’ where they remind Lynda Day of a promise she made as a child she’s forgotten to keep as an adult. But who are they and how do they feel? We don’t know, they’re just kind of there – they’re characters that, ironically enough, feel as if they have no ‘roots’ and are just there for show. We’re just told that they’re dying from the acid rain caused by mining on the planet and they’ve ‘borrowed’ mum to put things right (after first rejecting the Doctor and Cyril for being male; no idea why they reject Lily out of hand too given that she’s female and clearly of an age to be a mother even if she isn’t yet; actress Holly Earl was nineteen when she played this part and actually looks older though she’s meant to be playing fourteen/fifteen. Plus how do tress age Humans anyway. Do they count the rings under our eyes?) Unlike The Forest Of Cheem they look stupid, act stupid and have no back story we can understand. Sentient trees are a big problem for this series elsewhere (‘In The Forest Of the Night’ ‘mark Of The Rani’) but this lot might just be the worst. Plus, yet again, they’re a misreading of the Narnia books: like a lot of fairytales the dark forest is a place that’s dark not literally but because it’s full of people who aren’t on the right ‘path’ trying to drag you down with them or eat you. Having the forest turn out to be benevolent and sweet is as wrong as pitching a re-make of ‘Pulp Fiction’ starring The Care Bears to make it nicer, or having Quentin Tarantino direct a movie of The Tweenies which includes a gun battle and a moment when ‘we know a song all about bloodbaths!’ Watching this the first time, after all the pre-publicity about how much this story was like the Narnia books, all I could hear in my head was C S Lewis complaining ‘when I wrote I an enchanted forest I didn’t mean that kind of enchanted where they could talk, dummy!' 

Usually even when Moffat stories fall apart the dialogue will be good. In this story it’s…variable. There are some terrific lines here, including one big emotional speech early on when mum talks to the Doctor about losing her temper with her children because she’s upset at seeing them happy knowing they’re about to be sad and the Doctor stepping in to say that it’s because they’re going to be sad later they deserve to be happy now. It’s the heart of what this show is all about and the closest this story gets to understanding the truth of the Narnia boos (although Lewis would never have put it quite like that it does reflect his writing’s central message about making the most of life while we have it). There’s a great gag where Cyril wonders if they’ll see their uncle’s ghost and his sister points out that he isn’t technically dead yet and living in a care home down the road! This story relies heavily on Matt Smith and luckily he’s on top form. The scene of him as the caretaker, giving mum a boring adult bedroom and the children a wonderful bedroom (Hammocks! Model planes! Stars! The Magna Carta! Cluedo approximately seven years before it was on sale!) is perfect for the 11th Doctor whose just a big kid at heart who wants everyone to stay as innocent and childlike as him, all the more so because he knows how dark life can be and Matt Smith sells it perfectly. Admittedly Lewis, who didn’t believe in spoiling children, wouldn’t have approved of that scene either but for once its so perfectly Who-ish that I can happily overlook it. The scenes of him grumpily agreeing to see his ‘friends’ because Mum has made him are a delight, as if Rory’s comment that they always lay the Doctor a place at mealtimes ‘just in case’ he turns up, despite the two year gap, because he’s family. The scenes of snow-covered Androzanarnia are impressive, better than anything they managed in the Narnia films on a far bigger budget. 

 And then other scenes are just hopeless. Let’s start with that scene at the end when the Doctor goes back to tell Amy and Rory he’s not dead. It’s a weird bit to add on the end not least because the Doctor has a time machine – if he really wanted his companions to know he was alive he could have gone back the day after the events of ‘The Wedding Of River Song’ not waited two years. Plus as he admits he ‘knew’ River Song would have given the game away. The whole scene is played really oddly, as if both matt Smith and Karen Gillan have forgotten what their relationship is, starting frosty and ending in a hug. Moffat seems to think that Amy and Rory don’t belong in Christmas sories for some reason as they’re written out of all three they could potentially have been in. Officially that’s because Moffat thought their arc was ‘perfect’, plus the added complication that, not knowing he was going to be in series six as much as he was, Arthur Darvill had booked an appearance in the West End so didn’t have much free time. But there’s no reason Amy couldn’t have been in this story, especially as that arc is undone at series end anyway leaving them free to run off and have adventures. Indeed the story needs her cynical bark more than ever with so much treacle going on. A lot of showrunners use their characters as their voices in the series, as indeed any writers will if they spend any time with the people they create (who they see more regular than family or friends). Moffat is almost schizophrenic in the way that the 11th Doctor is his hope and buoyancy and inner seven year old believing in magic, while Amy is his down to earth counterpart who grew up. A lot of their adventures together (but especially ‘The Eleventh Hour’) can be seen as Moffat trying to undo everything the adult world threw at him so he can get back to the person he sued to be (because, after all, he got his dream job his seven year old self always wanted and miracles can happen). Rory is his gawky teenage self (much like Kenny was in ‘Press Gang’): well-meaning, kind-hearted, trying to please everyone but also a little bit hopeless. For some reason Moffat thinks only his big happy bouncing Doctor belongs at Christmas, but honestly all three specials would have been with at least Amy there. 

 Other people hard done by in this story are the two main guest stars. Moffat is a naturally funny writer. Few people have made me laugh as hard as he has writing for this show. For this episode he’s hired three big name comedians, in Claire Skinner (a a bit of an in-joke given she plays much the same harassed mother in ‘Outnumbered’, a comedy that understands how children think better than anything since Richmal Crompton’s ‘Just William’ books), Alexander Armstrong (the voice of computer Mr Smith in the Sarah Jane Adventures and famous for the Miller and Armstrong sketch show, the in-joke being that he played an RAF pilot just like the one here) and Bill Bailey (an eccentric stand-up comedian who as far as I know was never an Androzani minor but who loved Dr Who so much he once did a sketch about ‘Dr Qui’, how the show would look if it starred a Brazilian saxophone player who loved jazz!) None of them get to say anything funny. Not one line. It’s not, like some other Who stories, where the stunt guest stars deliver the lines so badly they’re not funny (looking at you Beryl Reid and ‘Earthshock’!) They’re treated as straightmen to Matt Smith. And even he’s not got that many funny lines to say as normal. None of these characters have enough depth for any of these actors to get their teeth into: all of them are good in other things, all of them are pretty bland here with nothing much to say or do and some of the acting is poor in the extreme (Skinner’s crying is the worst crying in the series and sounds like she’s sucking air). Moffat won’t have known it either but it was also slightly awkward casting Claire Skinner: in real life she was married to director Charles Palmer, who as well as being the son of actor Geoffrey ‘Silurians’ Palmer was in charge of several Who stories (‘Smith and Jones’ ‘The Shakespeare Code’ ‘Human Nature’ ‘Oxygen’ ‘The Eaters Of Light’). Only the pair are about to get divorced, Skinner secretly dating her Outnumbered co-star Hugh Dennis and re-marrying a few years after (no seriously, I didn’t believe it either when I found out). It must have been highly awkward for a production team who knew her husband and the actress trying to keep things quiet (officially she doesn’t start dating Huge till later b ut that’s officially – the rumours were this relationship went back far further than 2011). And this is a story, after all, about the importance of family life and togetherness. 

 In many ways this story is beginning to look like a spoiler for the Chris Chibnall years: there are big name guest parts who don’t get to do anything, a fundamental misunderstanding of the source material/historical period, too much standing around talking with nothing happening and a script that isn’t funny enough to be comedy or sad enough to be tragedy. The biggest hint of things to come, though, is that the story doesn’t just show us how other people are feeling and invite us to maybe feel the same if we don’t have a heart of stone, it orders us to. Like a lot of the Chibnall stories, but unlike every other Moffat story, this one feels like a lecture. The finale have the trees turn down both Cyril and The Doctor for being ‘weak’ because they’re ‘male’. Only a mother’s love is strong enough to be a beacon in the darkness like the trees need – a beacon that, implausibly, ends up being bright enough to lead an RAF fighter home to, which is why they call it a ‘mothership’, which has super powers even the Doctor doesn’t possess. Hang on: since when were alien talking trees so sexist? Why, after 48 years of being such a male-dominated series have we got a story that goes right the other way – couldn’t we have had a brief period when both sexes were treated equal? And how does a mother’s love work for trees anyway? This story could have done the same job had they just tweaked it, had Reg come home naturally and praised his wife for keeping the kids happy during this difficult time and not knowing how all the single mums in wartime manage it, had this story been more about the parental love that the trees needed. But Moffat can’t see the forest for the trees: he wants to write a big moral message and this is an issue that’s been on his mind. Equality was something long overdue being addressed in Who. But this is just clumsy. Oh and acid rain is bad. I mean, I think we can all agree on that but this is no ecological tale like ‘The Green Death’ about the dangers of what mankind’s doing to their planet and the evil forces it unleashes. It just rains a lot as a byproduct of industry. The Doctor never solves Androzani’s infrastructure to stop the trees going on strike in the future. He doesn’t build renewable energy windmills. We’re just meant to take it as read that it’s a bad thing. 

 The result, then, is easily the weakest of the Christmas specials. Even all the festive cheer and eggnog and possets can’t cover up for the fact that this story is all tinsel and no tree. The sentiment and mawkishness seems at odds with almost everything else Who and all credulity flies out the window long before the talking trees even turn up. There are some great Dr Who Christmas specials about the importance of family and love – but this isn’t one of them, it feels fake and forced. There’s plenty of room for a Narnia spinoff, with the Tardis as a wardrobe and a magical land, but this isn’t it. There’s an episode of Dr Who in a parallel world where Claire Skinner, Bill Bailey and Alexander Armstrong have some of the best loved star turns in this series, but not with these characters. There are great colourful Christmas specials that make us feel better even we can’t hear the sound– this one is all beige and half shot in the dark. We know that Dr Who can do better stories with talking trees and feminism (though not together, that would be silly). This is a duff story, a turkey that’s been overstuffed with too much sugar and gets more wrong than any story in the Moffat era that doesn’t feature Ashildr. There are good things to enjoy – I mean, this is Dr Who – and the Christmas spirit does allow you to look after the worst excesses if you’re in the right mood. But it’s not just one tiny little thing going wrong in this story but lots of them, all of them big. And this is an era when the series could least afford it, with ratings in freefall, budgets being slashed, executive producers leaving (its murky why but this series goes through a lot of them in this era, as you’ll see if you’re reading in order and keeping an eye on the executive producers credit at the start of each review; as leaving present Androzani minors Ven-Garr and Billis are named for outgoing producer Piers Wenger and Beth Willis) and even Dr Who Confidential axed by BBC3 as part of budget cuts (‘Widow’ is the last story they filmed being made, but the results were never shown on screen). As the highest profile story of the year this one desperately needed to be good to win lapsed old-timers back over and newcomers alike both. Instead it’s everything critics complained about the modern era of the show: an incomprehensible plot that hangs by a thread, featuring over-acting, weird looking monsters who turn out to be good and way too many emotions and sugar for one programme to have without giving you diabetes. Critics aren’t always right (all those complaints about wobbly sets in their olden days is a lie) but they were right this time – this episode was slaughtered, whatever they tell you now on this story’s Wikipedia page. Fans weren’t any kinder. C S Lewis would have been furious. So have yourself a happy Christmas, stop watching this episode and pick up a CS Lewis book and a Dr Who annual instead. Happy holidays! 

POSITIVES + Matt Smith is in his element playing Cosmic Santa to two children robbed of security and family at Christmas and he manages to be way more childish than they are without losing a shred of his authority. His idea for their space-age bedroom is brilliant. Totally wrong for the circumstances, but utterly in character. The Doctor’s job, more than ever before, is to put a smile on everyone’s faces and he does that alright. As Moffat says in interviews Christmas is an era made for the 11th Doctor – it’s the time of year he can wear a silly hat with nobody telling him off! 

 NEGATIVES – Not to be cruel to child performers (Heck, I wouldn’t have done any better) but Maurice Cole as Cyril only seems to have two expressions, surprise or bewilderment and he uses both of them a lot. To be fair to him Moffat’s not given him a lot to go on character-wise. I mean, Cyril is described in the script as ‘phlegmatic’ and that’s all, something the lad’s actually really good at, but then the script demands every emotion under the sun in quick order. Even Matt Smith struggles with that, as we’ll see in ‘Nightmare In Silver’. And while sister Holly Earl as Lily (Lucy till the last minute, when it was figured it was a Narnia reference too far – watch Matt Smith pausing before saying her name the first time as if checking he’s got the replacement and not the original script!) is more natural she’s not right for her part either and that’s pretty thankless as characters go too. In the young Amy Moffat really nailed his children’s characters. What happened? 

 BEST QUOTE: Madge: ‘Lily and Cyril's father, my husband, is dead and they don't know yet because if I tell them now then Christmas will always be what took their father away from them, and no one should have to live like that. Of course when the Christmas period is over I shall... I don't know why I keep shouting at them’. Doctor: ‘Because every time you see them happy you remember how sad they're going to be. And it breaks your heart. Because what's the point in them being happy now if they're going to be sad later? The answer is, of course, because they are going to be sad later’. 

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: ‘Good As Gold’ is unique in the Whoniverse, a mini-episode written as part of a ‘Blue Peter’ schools competition judged by Steven Moffat. The winning entry was put together by pupils from Ashdene School in Cheshire (thus making them all the youngest writers to work for the series by nearly a decade). Broadcast in May 2012, in the gap between ‘Widow’ and next story ‘Asylum Of The Daleks’, it lasts for three minutes and features the Doctor and Amy in the Tardis. Amy’s been reading a book called ‘the pocket space traveller adventurer’s handbook’ and says that it’s normal to have an adventure at least once a week. The Doctor uses his sonic screwdriver to ‘put the Tardis onto adventure settings’ but an explosion puffs smoke into the Doctor’s face and messes up his hair so he looks like Albert Einstein. The Tardis makes a landing in the middle of the 2012 Olympic opening ceremony just in time for an athlete to run inside with the Olympic flame (something tells me these kids were big fans of ‘Fear Her’!) And next second there’s a Weeping Angel inside the Tardis leading the Doctor and Amy to chant ‘don’t blink!’ (Now I see why Moffat chose this one out of all the entries, it features his own designs…very sneaky of the writers, they’ll go far!) I’m not quite sure why the Weeping Angels want the flame exactly (they’re not exactly the most athletic of Who monsters, they’re tied in last place with Erato and the Abzorbaloff) but the Doctor defeats them and is even given a gold medal for his troubles. This fun episode is no more daftly plotted than most 11th Doctor stories and made with a lot more love and care than it needed to be, treated impressively seriously by everyone from writers to cast and crew. 

 ‘The Professor, The Queen and The Bookshop’ is a more obvious companion story, which is the comic strip being run in the Christmas edition of Dr Who Magazine (issue 429) when ‘Widow’ originally went out. The 11th Doctor and a ‘junior’ version of Amy (still known as Amelia) and Rory land in a world that feels a little bit like Narnia and have impossible adventures. The ending (spoilers) reveals that actually this is all a story as told by C S Lewis from a parallel world here he had the idea for Dr Who rather than Sydney Newman and turned Dr Who into a children’s book series instead (writer Jonathan Morris having fun by throwing in all sorts of book names in that all sort-of exist in the Whoniverse but not as full canon entries, being unfinished or abandoned in some way: ‘The Masters Of Luxor’ (initially intended as the second ever story), ‘The Imps’ (abandoned 2nd Doctor story), ‘Scratchman’ (the Tom Baker/Ian Marter co-write that was nearly a film), ‘Shylock’ (abandoned 4th Doctor story), ‘Shada’ (unfinished 4th Dr story), ‘The Dark Dimension’ (the abandoned 30th anniversary story) and Song Of The Space Whale’ (which finally became ‘The Beast Below’). It’s a sweet story and works well with the Christmas special (arguably it’s a lot closer to the heart of Lewis’ storytelling and makes for a better story all round), although amazingly it wasn’t written to accompany it but was a revived project from 2003 (when Morris submitted it for the ‘Unbound’ series on Big Finish, though it would have been hard to create on audio). 

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