Last Christmas
(Christmas Special, Dr 12 with Clara, 25/12/2014, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Steven Moffat, director: Paul Wilmshurst)
Rank: 256
''This episode makes all the characters feel as if they're losing their sanity'
'Well, no wonder it stars Sanity Claus then!'
If ever there was a moment when Dr Who jumped a shark, or at any rate dodged a reindeer, it was ‘Last Christmas’, another episode in which the series tries to cash in on the fame of a big name celebrity famous worldwide that everyone knows without really having much of a story to go with it. And that person is of course…Father Christmas. Ho ho and indeed ho! If you weren’t there the point in time when we got the trailer for this festive special at the end of 'Death In Heaven' then, well, you missed quite a moment, one where every fan went ‘what the?’ in unison and one of those bits of television where everyone remembers where they were when they first saw it (mostly sitting in stunned silence at the fact they’d had the audacity to turn the dead Brigadier into a Cyberman). We were still digesting an episode that was hugely emotional (if not always in a way it was supposed to be), a gruesome tale where every spirit in the afterlife feels the pain of what happens to their body, and figuring that this was Dr Who was now, a very adult series designed to shock you, when in comes Nick Frost dressed as Santa Claus at the North Pole chasing alien crabs. It was, for us Whovians, akin to the shock of Watergate, 9/11 or indeed finding out that (childhood-ending spoilers) Father Christmas doesn’t really exist. The response of most of the fanbase was mostly unprintable but mostly centred around the idea that Steven Moffat had been on the eggnog a few months early and that the strain of writing the Christmas specials in early Summer, in time to get them made on time (something he always admitted was hard work) had ended up frazzling his brain.
A hallucination maybe? A
red herring? A disguise? Except no: the 'promise' made to us: this isn't a
cheat, he's not an alien or a robot and we really are at the North Pole. Speculations
abounded for the next seven weeks, ranging from holograms to The Master having
a really bad day at the outfitters, but no: as it turned out the answer is
still quite a lot of a cheat but against all the odds (and indeed common sense)
it does end up being more satisfying than you might think. Not enough to be a
classic or anything, but better than we feared it would be at the time, making
sense in a very confusing Steven Moffat type way. For (major spoilers) - we
really are at the North Pole and everyone at the latest DW base did indeed
experience Santa. Only it’s an invasion by a race known as the Kantofarri,
crabs that latch onto your face and feed off you in a rather kind and benign
way, by lowering your pain receptors and sending you into a huge deep sleep.
Only your subconscious keeps you fighting and who are you going to turn to as a
hallucination for help as a hero to keep you safe, someone that deep down you
still believe in and trust, especially when it’s Christmas time?
Well, for most fans of
course that would be the Doctor, but as events in this dream-within-a-dream
story show he’s got his face full at the moment. Is Father Christmas really
that far removed though? William Hartnell liked to say in the show’s early
years that the part was a ‘cross between The Wizard of Oz and Father Christmas’
(gaining a wig of long white hair to add to the illusion) and the script
emphasises the similarities between the two: the ‘sleigh’ that’s bigger on the
inside, the impossible age, the super-powers that seem like magic, the
impossible age and the love of children and all things good. He’s also a
character whose worn many different faces, each one slightly different and with
different personalities to match depending which face he’s wearing: this Santa,
for instance, is a tough nut with a love of sarcasm (he’s one of those department
store Santas who secretly hates children but really needs the work and not as schmaltzy
as I feared he would be). Best gag on this theme: Clara saying she doesn’t
believe in fairtytales, only for the Tardis to suddenly appear out of nowhere
(while later she tells the Doctor that she does believe, but her Santa looks ‘different’).
Santa’s being there oddly makes the 13th Doctor more grumpy than
normal (perhaps he fears the competition?) and there’s a little too much of the pair
bickering over and over whether Santa can exist or not while the plot stands
still. To be honest, it's a surprise it’s such a big deal: mythological
creatures that shouldn't exist turn up in Dr Who all the time, especially from
timelord mythology (plus he’s met Santa a fair few times by now in the comic
strips, of which more below). The big difference between the two is that the
Doctor is at least supposed to be rooted in science, with an explanation for
everything that happens even when it makes no actual sense, while Father
Christmas can simply turn round and call everything ‘magic’: the best moments
in this special by far come from when the two get their personas mixed up the
wrong way and Santa suddenly starts banging on about scientific gobbledegook or
the Doctor suddenly becomes an expert on dreams. For, in keeping with a lot of
science fiction, is science from a future when we don’t understand it really
that different from magic? Best to just accept that Santa’s there and say no
more.
For this is, after all, a
dream world, or rather multiple dream worlds within another, which might not
have worked in any other era but fits in beautifully with the general
‘nightmarish’ feel of a lot of the Moffat stories. It makes the story feel less
jarring with where we came from than it seemed in that preview trailer too:
‘Dark Water/Death In Heaven’ is a story about a long sleep, of waking up in
death to find that your life had all been a sort of dream. ‘Last Christmas’,
too, is a story that for all the jolly japes is all about death and yet another
story primarily concerned with grief, surprisingly hard-hitting for a story
that went out on Christmas Day where the usual Who laws of depth and emotion
don’t apply. It’s a relief that Clara gets time to grieve Danny rather than
simply being sent into the bright and colourful anti-sceptic world we feared
and her scenes with a ‘dream world’ version of her boyfriend work best (even if
they are overly sentimental and a bit over long). At the time this scene was
pretty irritating (didn’t we just say goodbye to him at length, like, a month
ago?) but now that we know that this
really was his last appearance it’s a good one and gives Coda a ‘coda’ past the
instant shock of his death that she knows she’s lucky to get and really
appreciates this time. You feel Clara’s pain as her imaginary Danny turns up
and shares the perfect Christmas Day she always wanted but which they never had
a chance to have, only for the Doctor to turn up in the middle of it like an
unwanted guest and tell her that none of it is real. For the most part Clara
has been rushing out on her commitments on Danny to have fun with the Doctor,
much to his annoyance, but here the tables are turned and she gets quite angry
that the Doctor interrupts the last moments she never thought she’d have. You
feel her pain as she just wants to sleep and live forever in this dream world,
because it’s so much better than the reality of living in grief. Moffat
cleverly taps into that uneasy feeling you get when you wake up from a dream
where someone you love and miss is suddenly alive again: you feel guilty for
waking up and disturbing the peace, of ‘carrying on’ your relationship with
them without their permission, the horror that ‘dream you suddenly forgot that
they were dead (one of his best lines is Danny imploring Clara to ‘miss me for
five minutes a day – I want to see proper tears – but then get on with the rest
of your life’). Waking up from those dreams, of being hit over the head that
the person you love is no longer there, is more of a nightmare than any Daleks
or Weeping Angels and all very Moffaty (although, as with quite a few stories
from 2014, you have to ask…Is everything alright at home? No series/special was
ever used as a script editor/showrunner/producer as therapy more than series
eight).
While most Christmas specials are happy through and through this one is sad, like the song it’s named over with the touch of melancholy that life is all about change and that every Christmas is precious because it might be the last one you enjoy all together and all alive. The Doctor, for instance, knows that grief is real while fantasy is not and while I’m not quite sure I buy the metaphor that grief burns your insides the same way that eating ice cream straight from the freezer does (it’s more like the shimmering effect an Ice Warrior gun has on your heart that turns your world upside down, with the ‘negative’ blast of a Dalek raygun). I can see where the writer was going. It’s by far Moffat’s cleverest way of getting round his annual problem, of setting up a big emotional finale to a series designed for a committed fanbase who know these characters inside out, then writing a happy-go-lucky family audience over Christmas who might not have seen the show in a year, if ever (while the UK audience viewing figures were down on every previous Christmas special more people saw this story than any of series eight, while weirdly enough growing interest across this year and constant networking and promotion there meant that more Americans saw this story than any other in the show’s history for a first broadcast).
There’s another theme
here too, of lies and truths and fantasy and reality, of how even control freak
Clara can’t manipulate life into granting her wishes and how the Doctor doesn’t
have super powers to always put things right. Both she and the Doctor ended the
last story having lied to each other in an effort to spare the other a
difficult decision and give them what they think the other most want: the
Doctor gets to run off in search of Gallifrey (even though it isn’t really
there – he’s just giving Clara the space to be with Danny and make a life
without him where they’re both safe) and Clara gets to grieve Danny in private
(while the Doctor gets to run off without looking back or worrying about her
and his effect on her). As it turns out both friends really need each other in
that moment and would have been better off being truthful. The web of lies has
big repercussions, each folding inside another like a dreamworld, with both
characters trying to make sense of what reality is. The other characters on
this base too – none of whom really work at the North Pole and who are all
losers back home in some way rather than the heroes their subconsciousness
wants them to be – are all in a similar position lying to themselves: we see
Bellows for who she really is, no longer a dynamic bossy hero but a frail
elderly lady in a wheelchair depending on the whims of the family around her
and Shona, a character who seems to have it all together in the dreamworld,
back on her messy sofa in her messy flat with a list of jobs for the Christmas
period (including the poignant message ‘make it up with Dave’, suggesting she’s
heartbroken in another way). But which are the real ‘versions’? The people they
want to be or the people life has shaped them to be? In this context, of a
world that’s topsy turvy and where everything that seemed to be certain turns
out to be fragile and delicate, that wasn’t anything as like as certain as it
felt it would be when you became an adult and had all the answers and would
understand how the world worked, Santa might as well exist too.
It’s certainly a far
better place to leave Clara than the unsatisfying ending to ‘Death In Heaven’.
The one question all the media had been asking across 2014 was how long Clara
was going to stay and, unusually for a production team who generally gave
details like that far in advance, nobody was saying anything. At the time this
was greeted as a ruse, a marketing ploy to keep fans guessing for the first
series in two years that hadn’t seen either a Doctor or companion leave, but
the truth was more prosaic. Jenna Coleman had loved working with Matt Smith and
figured her job would never be the same without him, staying on a year to help
the newboy settle in then leaving in the series eight finale. Moffat had duly
written the scripts accordingly: a heartbroken Clara, lying to spare the
Doctor’s feelings, lets him go off in search of Gallifrey while she can grieve
in private, Danny still dead. Only as the year went on she’d found herself
enjoying her job more and more, becoming close to Peter Capaldi too. The actor
begged her to stay so she went to Moffat to defer her decision, which he was
only pleased to do. The question was, should she go in the Christmas special or
commit to a full year? She still wasn’t sure so two endings were written, one
where the Doctor and Clara essentially pick up where they left off, their truths
now spoken and another with Clara an old lady who hasn’t seen the Doctor in 62
years, their lies having taken them too far apart. I’m so glad this turns out
to be just another ruse, for it would have been a terrible way to go: Clara is
lonely, having broken up with several suitors who never matched what she had
with Danny or The Doctor, a frail old lady who once has the universe at her
feet who can now no longer has the strength to pull a Christmas cracker on her
own (a mirror with the previous Christmas special ‘Time Of the Doctor’ where it
was Clara helping the 11th Doctor do exactly this). It’s a tough
watch and easily the worst scene in the story, arriving when the special’s
already gone on a bit too long as it is – not just because you care for the
character but for the awful prosthetics and ugly clunky dialogue, with the
Doctor telling Clara he ‘hadn’t noticed’ she’d aged while she’s far too smart
to fall for any more obvious untruths. All while we get the gifts of Murray
Gold’s Frankincense choir going way OTT (please, no myrrh!) It’s an ending that
as it is nearly sinks the whole story, so it’s a good job Santa turns up and
puts things right again, the sugary message for the audience being that it’s
never too late to forgive people in your life and spend time with them because
time is precious.
Time was certainly short
for Shona who was originally written to be the new companion and shares, with
Penny the journalist in ‘Partners In Crime’, the feat of somehow surviving to
the final draft even though their plot function was replaced by another person.
That’s a shame because, in many ways, she’s more interesting than Clara,
especially once the riddle of how she was had been undone: she’s every bit as
smart and feisty and courageous but with a vulnerability the sometimes arrogant
Clara never had and a better line in sarcastic retorts too. She’s a cross
between Benny Summerfield from the ‘New Adventures’ novels who sort-of became
River Song) and future companion Bill, for whom Moffat recycled a lot of this
notes when he realised he was going to have to create a new companion out of
thin air in a hurry when it became clear Chris Chibnall wasn’t quite ready to
take the show over yet. She’s by far the most interesting character in the
story and Faye Marsey plays her well in what feels at time like a series of
mini-auditions calling on different emotions in quick succession, especially in
the opening minutes: offering to fight Santa, dancing round to Slade while
trying not to think about monsters and being the only person in the room
terrified as much as they ought to be by brain-sucking crabs. It’s actually
quite sad that her plea for all the base people to meet up in real life doesn’t
happen (not least because this is, presumably, how the Doctor would have
tracked her down again) only for her to wake up in her flat, alone. She’s also a
sort of cross between Amy and Rory too, doing things that the two of them had
already done in the series. Talking of which…
It feels like a bad
pastiche of Moffat’s usual writing, which brings me on to another point: a lot
of this story feels like Moffat laughing at himself, doing what he normally
does then having the characters comment on it and poke fun at it. Of all the
‘official’ stories in the Dr Who canon this is the one that most feels like his
first ever script for the series, the sketch ‘The Curse Of Fatal Death’ for the
BBC’s 1999 Dr Who night in which the Doctor regenerates four times, goes back
in time to prepare for every plan The Master has, laughs at Dalek ball bearings
looking like boobs and replaces his deadly traps with ‘a sofa of reasonable
comfort’. It’s easy to imagine the writer trying to write yet another Christmas
special (after struggling to write ‘The Snowman’ and ‘Time Of The Doctor’ to
deadline) and getting badly drunk, reading all the comments about his work on
fan forums and writing them all in. A base under siege? Here we go again. The
daft and unlikely monsters that barely move? Check. The supporting characters
who are easily labelled and seem to turn up in most of his stories? (‘The old
one’ ‘the sexy one’ ‘the funny one’ ‘the
feisty one’) The Doctor actually comments
on it. The characters only having a loose understanding of their jobs? It turns
out that none of them can remember how they got to the North Pole. The big
battle that they can’t afford to show? It happens off screen. Again. And the
Doctor even comments on how there was no possible way they could have survived
it. The way every Christmas special features that same sodding festive song by
Slade? It’s here, in a scene where a character dances to it to blot out their
real thoughts (the way it’s used in many a Dr Who festive story; it was
actually a last minute replacement when ‘Santa Claus Is Coming To Town’ proved
to be still in copyright and too costly: it would have been a better fit
though: ‘You better not run, you better not hide…’ Was the original plan to
base a lot of this plot around the song?) The sort of mistake that lots of fans
will point out (that there are four manuals for four living members of the
base, because the writer forgot another four had died) It becomes a plot point.
Even the opening titles are a spoof: they’re close to the standard ones but the
time vortex is now blue and icy and the Tardis is covered in snow, which
dissolves, while the actor names come up in giant snowflakes. Best gag: Moffat’s
usual interminable scene of exposition telling us quickly who these people are
and what they’re doing which, uniquely, is told to us by Santa and two elves.
Well, at least that’s new!
A lot of Christmas Dr Who
stories poke fun at the series, Moffat’s especially, but this one feels more
like a lot of postmodern gags aimed squarely at the author himself before the
audience can get them in. Oh and there’s a Captain Jack-style joke in there
somewhere about how more people get the unwanted present of crabs for
Christmas, by not wanting to be alone over the holidays, but we won’t go there.
It’s also an obvious rip off of all sorts of sources outside and inside the context
of the series: Jenna herself called it a ‘cross between Alien’ and ‘Miracle on
354th Street’ in the press which it is, quite blatantly, the Father
Christmas who is Father Christmas not being believed while aliens attach
themselves to humans on a base. Both are listed on Shona’s sheet of films to
watch over Christmas, hinting that these are elements she’s added to her ‘dream’,
something that again would have worked better if she’d been the new ‘companion’
but doesn’t quite come off with Clara there, along with that year’s breakout
hit ‘Game Of Thrones’ and ‘The Thing From Another World’ weirdly (it’s not very
Christmassy) . Bizarrely it almost certainly wasn’t nicked from what seemed on
first viewing to be the most likely source, Netflix’s Black Mirror series
(Twilight Zone’s hipper grandson with less twists but better technology) and it’s
one and only festive special (to date) ‘White Christmas’ which is spookily like
this one (a base that might be the North Pole! A ‘dream world’ that’s actually
a computer!) although it was first released a mere few days before it. The
story also reminds me very much of the ‘Press Gang’ finale ’There Are
Crocodiles’, in which the office is burned down in a fire, the story playing
with techniques it so often did about whether main character Lynda escaped from
the smoke and is awake talking to ‘us’ via American boyfriend Spike or whether
she’s asleep in the fire, talking to a hallucinatory one (he is uncharacteristically
quiet after all!) ‘Last Christmas’ is, however, a blatantly obvious repeat
of the episodes ‘Amy’s Choice’ (where you’re not quite
sure where a dream ends or begins) with ‘Silence In The Library/Forest Of The
Dead’’ (Donna’s computer simulation perfect life, more believable than Clara’s)
plus the run of stories in series six that feature ‘The Silence’ (who are
basically the crabs with feet and even use the same sound effect). The problem
with that is, though, that to repeat ideas you need to add to them rather than
simply shuffle them around and combine them with other recycled ideas: nothing
in this story is better than any of its source material, which leaves you
feeling a bit ‘so what?’ about it all.
Those parts are genuinely
funny, but there’s still something deeply artificial about this story that
means it never quite works. Moffat’s stories all have that feeling of not being
quite real (it’s the biggest change from the Davies era, where everything was
rooted in reality; one of the reasons the Chibnall era never quite worked was
that it tries to have a leg in both camps and didn’t work as one or the other)
but this story pushes the fantasy element that bit too far. The best Dr Who
stories feel as if they could be happening for real, out there somewhere: this
one clearly isn’t. I mean, it’s not even happening to these characters, so how
can we believe in it and invest in it fully? It’s not just the dream setting
either: for all its talk of the real feeling of grief the feeling you get is
that you’ve watched a story designed to make people talk about it rather than
one to enjoy. Moffat admits that he added Father Christmas partly because he
was running out of Christmas novelties to include but partly because he could
imagine the radio Times cover of Santa Claus arm in arm with the Doctor
(something that really happened, but not the feted Christmas cover: Dr Who
Magazine responded by spoofing their actual cover by having Santa Claus reading
the magazine). He’s there for us to go ‘woah what’s going on?’ rather than have
a story that could only work with Father Christmas there. It’s an uneasy mixture of horror and comedy
too: Moffat always struggled to get the balance right, compared to Davies
anyway, and is generally at his best concentrating on one at a time rather than
the other. In this story though we get both, with one extreme lurching towards
another. As a result a lot of the
actually quite funny one-liners (most of them Santa being rude to the Doctor)
don’t quite fly because they’ve come after something horrific and even though
we know he’s an artificial construct for
whom the usual social rules don’t matter he still gets in the way at times when
people are in shock or grieving. Equally it’s hard to fully take in what should
be some of the creepiest scenes in the series, as crabs sit on people’s faces
and suck people’s heads by coming out from the TV (something else done by
Moffat before, remember, in ‘Time Of The Angels’) when you’re still busy
laughing at elves debating whether calling someone an elf is racist now
(‘especially when you’re not exactly tall yourself!’ they say to a shocked
Clara, in the episode’s best line). It’s also way too long: by 2014 it was set
in the stone of the TV schedules that all Christmas specials were an hour and
thus ran 10-15 minutes longer than usual but this is one special that could
have done with being shorter than the average length. It runs out of steam
midway through, adds a reindeer sleigh ride for no apparent reason in plot
terms (everyone could have ‘woken up’ from the base just as well) and at least
three extra layers of ‘at last we’ve woken up…except this is still a dream isn’t
it?’ when the audience are getting restless and bored, all goodwill of the
season used up already. ‘Dream yourself home’ (we did say that this character
was half Wizard of Oz didn’t we/) is as big a copout as ‘it was all a dream’.
And anyway it was all a dream! Oh and so’s that! And that! And that! Oh and
guess what? That too! Ho! Ho! No! Oh except Santa, who might or might not be
real: the story goes out of its way not to break children’s hearts (even to the
extent of the press interviews: Nick Frost said Father Christmas was his voice
coach in one interview he knew children might read).
Leaving aside whether
they should have tried this or not, though, Santa himself is good fun, less
like the sanitised ‘Coca-Cola’ version and more of an equal sparring partner
for Capaldi to square off against. The joke before the episode was on was that Moffat
looked through a directory of names that ended in a Wintry word like ‘Frost’ to
play Santa the casting of comedy actor Nick seemed ridiculous: he wasn’t old,
he wasn’t fat (not that fat anyway) and he didn’t have that sort of a beard or
hair. He’s also, how shall I put this? Not terribly convincing in the parts he
normally plays as the same down and out bitter loser nerd, so how can he pull
off jolly Mr Christmas? However this is easily the best the actor’s been in
anything I've seen and he outclasses longtime friend Simon Pegg's Dr Who turn
in 'The Long Game', really looking the part
with snow and ice sprinkled into his beard (because he was doubling with
another role and couldn’t just shave his real one off). He even does Capaldi
better than Capaldi with his Doctory pastiche ‘everything’s a bit dreamy weamy!’
Frost, along with Pegg, had appeared in the curious half-CGI, half-real film ‘The
Adventures Of Tintin’, the project Moffat left halfway through when the job of Who
showrunner came up (that film doesn’t feel entirely ‘real’ either, fake in a way
Herge’s drawings never were). Just as good are the elves, with Dan Starkey’s
Christmas present from the Dr Who team after years of appearing as
miscellaneous aliens (and specialising in Sontarons) the fact that he uses his
real face and doesn’t have to spend hours on the makeup chair or sweat under
prosthetics. It’s nice to see another Troughton in the cast list, this time
Michael (son of Patrick, younger brother of David), a kind gesture from a production
team to help boost his career after a long time away from acting when he became
a carer for his wife after a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis, although in the
end Professor Albert gets as little to do as all the other base members (good
as Jenna Coleman always is there might well be a far better, more equal story there
has Clara not been in it). The actors are giving this story their all and treating it at face value, seriously,
even Santa: it’s easy to imagine another universe, perhaps one where John
Nathan-Turner was still alive and producing the show for a 31st
year, where this show is an awful
pantomime of brightly dressed characters overdoing all the punchlines and
assuming Santa’s presence means its an out and out comedy (think ‘Time and the
Rani’ with the sort of over indulgences you only get at Christmas and shudder).
The result is a bit
uneven, half genuine ho ho ho and other parts oh no: parts of this story work
really well (the scene of the elves turning reality on its head by saying ‘your
mum and dad, one day out of the blue, decide to give you a big pile of presents
because they love you so much? It’s a lovely story but time to start living in
the real world!’ is one of
the funniest examples of Moffat turning everyday logic on it’s head, Goon show
style; sadly they cut one of the best gags where Shona asks how letters can get
to Santa by going up the chimney and Santa compares them to emails disappearing
into a ‘cloud’ and how the recipient still gets them), some character points
work really well (dream-Danny is so much more likeable I wish he’d been a dream
the whole way through series eight, while the character touch, both that Clara ‘remembers’
him taller than he really was and that the Doctor should notice it and try to
score a point about it is much more natural than how both were portrayed for
most of the year; I love the gag that Clara is ‘borderline’ for the naughty
list too and wants travel books not hair products) along with other parts that
don’t work so well (the crabs, the base, the entire last ten minutes which
really does seem like the tangerine at the bottom of the stocking when you
think you still have a present left). It’s all weirdly paced, with an explosive
first ten minutes, a slooooow middle section that seems to last for hours then
lots of quick scene false endings: some fans have wondered if Moffat was trying
to go for the feel of a dream, where time works to different parameters, but to
be honest it was probably just written like that. It’s a typically uneven Moffat Christmas
special then, yet somehow more so, like a turkey that’s raw down one side and
burnt down the other made up of bits he re-wrote and hammered to death and the
bits he could have done more with. The stuffing is good though: whatever you
think about the cliché that ‘it was all a dream’ the way it’s done is very
clever and enjoyable while it’s on if you don’t think about it too much. . Like
the best festive episodes this one features the sort of things even this show
couldn't possibly get away with in the regular series. On the downside though
it's all very uneven, lurching from big emotional set-pieces to corny jokes in
the blink of an eye. Although that's quite Christmassy too in a way: even if
you didn't start the episode on the sherry you'll soon feel like you were by
the end of it all! In the end it’s the most ‘Christmas cracker’ of Dr Who
stories: every so often something will go bang and leave you diving under the
table, before pausing for a bad joke and a novelty toy you can’t get at any
time of year – not would you really want more than once a year. On the plus
side ‘Last Christmas’ feels more genuinely Christmassey than most of the others
do (some of which feel like ’normal’ episodes with Christmas decorations hung
in the background and nothing more), full of 'magic', celebration, sentiment
and that peculiar melancholy that comes from knowing you won’t get to do this
again for another year and wondering what that might be like. In the right mood
to be indulgent and silly though, with a box of tissues ready for the sad bits
about grief, it has its moments: certainly a lot more of them than we ever
dreamed would be possible given that trailer. It is, however, maybe a bit too
bonkers for most fans to ever be comfortable (Moffat told the Radio Times ‘it’s
certainly the most bonkers thing I’ve ever written!’ He’s not wrong…)
One last point before I
go: the Doctor, knowing full well that Gallifrey isn’t really back, seems to
have gone to sleep on Androzani Delta – even though it’s the very last place he
should have risked going to sleep (see ‘Caves’
for why). Given that this entire story is a sequence of dreams-within-dreams
suppose, just suppose, that everything that’s happened in the series since 1984
was a dream and that the Doctor went to sleep as Peter Davison and woke up as
Peter Capaldi? (It would explain quite a lot, including the fever dream that
was ‘Trial Of A Timelord’, although conversely it could be that everything
since the Doctor went to sleep at the start of ‘The Mind Robber’ has been a
dream!)
POSITIVES + The Doctor
and Clara both find closure by acting out what they should have said to the
other last time round and they get plenty of second chances to put things right
again every time they 'wake up' and find life has all been a dream. And if its
ever possible to have second chances then its at Christmas. In other words
'Last Christmas' is the most 'It's A Wonderful Life' of all Dr Who stories, about
the power and importance of everyone whether they feel like a success or a
failure and all the better for it.
BEST QUOTE: ‘You know
what the problem is with telling fantasy and reality apart? They’re both
ridiculous’
The Doctor next met
Father Christmas when he was the 3rd Doctor, in ‘A Visit From Saint
Nicholas, a short story in the anthology ‘Christmas Around The World’ (2008).
Sarah Jane is bored by the UNIT Christmas party so they go off travelling in
the Tardis, arriving at a mansion owned by the writer Clement C Moore in the
1820s. Father Christmas arrives on the author’s lawn in the middle of the
night, watched by an astonished Sarah Jane, while a sleep-disturbed Moore
sticks his head out the window and is inspired to write ‘The Night Before
Christmas’. Another typically daft festive stocking-filler from Big Finish.
The Doctor met Santa
Claus again when he was the 11th Doctor, along with his nasty
robo-form selves, in the weirdo 2011 comic strip ‘Silent Knight’, published
exclusively in America. Weird not simply because it features the real Father
Christmas (they’re becoming old friends by now) but because not a word is
spoken until right at the end when, of course, Matt Smith says ‘Incidentally, a
Merry Christmas to those of you at home’ just like the good old days of ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’. A simple tale with lots of in-jokes (there are some familiar names
from the Dr Who Magazine strips on Santa’s naughty list!) it’s the sort of
thing you can only get away with over the holidays and ends the way it should,
with the Doctor slipping some winning lottery numbers to some helpful orphaned
children and receiving a new sonic screwdriver from Santa’s sack.
Previous ‘Dark
Water/Death In Heaven’ next ‘The
Magician’s Apprentice/The Witch’s Familiar’
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