“Joy to the World” spoilers follow.
If there’s one thing Steven Moffat loves to do Doctor WhoIt is finding a monster buried in earthly life. He’s created statues, shadows, lost children, and even the theme of silence for some of the show’s most terrifying villains. Unfortunately, the mysterious extra door you often find in older hotel rooms isn’t a universal concern, but it’s still a resource for me. This is the inspiration for “Joy to the World” Doctor WhoA Christmas special for 2024. Something light and fun and a little scatterbrained, just like Christmas is meant to be, right?
when Doctor Who Following its return, the show was once again integrated into the UK cultural firmament in a way it had never been before. Part of this process was adding the show to BBC One’s Christmas schedule, making it a global cultural touchstone. For most of its run after 2005, an episode aired alongside “Al-Silsilal”. Strictly Come Dancing and EastEnders Festive offers. Imagine the British equivalent of those events where everyone gathers around the TV like the Super Bowl or the Macy’s Day Parade, but on Christmas Day. Even if you don’t like any of the prices offered, you are still expected to sit down and eat it with the family.
With these specials, the prestigious timeslot, longer runtime and larger budget are as much burdens as they are benefits. The show should reach a much wider audience than usual, as eager fans sit shoulder-to-shoulder with their elderly relatives, filling every silence with gossip about their neighbor’s garden project. Therefore, the story needs to be a little more fluid, with less need for the audience to pay full attention to what’s happening. It should be an oasis of fun in the melodramatic action that is the BBC’s Christmas Day schedule.
Normally, the festive special would be the sole remit of the presenter, but Russell T Davies has handed the reins to Steven Moffat. Moffat succeeded Davies as showrunner the first time around, and co-created it Sherlock He is widely considered the best writer of the twenty-first century. With an impeccable pedigree like that, it was already written.”Boom“For Ncuti Gatwa’s team’s first season on the title track, expectations are high.
Moffat is a farce writer with a keen understanding of structure, so it’s no surprise to open it up In precision methods. The Doctor provides room service to a variety of people in different time periods including Edmund Hillary’s Everest Base Camp and the Orient Express before stumbling upon Joey in a miserable hotel room in London in the year 2024. After the credits, we return to the Doctor arriving at the Time Hotel Which allows guests to vacation through history. Don’t worry about causality or anything thunder Scams The hotel was built in a way to protect its guests from spoiling the schedule.
The Doctor is looking to steal some milk for his coffee from the hotel buffet, but his eyes fall on something sinister: someone carrying a briefcase with a chain of handcuffs trying to get into the room. The Doctor recruits Trev, one of the employees, to watch as he explores the future to see what scheme could be afoot. As it turns out, the issue is conscious and Evil, jumping from host to host and possessing each one in turn. Once it moves to the next host, the last host disintegrates.
Here the doctor bumps into Joy, who, through the commotion, ends up handcuffed to the suitcase instead of the hotel manager. When the Doctor opens the case to try to find a solution, the case threatens to kill anyone connected to him unless he gets a four-digit code. Who should provide the code? The Doctor emerges from his future and takes Joey with him while leaving our Doctor trapped in 2024 without a TARDIS. As the hotel door closes, the Doctor takes aim at his future self, talking about why he’s always alone and people always leave him. He is doubly upset because he never has to travel “the long way” day after day.
And so, the episode basically stops to give us an extended sequence of the Doctor making friends with Anita, the hotel manager. The Doctor gets a job as a handyman at the hotel, slowly lets his guard down, and spends more time with Anita until they become a platonic couple. It’s a scene you wouldn’t see before in a regular episode, with snippets of the Doctor and Anita’s lives. He made the microwave bigger on the inside, repainted Anita’s TARDIS blue, and they even sit and talk to each other in chairs – a key visual since there are no chairs in the TARDIS. But as the year passes and it’s time for the Doctor to return to his own show, he waves goodbye to Anita.
Back at the Time Hotel, the Doctor flashes back to the events of a year ago, sharing the code and dragging Joey into new adventures. The Doctor works out that the briefcase contains the embryonic form of an artificial star that would provide an imaginable source of power to whoever possesses it. But unless you have an Omega Hand, stars take a long time to develop, far longer than anyone can wait and test their experience. Unless, of course, you hijack a time hotel and take it back to the time of the dinosaurs, waiting for human history to begin to see if it works.
Joy, still obsessed with the case, heads to the hotel’s dinosaur room while the Doctor tries to break his hold on her. To do so, it stirs up emotions strong enough to poison the relationship between the case and its host before it obliterates them. He bullies her and forces her to reveal the reason for her stay in an upscale London hotel. It was revealed that she was grieving the loss of her mother, who died of Covid-19 in an isolation ward and Joy was unable to say goodbye to her in person. Unfortunately, before the Doctor can deactivate the Star Seed, a (cool-looking) dinosaur eats it, putting it out of his reach.
The Doctor and Joey return to the hotel, and after 65 million years, they find the star ready to explode. He’s locked inside a stone structure with a heavy stone door that neither of them can move, and time is running out. So the Doctor, who brags that he is “good with rope”, steals a rope from Mount Everest Base Camp, and hangs it at the back of the Orient Express to haul the stone away. It’s an impressive and kinetic scene that’s only let down by the horrific CGI when Jatoa stands on the train. normal Doctor Who: She can now do dinosaur disguises, but now she can’t do disguised trains.
Here things lose their coherence, as Joey’s eyes flash with possessive energy, but by the time the Doctor returns, Joey has… eaten the star? Somehow absorbed? Make friends with and bond with it? He finds her standing on the edge of a cliff, where Joy says she will merge with the star and take him up to the sky, where he will never hurt anyone. At this point in my notes, I wrote “Don’t Let This Be Bethlehem,” when the camera pulled back to reveal exactly where they were, with three camels parked outside a stable. shelter.
Joy reunites with her mother and the Doctor returns to travel, but not before getting Anita a job managing the Time Hotel. We also got a little shot of Ruby Sunday, who will be returning to the show for its second season.
As I said above, you can’t judge “Joy to the World” on the merits of an average episode since it serves so many masters. But I don’t think we can call it the strongest episode in Steven Moffat’s oeuvre or the show’s Christmas variety. Like all episodes of the Disney era, it has a slightly incoherent quality with the pacing sagging and bogging down in all the wrong places. I’m standing by for a long time where we see a “normal” year in the Doctor’s life, but the story framing it should have been tighter to balance out the slowness. It’s a fun enough way to spend an hour with a stomach full of holiday turkey (or its preferred equivalent) with enough grossness to make you think you’ve seen something very profound. But I don’t think I’ll go back and watch this movie over and over again like I do, say, The Christmas Invasion.
