Spoilers for “Joy to the World” follow.
If there’s one thing Steven Moffatt likes to do Doctor Whoit’s about finding a monster buried in the everyday. He’s turned statues, shadows, lost children, and even the idea of silence into some of the series’ most terrifying villains. Unfortunately, the mysterious extra door often found in older hotel rooms isn’t such a common problem, but it’s still a valuable seam for him to discover. This is the inspiration for “Joy to the World” Doctor WhoThe Christmas Special 2024. This is light, fun and a little scattered, just how Christmas should be, right?
When Doctor Who Upon its return, the show was reintegrated into the UK’s cultural firmament in a way never before seen. Part of this process was to include the show in the BBC One Christmas Day program, making it a universal cultural touchstone. For most of its run after 2005, one episode aired alongside the Be sure to come dance And EastEnders’ festive specials. Imagine the British equivalent of the 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 one of the dishes on offer, you are still expected to sit with the family and eat it.
With these special offers, the prestige time slot, longer duration and larger budget are both burdens and advantages. The show must play to a far larger audience than usual, with die-hard fans sitting elbow to elbow and older relatives filling every silence with gossip about their neighbor’s gardening project. As a result, the story needs to be a little looser so that the audience doesn’t have to pay as much undivided attention to what’s happening. And it must be an oasis of fun in the melodramatic drudgery that is the BBC One Christmas Day programme.
Normally the festive special would be the sole responsibility of the showrunner, but Russell T. Davies handed the reins to Steven Moffatt. Moffatt succeeded Davies as showrunner for the first time and was a co-creator Sherlock and is widely considered the best Who author of the 21st century. With such an impeccable pedigree and having already written:boom“Expectations are high for Ncuti Gatwa’s first season on the title circuit.
Moffatt is a narrative farce writer and has a strong sense of structure, so it’s no surprise that we open the novel in medias res. The Doctor provides room service to a variety of people in various time periods, including Edmund Hilary’s base camp on Everest and the Orient Express, before encountering Joy in a miserable London hotel room in 2024. After the credits roll, we rewind to the Doctor arriving at the Time Hotel, which allows guests to vacation throughout history. Don’t worry about causality or anything like that A sound of thunder Shenanigans, the hotel is somehow built to keep its guests from screwing up the schedule.
The doctor wants to steal some milk for his coffee from the hotel buffet, but his eyes are caught by something eerie: a person with a briefcase and a handcuff chain is trying to check into a room. The Doctor recruits Trev, one of the employees, as a guard while he looks ahead to find out what kind of plan might be afoot. As it turns out, the case is sentient And Evil jumps from army to army and takes possession of each one in turn. Once it has jumped to the next host, the last one disbands.
Here the doctor comes across Joy, who is tied to the position of hotel manager through a joke. When the Doctor opens the case to find a solution, the case threatens to kill everyone he’s connected to unless they get a four-digit code. Who should provide the code? The Doctor, emerging from his own future, takes Joy with him, leaving “our” Doctor trapped in 2024 without the TARDIS. As the hotel door closes, the Doctor insults his future self and explains why he is always alone and people constantly leave him. He is doubly annoyed because he normally never has to drive “long distance” one day at a time.
And so the episode essentially ends to show us an extended sequence in which the Doctor befriends 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 are a platonic couple. It’s a sequence you’d never see in a regular episode, with snippets of the Doctor and Anita’s lives. He enlarges the inside of the microwave, paints Anita’s TARDIS car blue, and they even sit in chairs and talk to each other – an important image since there are no chairs on 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.
When he returns to the time hotel, the doctor tells her again about the events of a year ago, shares the code and takes Joy on new adventures. The Doctor discovers that the briefcase contains the embryonic form of an artificially created star that would provide the owner with a source of imaginable power. But unless you have the Hand of Omega, the evolution of stars takes a long time, much longer than anyone could wait and test their experiment. Unless, of course, you hijack a time hotel and send it back to the time of the dinosaurs and wait for human history to begin to see if it works.
Joy, still obsessed with the case, heads to the hotel’s dinosaur room as the Doctor tries to escape his power over her. To achieve this, he provokes an emotion powerful enough to poison the connection between the case and its host before extinguishing it. He bullies her and gets her to reveal why she’s staying in a run-down London hotel. It turns out she’s grieving the loss of her mother, who died of COVID-19 in an isolation ward and Joy wasn’t able to say goodbye to her in person. Unfortunately, before the Doctor can deactivate the Starseed, it is eaten by a (brilliant looking) dinosaur, leaving him unable to reach it.
The Doctor and Joy return to the hotel and find, 65 million years later, that the star is now ready to explode. It’s locked in a stone building with a heavy stone door that none of them can move, and time is running out. So the Doctor, who prides himself on being “good with ropes,” steals a rope from Everest Base Camp and hangs it on the back of the Orient Express to haul the rock away. It’s an impressive and kinetic sequence, only let down by the terrible CGI as Gatwa stands on the train. Typical Doctor Who: It can now make convincing dinosaurs, but now it can’t make convincing moves.
This is where things lose their connection as Joy’s eyes flash with possession energy, but when the Doctor returns, Joy has… eaten the star? Somehow absorbed? Friendly and connected to him? He finds her standing on the edge of a cliff, where Joy says she will merge with the star and take it to the sky, where it will harm no one. At this point in my notes I wrote, “Don’t let this be Bethlehem,” when the camera pans out to show them right there, along with three camels parked in front of a stable. Oy.
Joy meets her mother again and the Doctor travels again, but not before getting Anita a job as manager of the Time Hotel. We also get a small shot of Ruby Sunday, who will return in the show’s second season.
As I said above, you can’t judge “Joy to the World” on the merits of a regular episode because it involves multiple masters. But I don’t think we can call it the strongest episode of Steven Moffatt’s oeuvre or the series’ various Christmas specials. Like all Disney-era episodes, it has a slightly incoherent quality, with the pacing slipping and breaking in all the wrong places. I’m all for the long side where we see a “normal” year in the Doctor’s life, but the framing story should have been tighter to compensate for the slowness. It’s a fun way to spend an hour with a stomach full of festive turkey (or your preferred equivalent), with so much craziness that you’ll think you’ve seen something profound. But I don’t think I’ll watch this movie again and again like I would, say, The Christmas Invasion.
