The Best Episode of the Doctor Who Christmas Special Is the Bittersweet Paradox

Doctor Who fans are getting a special treat under the Christmas tree today with the arrival of “Joy to the World,” this year. special holiday episode. But they are getting an even better gift wrapped inside this: because beyond the end of the regional celebrations, this great inner journey has a story that can stand alone as the best part. WHO in his own right.

About a third of the way into its running time “Joy to the World” takes a detour. After setting up the Time Hotel where the Doctor lives – a business of thousands of gates that are sent to send visitors every Christmas in history – we quickly jump through these doors as he follows a strange suitcase jumping through the middle chained, it seems. empty crowds. The Doctor and the current holder of the bag, the Silurian manager of the hotel, find themselves walking through the door of Christmas 2024 in London, where they meet a girl named Joy in her hotel room. Some confusion later, the Doctor discovers that the suitcase is messing with the hordes after boarding a new one: the Silurian dies and Joy is installed as the latest carrier, prompting him to call out dire warnings about starbursts. Before the Doctor can understand what’s going on with the suitcase… The Doctor walks through the door.

This doctor, from another time in the future, takes the anger out of his predecessors for not explaining to him how to solve the mystery of the bag, as he begins to get Joy out of the room and leave our “Doctor”, forced to do so. to perceive things from a distance. The door closes, and we dwell on the thoughts of “our” Doctor, who realizes that he is stuck in 2024 without a TARDIS and has no way back. a whole year.

What follows is a growing list that is brimming with the potential to be a killer episode Doctor Who in his own right. Without money or a place to stay, the Doctor has to provide support to the hotel’s manager, Anita (Steph de Whalley, in a wonderful supporting role), doing odd jobs, for rent. he was Joy’s room. The Doctor is trying to figure out the suitcase in his spare time, sure, but he’s still forced to spend a moment, in one place, and live a life he doesn’t usually get to live.

This is not an idea Doctor Who they don’t know at all, of course. The first half of the Third Doctor’s entire existence was built around the premise that the Doctor was banished to modern-day Earth and forced to reinvent himself, but continued as UNIT’s science advisor. The Fourteenth Doctor’s arc ends with him being given the grace to live with Donna and her family, freed from the need to be the Doctor. Steven Moffat in particular, who wrote “Joy to the World,” was fascinated by the concept throughout his tenure as showrunner; Episodes like “The Lodger,” “The Power of Three,” and even a holiday special, “The Husbands of River Song,” all deal with the idea of ​​the Doctor, either by choice or circumstance, leaving his temporary wandering life in the fourth episode to have life “normally.”

But unlike this sequence in “World’s Happiness,” the previous events only analyze them in an obvious way, the fact that the Doctor is spending so much time in one place, in one moment, especially in the background against the real reason for it. And that is, honestly, why Doctor Who it’s the show we all watch to see the Doctor travel through time and space, fight monsters, and save worlds from catastrophic destruction. Making him live a normal life is rare because, as the Doctor creates for himself here, it’s just boring as a science fiction show.

And yet, for a third of the episode – and it’s undoubtedly the best episode – we’re asked to be with the Doctor as he lives this year, to get to know Anita better, and to know what life is like. like thiswell, until the time comes when his year is over and he has to say goodbye to his new friend, it’s almost as painful as losing a friend. There is no great danger or mystery, the Doctor does not count the time, although he knows that he has Joy’s room at the hotel that he has booked for a year, instead the whole series is about exploring the possibilities of different glasses. in the Doctor’s life and being.

Most importantly, it is a necessary healing period for this Doctor, to make a friend and part with them like this. Not because the last season of Doctor Who struggle with his household goods to make the Doctor and Ruby feel like the friends they always told us they were, but because it’s not with Joy, the special “companion” that the Fifteenth Doctor makes up for his loneliness after breaking up with Ruby. It’s only with Anita, and it’s her connection and inspiration that keeps her going after losing her first friend, one of the first people she sealed in this body. Again, this is something of a holiday special that touched on it – “The Runaway Bride” and the Tenth Doctor’s thoughts on Rose, and “Voyage of the Damned” and, uh, the Tenth Doctor’s thoughts on Martha – but their final endings are memories. that the Doctor needs someone to share experiences with.

Temporarily, and brilliantly, “Joy to the World” asks us and the Doctor alike if life is something to be shared with someone, not Time and Space.

Now you can check Doctor Who“Joy to the World” on Disney+ worldwide, and on the BBC in the UK and Ireland.

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