Doctor Who and Joy to the World

And we’re back on Christmas with a new Doctor Who, once again written by Steven Moffat.

The Christmas Special has been a staple of the show since it came back in ’05, and after a few years trying out being a New Year’s Day Special instead, Davies made sure it was back on the 25th. One of the various interview clips doing the rounds for this sees Davies and Moffat asked why Who is such a good fit for Christmas, and the best answer is given my Moffat as “The Doctor occupies the same place in a child’s mind as Santa Claus.” Hard to argue! Despite that, or maybe partly because of that, the christmas specials have always been “the weird ones.”

They’ve always had two not-totally-compatible sets of goals. On the one hand, they’re the the only new episode in the long 9+ month gap between seasons. New Who has tended to be a spring show, so even when the show was at maximum production, the christmas show would air 4 or 5 months after the last episode and 4 or 5 before the next. The push there is to make it a “big one”, something “worth the wait”.

On the other hand, it’s Christmas. The order of the day is something fun and entertaining you can watch at the end of a day that was already full. Go have a good time hanging out with a fun character getting into hijinks.

This gets magnified as the Christmas special tends to get pressed into service as a Doctor’s first or last show. Last year was Gatwa’s big solo debut, this year is a much more casual business-as-usual special.

And so, the end result of that tension is we get a pretty standard Moffat Christmas Special (complimentary.) Moffat tends towards “fun and frothy comedy” as the speed for christmas episodes, and that’s not a bad instinct, and that’s certainly what we have here. He likes to make ‘em as Christmassy as possible, and keep it just on this side of full-blown farce. It cooks along, uses as much of that Disney+ money as it can, fun locations, wacky concepts.

The past christmas episode it reminded me the most of “Voyage of the Damned”, in that it was a fun adventure in a high concept setting in which nearly the entire guest cast, including the big-name guest star, got killed off in horribly tragic ways. So, standard Doctor Who, then.

As is usually the case at Christmas, the whole enterprise is held together entirely on the raw charisma of Ncuti Gatwa. He’s great here, having clearly settled into the part, managing to really hit that note of having a twinkle in his eye while also being sad.

Gatwa reminds me a lot of Capaldi early on, in that the show ended up with a better & more interesting performer than maybe they were expecting, and took a while to figure out just how to deploy him. Like Capaldi’s first christmas episode, this felt like the show settling into what this take on the character can do. The obvious contrast here is with “Boom”, and while that was an episode that was very easy to imagine Smith or Capaldi starring in with no major changes, it’s much harder to imagine either of them starring in this. Gatwa clearly knows how he wants to do this, and the show is finally catching up behind him.

“Space Shenanigans caused the Christmas Star” feels like the sort of thing Doctor Who was going to get around to eventually, and so six decades in they finally do it. The time between where the Doctor is being obvious to anyone in the audience paying attention and the on screen caption making it official was painfully slow, weirdly bad pacing that makes it a bigger deal than it should have been. But it makes up for with the sly joke revealing why there were no rooms at the inn—they were full up with time travellers there because it was Christmas. That might be the most Douglas Adams joke that Adams never wrote himself.

The best part of the episode, though, was the year the Doctor spent hanging around the hotel with Anita. Structurally, it’s very strange, it’s as if they found a different, better idea for the episode half-way through and then tried to do both. The result is you end up in the very strange place where the guest character with the biggest emotional impact on the story and the Doctor is not the one played by the big name guest star, and it distorts the pacing such that the end feels terribly rushed, and Joy’s Big Decision happens almost entirely off-screen. I’m not suggesting they take that out, far from it, I sort of wish they had leaned further in and made that the whole show, because it’s spectacular. Every Doctor ends up with a story where he’s stuck in one place and has to make do while things catch up with him, or vice-versa, and Gatwa’s take is uniquely suited to making that premise sing.

We spent a lot of time last year talking about Gatwa’s Fifteenth Doctor as a new, more emotionally healthy model, and this is a perfect example. He just gets a room, helps out, makes a friend. His time sitting around with Anita makes an interesting implied contrast with past companions; do things really never slow down enough for them to sit around and talk? That’s a neat take on the character as he’s been, and I hope the micro-epiphany around not having chairs sticks.

More broadly, I hope all this stuff around the Doctor becoming healthier is going somewhere beyond just operating as the blanket reason why Gatwa doesn’t play him as having untreated ADHD. “You really do have friends and you both shouldn’t and don’t need to be alone,” is a well the Old New Show went back to many times, but never moved past that. I’m not sure what’s on the other side of that door for a show with this premise, but I hope they try to find out.

As a stray continuity point, I think it’s interesting that for the first time in a long time, when asked if he was married, the Doctor just said no, without a reference to River (or Elizabeth I, or “The Aztecs.”) With the Tennant 08 Revival now a year in the past, Old New Who seems to have really slid back into history next to Old Who. This really was the start of Season 2 of New New Who, no matter how grouchy the wikipedia editors get.

The COVID stuff caught me really off-guard; I was not expecting Who to ever acknowledge that the pandemic happened at all, much less to do so with full-throated rage at the UK government. I think this was the first piece of media of any kind I can remember seeing with a scene set in a hospital COVID ward. I didn’t object to it, but that was some pretty strong medicine to slam into without warning. I guess we’re far enough into Long March that we can start grappling with what happened during that terrible winter of 2020. Probably a good sign.

Overall, big fun, I enjoyed it very much, looking forward to more.

At this point, it’s clear New New Who didn’t do anywhere near as well as anyone hoped. This time last year there was lots of big talk about a broad new glorious future stretching out ahead of us, but now everyone is a little more muted, with anything past the already filmed second season of the Gatwa/Disney era seemingly undecided (and as yet un-commissioned.)

I suspect we’re going to be picking apart the reasons why the Disney+ era didn’t launch like they were expecting for a long time, but anecdotally it’s clear that “Space Babies” was a little too much for a lot of people. That puts something of a pall over the proceedings; rather than a bold beginning, it’s starting to feel like this might be a little footnote before Who goes back into hibernation for a bit.

As fun as this episode was, there’s nothing here that’s likely to turn around the low viewing numbers left in the wake of the last series, like “Doctor Mysterio” in 2016, there’s a real sense of “really, that’s all you’re doing?”

The thing about Doctor Who is that it was actually, properly cancelled at least three times—in 1985, 1989, and 1996—and then also had near misses in 1969, 2009, and 2023, and those are just the ones I can remember off the top of my head. The other thing about Doctor Who is that despite that, they’re still making new episodes 61 years later. For Doctor Who fans, convincing ourselves it’s about to be cancelled again is our love language. There’s always going to be more Doctor Who, it’s just a matter of how long we have to wait.

Finally: I love that “mavity” looks like it’s just going to be an ongoing in-joke, and not pay off anywhere.