“Doctor Who: Joy to the World Review: “What a star

Spoilers follow for “Joy to the World.”

If there’s one thing Steven Moffatt likes to do Doctor Whois to find a monster buried in the mundane. He made statues, shadows, lost children and even the idea of ​​silence into some of the show’s most terrifying villains. Unfortunately, the mysterious extra door that you often find in older hotel rooms is not a universal concern, but it is still a rich seam for him to mine. It is the inspiration for “Joy to the World”, Doctor WhoChristmas Special 2024. Which is light, fun and a little bit scattered, just like Christmas is meant to be, right?

By the time Doctor Who returned, the show was woven into the cultural firmament of the United Kingdom in a way that it had never been before. Part of this process was adding the show to BBC One’s Christmas Day programme, making it a universal cultural touch. For most of its post-2005 run, it aired an episode alongside the Strictly Come Dancing and EastEnders’ festive specials. Imagine the British equivalent to those events of everyone gathered around the TV like the Super Bowl or Macy’s Day Parade, but on Christmas Day. Even if you do not like any of the fare offered, it is still expected to sit with the family and consume.

With these specials, the prestigious time slot, longer duration and bigger budget are burdens as well as benefits. The show will play to a much wider audience than normal, with amused fans sitting elbow-to-elbow with elderly relatives filling every silence with gossip about their neighbor’s garden project. Consequently, the story needs to be a bit more expansive, with less need for the audience to pay undivided attention to what is happening. And it should be an oasis of entertainment in the melodramatic drudgery that is the BBC One Christmas Day schedule.

Normally, the festive special would be the sole province of the showrunner, but Russell T. Davies handed the reins to Steven Moffatt. Moffatt succeeded Davies as showrunner the first time, co-created Sherlock and is widely regarded as the best Who writer of the 21st century. With a pedigree as impeccable as that, and having already written”Boom“For Ncuti Gatwa’s first season on the road to the title, expectations are high.

Moffatt is an arch farce writer and has a strong understanding of structure, so it’s no surprise that we opened up. in medium res. The Doctor offers room service to a variety of people in different time periods, including Edmund Hilary’s base camp at Everest and the Orient Express before bumping into Joy in a miserable London hotel room in 2024. After the credits, we return to the Doctor. arrived at the Hotel Time, which allows guests to vacation throughout history. Don’t worry about causality or anything A sound of Thunder shenanigans, the Hotel is somehow built to protect its guests from messing up the timeline.

The doctor tries to steal some milk for his coffee from the hotel buffet, but his gaze is caught on something sinister: a person carrying a briefcase with a chain of handcuffs tries to check into a room . The Doctor recruits Trev, one of the employees, to watch while he scouts ahead to discover what scheme might be afoot. As it turns out, the case is sensitive and evil, jumping from one host to another and possessing each in turn. Once it has jumped to the next host, the last one disintegrates.

It is here that the Doctor runs into Joy who, due to pranks, ends up handcuffed to the case in the hotel manager’s place. When the doctor opens the case to try to find a solution, the case threatens to kill whoever is connected unless they receive a four-digit code. Who should provide the code? The Doctor, emerging from his own future, took Joy with him, leaving “our” Doctor trapped in 2024 without the TARDIS. When the hotel door closes, the doctor throws abuse at his future self, because he is always alone and people always leave him. He is doubly angry since he never normally travels “the long way”, one day after another.

And so, the episode essentially stops to give us an extended sequence of the Doctor befriending Anita, the hotel manager. The Doctor gets a job as a hotel clerk, and slowly lets his guard down, spending more time with Anita until they are a platonic couple. It’s a sequence you’ll never see in a regular episode, with snippets from the life of the Doctor and Anita. He makes the microwave bigger inside, repaints Anita’s TARDIS car blue and they even sit and talk to each other on chairs – a key visual given the lack of chairs on the TARDIS. But as the year goes by and it’s time for the Doctor to return to his own show, he says goodbye to Anita.

Returning to the time hotel, the Doctor finds himself in the events of a year ago, sharing the code and dragging Joy to new adventures. The Doctor elaborates that the briefcase contains the embryonic form of an artificially created star that offers an imaginable source of power to whoever has it. But if you do not have the hand of the Omega, the stars take a long time to develop, much longer than he could wait and try his experiment. Unless, of course, he hijacks a time hotel and returns it to the time of the dinosaurs, waiting for when human history begins to see if it works.

Joy, still possessed by the case, heads to the hotel’s dinosaur room while the doctor tries to break his hold on her. To do that, it causes an emotion strong enough to poison the link between the case and its host before it obliterates them. He intimidates her, causing her to reveal why she is staying in a London hotel. It turns out that she is mourning the loss of her mother who died of COVID-19 in an isolation ward and Joy was unable to say goodbye in person. Unfortunately, before the Doctor can deactivate the star seed, it is eaten by a (bright looking) dinosaur, putting it out of his reach.

The Doctor and Joy return to the hotel and, 65 million years later, find that the star is now ready to detonate. She was locked in a stone structure with a heavy stone door that none of them could move, and time ran out. So, the doctor, who boasts that he is “good with rope”, steals a rope from Everest base camp, hangs it on the back of the Orient Express to remove the stone. the terrible CGI when Gatwa is on the train. Typical Doctor Who: Now he can make convincing dinosaurs, but now he can’t make a convincing train.

This is where things lose their coherence, as Joy’s eyes flash with possession energy, but when the Doctor returns, Joy has… eaten the star? Absorbed in some way? Did he make friends and bond with him? He finds her on a cliff, where Joy says she will merge with the star and take her to heaven, where she won’t hurt anyone. At this point in my notes, I’ve written “Don’t let this be Bethlehem,” when the camera pulls to reveal that’s exactly where I am, complete with three camels parked outside a barn. Oi.

Joy is reunited with her mother and the doctor travels again, but not before he gets Anita a job running the Time Hotel. We also have a bit of Ruby Sunday, who will be returning to the show for her own second season.

As I said at the top, you can’t judge “Joy to the World” on the merits of a regular episode since it serves many masters. But I don’t think we can call it the strongest episode of Steven Moffatt’s work or of the show’s various Christmas Specials. Like all Disney-era episodes, it has a slightly disjointed quality where the pacing falters and zips in all the wrong places. I’m for the long part where we see a “normal” year in the life of the Doctor, but the story that frames it needs to be tighter to balance out the slowness. It’s a pretty fun way to spend an hour with a stomach full of holiday turkey (or your favorite equivalent) with enough mawkishness to make you think you’ve seen something very profound. But I don’t think I’ll be going back to watch this over and over again like I would for, say, “The Christmas Invasion.”