Spoilers for “Joy to the World” follow.
If there's one thing Steven Moffatt loves to do doctor whois to find a monster buried in the mundane. He's turned statues, shadows, lost children, and even the idea of silence into some of the show's scariest villains. Sadly, the mysterious extra door often found in older hotel rooms is not as universal a concern, but it's still a nice seam for him. That is the inspiration for “Joy to the World” doctor whoChristmas Special 2024. Which is light, fun and a little scattered, a lot like what Christmas should be, right?
When doctor who When it returned, the show reintegrated itself into the UK's cultural firmament as it had never done before. Part of that process was adding the show to BBC One's Christmas Day schedule, making it a universal cultural touchstone. For most of its post-2005 run, it has aired one episode alongside the Strictly come dance and EastEnders' holiday specials. 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 food on offer, you are expected to sit with the family and eat it.
With these special offers, the prestigious schedule, longer run time, and larger budget are both burdens and benefits. The show has to play to a much larger audience than usual, with die-hard fans sitting shoulder to shoulder with elderly relatives filling every silence with gossip about their neighbor's garden project. Consequently, the story needs to be a little more flexible, with less need for the audience to give their full attention to what is happening. And it should be an oasis of fun in the melodramatic monotony that is BBC One's Christmas Day programming.
Normally, the holiday special would be the sole purview 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 considered 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 title track, expectations are high.
Moffatt is a farce writer and has a great understanding of structure, so it's no surprise that we open in res media. The Doctor offers room service to a variety of people in different time periods, including Edmund Hilary's base camp on Everest and the Orient Express before running into Joy in a miserable London hotel room in 2024. After the credits, we return to the Doctor. arriving at Hotel Time, which allows guests to vacation through history. Don't worry about causality or any A sound of thunder shenanigans, the hotel is somehow built to protect its guests from ruining the timeline.
The Doctor wants to steal some milk for his coffee at the hotel buffet, but something sinister catches his attention: a person carrying a briefcase with a chain of handcuffs is trying to check into a room. The Doctor recruits Trev, one of the employees, to keep watch while he explores what plan might be afoot. It turns out that the case is sensitive. and evil, jumping from host to host and possessing each in turn. Once it jumps to the next host, the last one disintegrates.
It is here that the Doctor runs into Joy who, through shenanigans, ends up handcuffed to the briefcase instead of the hotel manager. When the Doctor opens the case to try and find a solution, the case threatens to kill whoever it's connected to unless he gets a four-digit code. Who will provide the code? The Doctor, emerging from his own future, taking Joy with him and leaving “our” Doctor trapped in 2024 without the TARDIS. When the hotel door closes, the Doctor insults his future self about why he is always alone and people always leave him. He is doubly upset because he usually never has to travel “the long way around,” day after day.
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 handyman and slowly lets his guard down and spends more time with Anita until they become a platonic couple. It's a sequence you'd never see in a normal episode, with snippets of the Doctor and Anita's lives. He makes the microwave bigger inside, repaints Anita's TARDIS car blue, and they even sit and talk to each other in chairs, a key image given the lack of chairs in the TARDIS. But as the year passes 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 once again intervenes in the events of a year ago, sharing the code and taking Joy on new adventures. The Doctor discovers that the briefcase contains the embryonic form of an artificially created star that would offer a source of imaginable power to whoever possesses it. But unless you own the Hand of Omega, stars take a long time to develop, much longer than anyone could expect and try their experiment. Unless, of course, you hijack a time hotel and send it back to the time of the dinosaurs, waiting for human history to begin to see if it works.
Joy, still possessed by the case, heads to the hotel's dinosaur room as the Doctor attempts to free her. It does this by provoking an emotion strong enough to poison the bond between the case and its host before it erases them. He intimidates her, prompting her to reveal why she is staying at a luxury 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 to her in person. Unfortunately, before the Doctor can deactivate the starseed, a (glossy-looking) dinosaur eats it, leaving it out of reach.
The Doctor and Joy return to the hotel and, 65 million years later, discover that the star is ready to detonate. He's been 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 boasts of being “good with ropes,” steals a rope from Everest Base Camp and hangs it from the back of the Orient Express to drag the stone. It's an impressive, kinetic sequence that only drops the terrible CGI when Gatwa is standing on the train. Typical doctor who: Now you can convince the dinosaurs, but you can't make a convincing train.
It's here that things lose their coherence, as Joy's eyes glow with possessive energy, but when the Doctor returns, Joy has… eaten the star? Did you absorb it in some way? Did you become friends and join 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 heavens, where it won't do anyone any harm. At this point in my notes, I wrote “Don't let this be Bethlehem,” when the camera pulls back to reveal that that's exactly where they are, with three camels parked outside a stable. Hey.
Joy is reunited with her mother and the Doctor travels again, but not before getting Anita a job running the Time Hotel. We also have a little photo of Ruby Sunday, who will be returning to the show for its second season.
As I said at the beginning, you can't judge “Joy to the World” on the merits of a regular episode, as it serves multiple masters. But I don't think we can call it the strongest episode of Steven Moffatt's oeuvre or of the show's various Christmas specials. Like all episodes of the Disney era, it has a slightly incoherent quality where the pace dips and speeds up in all the wrong places. I'm all for the length where we see a “normal” year in the Doctor's life, but the framing story should have been tighter to balance out the slow pace. It's a pretty fun way to spend an hour with a stomach full of Christmas turkey (or your preferred equivalent) with just enough gooeyness to make you think you've seen something pretty profound. But I don't think I'll go back to watching this over and over again like I would, say, “The Christmas Invasion.”
