The various showrunners of the modern-day Doctor Who have used their holiday specials for different purposes. Sometimes it’s to advance the show’s canon, other times it was to introduce a new Doctor, as it was a year ago when we met Ncuti Gatwa as the Fifteenth Doctor. In this year’s holiday special, showrunner Steven Moffat wanted to tell a relatively simple story. Well, as simple as you can manage when the ultimate time traveler lands his TARDIS at a place called the Time Hotel.
DOCTOR WHO: JOY TO THE WORLD: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: “THE QUEENS HOTEL, MANCHESTER, 1940.” As two older Brits look at the results of Nazi bombs, a man busts in and asks if they ordered a ham and cheese toastie and a pumpkin latte.
The Gist: That man is The Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa), who pops in and out of different time periods — the Orient Express in 1962, Mount Everest in 1953 — with that same ham and cheese toastie and pumpkin latte, always realizing he was in the wrong place.
Then in 2024 London, we see a woman named Joy (Nicola Coughlan) check into a rather sad-looking single room in the Sandringham Hotel. Almost as soon as she enters, The Doctor pops in via the room’s locked “extra door” with the tray, following a lizard-like man with a briefcase handcuffed to him.
At Christmas in the year 4042, The Doctor’s TARDIS has landed in the lobby of a hotel in London. With the help of Trev (Joel Fry), an eager-to-please security guard, The Doctor finds out that the hotel is a Time Hotel, with different rooms being a portal into different time periods on earth. He’s suspicious of a man with a case handcuffed to him, so he decides to scope out the time portals while the man cools his heels in the bar. “The only meaningful way to follow someone is to get there first,” The Doctor says.
What The Doctor doesn’t know is that the briefcase attaches itself to someone who it thinks can give them more access, and the former holder dies. So by the time he busts into Joy’s room, the case is attached to the manager. But then the case attaches itself to Joy, who recites “the star seed will bloom and the flesh will rise.” The Doctor opens the case to see that it’s a star seed, but it also has a self-destruct mechanism. To get the code to bypass the final self-destruct, the Doctor from a year in the future comes in and gives it to him.
How does the Doctor get the code? By spending an entire year in the same hotel room, forging a deep friendship with the manager, Anita (Stephanie de Whalley). After that, though, it’s up to The Doctor and Joy to figure out how to make sure the star is far away from Earth when it’s born.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Well, it’s hard to compare Doctor Who with anything but itself, given the show’s sixty-plus year history.
Our Take: Current Doctor Who showrunner Steven Moffat wrote “Joy To The World”, and it has Moffat’s signature sense of whimsy and light slapstick. It’s a bit light on actual story, though; it feels as if this holiday episode is designed to be more of an exercise in showing how good the show’s VFX have gotten over the years.
But it’s also another showcase for the infectious positivity of Gatwa’s version of The Doctor, and a good way to bring in Coughlan to bring in some guest star mojo. They play off each other very well, especially during a scene where The Doctor has to get Joy angry in order for her personality to overtake whatever trance the briefcase has her in.
As you might expect from a holiday special, the ending is mostly to give a feelgood, “peace on Earth, good will towards men” kind of vibe, but it’s surprising enough in that vein to make the story worth the hour’s investment.
That hour moves pretty quickly, though, because the touching friendship The Doctor forges with Anita is probably the most surprisingly moving part of the story. It was a time for The Doctor, who is forever hopping through time, to slow down and relate to someone, and the fact that he became vulnerable, opening up the recalcitrant manager in the process, made us want to see Anita as his new companion in the upcoming season, even though we like the usual pairing of The Doctor with Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson).
Sex and Skin: None. This iteration of Doctor Who is completely suitable for kids 7 and up.
Parting Shot: The Doctor realizes where he is and what year he’s in.
Sleeper Star: We really did enjoy The Doctor with Anita during the year he was at the hotel; credit Stephanie de Whalley with giving a lot of humanity to what we at first thought was a small part.
Most Pilot-y Line: We’re still trying to figure out how the future Doctor got the code that he gave to one-year-prior Doctor. Maybe it’s not supposed to be figured out.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Doctor Who: Joy To The World is certainly schmaltzy, and the plot is thin, but the infectious optimism of Ncuti Gatwa and the always-welcome presence of Nicola Coughlan make the holiday episode an enjoyable hour to watch.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
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