When it comes to Doctor Who Christmas specials, I’m always more forgiving of the over-the-top cheesiness than I am for the rest of the year. If you can’t go all out with an in-your-face message about the joy of life at Christmas, then when can you? However, Joy to the World stretches my acceptance of it to its breaking point, as it desperately wants to cram as much cheesy emotionality into my face as it possibly can.
It’s such a contrast to how the episode starts, which is such a quick and fun introduction to the situation that it got me in such a good mood to watch a wild Doctor Who adventure. The last time Steven Moffat wrote an episode for Gatwa’s Doctor he confined him to a single spot and went for a very serious tone, so I’m glad we got to see the other side of Moffat’s writing style here, where he lets 15 be his lively-self from the world go, working out what’s wrong and how to solve the problem with a smile and a series of great jokes that cracked me up.
It forces you to stop and reflect when the episode suddenly slams the brakes 20 minutes in and we spend a little while doing a side adventure that is the most compelling part of the episode, yet it has absolutely nothing to do with the plot.
It’s always fun to see the Doctor forced into a situation where he has to live like a normal person. I enjoyed the roughly ten-minute sequence where we see him live day-to-day for a change and do lots of mundane things around the hotel while somehow still making everything feel a little more magical in his own way. I enjoy seeing 15 just “hang out” with no crisis more than any other Doctor, and this section of the episode is the perfect example of why.
I just wish it mattered at all to the main plot of the episode. I get that it’s thematically aligned with the Doctor’s greater arc that we’ll see explored in the 2025 season, but aside from a couple of lines that loosely tie it in at the end, it has nothing to do with anything else that goes on here. I still enjoyed it, but it felt out of place.
As for this main plot I’ve been ignoring, it’s pretty simple, but about what I expect for a Christmas episode. This isn’t a time for us to get bogged down in complex plots or intense showdowns, we just need a simple excuse for the Doctor to run around and stop the world from ending for an hour, and that’s exactly what the Star Seed does.
The beginning section gives us a solid mystery as the briefcase keeps changing hands, and the pace at which every little detail is revealed is great, as it keeps giving you new things to think about.
It showcases Moffat’s great ability to come up with fun yet simple sci-fi concepts and then do weird and whacky things with them. The Time Hotel is such a great idea – the kind that lets your imagination run wild as soon as you hear it. Every door leading to a different time zone gives you endless possibilities to play with and the episode makes the most of it, having the Doctor use a train in 1962 to open an ancient tomb in 1 AD using a rope from 1953, and running it all through a futuristic hotel – that’s the silly but enjoyable stuff I come to a Doctor Who Christmas special for.
When the episode tries to get serious, it starts to lose me. Joy is an instantly relatable character, performed with this great awkward energy where you can see that she’s hiding how she really feels about a situation at any given moment for fear of rocking the boat too much, but exactly that fact makes her fade into the background a bit whenever the Doctor is there to assert himself in the scene.
It means that when she decides to take the Star Seed into herself and make the sacrifice play I didn’t feel attached enough for it to hit as hard as it was supposed to. Plus, we give up on all pretense and just outright tell the Doctor that he’s too lonely, despite the episode doing quite a good job of showing it up until this point.
Still, if it had ended things with Joy accepting her fate and going out with a smile, I would’ve accepted that dose of cheese and found it to be a sweet if on-the-nose ending. However, it then keeps going with a series of scenes that desperately try to rub the point in and it’s just too much. Fine, have a little scene of Ruby calling her mum because that keeps things boiling over for the coming season, but did we really need the random one-off characters from each time zone talking about how everything’s suddenly great now?
Then there’s the scene with Joy’s mum in the hospital. Everyone’s going to have a different but strong reaction whenever the Covid pandemic is leveraged for a tragic scene like this, but for me, it’s still in that “too soon” zone where I find it cringeworthy and cheap to invoke it to get a reaction out of the audience. We don’t need any more emotional reflections on the pandemic, Bo Burnham did one for everyone and no one else needs to try.
Speaking of cringeworthy scenes, I absolutely howled with laughter at the reveal that the final scene took place in Bethlehem in 1 AD. It’s such an outright ridiculous way to end the episode that I almost respect it, but if Moffat really thought that would be some emotional or poignant way to end the episode then I don’t know what to say. Maybe he just felt bad about how much his episode from earlier in the year dunked on religion, but this is quite the overcompensation.
The ending may have been far too heavy-handed, but I enjoyed just about everything that got us there. The detour of the Doctor being stranded on Earth was the bit of the episode that resonated with me the most, but it does lose points for a lack of cohesion. It shouldn’t feel like we’re taking a break from the episode mid-way through it. However, it made me smile plenty, with fun action scenes, good jokes, and a brisk pace that never let my attention wander, which is all I really ask of a Christmas special.
Score: 7/10
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