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Doctor Who: A Christmas Carol – Steven Moffat's 1st Overbaked Special

Doctor Who Christmas Specials used to be a cool event, appointment television at its finest for the family. Showrunner Russell T. Davies brought them back to make them special and his successor Steven Moffat continued the tradition. With the big day coming up, the BBC has cut together 21-minute videos of some of them. This one is of Moffat's first special, "A Christmas Carol" from 2010.

Doctor Who: A Christmas Carol: Steven Moffat's 1st Overbaked Special
"Doctor Who: A Christmas Carol" still, BBC

Doctor Who: A Christmas Carol is Moffat at his most shamelessly mawkish and manipulative. It feels like he was throwing as many things into the mix as possible and the result is an overcooked, sickly-sweet pudding. A Christmas pudding too much treacle and not enough brandy.

Of course, Moffat would adapt Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, filtered through the Science Fiction lens of Doctor Who. He combines it with "Continuity Errors", a short story he wrote in the 1990s for one of the Virgin Doctor Who short story anthologies. In the original story, the Seventh Doctor (Sylvester McCoy) has to persuade an angry, bitter, officious librarian to let him borrow a highly restricted book that he needs to read in order to avert a catastrophic war. He ends up going back in time to change the events in her life that made her bitter and mean so that when he comes back to the present, she might now be a happier, kinder person who's willing to help him. In "A Christmas Carol", the Tenth Doctor (Matt Smith) has to change the Scrooge manque into letting him use his machinery to keep a space cruise liner from crashing and killing the people on-board, including Amy (Karen Gillen) and Rory (Arthur Darvill).

There are those of us who think "Continuity Errors" is the better story. It's low-key and self-contained. "A Christmas Carol" is just too much like Moffat throws in everything and the kitchen sink hoping it wouldn't be boring. There's Amy and Rory spending their honeymoon in her strippergram policewoman outfit and his Roman Centurion uniform, showing off Moffat's penchant for harmless kink that pushes at the boundaries of the show's family-friendly restrictions. Casting Michael Gambon as Scrooge figure Kazran Sardick is the definition of too much since he is always the hammiest actor for 100 miles. Of course, Moffat has to throw in a space shark, since space sharks in "A Christmas Carol" are a whole "what the hell, why not?" trope. Then there's the Doctor's ethically dubious tactic of altering Kazran's entire life history to make him fall in love with the dying Abigail (opera singer Katherine Jenkins in the show's latest round of celebrity stunt casting) to force him to learn empathy so he would be willing to save people. The Eleventh Doctor is no less manipulative than the Seventh Doctor, though he hides his malevolence behind a clownish façade even more.

It would take Moffat a few more tries before he got the balance of his Doctor Who Christmas Specials right, but this first attempt shows he's willing to do anything to keep your attention.

The Doctor Who Christmas Specials are streaming on HBO Max in the US.


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Adi TantimedhAbout Adi Tantimedh

Adi Tantimedh is a filmmaker, screenwriter and novelist. He wrote radio plays for the BBC Radio, “JLA: Age of Wonder” for DC Comics, “Blackshirt” for Moonstone Books, and “La Muse” for Big Head Press. Most recently, he wrote “Her Nightly Embrace”, “Her Beautiful Monster” and “Her Fugitive Heart”, a trilogy of novels featuring a British-Indian private eye published by Atria Books, a division Simon & Schuster.
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