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This year’s Doctor Who Christmas Special, “Joy to the World,” is the most Steven Moffat of Christmas specials - in all the right ways.
Posted in: BBC, Disney+, Doctor Who, TV | Tagged: christmas, doctor who, Ncuti Gatwa
Doctor Who: Joy to the World: The Most Moffat of Christmas Specials
This year’s Doctor Who Christmas Special, “Joy to the World,” is the most Steven Moffat of Christmas specials - in all the right ways.
This year's Doctor Who Christmas Special "Joy to the World" is the most Steven Moffat of Christmas specials you can possibly get, melding timey-wimey shenanigans, snarky comedy and farce, surprising emotional insights, and a tear-jerker ending. Christmas Specials might be considered a bit outside of the usual series stories, but Moffat is in Maximum Showoff Mode here, reveling in the sheer lunacy of it all. Here's a rundown of the whiplash shifts in character, plot, tone, and easter eggs.
The Doctor as Cosmic Freeloader
The story opens with The Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) arriving in the lobby of The Time Hotel to help himself to the free coffee and pastries table as if he owns the place because total confidence is the con man's best weapon. He has programmed the TARDIS to home in on any place with fresh milk so he can get it for his morning coffee, and that's what brings him to the hotel. His walking around in a robe might be a reference to Arthur Dent in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
The Unexpected Companion
The Doctor gets a new companion apart from Joy – Anita Benn (Steph de Whalley), the hotel receptionist at the hotel Joy checks into. Anita becomes a unique companion because she doesn't travel with him in the TARDIS to fight aliens or save the world. Instead, he just spends a year with her doing nothing but normal things, helping with the hotel as a new member of staff to earn his keep to stay there while he waits for the door to the Time Hotel to open again so he can go back to trying to save Joy and keep everything from getting blown up. The subplot of the Doctor and Anita becomes its own short story as they explore the ordinariness of life. Anita is lonely and often disappointed in the men she meets as she whiles away her life working at the hotel. Their time ends when the Doctor rushes off at Christmas the next year but she gets a coda with the Doctor recommending her as a new hire to the Time Hotel that could take her to new adventures. This subplot is the most unexpected and touching part of the special without any aliens or explosions. It's part of the series' celebration of ordinary people.
Hotel Rooms as Existential Metaphors
Moffat has a particular talent for finding poetic metaphors in ordinary and mundane things. Here he makes choosing hotel rooms as metaphors for a person's true self. The Doctor provokes Joy to anger by saying she booked herself into a small hotel in the middle of nowhere in town and picked the plainest room devoid of meaning as an expression of herself. This says everything about her: she chose to be alone on Christmas. This leads to…
Political Commentary
Joy reveals she's grieving for her late mother, who died from COVID in the hospital during Lockdown, and she was prohibited by law from being with her, instead saying goodbye via an iPad. Her bitter reference to "those people with their wine parties" is to then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson having wine parties with his staff at No. 10 while people across the country couldn't be with their dying loved ones under penalty of arrest and fines. This moment is a flash of political anger that has always been in Doctor Who.
The Villain is Capitalism
"Wherever there's a corporation, there's PR. Evil can't resist. They just can't stop themselves. Evil must logo," declares The Doctor when he recognizes an evil megacorporation. Villengard are the bad guys behind the secret plot that uses and kills innocent people to achieve their goal of hatching their own sun to provide them with power. The bad guy in this story is a faceless corporation, not any single person, that callously pursues profit at the expense of literally everyone. Anti-capitalism on Doctor Who? Not the first or the last time. Like in "Boom," a dead person's personality uploaded into the company's AI helps save the day.
In-Jokes Galore
Moffat can never resist self-referential in-jokes, but then Doctor Who is a magnet for those. The Doctor tells Anita about the Weeping Angels and she laughs at the absurdity of it all. The Doctor makes a joke about the rope that's a callback to the last Christmas Special. He paints Anita's car TARDIS blue. The sonic screwdriver gets used extensively in this episode to look cool, so the show gets to sell the new toy to kids.
The Oldest Mystery Solved! British Atheism Ruffles Feathers!
Moffat promised an answer to the oldest mystery in the world. That turns out to be the question, "Where did the star of Bethlehem come from that brought the Three Wise Men to the birth of Jesus?" Moffat is playing with history and atheism here. Joy becomes that star. She's the one-time-only companion who sacrifices her life and brings joy to the worlds across time, reuniting with her mother and reminding everyone at Christmas of their loved ones. Some religious viewers have been a bit put out by this, but Moffat and Russell T. Davies have always liked to tease and troll. The Doctor is responsible for bringing that star to 0001 AD. Even the Bible is timey-wimey. The last one-off companion who died was Astrid Perth (Kylie Minogue) on the Starship Titanic, who also became stardust, so Joy's death here is sort of a callback to hers, both companions the Doctor failed to save.
This Christmas Special is About Loneliness and Loss
The overriding theme of this Doctor is endless loss. He always loses someone and often very quickly, more than past Doctors. This theme was always there in the series, of course, but Moffat shines a light on it here. The Doctor is the Lonely God, bringing solace to lonely people. This Doctor is different from the others in that he doesn't always save people. He makes them better, even if they die or transcend at the end. He's a variant of Peter Pan, eternally young and always alone. That's his neverending tragedy, so can you blame him for crying so much these days? Cut him some slack!
Doctor Who: Joy to the World is streaming on Disney+ outside the UK.
Doctor Who Christmas Special: Joy to the World
10/10
This year’s Doctor Who Christmas Special “Joy to the World” is the most Steven Moffat of Christmas specials you can possibly get, melding timey-wimey shenanigans, snarky comedy and farce, surprising emotional insights, and a tear-jerker ending. Christmas Specials might be considered a bit outside of the usual series stories, but Moffat is in Maximum Showoff Mode here, reveling in the sheer lunacy of it all. Here’s a rundown of the whiplash shifts in character, plot, tone, and easter eggs.
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