Posted in: BBC, Disney+, Doctor Who, TV | Tagged: bbc, doctor who, Doctor Who: Joy to the World, Ncuti Gatwa, Nicola Coughlan, steven moffat

Doctor Who: "Joy to the World" Was Moffat's Meditation on Loneliness

Doctor Who: Joy to the World was Steven Moffat's meditation on loneliness, showing how the Doctor and every character are worse for it.

"Joy to the World" is everything you can expect from a Steven Moffat Doctor Who Christmas Special. It's clever, twisty, silly, funny, and tragic in equal measure, but at heart, it's Moffat's poignant meditation on loneliness and finding a purpose to get out of that. Loneliness is an issue for many people at Christmas. In US TV shows, Christmas specials and episodes are all joyful celebrations of getting together with friends and family. British Christmas specials often directly involve main characters who feel lonely, alone, and unloved at Christmas, which should tell you non-Brits what a big deal it is in the UK.

All The Lonely People, Where Do They All Come From?

All the key characters in "Joy to the World" are lonely people: The Doctor, Joy, and the – other supporting characters, and the story dramatizes how that loneliness affects them and the way they move through their lives and the decisions they make. This is what good TV writers do. Without ever saying out loud, "This is all about loneliness!" (that's what a US TV show would say outright), they sprinkle characters who embody the themes, and Moffat is a master of thematic layering on top of clever, twisty plots and timey-wimey structures. Joy (Nicola Coughlan) is clearly lonely and grieving her mother, feeling so guilty that she checks into a lonely hotel room to spend Christmas because she thinks she deserves no better. Trev the hotel security guard (Joel Fry) is clearly lonely in his lowkey awkwardness, low self-esteem and need to be useful and not let The Doctor down.

The hotel manager (Moffat regular Jonathan Aris) is one of the last surviving Silurians who found solace and friends working at the Time Hotel. Hotel guest Silvia Trench (cheekily named after the first Bond girl) character played by Niamh Marie Smith) travels alone on the Orient Express, trying to write a letter to the woman she loves, fearing rejection. Sandringham Hotel concierge Anita (Stephanie de Whalley in a quietly funny and unflashy poignant performance that steals the show) works a lonely job in a lonely little hotel while weathering disappointed boyfriends and breakups, and her quietly funny ordinariness makes her the most Moffat of characters in the story. Then there's the loneliest of them all: the Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa).

Doctor Who: The Lonely God

Throughout "Joy to the World," The Doctor and lonely people are perpetually drawn to each other. He makes friends with lonely people and will help them out of that state in acts of kindness both casual and elaborate. Both Trev and the hotel manager would have died whether the Doctor showed up or not as they were drawn into Villengard's scheme to hatch their top secret power source, but the Doctor gave them solace and purpose. Trev found a mission to help the Doctor save the world. The Doctor offers the dying hotel manager kindness in offering him remembrance in his last moments. Trev gets killed because The Doctor wasn't there to prevent it. The Doctor encourages Syliva Trench to pursue her love. Anita unwittingly and casually becomes the Doctor's most unusual companion by just hanging around with him for a year, living a perfectly normal life where their friendship eases their loneliness.

The Time Hotel staff seems to be full of lonely people who find purpose in being of service to the guests and give the hotel manager a life and a found family, and the Doctor recognizes this when he persuades them to hire Anita to make her life more colourful and fun and find her more friends. Joy finds purpose and redemption from her guilt by sacrificing herself to meld with the baby star and not only becomes a star forever in the sky that brings joy to the world at Christmas but also the star of Bethlehem that guided the Three Wise Men to Bethlehem in 0001 AD after her encounter with The Doctor. The Doctor inadvertently becomes the angel who oversaw the birth of Christ and all of Christmas. Both Anita and Joy recognize The Doctor's loneliness and encourage him not to be alone – but in the end, the Doctor can never be free of loneliness because he is always leaving or losing people. This is why he'll always have to keep making new friends.

The Doctor's loneliness has always been inherent in the series, but this is the deepest the series has dived into that aspect of his character, and it's the saddest Doctor Who Christmas special of them all. And Steven Moffat knows that.

Doctor Who: Joy to the World is streaming on Disney+ outside the UK.

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