Posted in: BBC, Doctor Who, TV | Tagged: bbc, doctor who, jenna coleman, last christmas, opinion, peter capaldi, steven moffat

Doctor Who: Last Christmas Gifted Us Steven Moffat's Best Special

Doctor Who: Last Christmas is the other 20-minute compilation video the BBC released on their YouTube channel in the run-up to Christmas. This is a whole lot better than the new videos that are still trying to cram Flux down our throats when we're all trying to forget it ever happened. "Last Christmas" is Moffat's first Christmas special featuring the Twelfth Doctor (Peter Capaldi) and might be his best.

Doctor Who: Last Christmas is the other 20-minute compilation video the BBC released on their YouTube channel in the run-up to Christmas. That's better than the new clip videos still trying to cram Flux down our throats when we're all trying to forget it ever happened. "Last Christmas" is Moffat's first Christmas special featuring the Twelfth Doctor (Peter Capaldi) and might be his best. The video does a pretty good job of showing the highlights of the Christmas special. It came after the deeply flawed first season featuring Capaldi's Twelfth Doctor, which felt like a series of experiments in just how prickly and unlikable Moffat could get away with for a new Doctor. It also featured an attempt at giving companion Clara (Jenna Coleman) a love story with her fellow schoolteacher Danny Pink (Samuel Anderson) that felt like a plot construction than genuine emotion despite Coleman and Anderson's efforts. "Last Christmas" works because it's a Doctor Who story that integrates Science Fiction and Christmas into the story as a coherent whole.

Sticking with the magpie nature of Doctor Who, Moffat liberally lifts from Inception, John Carpenter's The Thing, and Alien with a bit of Miracle on 34th Street thrown in. It's a classic Doctor Who alien invasion story with a Christmas twist as a way to make Santa a major character in it. The dream crabs are a play on the face-huggers from Alien but with a creepier twist, and the Russian Doll dream-within-a-dream twists let Moffat play with his puzzle box plotting. The dreamers find themselves a group of scientists at a remote station up in the North Pole is lifted from The Thing. Moffat plays with the notion that the dreamers might not all be from the same time period, and their perceptions of themselves in dreams might be different from what they are in the waking world. The story also suggests there's a force in the universe more powerful than The Doctor: Santa Claus. Nick Frost is the story's secret weapon as a sardonic, slightly irritated Santa who acts like a cop trying to herd a bunch of cats.

This was originally going to be Coleman's last episode, but she changed her mind and told Moffat she wanted to stay for one more season. This prompted him to rewrite the original ending where the Doctor would visit an elderly Clara for one final goodbye. Instead, Moffat uses the change to the story's advantage through a bit of Santa ex Machina for one more twist to restore the Doctor-Clara relationship and one final twist that Santa might be real after all. This is a Christmas Special without a regeneration scene where all the elements worked together and without a story that catered hard to kids like "A Christmas Carol" or "The Doctor, The Widow, and The Wardrobe". It had the most surprising and funny twists, and the emotional moments felt unforced and earned. Doctor Who Christmas specials felt like special occasions. Let's hope Russell T. Davies brings them back.

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