‘Doctor Who: Joy to the World review:’ What a star
Spoilers follow for “Joy to the World.”
If there’s one thing Steven Moffatt loves to do Doctor Whois to find a monster buried in the area. He made statues, shadows, lost children and even the concept of peace some of the most terrifying in the game. Sadly, the mysterious extra door you often find in older hotel rooms isn’t a universal concern, but it’s still a rich seam in mine. That’s the inspiration for “Joy to the World,” Doctor Who‘s 2024 Christmas Special. Which is light, happy and a little messy, just like Christmas is meant to be, right?
When Doctor Who returned, the show weaved its way back into the UK cultural scene like never before. Part of that process was adding the show to the BBC One Christmas Day programme, making it a cultural touchstone around the world. For most of its shows after 2005, it broadcasts an episode near the Strictly Come Dancing again EastEnders’ festive specials. Think of the British equivalent of those events that everyone is watching all over TV like the Super Bowl or the Macy’s Day Parade, but on Christmas Day. Even if you don’t like any of the fare on offer, you are still expected to stay with the family and eat it.
With these specials, fame time, long run times and big budgets are as much burdens as they are benefits. The show must play to a much wider audience than usual, with diehard fans sitting elbow to elbow with elderly relatives filling every silence with gossip about their neighbor’s garden project. Therefore, the story needs to be a little looser, with less need for the audience to pay full attention to what is happening. And it needs to be the sad entertainment that is the BBC One Christmas Day schedule.
Normally, a festive special would be the province of one actor only but Russell T. Davies handed the reins to Steven Moffatt. Moffatt succeeded Davies as showrunner for the first time, which was put together Sherlock and is widely regarded as the best writer of the 21st century. With a pedigree as good as that, and having written “Boom” in Ncuti Gatwa’s first title-winning season, a lot is expected of him.
Moffatt is a writer of arch farce and has a firm grip on plot, so it’s no surprise that it opens in medias res. The Doctor provides room service to various people at different times including Edmund Hilary’s Everest camp and the Orient express before joining Joy in a sad London hotel room in 2024. After the credits, we return to the Doctor. arrives at the Time Hotel, which allows visitors to visit all of history. Don’t worry about causality or anything else The Sound of Thunder shenanigans, the Hotel is somehow designed to protect its guests from messing up the timeline.
The Doctor wants to steal the milk for his coffee from the hotel restaurant, but his eye is caught by something sinister: A man with a handcuffed bag is trying to search the room. The Doctor hires Trev, one of the crew, to keep an eye on him while he figures out what program is going on. As it turns out, the case makes sense again bad, jumping from one place to another host and managing each one in turn. Once it jumps to the next host, the last one is disintegrated.
Here is the Doctor in conflict with Njabulo, who suddenly storms off with his hands tied and guilty instead of the hotel manager. When the Doctor opens a case to try to find a solution, the case threatens to kill anyone it’s connected to unless they get a four-digit code. Who will provide the code? The Doctor, from his own future, takes Joy with him while leaving “our” Doctor stranded in 2024 outside the TARDIS. As the hotel door closes, the Doctor is angry with his future self, about why he lives alone and people always leave him. He is doubly annoyed as he usually doesn’t have to walk the “long way,” day after day.
So, the episode pauses to give us an extended sequence of the Doctor befriending Anita, the hotel manager. The Doctor gets a job as a hotel maid, and slowly lets his guard down, spending more time with Anita until they become a regular couple. It’s a sequence you won’t see in a regular episode, with snapshots of the Doctor and Anita’s life. He makes the microwave bigger inside, repaints Anita’s TARDIS car blue and they even sit and chat in the seats – an important visual due to the lack of seats in the TARDIS. But as the year ends and it’s time for the Doctor to return to his show, he says goodbye to Anita.
Returning to the time hotel, the Doctor suddenly enters the event of last year, sharing the code and taking Joy out of the new events. The doctor observes that the bag contains an embryonic form of an artificially created star that can provide a source of imaginary power to anyone who owns it. But unless you own the Hand of Omega, stars take a long time to grow, much longer than anyone can afford to wait and check their test. Unless, of course, you hijack a time hotel and take it back to the time of the dinosaurs, waiting for human history to begin to see if it works.
Joy, still suffering from guilt, heads to the dinosaur room at the hotel when the Doctor tries to interrupt her. In order to do that, he stirs up emotions strong enough to poison the connection between the case and its master before it destroys them. He tortures her, forcing her to reveal why she lives in a low-end London hotel. It turns out that she was saddened by the loss of her mother who died of COVID-19 in the ward alone and Joy was unable to say goodbye to her in person. Sadly, before the Doctor can deactivate the star seed, it is eaten by a (good looking) dinosaur, putting it out of his reach.
The Doctor and Joy return to the hotel and, 65 million years later, find the star is now ready to explode. Locked inside a stone building with a heavy stone door none of them move, and time flies. So, the Doctor, who prides himself on being “good with a rope,” steals a rope from Everest base camp, hangs it from the back of the Orient Express to remove the rock. terrible CGI when Gatwa is standing on the train. General Doctor Who: Now it can make convincing dinosaurs, but now it can’t make a convincing train.
This is where things lose their coherence, as Joy’s eyes light up with the power of possession, but by the time the Doctor returns, Joy has… eaten a star? Did you take it somehow? Did you make friends with it and get involved with it? He finds him standing on a cliff, where Njabulo says he will meet a star and take him to the heavens, where he will not harm anyone. At this point in my notes, I wrote “This shouldn’t be Bethlehem,” when the camera pans out to reveal that this is exactly where they are, complete with three camels parked outside the stable. Oy.
Joy reunites with her mother and the Doctor returns to travel, but not before he gets Anita a job managing the Time Hotel. We also get a sneak peek of Ruby Sunday, who will be returning to the show for its second proper season.
As I said above, you can’t judge “Joy to the World” on the merits of a typical piece as it works for many artists. But I don’t think we could call it the strongest episode of Steven Moffatt’s operation or the show’s various Christmas specials. Like all Disney-era episodes, it has a slightly disjointed quality where the ride drops and zips in all the wrong places. I’m on the sidelines for a long time when we see a “normal” year in the Doctor’s life, but the story it sets had to be strong to balance the slowness. It’s a fun enough way to pass an hour with a belly full of holiday turkey (or your preferred equivalent) with enough wit to make you think you’ve seen something serious. But I don’t think I’m going to go back and watch this one as often as I would, say, “The Christmas Attack.”
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