Spoilers follow for “Joy to the World.”
If there’s one thing Steven Moffatt likes to do with Doctor Whoit is to find a monster buried in the banal. He transformed statues, shadows, lost children, and even the idea of silence into some of the series’ most terrifying villains. Unfortunately, the mysterious extra door often found in older hotel rooms isn’t as universal a concern, but it’s still a rich vein to mine. This is the inspiration for “Joy to the World” Doctor WhoThe 2024 Christmas special from . Which is light, fun and a little scattered, kind of like Christmas is supposed to be, right?
When Doctor Who Returning, the show was reintegrated into the UK’s cultural firmament as it had never been before. Part of this process included adding the show to BBC One’s Christmas Day schedule, making it a universal cultural touchstone. For most of its run after 2005, it aired an episode alongside the Strictly Come Dance And EastEnders’ festive specialties. Imagine the British equivalent of those events where everyone gathers around the TV like the Super Bowl or the Macy’s Day Parade, but on Christmas Day. Even if you don’t like any of the dishes offered, you are still expected to sit down with the family and consume it.
With these specials, the prestigious time slot, longer runtime, and larger budget are as much burdens as benefits. The show must appeal to a much wider audience than usual, with die-hard fans sitting shoulder to shoulder with elderly parents filling every silence with gossip about their neighbor’s garden project. Therefore, the story needs to be a little looser, with the audience less needing to be fully attentive to what is happening. And it must be an oasis of pleasure in the melodramatic drudgery that is BBC One’s Christmas Day schedule.
Normally, the festive special would be the exclusive purview of the showrunner but Russell T. Davies has handed over the reins to Steven Moffatt. Moffatt took over from Davies as first-time showrunner, co-creating Sherlock and is widely considered the best Who writer of the 21st century. With a pedigree as impeccable as that, and having already written “Boom“For Ncuti Gatwa’s first season on his way to the title, expectations are high.
Moffatt is an arch joke writer and has a solid understanding of structure, so it’s no surprise that we open in the media. The Doctor provides room service to various people in different time periods, including Edmund Hilary’s Everest base camp and the Orient Express, before running into Joy in a miserable hotel room in London in 2024. After the credits, we return to the Doctor. upon arriving at the Time Hotel, which allows guests to vacation through history. Don’t worry about causality or anything A sound of thunder shenanigans, the hotel is somehow built to protect its guests from screwing up the timeline.
The Doctor seeks to steal milk for his coffee from the hotel buffet, but his eye is drawn to something sinister: a person carrying a briefcase with a chain of handcuffs attempts to check into a room. The Doctor recruits Trev, one of the employees, to keep watch while he explores the future to determine what plan might be afoot. It turns out that the matter is sensitive And evil, jumping from host to host and possessing each in turn. Once transmitted to the next host, the last one disintegrates.
It is here that the Doctor comes across Joy who, because of her detours, finds herself handcuffed to the briefcase in place of the hotel manager. When the Doctor opens the case to try to find a solution, the case threatens to kill anyone it is connected to unless they get a four-digit code. Who should provide the code? The Doctor, emerging from his own future, taking Joy with him while leaving “our” Doctor trapped in 2024 without the TARDIS. As the hotel door closes, the Doctor hurls insults at his future self, explaining why he is always alone and why people always leave him. He is doubly upset because he normally never needs to take a “long trip”, one day after another.
And so the episode basically stops to give us an extended sequence of the Doctor befriending Anita, the hotel manager. The Doctor gets a job as a handyman at the hotel and slowly lets his guard down, spending more time with Anita until they become a platonic couple. It’s a sequence you’d never see in a normal episode, with bits and pieces of the Doctor and Anita’s lives. He enlarges the microwave inside, repaints Anita’s TARDIS car blue and they even sit and talk to each other on chairs – a key visual given the lack of chairs on the TARDIS. But as the year passes and it’s time for the Doctor to return to his own show, he says goodbye to Anita.
Returning to the Time Hotel, the Doctor revisits the events of a year ago, sharing the code and taking Joy on new adventures. The Doctor discovers that the briefcase contains the embryonic form of an artificially created star which would offer an imaginable source of power to whoever possesses it. But unless you have the Hand of Omega, stars take a long time to develop, much longer than anyone could wait and test their experience. Unless, of course, you hijack a time hotel and send it back to the age of the dinosaurs, waiting for the beginning of human history to see if it works.
Joy, still possessed by the case, heads to the hotel’s dinosaur room as the Doctor attempts to break his hold on her. To do this, it provokes an emotion strong enough to poison the link between the case and its host before it erases them. He intimidates her, pushing her to reveal why she is staying in a low-end London hotel. It turns out she’s grieving the loss of her mother, who died of COVID-19 in an isolation ward and Joy didn’t get to say goodbye to her in person. Unfortunately, before the Doctor can deactivate the starseed, it is eaten by a (glowing-looking) dinosaur, putting it out of his reach.
The Doctor and Joy return to the hotel and, 65 million years later, discover that the star is now ready to explode. He’s been locked in a stone structure with a heavy stone door that neither of them can move, and time is running out. So the Doctor, who boasts of being “good with rope”, steals a rope from Everest base camp, hangs it from the back of the Orient Express to take the stone away. It’s an impressive, kinetic sequence that’s only let down by the terrible CGI when Gatwa is standing on the train. Typical Doctor Who: He can now create convincing dinosaurs, but he can no longer create a convincing train.
This is where things lose coherence, as Joy’s eyes glow with possessive energy, but by the time the Doctor returns, Joy has… eaten the star? Did you absorb it in any way? Did you become friends and bond with him? He finds her standing on the edge of a cliff, where Joy says she will merge with the star and take it to the sky, where it will harm no one. At this point in my notes I wrote “Don’t let it be Bethlehem”, when the camera pulls back to reveal that that’s exactly where they are, with three camels parked outside a stable. Oh.
Joy reunites with her mother and the Doctor begins traveling again, but not before finding Anita a job running the Time Hotel. We also have a quick photo of Ruby Sunday, who will return to the series for its second season proper.
As I said at the top, you can’t judge “Joy to the World” on the merits of a regular episode since it serves multiple masters. But I don’t think we can call it the strongest episode in Steven Moffatt’s oeuvre or the series’ various Christmas specials. Like all Disney-era episodes, it has a slightly inconsistent quality where the pacing sags and zips in all the wrong places. I’m all for the long aside where we see a “normal” year in the Doctor’s life, but the story that frames it should have been tighter to balance out the slowness. It’s a pretty fun way to spend an hour with a stomach full of holiday turkey (or your preferred equivalent) with enough sentimentality to make you think you’ve seen something pretty profound. But I don’t think I’ll come back and watch this one over and over again like I would, say, “The Christmas Invasion.”
