The best part of the Doctor Who Christmas special is a bittersweet paradox

doctor who Fans will receive a very special gift under the Christmas tree today with the arrival of “Joy to the World,” this year’s special Christmas episode. But they will receive an even better wrapped gift. inside it: because beyond the episode’s broad festive wrappings, this larger internal adventure has a side story that could stand on its own as a fantastic episode of WHO in their own rights.

About a third of the way through “Joy to the World” it takes a side step. After establishing the Hotel Time that the Doctor is staying at (a business of countless front doors currently sending guests to every Christmas in history), we are quickly led through a bunch of such doors as he follows a strange suitcase jumping between handcuffed, apparently vacant hosts. The Doctor and the briefcase’s current host, a Silurian hotel manager, find themselves passing through a door into Christmas 2024 in London, where they both meet a young woman called Joy in her run-down hotel room. After some chaos, the Doctor discovers that the suitcase is somehow disintegrating the hosts after jumping to a new one: the Silurian dies and Joy is trapped as the briefcase’s last bearer, causing her to sing ominous warnings about a starseed in flower. Before the Doctor can really understand what’s going on with the suitcase… the Doctor walks through the door.

This Doctor, from some point in the future, ignores his predecessor’s annoyance for not giving him any information on how to solve the mystery of the briefcase, as he begins to remove Joy from the room and leave “our” Doctor, forced to solve the things along the way. The door slams shut and we are left with the perspective of “our” Doctor, who realizes that he is now trapped in 2024, with no TARDIS and no way back. a whole year.

What follows is an extended sequence that brims with the potential to be a killer episode of doctor who in his own right. With no money or a place to stay, the Doctor has to offer his services to the hotel manager, Anita (Steph de Whalley, in a fantastic supporting role), doing odd jobs, renting out what was Joy’s room. The Doctor is working on trying to figure out the suitcase in his downtime, sure, but he’s still forced to sit moment by moment, in one place, and live a life he doesn’t normally have to experience.

this is not an idea doctor who not entirely familiar, of course. The first half of much of the Third Doctor’s existence was based on the premise that the Doctor was exiled on contemporary Earth and forced to fend for himself, but still regularly embarked on adventures in his capacity as UNIT’s scientific advisor. . The Fourteenth Doctor’s arc concludes with him being granted the grace to exist and live a life with Donna and her family, free from the need to be the Doctor. Steven Moffat in particular, who wrote “Joy to the World,” became fascinated with the idea during his tenure as showrunner; Episodes such as “The Lodger”, “The Power of Three” and even an earlier Christmas special, “The Husbands of River Song”, address the idea of ​​the Doctor, whether by choice or circumstance, momentarily giving up his life as a wanderer in the fourth dimension to live “normally”.

But unlike this sequence in “Joy to the World,” those past episodes only examine them in the abstract, the fact that the Doctor spends a disproportionate amount of time in one place, at one moment, largely in the background against the real reason for it. And that is, honestly, because doctor who is a show we all watch to see the Doctor traveling through time and space, fighting monsters and saving worlds from calamitous destruction. Having him live a normal human life is a rarity because, as the Doctor initially gets angry here, it’s a bit boring for a sci-fi action-adventure show.

And yet, for a good third of the episode (and arguably the best episode), we’re asked to sit with the Doctor as he lives this year, getting to know Anita better, knowing what it’s like to live. like thisbetter, to the point that when the time comes when his year is over and he has to say goodbye to his new friend, it is almost as heartbreaking as losing a teammate. There’s no big threat or mystery, the Doctor isn’t even counting down the clock in particular, even though he knows he’s booked into Joy’s room at the hotel for just a year, instead the entire sequence revolves around exploring the potential of this different lens. in the Doctor’s life and sense of being.

It’s also crucial that it’s a necessary healing period for this particular Doctor, making a friend and then parting ways with him in this way. Not simply because the last season of doctor who It really struggled with its domestic element to make the Doctor and Ruby feel like the friends the series constantly told us they were, but because it’s not with Joy, the special’s de facto “companion” with whom the Fifteenth Doctor processes his loneliness. after separating. with Ruby. It’s only with Anita, and it’s their connection and inspiration that pushes him to keep going after losing his first friend, one of the first people he made his mark on in this incarnation. Again, this is something that previous Christmas specials have also mentioned: “The Runaway Bride” and the Tenth Doctor’s feelings towards Rose, and “The Journey of the Damned” and, uh, the Tenth Doctor’s feelings towards Martha, but her final conclusion is reminders. that the Doctor needs someone to share adventures with.

For a moment, and at its brightest, “Joy to the World” asks both us and the Doctor if life itself is the adventure he needs to share with someone, rather than Time and Space.

Now you can look doctor who‘Joy to the World’ on Disney+ worldwide and on the BBC in the UK and Ireland.

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