Doctor Who’s Christmas Special Has Its Cake and Eats It

Returning Doctor Who showrunner Russell T. Davies might have pioneered modern Doctor Who holiday specials—Christmassy monsters, high spectacle, an occasional amount of Kylie Minogue—but it’s arguable that it was his successor, Steven Moffat, that really nailed the balancing act of what a good Doctor Who Christmas story should be. The answer, paradoxically, is not really a great sci-fi story all that much—or at least, that’s not as important as a swath of earnest, almost cloying sentimentality about the romance of the season. This year’s offering, Moffat’s first Christmas script since 2017’s Twelfth Doctor send off “Twice Upon a Time,” mostly succeeds in that balancing act with an interestingly time-twisting Doctor Who adventure festooned with festive charm—one that really leans on the latter to help make up for a few missteps in the former.

“Joy to the World,” airing next week on Christmas Day, has a few parallels to Ncuti Gatwa’s full-fledged debut as the 15th Doctor in last year’s holiday episode, “The Church on Ruby Road,” in so much that it relies on an array of charming performances to try and mask when its story doesn’t quite cohesively come together. It trades the fantastical bent of creepy baby-snatching goblins for more traditional sci-fi aesthetics as the Doctor shacks up in a futuristic “Time Hotel” for the holidays, offering temporal gateways to Christmases across human history. It also leans heavy on that seasonal aesthetic too, with plenty of snow, tinsel, and trees, feeling much more of the season rather than simply being any old episode that happens to air near the end of December.

Intrigued by the mystery of a strange suitcase that seems to be fatally swapping between hosts at the hotel, it is in this festively timey-wimey scenario—and via the Time Hotel’s aforementioned gateways—that the Doctor crosses paths with the lonely Joy (Nicola Coughlan), as she checks into a run-down hotel in London during Christmas 2024. The mystery of why Joy becomes so important to the Doctor’s latest adventure is actually put aside for a good chunk of “Joy to the World” as it takes a sideways step into exploring the ramifications of the Time Hotels’ gateways, and the temporal paradoxes that come with them. It’s all perfectly Moffat-y, a blend of laughs, time-twisting story telling, and the almost mandatory melancholy that comes with his best outings as a writer, as the Doctor finds himself thrust into the life of another lonely woman along the way (Steph de Whalley’s Anita, perhaps secretly the breakout star of “Joy to the World”). It’s a killer Doctor Who story idea, one that also deftly touches on the Doctor’s own loneliness after parting ways with Ruby. It just so happens to be appropriately seasonally stuffed inside another Doctor Who episode that is… well, not quite given the time to breathe into something as interesting.

“Joy to the World” makes up for those structural shortcomings with Joy’s storyline by really allowing that element of the episode to be where it goes all out on the sentimentality of the festive season, with a climactic narrative high on heart-tugging emotional drama to make up for the fact that it’s playing a bit fast and loose with the logistical underpinnings, especially contrasted with the plot-within-a-plot the first half of the episode of is devoted to. For the most part it works, thanks to stellar performances from Gatwa and Coughlan, and will particularly strike a bittersweet chord for people going through Christmas without loved ones. But if you find yourself particularly immune to Doctor Who‘s sentimental charm offensives at this time of year, you might find the culmination of it all a little wanting—and wondering just how the episode might have been if it stayed with that initial plot-within-a-plot as its main idea.

But even if you don’t find yourself resonating with the emotion of it all, there’s still at the very least a good chunk of great Doctor Who to be found in “Joy to the World,” even if it’s not the ultimate focus of the episode. There’s enough here to satisfy either anyone looking for a great Doctor Who idea, or someone who just wants something big and Christmassy to swell their heart with seasonal spirit as they sit down with over the festive period—and at this point in Doctor Who‘s long history of holiday specials, that we can still get stories that manage to balance both is a welcome little gift under our collective trees.

Doctor Who returns to Disney+ around the world and on the BBC in the UK and Ireland on Christmas Day, December 25.

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