If you haven’t seen the Doctor Who 2024 Christmas special, “Joy to the World,” hop back in the TARDIS and give it a watch before you read this review; it spoils the episode early and often!
Fortunately for Doctor Who fans, it doesn’t take nearly as long for Russell T. Davies and writer Steven Moffat to cook up a Christmas special as it takes for the Star of Bethlehem to grow inside of a deadly corporate suitcase. It has only been six months since we crawled out from under the pile of Easter eggs in the Season 1 Finale, Empire of Death, and now we are back, caught in a flurry of pages from Steven Moffat’s notebook.
This is both good news and bad news.
It’s good news in the sense that the 2024 Christmas special, “Joy to the World,” is packed full of fun nods and energizing character dynamics. Not only do we get big swings like the Time Hotel, a dinosaur, and the original Bond girl materializing in the Whoniverse (the fictional character, mind you, not the historical actress) – but we also get a sequence of The Doctor bemoaning his own inability to make real human connections and an episode-within-the-episode of The Doctor building a genuine bond with a hotel manager. Of course, she is going to require some therapy from the one and only Martha Jones after imprinting on The Doctor…but more on that later.
It’s bad news in the sense that the latest Davies iteration of the show seems obsessed with throwing everything and the kitchen sink at us at any given moment; this overflowing basket of Easter eggs and teasers gets so dense at times that it suffocates the emotional beats that could otherwise make the series stand out from a broader market that is already flooded with spectacle. Unfortunately, this episode doesn’t even give its talented guest star, the dynamic Nicola Coughlan (Bridgerton), much time to shine as Joy Almondo. She pops in with fun energy and eventually gets a chance to showcase her depth, but mostly, she is zombified by an evil briefcase. While Coughlan lands her big emotional moment when she is psychologically broken by The Doctor in order to weaken the influence of the sinister briefcase, the script requires her to jump straight back into the cultish collective unconscious of a corporate experiment without making it abundantly clear whether or not Joy is in control of her own mind.
Despite the episode being a bit of a mixed bag, the most important takeaway is that, however you feel about the current stewardship and direction of Doctor Who, Ncuti Gatwa is a star. In this episode alone, he gives us everything from dashing, cocky detective to romcom star; he even shows that he is capable of the harsh emotional detachment that The Doctor is often forced to deploy when he unpacks Joy’s psyche with ruthless efficiency.
In the end, this episode plays more like an outline for a compelling season of television than a cohesive episode; Moffat’s Time Hotel is a fun idea that allows Whovians who have seen it all the chance to experience time travel with new rules; but the concept is sharing too much screen time with other goals. Similarly, the Villengard Corporation (last seen in Boom) returns as a cold, desensitized force that trades human lives like currency, but before we even begin to understand their plans to create a new sun at the cost of every life on planet Earth, we are left to consider that the corporate plot was, maybe a good thing, actually? Not only does the episode imply that the beings who were absorbed into the star seed managed to hijack the technology, but the closing shot suggests that this corporate creation is literally the biblical Star of Bethlehem; this is a pretty big shift to execute with so little explanation and insight. We needed more time to contextualize these characters, as well as Villengard’s intentions, over the course of a season to better understand how we should feel about this final solution.
It would have been nice to spread our time with Coughlan’s Joy Almondo over a longer time frame, spend a week on Everest with Sir Edmund Hillary, and hang with Bond girl Sylvia Trench (portrayed by newcomer Niamh Marie Smith in this episode) to better understand this epic IP crossover. Heck, even the subtle nod to Moffat’s Holmesian detectives in the Manchester sequence could have heralded a return for Doctor Who’s favorite crime-solving couple: Madame Vastra and Jenny. Yet another underserved piece of this episode was the eager-to-please Trev Simpkins (Joel Fry, Our Flag Means Death). His instant chemistry with The Doctor came and went in a matter of moments. While each moment worked, they were so fleeting that they felt like another tease of something that could have been great.
Ultimately, the best part of the special was the episode-within-an-episode in which The Doctor has to wait patiently for a year to deliver a bootstrap paradox code to his past self and save Joy’s life. We almost never see The Doctor slow down, but for once, he gets a whole year to stay in place and develop a friendship with hotel manager Anita Benn (Stephanie de Whalley, 50 Kisses). What starts as a relationship of necessity evolves into a story of fellowship as the pair strike up a meaningful friendship that includes tropical beverages and weekly game nights. It is executed beautifully, but like most of the things this episode got right, it gets cut short. Anita clearly falls for The Doctor, and does everything short of dropping an anvil on his head to let him know how she feels.
Unfortunately, our most human Doctor yet falls into egotistical Tenth Doctor territory and fails to show any understanding whatsoever of the impact he made on Anita. He leaves her with a few kind words and a wave of disappointment. It is genuinely shocking to see this Doctor lead someone on the way the Tenth Doctor led Martha Jones on for so, so long. If this aside could have been an entire low-budget episode with nothing but human stakes, it could have been incredible television. Imagine watching The Doctor reckon with the complexity of this relationship. Imagine watching him take responsibility for giving Anita the wrong idea about the nature of their relationship. We could have learned so much more about The Doctor. Instead, we only flash back to Anita briefly, and we are supposed to believe that a job offer to work at the Time Hotel was what she needed from The Doctor all along.
Boo! Hiss! Bah-Humbug! We came so close to tasting greatness…
But hey, this is the holiday season. It’s time to put aside all Grinchiness and embrace the Whovians by our sides. Overall, this episode was a lot of fun and let us feel our feelings. Joy managing to be there for her dying mother in the form of a sentient star was a beautiful idea and we got to enjoy a collection of scenes that were rich with human connection and emotion. In the end, what more could you want from a Christmas special?
Fow now, keep holding your fellow Whovians close while we wait for season two. Since you’re already snuggled up together, you might as well enjoy the kickass teaser trailer for season two featuring our first footage of Varada Sethu as an official member of Team TARDIS! We’ll see you in the new season!
