When Doctor Who Christmas specials first began with the 2005 revival, they often existed lateral to main storylines bar the occasional outlier (such as The Time of the Doctor). With The Church on Ruby Road last year, though, Ncuti Gatwa’s tenure as The Doctor began with an episode that sparked off the season ahead, showcasing a vibrant vitality to its new cast and igniting new mysteries to be explored. Gatwa’s second festive special, Joy To The World, falls back into the story-lateral festive fare that made up Russell T Davies’s rebooted tenure. However, this manifests in regression as the story follows similar beats to Davies’ prior specials, making the episode feel hackneyed and empty, scuppering its more enticing musings on festive loneliness.
Joy To The World cold-opens with the Doctor appearing in multiple timelines, entering through doors that are always locked: in Manchester during World War Two; Mount Everest during the Raleigh expedition; on board the Orient Express; and the Sandringham Hotel in 2024, where Joy (Nicola Coughlan) has checked in to a single room. Bursting through the door is a Silurian, a green-skinned reptilian species from Doctor Who episodes past, followed quickly by the Doctor. After the credits, we watch the Doctor arrive at the Time Hotel in 4202, a luxurious hotel where residents can take mini breaks at “history’s greatest hits.” Dressed in pyjamas, he fills two mugs with tea, a habit he’s yet to break since previous companion Ruby left.
Noticing a strange man with a briefcase, he hops back into the TARDIS to put on the stunning brown leather coat that has become the signature of the character’s costume. After a brief interaction with hotel staff member and comic relief Trev (Joel Fry), the doctor begins searching for the man by testing doors, pretending to be room service with a toastie and pumpkin latte. Finally emerging back at the start, with Joy in a hotel room, we see that the sinister briefcase that caught the Doctor’s eyes had exchanged hands and is now attached to the Silurian, who vocalises the same phrase used by previous briefcase attendees: “The star seed will bloom and the flesh will rise”. It’s not long before the briefcase detaches from the Silurian hotel manager (Jonathan Aris) – a death scene between him and The Doctor allows Gatwa the opportunity to showcase the deep sadness felt by the thousands of years experienced as the Time Lord – and finds a new host in Joy.
Attempting to detach the mysterious briefcase from Joy is where we arrive at what is the centrepiece of the episode. In what is quite familiarly timely-wimey for the show, as the Doctor attempts to defuse the briefcase a timer counts down and he requires a code. Thus a version of Gatwa – from a future version of the time hotel – arrives to reveal the code, leaving the past Doctor to become the future Doctor the long way round. This is a ‘bootstrap paradox’ as the show states but is more commonly exemplified by the “What comes first, the chicken or the egg?” adage. This is an indirect motif of episode scribe and former showrunner Stephen Moffat, whose stories jumped sharks and plots ran round in silly circles to the point this writer almost called it quits with the show.
It’s lucky that this frustration resides on the periphery of the Doctor’s journey between the temporal points of the bootstrap paradox. Realising 2025 is when the portal to the time hotel will open again, the Doctor stays for a year in the more basic London hotel with manager Anita (Steph de Whalley). The Doctor is hired as live-in help to fix light switches and amusingly serve residents before they can order. Over the course of 12 months, a sweet montage sequence where Anita and the Doctor bond plays as fun parallel to a Moffat-era episode ‘The power of three‘ where the doctor was trapped and bored in the ruminations of everyday life. The Doctor that spends a year in the hotel is instead embracing the little joys of life and companionship. Joy to the World is an episode that consistently highlights the loneliness felt by individuals at Christmas time.
This theme runs red hot throughout the episode as the scripts examines the Doctor’s loneliness at no longer flying the universe with Ruby, Joy’s loneliness from her departed mother at the hands of Covid-19, which is flanked alongside the constriction of lockdown loneliness in which families were torn apart, especially those who died. The reveal of this is a heart-tugger. Coughlan is underused in the episode as a whole – the second act in the hotel takes up a lot of runtime – but the ferocity she has in this moment really showcases her ability as an actress. It’s a shame that her outburst, in which she describes ‘partygate’ (where UK Conservative MPs partied through lockdown), never actually names Boris Johnson or other conservative MPs that have since faced criminal charges because the episode, in time, will soon require doing homework to explain the outburst.
Inside the briefcase is something called a star seed, which we soon find out will explode at some point so evil megalomaniac weapons company Villengard can harvest the energy created. However, this soon pivots within a third act that is wholly different to the antagonistic acts that precede it. Not only is the switch tonally uncouth – turning into a flaccid, saccharine message of Christmas hope – it occurs in a third act that also resembles that of Voyage of the Damned, in which a temporary protagonist instructs the Doctor to find a new companion to fill in a lonely life. With Davies’ writing regurgitating old scripts, one has to wonder if the show already requires a change of guard.
To chirp the same record, Gatwa remains extraordinary casting but much like when Peter Capaldi or Jodie Whittaker were the Doctor, it is the scripts that are letting the team down. Joy to the World wastes so much in favour of watered-down sci-fi, in an episode that lacks something tangible to root against because the creators’ strings are being pulled like puppets. This is an episode that wants to fight the structures of power, but said power controls the creation of the show. One can’t help but feel the likes of Joy to the World, a discombobulating Christmas special that can only pay lip service to its rehashed ideas, is a sign of worse things to come…
Doctor Who – Joy to the World is now streaming on Disney+.
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