Spoilers for Joy to the World follow.
If there's anything Steven Moffat loves to do Doctor Whois to find the monster buried in the ordinary. He turned statues, shadows, lost children, and even the idea of silence into the series' most terrifying villains. Unfortunately, the mysterious extra door often found in old hotel rooms doesn't cause such widespread concern, but it's still a rich supply for him. This is the inspiration for Joy to the World. Doctor WhoChristmas Special 2024. It's light, fun and a little bit scattered, just the way Christmas should be, right?
When Doctor Who Since its return, the show has re-emerged into UK cultural life in a way it never has before. Part of this process included the show being added to the BBC One Christmas Day programme, making it a universal cultural touchstone. For most of its run after 2005, it aired the episode next to Dancing under strict control And EastEnders' holiday promotions. 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 on offer, you should still sit with your family and consume them.
In the case of these special offers, the prestigious time slot, longer lead time and larger budget are not only advantages, but also burdens. The show appeals to a much wider audience than usual, with die-hard fans sitting shoulder to shoulder with elderly relatives filling every silence with gossip about their neighbor's gardening project. Therefore, the story needs to be a little looser, with less need for the audience to pay close attention to what's going on. And it should be an oasis of fun amidst the melodramatic routine that is the BBC One Christmas Day schedule.
Typically the showrunner would handle the holiday special, but Russell T. Davies handed the reins to Steven Moffatt. Moffatt succeeded Davis as showrunner for the first time and became co-creator Sherlock and is widely regarded as the best Who writer of the 21st century. With such an impeccable pedigree and having already written”Boom“Expectations are high for Ncuti Gatwa’s first season on the title circuit.
Moffat is a writer of arch-farms and has a keen eye for structure, so it's no surprise that we discover in media resolution. The Doctor offers room service to different people at different points in time, including Edmund Hilary's Everest Base Camp and the Orient Express, before bumping into Joy in a miserable London hotel room in 2024. After the credits we return to the Doctor. arriving at the Time Hotel, which allows guests to experience a holiday throughout history. Don't worry about cause and effect or anything else. Sound of thunder shenanigans, the hotel is somehow built to protect its guests from schedule disruptions.
The doctor wants to steal some milk for coffee from the hotel buffet, but his eye is caught by something sinister: a man with a briefcase on a chain of handcuffs is trying to break into the room. The Doctor hires Trev, one of the staff, to keep an eye on things while he scouts the area to see what plan might be going ahead. As it turned out, it was a reasonable thing And evil, jumping from master to master and taking possession of each of them in turn. As soon as it passes to the next owner, the latter disintegrates.
It is here that the Doctor runs into Joy, who ends up handcuffed to a suitcase instead of the hotel manager due to a prank. When the Doctor opens the case to try to find a solution, the case threatens to kill whoever it is connected to unless it receives the four-digit code. Who should provide the code? The Doctor emerges from his future, taking Joy with him, leaving “our” Doctor trapped in 2024 without the TARDIS. As the hotel door closes, the Doctor insults his future self by saying why he is always alone and people always leave him. He is doubly upset because he usually never has to travel the “long way,” day after day.
So the episode essentially ends to give us an extended scene in which the Doctor befriends Anita, the hotel manager. The Doctor takes a job as a handyman at a hotel and gradually lets his guard down, spending more time with Anita until they become a platonic couple. It's an episode you'd never see in a regular episode, with snippets 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 effect given the lack of chairs in the TARDIS. But after a year, when it's time for the Doctor to return to his show, he waves goodbye to Anita.
Returning to the time hotel, the Doctor recalls the events of a year ago, sharing the code and sending Joy off on new adventures. The Doctor finds out that the briefcase contains the embryonic form of an artificially created star, which will become a source of conceivable power to the one who owns it. But unless you have the Hand of Omega, it will take a long time for the stars to develop, much longer than anyone can wait and test their experiment. Unless, of course, you hijack the time hotel and send it back to the time of the dinosaurs, waiting for human history to start testing whether it works.
Joy, still obsessed with the case, heads to the dinosaur room in the hotel while the Doctor tries to break free of his hold over her. To do this, he evokes an emotion strong enough to poison the bond between the thing and its master before it destroys them. He taunts her into revealing why she was staying at a cheap London hotel. It turns out that she is grieving the loss of her mother, who died of Covid-19 in an isolation ward, and Joy was unable to say goodbye to her in person. Unfortunately, before the Doctor can deactivate the star seed, it is eaten by a (shiny-looking) dinosaur, putting him out of reach.
The Doctor and Joy return to the hotel to find, 65 million years later, that the star is about to explode. He is trapped inside a stone structure with a heavy stone door that neither of them can move, and time is running out. So the Doctor, who boasts that he is “good with a rope”, steals a rope from Everest Base Camp and hangs it from the back of the Orient Express to pull out the stone… It's an impressive and kinetic scene, only let down by the terrible CGI when Gatva is standing on the train. Typical Doctor Who: Now he can convincingly imitate dinosaurs, but he cannot convincingly imitate a train.
This is where things lose their coherence as Joy's eyes sparkle with the energy of possession, but by the time the Doctor returns, Joy has… eaten a star? Did you absorb it somehow? Made friends with him and became close to him? He finds her standing on the edge of a cliff, where Joy says she will merge with a star and take her to heaven, where she will not harm anyone. At this point in my notes I wrote “Don't let this be Bethlehem” as the camera pans out to show exactly where they are, along with three camels parked outside a stable. Oh.
Joy is reunited with her mother and the Doctor sets off on his journey again, but not before he gets Anita a job at the Time Hotel. We also have a sneak peek of Ruby Sunday, who will be returning to the show for season two.
As I said above, you can't judge “Joy to the World” on the merits of an ordinary episode, as it serves multiple masters. But I don't think we could call it the strongest episode of Steven Moffat's work or the series' various Christmas specials. Like all episodes from the Disney era, it's a bit disjointed, with the pacing sluggish and flickering in all the wrong places. I'm all for a long digression where we see a “normal” year in the Doctor's life, but the story surrounding it should have been more condensed to balance out the slowness. It's a fun enough way to spend an hour with a belly full of holiday turkey (or your favorite equivalent), yet sentimental enough to make you think you've seen something quite profound. But I don't think I'll be going back to watch this movie over and over again like, say, The Christmas Invasion.