Doctor Who - Joy To The World

The Joy Of Rex

Doctor Who -
Joy To The World
UK/USA 2024
Airdate: 25th December 2024

Warning: Some big spoilers here.

It’s nice having a Doctor Who Christmas Special to look forward to again. Now, admittedly, last year’s show which returned it to the Christmas Day slot was... well... a bit of a disaster and, as it turned out, kind of a harbinger of what was probably the worst series of Doctor Who in quite some time. However, it’s nice to be able to report that this year’s special, Joy To The World, was a pretty good return to form for the show. One can only hope that this signals a better season than the last one... although it was written by Steven Moffat so my expectations were that it would at least be interesting at any rate.

The plot involves an attempt to grow a star seed through various doors in a Time Hotel, which specialises in lodging its guests in different periods. So we have The Doctor and his companions visiting various places like the 1940s in London, the early 1960s on the Orient Express and they even at one point, almost get eaten by a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Of course, once the star seed is finished it will go off and burn the planet to cinders to create a new star but, hey ho, that’s what The Doctor is here to stop.

So we have Ncuti Gatwa back as the main man and the beautiful Nicola Coughlan as new companion Joy. Gatwa is given a script he can do a good job with (including a companion saving scene which, I suspect, is inspired heavily by the scene between Tom Baker and Elisabeth Sladen in the Fourth Doctor story Ark In Space, reviewed here) and Coughlan is pretty good as his short lived companion (yep, all I’m saying is that she ends her story in a similar way to Kylie Minogue in the 2007 Doctor Who Christmas Special Voyage Of The Damned).

Also very good in this episode is another companion who The Doctor spends a year with, named Anita, played by Stephanie de Whalley, who has really nice chemistry with the current incarnation and, all I’m saying is that they should maybe pick her up as a regular companion at some point. Some of the most moving scenes in this special involve her and The Doctor. And then there’s Joel Fry, who I really think a lot of as an actor anyway and who brings his particular comic timing to the story too.

There was some great writing involved as well. Moffat is maybe not taking things as seriously as some long term fans might want him to but, he has a lovely moment where, after a year of not cracking the password code to get Joy out of trouble, The Doctor merely remembers the code his future self told him it was, creating a nice temporal paradox. And then there’s the wonderful line from The Doctor... “Pardon my French but, what the French is going on!” Which was quite brilliant and he used the new ‘curse term’ French later on in the episode too. Along with yet another infuriating reference to Mavity. I mean, when the heck are they going to tidy up that loose end which dates back to the three David Tennant specials from last year?

My favourite moment, however, was a visual reference. Not only was there a costumer’s shop in the Time Hotel which evoked the name of Mr. Benn, but the costume in the shop was the red suit of armour which was from my favourite episode of Mr. Benn from when I was a kid. Nicely done sir.

On the negative side... because you knew I’d have some negative comments, right? Well I didn’t like it too much that the woman on the train in 1962, who turned out to be a lesbian (or must be bisexual right, since she shacks up with Sean Connery in Dr. No the same year)... was Sylvia Trench from the first two Bond films. But what's so wrong about this character appearing here is... the James Bond books and films are already established as fictional works in the WHONIVERSE... so how can she appear as a real character too?

Similarly, although it didn’t bother me too much, I suspect there might be a few noses bent out of shape with The Doctor witnessing the arrival of the three kings at Bethlehem at the end of the story. What did bother me was the fact that, even though they were the best scenes in the show, The Doctor waited around for a whole year from 2024 to 2025 to catch up to the Time Hotel again. Well, honestly, since there is now another incarnation of The Doctor on Earth at exactly the same point, why didn’t he just go and borrow David Tennant’s TARDIS for a little while? This is kind of a sloppy continuity error, methinks.

Still, I did quite enjoy Joy To The World and it’s certainly one of the best episodes Ncuti Gatwa has been in so, yeah, this was a nice treat for a Christmas evening and I am just keeping my fingers crossed that it won’t be the last Christmas special ever. I’m kinda expecting the show to get cancelled any month now unless someone comes to its rescue.