The best part of the Doctor Who Christmas Special is a bittersweet paradox

Doctor Who fans get an extra special treat under the Christmas tree today with the arrival of ‘Joy to the World’, this year’s special holiday episode. But they get an even better wrapped gift within the this: because beyond the episode’s broad holiday wrappers, this larger domestic adventure has a side story that could stand alone as a fantasy episode of WHO in its own rights.

About a third of the running time of “Joy to the World” takes a step to the side. After setting up the Time Hotel where the Doctor is staying – a business of countless gateways currently set to send guests every Christmas in history – we’re quickly whisked through a bunch of these doors as he follows a strange suitcase bouncing between seemingly handcuffed free hosts. The Doctor and the briefcase’s current host, the hotel’s Silurian manager, find themselves walking through the door to Christmas 2024. in London, where they both meet a young woman named Joy in her dilapidated hotel room. Some mayhem later, the Doctor discovers that the briefcase is somehow disintegrating the hosts after transferring to a new one: the Silurian dies and Joy is strapped in as the briefcase’s newest bearer, prompting her to sing ominous warnings of a starseed blossoming . Before the doctor can figure out what’s going on with the suitcase… the doctor walks through the door.

This Doctor, from some point in the future, brushes off his predecessor’s annoyance that he doesn’t provide any information on how to solve the briefcase mystery as he begins to usher Joy out of the room and leave “our” Doctor forced to figure things out the long way. The door slams shut and we’re left in the perspective of “our” Doctor, who realizes he’s now stuck in 2024. no TARDIS and no way back for a whole year.

What follows is an extended sequence that is packed with the potential to be a killer episode Doctor Who by itself. With no money or a place to stay, the doctor must offer his services to the hotel manager, Anita (Steph de Wally, in a truly fantastic supporting role), doing odd jobs renting out anything. it was Joy’s room. The Doctor tries to figure out the suitcase during downtime, sure, but he’s still forced to sit moment by moment, in one place, and actually live a life he shouldn’t normally be living.

This is not an idea Doctor Who is a complete stranger, of course. The first half of most of the Third Doctor’s entire existence was built on the premise that the Doctor was exiled to modern-day Earth and forced to fend for himself, but he still regularly ventured out in his capacity as UNIT’s scientific advisor . The Fourteenth Doctor’s arc ends with him being given the grace to exist and live a life with Donna and her family free of the need to be the Doctor. In particular, Steven Moffat, who wrote Joy to the World, was fascinated by the idea throughout his tenure as showrunner; episodes like “The Lodger,” “The Power of Three,” and even a previous holiday special, “The Husbands of River Song,” all dealt with the idea of ​​the Doctor, either by choice or circumstance, momentarily giving up his life as a vagabond in the fourth dimension to live “normally”.

But unlike that sequence in Joy to the World , these past episodes really look at them in the abstract, the fact that the Doctor spends a disproportionate amount of time in one place, at one time, largely in the background to the actual reason for it . And that is, frankly, because Doctor Who is a show we all watch to see the Doctor travel through time and space, fight monsters and save worlds from catastrophic destruction. Getting him to live a normal human life is rare because, as the Doctor initially bristles here, it’s just a bit boring for a sci-fi action adventure show.

And yet, for a third of the episode – and perhaps the episode at its best – we’re asked to sit with the Doctor as he lives this year, getting to know Anita better, getting to know what it’s like to live like thisbetter, so much so that when the time comes when his year is up and he has to say goodbye to his new friend, it’s almost as heartbreaking as losing a companion. There’s no great threat or mystery, the Doctor isn’t even particularly counting down the clock, even if he knows he only has Joy’s hotel room booked for a year, instead the whole series becomes an exploration of the potential of this different lens on life and the sense of being to the doctor.

Most importantly, it’s also a necessary healing period for this particular Doctor to find a friend and then break up with him like this. Not just because the last season of Doctor Who I really struggled with his home element to make the Doctor and Ruby feel like the friends the series has consistently told us they are, but since it’s not with Joy, the de facto “companion” of the special, that the Fifteenth Doctor works through his loneliness after breaking up with Ruby. It’s only with Anita, and her connection and inspiration is what pushes him forward after the loss of his first friend, one of the first people he left a mark on in this incarnation. Again, it’s something that past holiday specials have also touched on – The Runaway Bride and the Tenth Doctor’s feelings for Rose and Voyage of the Damned and, uh, the Tenth Doctor’s feelings for Martha – but their ultimate conclusion are reminders that the Doctor he needs someone to share his adventures with.

For a moment, and most vividly, Joy to the World asks both us and the Doctor if life itself is the adventure to share with someone, rather than time and space.

You can now watch Doctor Who“Joy to the World” on Disney+ worldwide and on the BBC in the UK and Ireland.

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