It’s Christmas time, and in good years that means another Doctor Who special. This year, The Doctor is flying companionless in “Joy to the World,” but still manages to make some meaningful connections.
The Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) lands in a London of the far future where the Time Hotel allows guests to celebrate Christmas across all of human history. Desperate and lonely, The Doctor latches onto a mysterious man with a briefcase as a distraction. This leads to a chance meeting with another lonely soul on Christmas, Joy (Nicola Coughlan), as the two try to outwit a sentient weapon using the Time Hotel to gestate a star.
This episode was written by former showrunner Steven Moffat, his second of the Disney Who era and arguably the same episode as the first. There’s a ticking time bomb, dead characters are resurrected in a computer matrix, the bad guys are the Villengard Corporation, and there’s even another daughter/parent reunion moment. Aside from the hotel and a dinosaur, “Joy to the World” is essentially “Boom: Christmas Edition.”
That doesn’t make it bad by any means. “Boom” is excellent, a tight adventure with high stakes that gives Gatwa’s Doctor lots of room to breathe and swagger around the place being clever. What makes “Joy to the World” the superior adventure is actually when the bomb is removed.
For about a quarter of the episode, The Doctor is taken out of the action and forced to spend a year in linear time working at a hotel until he can return to the action. He befriends a hotelier, Anita, and over the course of the year, The Doctor begins to examine how empty his nomadic life can be.
Steph de Whalley as Anita is the episode’s real MVP. From the moment time travel and aliens enter her life, she accepts it as only someone that works the night shift at a rundown hotel can. She and The Doctor build one of the warmest friendships seen in the show’s long history. Through him, Anita begins to see the world outside her hotel as worth exploring, while she teaches him the importance of regular connections.
It shows a lot of growth from Moffat’s older work, where The Doctor could often not stand staying in place for any length of time unless there was evil to thwart. Instead, The Doctor has to deal with what living in the Tardis actually means about him as a person. The fact that he has a spaceship with no chairs weighs on him, forcing him to wonder why he is so intent on pushing people away.
Disney Who has been one long exploration of The Doctor’s trauma and what he should do about it. The Fifteenth Doctor’s birth was supposed to separate him from the baggage of his predecessors, leaving it all behind with the old him as he ran off shiny and new. That’s how it started, sure, but Gatwa’s Doctor has spent the last season realizing that there are no fresh starts, not really. He is still the same person who has witnessed the same terrible things. Healing from that will take a lot more than a funky regeneration.
The plot of “Joy to the Word” is fine, and the continued buildup around Villengard has some intriguing possibilities for the future. Coughlan has a couple of amazing moments, but never really rises to the level of guest companion like Kylie Minogue or Claire Skinner did. The ending, including the surprise reveal of the last time setting, is almost too hopeful.
But it all makes for a wonderful backdrop for Gatwa to expand his Doctor some more. The time is well spent as he forges a new kind of Doctor, one that has honestly never really been done before in the show’s long history. While “Joy to the World” is firmly in the middle of the ranking of Christmas specials, as a character piece for The Doctor it is a guiding star.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2024.
