The Best Part of Doctor Who‘s Christmas Special Is a Bittersweet Paradox

Doctor Who fans are getting 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’re getting an even better present wrapped within it: because beyond the broad festive wrappings of the episode, this bigger-on-the-inside adventure has a side story that could stand alone as a fantastic episode of Who in its own rights.

About a third of the way into its run time “Joy to the World” takes a sideways step. After setting up the Time Hotel the Doctor is staying at—a business of myriad gateways currently set to send guests to every Christmas in history—we’re quickly whisked through a bunch of those doorways as he follows a strange suitcase hopping between handcuffed, seemingly vacant hosts. The Doctor and the briefcase’s current host, a Silurian manager at the hotel, find themselves going through a door into Christmas 2024 in London, where they both meet a young woman named Joy in her run-down hotel room. Some chaos later, the Doctor discovers the suitcase is somehow disintegrating hosts after it hops to a new one: the Silurian dies and Joy is latched onto as the briefcase’s latest carrier, making her chant ominous warnings about a star seed blooming. Before the Doctor can get a real grasp of 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 at him not providing any information about how to solve the mystery of the briefcase, as he begins to whisk Joy out of the room and leave “our” Doctor, forced to figure things out the long way around. The door slams shut, and we stay on the perspective of “our” Doctor, who realizes that he’s now stuck in 2024 with no TARDIS and no way back for a whole year.

What follows is an extended sequence that is brimming with the potential to be a killer episode of Doctor Who in its own right. With no money or place to stay, the Doctor has to offer his services to the manager of the hotel, Anita (Steph de Whalley, in a genuinely fantastic supporting turn), doing odd jobs, renting out what was Joy’s room. The Doctor is working on trying to figure out the suitcase in his downtime, sure, but he’s still forced to sit moment to moment, in one place, and actually live out a life he usually doesn’t have to experience.

This is not an idea Doctor Who is entirely unfamiliar with, of course. The first half of much of the Third Doctor’s entire existence was built on the premise that the Doctor was exiled on contemporary Earth and forced to make do for himself, but he was still regularly going on adventures in his capacities as UNIT’s scientific adviser. The Fourteenth Doctor’s arc concludes with him being granted the grace to exist and live out a life with Donna and her family, freed from the need to be the Doctor. Steven Moffat in particular, who wrote “Joy to the World,” was fascinated with the idea throughout his tenure as showrunner; episodes like “The Lodger,” “The Power of Three,” and even a prior holiday special, “The Husbands of River Song,” all tackle the idea of the Doctor, either through choice or circumstance, momentarily giving up his life as a wanderer in the fourth dimension to live “normally.”

But in contrast to this sequence in “Joy to the World,” those past episodes only really examine them in abstract, the fact that the Doctor is spending a disproportionate amount of time in one place, in one moment, largely in the background against the actual reason for it. And that is, honestly, because Doctor Who is a show we all watch to see the Doctor traveling through time and space, fighting monsters, and saving worlds from calamitous destruction. Making him live a normal human life is a rarity because, as the Doctor initially bristles himself here, it’s just kind of a bit boring for a sci-fi action adventure show.

And yet, for a good third of the episode—and arguably the episode at its best—we are asked to sit with the Doctor as he lives out this year, getting to know Anita better, getting to know what it’s like to live like this, better, to the point that when the time comes that his year is up and he has to say good bye to his new friend, it’s almost as heartbreaking as losing a companion. There is no grand threat or mystery, the Doctor isn’t even particularly counting down the clock, even if he knows he has Joy’s room at the hotel booked for just a year, instead the whole sequence becomes about exploring the potential of this different lens into the Doctor’s life and sense of being.

Crucially too, it’s a necessary period of healing for this particular Doctor, to make a friend and then part ways with them in this way. Not simply because the last season of Doctor Who really struggled with its domestic element to make the Doctor and Ruby feel like the friends the series constantly told us they were, but because it’s not with Joy, the de facto “companion” of the special that the Fifteenth Doctor processes his loneliness after parting ways with Ruby. It’s only with Anita, and it’s her connection and inspiration that pushes him to move forward in the wake of losing his first friend, one of the first people he imprinted on in this incarnation. Again, this is something past holiday specials have touched on too—”The Runaway Bride” and the Tenth Doctor’s feelings over Rose, and “Voyage of the Damned” and the, uh, Tenth Doctor’s feelings over Martha—but their ultimate conclusion are reminders that the Doctor needs someone to share adventures with.

For a moment, and at is brightest, “Joy to the World” asks us and the Doctor alike if life itself is the adventure he needs to share with someone, rather than Time and Space.

You can now watch Doctor Who‘s “Joy to the World” on Disney+ around the world, and on the BBC in the UK and Ireland.

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