Episode Discussion | Doctor Who | Special: "Joy to the World"

The actor playing Trev did such a delightful heavy lift at the start. Wow.

So few lines, so relatable, what an immediate hook.

And gosh darn it, Villenue had better have such a huge commupance coming! The Daleks have given me decades of terror and heartbreak, but I just despise Villenue in a whole other way, for what they did to Trev!

The big location reveal was super obvious to me, but I still enjoyed it.

If

happened at all in the Doctor Who Universe, of course the Time Hotel would have a door there.

And of course it happened, in the Doctor Who Universe. The rules are pretty clear that anything and everything hard to believe in history is absolutely bound to turn up.

With that in mind, where and when else is a newborn star named Joy going to make their first appearance?

See, what I always liked the best about Doctor Who christmas episodes is when they manage to use the holiday traditions as a background for science fiction, which in itself is just a big idea way of talking about the human condition. When these specials really play well, they loop back and produce secular little narratives that join the speculative science and the human need for connection that can be at its most precarious during midwinter.

Spoilers for the episode ahead

Joy to the world(s?) had a lot of that between poor lonely Joy herself, the Doctor aching for companionship, the Time Hotel connecting people across time eras, and that cosmic nuclear football that seems to threaten it all.

Moffat can really pull at your heart strings when he wants, even with characters you've only known for minutes. Joy speaking forlornly to a fly in her depressing hotel room; eager to please concierge Trev, wanting so much to not let people down too much; and Anita from reception — in particular her bottle year with the Doctor was a significant parenthetical before he caught up with the main rush of narrative.

The Scooby-Doo conceit of running from door to unconnected door down a corridor holds up even under pressure of a holiday related trauma and time travel. The star seed, in all its Pulp fiction-y MacGuffin glory, isn't nearly as clever as the prefab conflict Villengard whipped up in Boom, but it's vaguely threatening enough to drive the story.

The climax is where they lost me, though. I was fully on board with Joy's loss of her mother, Trev infiltrating the star over the course of aeons, and the Doctor using the Orient Express to force a door open (a more convincing use of rope than Empire of death). And all of it coming together in Joy's ascension made perfect sense — until that reveal of the location.

I realise that this era of Who is more fantasy- and fairytale-prone than previous ones, but tying the ending into the actual f—king biblical nativity isn't cute, or topical, or even relevant. It's just pandering, and lower than I'd expect from a hardnosed atheist like Moffat. My entire family groaned.

All in all a very good special, bookending a beautiful sabbatical vignette in the midst of the convoluted action — all let down by tacked-on religious bullshit in the final minutes.

My initial reaction is that it was pretty good - not in the top tier of Christmas specials, but pretty good.

I would imagine that some people might not appreciate the lockdown stuff, but I don't think it was pushing any kind of agenda - just acknowledging that there were some tragic side-effects of that whole situation.

What really struck me was how well the episode fleshed out Joy, Anita, Trev with fairly limited screen time. Ironically, Joy was probably the least fleshed-out, but Nicola Coughlan played the part very well.

Surprisingly enough, the cuts for (much shorter) airtime worked quite well. Some parts of the plot were lost, and people were inexplicably saved from certain pickles to appear unharmed — but that was to be expected. I enjoyed the edit more than I expected. There were more exterior shots added than strictly necessary, and I guess they were often used to disguise cuts.

The reason to race through most of the serial, of course, was to get to the Time Lord trial and the Second Doctor's regeneration into the Third — canonically eliminating another ambiguity from the Whoniverse that had until now allowed for the Season 6B theory.

The trial had some fun, 21st century additions that I rather enjoyed — if you know you know — but the added regeneration sequence didn't just fill a gap where fans' imaginations had run creative for 55 years. It also gave us an absolutely atrocious CGI rendered closeup shot of "Jon Pertwee".

Is anybody happier and better off that we have this new end to War Games? I doubt anybody is more than indifferent to those dreary last minutes. And I'll definitely remember season 6B fonder.