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Doctor Who fans get an extra special treat under the Christmas tree today with the arrival of “Joy to the World” on this year’s day. holiday special episode. But they get an even better gift wrapped inside it: because beyond the festive scope of the episode, this larger adventure inside has a side story that could stand alone as a fantastic episode of WHO in their rights.
About a third of the way into its run time “Joy to the World” takes a side step. After setting up the Time Hotel the Doctor finds himself in – a myriad-door affair currently arranged to send guests to every Christmas in history – we’re quickly whisked through a bunch of those doors as he follows a strange suitcase bouncing between hands handcuffed, apparently. vacant guests. The Doctor and the briefcase’s current host, a Silurian hotel manager, find themselves stepping through a door in Christmas 2024 London, where they both meet a young woman named Joy in her shabby hotel room. . After some chaos, the Doctor discovers that the suitcase is somehow disintegrating the host after jumping to a new one: the Silurian dies and Joy is hooked as the last carrier of the suitcase, making his song threatening warnings about to the bloom of a star star. Before the doctor can really figure out what’s going on with the suitcase…the doctor walks through the door.
This doctor, from a certain point in the future, removes the annoyance of his predecessor by not providing information on how to solve the mystery of the briefcase, as he begins to take Joy out of the room and leave “our” doctor , forced to understand things in the long run. The door closes, and we stay on the perspective of “our” Doctor, who realizes that he is now locked in 2024 without a TARDIS and no return to a whole year.
What follows is an extended sequence that is full of the potential to be a killer episode Doctor Who in his right. With no money or place to stay, the doctor has to offer his services to the hotel manager, Anita (Steph de Whalley, in a truly fantastic supporting turn), doing chores, renting what was Joy’s room. The doctor works to try to understand the suitcase in his downtime, of course, but he is always forced to sit moment by moment, in one place, and actually live a life that does not need experiences.
This is not an idea Doctor Who is completely unknown, of course. The first half of most of the Third Doctor’s existence was built on the premise that the Doctor was exiled on contemporary Earth and forced to fend for himself, but was still regularly adventuring in the his capacity as a scientific adviser to UNITA. The Fourteenth Doctor’s arc concludes with him being granted the grace to exist and live 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 position as showrunner; episodes like “The Lodger,” “The Power of Three,” and even an earlier holiday special, “The Husbands of River Song,” all tackle the idea of the Doctor, either by 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 examine them in the abstract, the fact that the Doctor spends a disproportionate amount of time in one place, in one moment, largely in the background against the real reason for that. And that is, honestly, why Doctor Who is a show we all watch to see the Doctor travel through time and space, fight monsters, and save worlds from calamitous destruction. Having him live a normal human life is a rarity because, as the Doctor initially flaunts here, it’s just a bit boring for a sci-fi adventure show.
However, for a good third of the episode – and without a doubt the episode at its best – we are asked to sit with the Doctor as he lives this year, to know Anita better, to know what it is to live. like thisbetter, to the point that when the time comes that his year is over and he has to say goodbye to his new friend, it is almost as heartbreaking as losing a partner. There is no great threat or mystery, the doctor is not even particularly counting the clock, although he knows that he has Joy’s room in the hotel reserved for only one year, instead the whole sequence becomes to explore the potential of this different lens. in the life of the doctor and the sense of being.
Crucially also, it is a necessary period of healing for this particular Doctor, to make a friend and then part with them in this way. Not only 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 why not with Joy, the de facto “companion” of the special that the Fifteenth Doctor processes the his loneliness after Ruby’s separation. He is alone with Anita, and it is their connection and inspiration that pushes him to move forward after the loss of his first friend, one of the first people he impressed in this incarnation. Again, this is something past holiday specials have touched on as well — “The Runaway Bride” and the Tenth Doctor’s feelings about Rose, and “Voyage of the Damned” and the, uh, feelings of the tenth doctor about Martha – but his final conclusion are memories. that the Doctor needs someone to share adventures with.
For a moment, and the brightest, “Joy to the World” asks us and the Doctor if life itself is the adventure that needs to be shared with someone, rather than Time and Space.
You can watch it now Doctor Who“Joy to the World” on Disney+ worldwide, and on the BBC in the United Kingdom and Ireland.
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