Review: 'Doctor Who: Joy To The World'

Even if you're the biggest Doctor Who fan, the annual Christmas specials can be a jarring and unpredictable experience. Sometimes the stories are essentially stand-along Christmas-tinged tales that don't connect with the series events at large. But more often than not, the Christmas episodes perform the task of being bridges between seasons. The opportunity for producers of the show to readjust and reset the direction of the series based on how the previous season was received by viewers.

And based on the erratic execution of the previous season, Doctor Who could use a bit of a reset. I think it's fair to say last season - which featured the 17th Doctor, played by Ncuti Gatwa - never quite jelled for fans. The storylines lines often seemed lightweight and for all of his impressive acting skills, Ncuti Gatwa often seemed to be tearing frantically through every episode like a time traveling used car salesman. It's not always easy to place your finger on precisely why a new season or a new doctor doesn't quite work. But that is what it felt like last season.

Doctor Who: Joy To The World opens with the Doctor arriving at the Time Hotel, a place where guests can book rooms that allow them to go back in time without disrupting the timeline or causing any paradoxes. While there he discovers a mysterious briefcase that seems to be the center of a dangerous conspiracy. But don't spend too much time dwelling on that part of the story, because it's so obtuse and confusing you couldn't successfully diagram it out with the help of a wall-sized white board and a box of twenty differently-colored markers.

The real point of the episode is to give Ncuti Gatwa's Doctor the opportunity to slow down, to be thoughtful and sentimental in a way he hadn't managed to be at any point last season. He first meets Joy (Nicola Couglan), a lonely woman who willingly accepts her fate after reminding the Doctor that she was more than just her loneliness and pain.



But the high point of the episode is the relationship between The Doctor and Anita Benn (Steph De Whalley), the receptionist and perhaps only employee of the Sandringham Hotel. Set in the present day, The Doctor finds himself forced to stay there waiting for an entire year (the reason doesn't matter - trust me). But as a consequence, he learns to relax. To enjoy the passage of each day. He and Anita grow as close as two people can be without it becoming physical. He finds a friend and allows himself to  - for lack of a better term - be human.

The scenes between the two of them only take up perhaps ten minutes of the episode, but they might be my favorite moments of this Doctor's run. There is a fragility and lack of bluster that is charming and I am sorry that this version of the Doctor has been in such short supply over the past year.

Of course, since this is Doctor Who, the episode is also jammed with all sorts of fan service Easter Eggs and inside jokes. But none of those were as interesting as the moments in which The Doctor sat in his room and played board games with Anita or shared a drink on the fire escape while they watched the sunset. 

One of the things I always loved about science fiction was that at its best, it revealed as much about humanity as it did about technology and the future.

That's a lesson Doctor Who seems to have forgotten in recent years. And I hope that the best moments of this year's Christmas special are a reminder to everyone the show works best when it remembers that balance between humanity and science.

Doctor Who: Joy To The World is currently streaming on Disney+.