The following contains spoilers for “Joy to the World.”
If there’s one thing Steven Moffat wants to do with Doctor Who, it’s to find hidden monsters in everyday life. He crafted statues, shadows, lost children, and even the concept of silence into some of the show’s most terrifying villains. Sadly, the mysterious extra doors often found in old hotel rooms aren’t such a universal concern, but they’re still a rich thread of inquiry for him. That’s the inspiration for Doctor Who’s 2024 Christmas special, Joy to the World. What’s something that’s light, fun, and sprinkled with a little bit of what Christmas is supposed to be?
When Doctor Who returned, the show wove itself back into the British cultural firmament in a way it had never been before. As part of that process, we added the show to the BBC One Christmas Day schedule, making it a universal cultural touchstone. For most of its run from 2005 onwards, it aired episodes alongside festive specials of Strictly Come Dancing and EastEnders. Imagine the British equivalent of events like the Super Bowl or the Macy’s Day Parade, events where everyone gathers in front of the television, taking place on Christmas Day. If you don’t like any of the fare on offer, you’re still expected to sit down and eat with your family.
For these specials, prestige timeslots, longer runtimes, and larger budgets are both benefits and burdens. The show has to be broadcast to a much wider audience than usual, with devoted fans sitting elbow-to-elbow with elderly relatives and filling the silence with gossip about neighborhood garden projects. Therefore, the story needs to be a little looser, reducing the need for the audience to pay intensive attention to what’s going on. And it has to be an oasis of fun amidst the melodramatic drudgery that is the BBC One Christmas Day schedule.
Normally this festive special would be the showrunner’s sole responsibility, but Russell T. Davies has handed over the reins to Steven Moffat. Moffat succeeded Davies as the first showrunner, co-created Sherlock, and is widely regarded as the best Who writer of the 21st century. With such a perfect pedigree and already writing “Boom” for the first season of Ncuti Gatwa’s title road, expectations are high.
Bad Wolf/BBC Studios
Moffat is a writer of farce and has a strong grasp of structure, so it’s no wonder he opens his stories in Media Res. The Doctor provides room service to a variety of people in different time periods, including Edmund Hillary’s Everest base camp and the Orient Express, and encounters Joy in a dreary London hotel room in 2024. After the credits, we return to the Doctor. Upon arrival at Time Hotel, guests are transported to a vacation in history. You don’t have to worry about cause and effect or Sound of Thunder shenanigans. This hotel is somehow built so that guests don’t mess up the timeline.
The Doctor is about to steal coffee milk from a hotel buffet when something ominous catches his eye. A person with a briefcase with handcuff chains tries to check into the room. The Doctor hires one of his employees, Trev, to keep watch while he scouts ahead to discover what plans are afoot. As it turns out, the case is intelligent and evil, bouncing from host to host and possessing each one in turn. Jumping to the next host causes the last host to collapse.
Bad Wolf/BBC Studios
Here, the Doctor encounters Joy, and the joke ends up handcuffing him on the case instead of the hotel manager. When the Doctor opens a case to try to find a solution, the case threatens anyone involved with death unless they get a four-digit code. Who will provide the code? The Doctor emerges from his own future and takes Joy with him, leaving “our” Doctor trapped in 2024 without the TARDIS. As the hotel door closes, the Doctor rants to his future self about why he’s always alone and why people always leave him. He is doubly upset because he usually doesn’t have to make the “detour” every day.
So the episode basically stops and we get a long sequence where the Doctor befriends Anita, the hotel manager. The Doctor takes a job as a handyman at a hotel and gradually lets down his guard, spending more and more time with Anita until they become a platonic couple. This is a sequence you would never see in a regular episode, and it includes parts of the Doctor’s and Anita’s lives. He made the inside of the microwave bigger, repainted Anita’s car, the TARDIS, blue, and even had them sit in chairs and talk to each other. This key visual takes into consideration the fact that there are no chairs in the TARDIS. However, as the years pass and it’s time for the Doctor to return to his own show, he says goodbye to Anita.
Bad Wolf/BBC Studios
Back at the Time Hotel, the Doctor begins retelling what happened a year ago, shares the code, and takes Joy on a new adventure. The Doctor discovers that the briefcase contains the earliest form of an artificial star, providing its possessor with an unimaginable source of power. But unless you own the Hand of Omega, star development takes a long time, much longer than anyone can wait and test experiments. Unless, of course, you take over a time hotel and send it back to the age of dinosaurs, waiting for human history to start seeing if it works.
Joy, still obsessed with the case, heads to the hotel’s dinosaur room while the Doctor attempts to break his hold on her. To do so, he arouses strong enough emotions to poison the relationship between the incident and its organizer, before extinguishing the relationship between them. He bullies her into revealing why she is staying at a luxury hotel in London. Joy is grieving the death of her mother, who died in an isolation ward due to coronavirus infection, but it turns out that Joy was unable to say goodbye to her mother in person. Sadly, before the Doctor can deactivate the Starseed, it is eaten by a (glorious-looking) dinosaur and placed out of reach.
Bad Wolf/BBC Studios
The Doctor and Joy return to the hotel and discover that 65 million years later, the star is ready to explode. Trapped inside a stone building with a heavy stone door, neither of them can move, and time is running out. The doctor, who boasts that he is “good with ropes,” steals a rope from Everest’s base camp, hangs it on the back of the Orient Express, and transports the stone. Horrible CGI when Gatwa is standing on the train. Typical Doctor Who: You can now create convincing dinosaurs, but you can’t create convincing trains.
Things get a bit inconsistent here as Joy’s eyes flash with possessive energy, but by the time the Doctor returns, Joy has… eaten a star? Did you absorb it somehow? Have you made friends and strengthened your bond? He finds her standing on the edge of a cliff, where Joy says she will fuse with the star and take it to heaven, where it will not harm anyone. At this point I wrote in my notes, “This must not be Bethlehem,” and when the camera started rolling, that’s exactly where they were, three camels parked outside a stable. It was reflected. Hey.
Bad Wolf/BBC Studios
Joy is reunited with her mother, and the Doctor returns to travel, offering Anita a job managing the Time Hotel. We also get a little shot of Ruby Sunday returning to the show in an official second season.
As I mentioned at the beginning, Joy to the World serves multiple masters, so you can’t judge it by how good the regular episodes are. But I don’t think it’s the strongest episode of Steven Moffat’s work or the show’s various Christmas specials. Like all episodes from the Disney era, this one has a slightly disjointed quality, with the pacing slowing or moving quickly in the wrong places. I agree with the long digression about a “normal” year in the Doctor’s life, but the story should have been structured more tightly to compensate for the slowness. It’s quirky enough to make you feel like you’ve seen something quite profound, and it’s a fun enough way to spend an hour while filling your stomach with holiday turkey (or your favorite equivalent). But I don’t think I’ll keep coming back to see it like, say, The Christmas Invasion.
