Doctor Who: Joy to the World

Ham and cheese toastie and a pumpkin Latte?

Doctor Who delivers the best, most perfect, most lovely Doctor Who story of all time.

It lasts for slightly under nine minutes and is awkwardly shoehorned into the middle of a relatively enjoyable, albeit deeply flawed Doctor Who Christmas episode.

I need to beg your indulgence for the length on this one. Turns out I had a lot to say about it.

There's a long and proud history of the Doctor Who short story/minisode, whether they were in written form or full cast productions. Now that I think about it, the history dates all the way back to the first Christmas Annual, sold at Christmas 1965. So, I suppose it's at least arguably appropriate that the series perfected the short form story for Christmas 2024.

We need to talk about Anita. That's what I'm getting at. But why don't we discuss the rest of the episode first and circle back around to the Anita section at the end, so we can end on a high note. Call it a Christmas present to ourselves.

The Time Hotel is, on its own, a nifty concept. The idea of future people spending holiday time at various hotels in the past is a fun thought. I mean, the possibility of drunken future tourists accidentally causing temporal pollution and destroying all of time is insanely high, but I'm going to assume the hotel staff has a system for that. And this being a Christmas episode one expects to give a little more latitude on the hard sci-fi implications of things. Although we do have to acknowledge that it's not a million miles away from the same basic premise in 'The Girl in the Fireplace.'

The character work across the board is exceptional, with even the unnamed Silurian hotel manager getting a pleasantly sketched out inner life of his own, outside of what's necessary for this story. Particular praise has to go to Joel Fry's Trev Simpkins who is a never-ending delight throughout this entire episode. The fact that his dying words are 'Oh no, I've gone and let him down,' only for him to be able to redeem himself via having had his consciousness uploaded to the computer system that's causing the problem is a lovely character arc. Although we do have to acknowledge that it's not a million miles away from the same basic premise in 'Forest of the Dead.'

It's at this moment that those of you with solid pattern recognition skills might begin to suspect what one of my criticisms of the episode is going to be.

In fact, there's really only one character that isn't served particularly well in the script, and that's the titular Joy herself. This is for a couple of reasons, but before digging into them I do want to give an enormous amount of credit to the one scene that actually did give her proper character work to dig into. I'm referring, of course, to the sequence where the Doctor makes her angry enough to recount how she had to say goodbye to her dying mother over an iPad due to COVID protocols while the upper crust got to ignore the protocols altogether and have parties.

That scene is amazing, and Nicola Coughlan completely nails the entire thing. The Doctor isn't wrong when he describes her smile as the lid on a boiling pot and she makes that metaphor viscerally real. Excellent work. There are just two problems with it. Everything that came before, and everything that comes after. Neither of which are in any way Nicola Coughlan's fault, I want to make clear.

Before that scene, we haven't really had a chance to get to know Joy at all. We're introduced to her in her sad little hotel room, where she's interrupted by the main plot of the episode popping by for a visit, and other than a few completely justified observations about mansplaining and getting talked over, that's it. She gets the deadly plot mystery of the week locked to her wrist and immediately escorted out of the storyline for a bit. Once we finally get back to her, we get a lot of good information and character work, but we no longer really care about Joy by then because we just watched the best Doctor and one-shot companion mini-episode ever starring the Doctor and Anita, and Joy is just never going to be able to compete with that.

After her amazing scene about losing her mum, Joy faces an entirely different problem as a character. The problem being that she's the face and voice of 'what the bad guys' star seed is supposed to be doing and how exactly it's going to do that. And the episode can't make up its mind about either of those things. They keep moving the goalposts every thirty to forty-five seconds as regards how any of it is supposed to work.

First, it's a seed of a star that just needs a really long time to gestate before it can explode into the starry self it was always destined to be. In order to make that happen, the Villengard Corp plans to put it in a Time Hotel room way, way, way back in pre-history, then nip a few rooms down to the point in time when it explodes into a star. Ok, that's fine enough. I don't get how making a new star translates into 'having infinite energy,' nor do I understand why they couldn't just use a star that already exists, as I imagine that they aren't all claimed and deeded. There are kind of a lot of them already out there. But sure. They want to make a new star, so they're essentially 'microwaving' one from scratch, to paraphrase how the Doctor describes it.

OK, fine. There are certainly plenty of Doctor Who villain plots that make less sense than that, so I'm down with it. But then the case and seed get eaten by a dinosaur and lost, so according to the already established riles, the Earth around Anita's time should be building hydrogen into helium at a temperature of millions of degrees and the Doctor has lost.

But we can't have that, so suddenly out of nowhere the Doctor announces that the Villengard Corp needs to send a signal to trigger the explosion once the time is up, and since Joy was the last carrier, it will have to come through her – despite the fact that he also says shortly after that the case has been using people to carry it around and get a nifty temple built for all of human history up until that point. Except that Joy still counts as the last carrier for... reasons. And now we can't get to the case which we already decided we couldn't stop exploding because of a big rock, and so the Doctor pops out for a montage of using almost all of the people and places he saw in the opening montage of the episode to get the rock pulled loose, and while he's doing that we got a further goalpost move.

It seems that all the star seed really needed was a compassionate talking to from Joy which allows her to absorb it into herself, magically levitate, fly into space, and somehow get the unimaginable distance away from the Earth that she would need to be for the Earth to not be completely destroyed by the explosion. Oh, and Star-Joy can also now reach down and scoop out human souls to take into itself, as we see her do to her mum, immediately after her mum finishes that iPad conversation that we heard her talk about. Because that's a thing that stars are known for.

OK, to be fair the star was created by the tech in the suitcase, and we already saw that the tech in the suitcase had the ability to absorb what we might call the 'souls' of people, for lack of a better word, so if you squint really hard and don't think too much about it they just about get away with that part of it. I remain resolute, however, that the leap from 'it's going to explode any moment' to, 'I've inserted it inside myself and now I'm going to fly away to become an annual beacon of hope' is absolutely batshit crazy, comes out of nowhere, and is given no explanation at all.

Joy never had any hope for solid character work when she was constantly being asked to shoulder the burden of explaining every new 'this time we really mean it' change in what the Hell was going on with the star seed. She did at least get to use the rogue tech in order to reach out with shiny golden dust and fix everything. Although we do have to acknowledge that it's not a million miles away from the same basic premise in 'The Doctor Dances'.

We need to talk about Anita:

Here's the pitch. The Doctor is in a modern-day hotel on Christmas. This is thanks to a door that opens once a year, on Christmas, linking a Time Hotel in which the Doctor landed the TARDIS and whatever hotel is being offered for that year's Christmas trip. While there he trips a plot device that requires a four-digit code to not kill anyone. The Doctor realizes that the only way he can learn the four-digit code in time is for future him to learn it, run in and tell it to him, and then leave again.

This is of course the Bootstrap paradox that the Doctor described in 'Before the Flood,' but I'm not going to do the 'although this is not a million miles' gag again. It's called the rule of three, people.

The earlier Doctor is now left behind and cut off from his TARDIS, which is still parked at the Time Hotel. Angrily, he shouts at his future self that this is why everyone hates him and why he's always alone. The Doctor is establishing that he doesn't believe that he deserves friendship or love, as that's the most hurtful thing he can think of to shout at his future self. And who knows how to hurt us better than ourselves?

Due to the fact that the earlier Doctor knows where the Time Hotel's door is going to be next Christmas, he knows that he just has to wait a year and be there when it arrives. And so, he starts to wait. And thanks to some clever dialogue in his fight with himself earlier, he starts to recognize the visual metaphor of the empty chair in his room. and gradually he works up the courage to ask Anita, the nice lady that runs the hotel, to sit in it and share time with him.

And they become friends. We see a montage of their year spent together, laughing, playing silly games, falling desperately in friend-love. And it's all magical and so full of joy.

And then the year ends, and the Doctor leaves her after a touching goodbye about remembering old friends. He goes to the time door for that Christmas, returns to the Time Hotel, goes back to the door for the previous Christmas, gives himself the code that he told himself last year, and leaves his previous self stranded there.

That's the basic time travel loop structure of it. But here's the important part. As the now present, formerly future Doctor listens to his younger self berate him for not being worthy of love, he looks at the chair, sitting in the room waiting to be filled with the love of a friend that he knows is coming, and in that one look we see that he now knows that he is worthy of being loved. He has friends that, even if they've Auld Lang Syned, still love and remember him. And through the closing door to his past, he whispers 'Be gentle. You're going to miss her.'

Best. Short. Story. Ever. The time loop logistics are airtight, the emotional core makes the mechanics of the story stronger, and vice versa. Anita's brave acceptance of the Doctor leaving made me cry so much more than Joy's mum. I'll never forgive him for leaving her behind.

Anita should have been the next companion

Bits and Pieces:

-- I love that we've gotten to a place in society where we can see Anita be totally casual about asking the Doctor about if he has a boyfriend without even remotely making it a thing. I've seen the Doctor and Ruby described as Chaotic Queer Besties (and I love that description, for the record) but the Doctor and Anita are just solid best friends.

-- I also really love the choice that they never really give us any info about Anita's backstory. There are enough hints to get the general picture, but there's so much we don't know. Someone left her. Somebody let her down. Badly. But she hasn't let it make her bitter. She's aware enough to ask the Doctor who he isn't calling, and she's a trusted enough friend to not let him avoid answering the question. And when he answers, she just accepts him, and is there for him.

-- The woman on the Orient Express in Italy in 1962 is named Sylvia Trench. There's a very interesting connection between who she is, what she means for a connection between Doctor Who and the James Bond franchise, and the significance of the year, but I only know that because I stumbled across an article about it two days ago, so I don't think I have the right to talk about it here. It definitely rewards googling, though. Steven Moffat is at least a big a fan of James Bond as he is Doctor Who, for the record.

-- The gentlemen at Base camp in Everest are credited as Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, for what that's worth. I do actually know who they were. I kind of respect that the episode never felt the need to make a big deal about it and mention their names.

-- OK, yes, I get that the whole point that they were building up to was that Joy turned her grief and anger into a literal beacon of hope that, thanks to the interconnectedness of all the Christmases through the Time Hotel shines down on us every Christmas radiating hope. But the hoops they had to jump through to get there. Sheesh.

-- The Doctor standing on top of the train to throw his grappling hook is another thing that they could really only get away with in a Christmas episode.

-- OK, I've been dancing around it this whole review. This episode has a lot of Steven Moffat hallmarks, callbacks, and straight up recycling of ideas. None of it is bad, really, but the ones I've already mentioned combined with him compulsively making everything bigger on the inside, plus the 'It always takes you where you need to go' callback...

-- Look, I've heard at least third hand a couple of times that Steven Moffat is saying that this is going to be his last Doctor Who script. And sure, he's said that before. And yes, I haven't really disliked either this episode or 'Boom.' But maybe it's for the best if he does ride off into that sunset. At least for a while. Vinay Patel wrote 'Demons of the Punjab,' which is among the best things Doctor Who has done in the last decade, as well as 'Fugitive of the Judoon,' which... also has its merits. Sarah Dollard wrote 'Face the Raven,' which is, for my money, one of the best episodes of Doctor Who ever, as well as 'Thin Ice,' which is a perfectly good story also. I'd love to see a third story from either of those two. Or a first from a hundred other fresh writers out there.

-- Regarding the 'It always takes you where you need to go' quote. I know that that's actually a Neil Gaiman quote, not Steven Moffat. I'm sure Steven included it in this script because that episode is one of the best of his tenure. It would be interesting to know when exactly the script for this episode was locked off, and if that was before the unpleasant accusations were made against Neil Gaiman. I'm still not sure what to say about that whole situation. God help me when Sandman comes back for season two and I have to figure out how I feel about it. For now, I think they would have been better off to just cut that exchange about Anita's car and not bring the elephant into the room. Just my two cents.

-- There was a big deal made about the extra locked door in hotel rooms on this one, much like the crack in the wall back in 'The Eleventh Hour.' But... aren't those locked doors pretty much always just the connecting door to the next room in case you wanted to rent both as a suite? That's pretty much always the case in the US. Are things different in European hotels?

-- I don't know which bit was funnier, the honeymooning couple awkwardly in bed while the Doctor examined the spare door in their room, or the Doctor's reaction when Anita handed him a plunger to fix a toilet. Both were very, very funny.

-- Pedantry forces me to mention that the novel Murder on the Orient Express is a much thicker book than that. And do people actually bring it to read on the train? That feels a little on the nose.

-- Can you imagine how lukewarm and disgusting that ham and cheese toastie and the pumpkin latte were by the end of the Doctor's search?

-- OK, I'll mention it. The reveal at the end that it was Joy's star that guided the wise men to Jesus' birth. First of all, I feel obligated to mention that the church moved the official date of Jesus' birth from May to late December to coincide with the winter solstice. This allowed them to pretend that all those Pagans were celebrating the birth of Jesus, and not the solstice rituals they'd been observing for centuries, no sir. That said, the title card didn't mention a month at the end, just that it was year 0001, so whatever. Maybe the Time Hotel knew when the real dates were and adjusted. As for the bigger picture, much like the James Bond tie-in I mentioned earlier, I'm not a huge fan when fictional universes cross over into each other without a good reason, if I'm being honest. It feels gratuitous.

Quotes:

Joy: "Do you have a room please? Just for the week."
Anita: "Single?"
Joy: "Oh, does it show?"
Anita: "Room, I mean."

The Doctor: "I've got a nav-com algorithm that homes in on fresh milk. I mean, I could just get a fridge."

The Doctor: "Stroll with me. Keep it casual, like you haven’t noticed anything dangerous."
Trev: "I haven’t noticed anything dangerous."
The Doctor: "Then why aren’t you strolling better?"
Trev: "I’m pretending to not notice something I really haven’t noticed. I haven’t perfected a stroll for that."

Trev: "I’m on this. This is going to be the least I’ve ever let anybody down."

Joy: "Oh, this is men all over. Even lizard men."
Anita: (poking her head around the corner) "Oh, I know."

The Doctor: "Pardon my French, but what the French is going on?"

The Doctor: "I’m thinking."
Joy: "Well, could you close the case and think?"
The Doctor: "I’m a very visual person."

Anita: "You know what?"
The Doctor: "What?"
Anita: "This is my favorite night of the week."
The Doctor: "Yeah."

The Doctor: "Everyone who knows you is so lucky. I bet you they tell you that all the time."
Anita: "Just the once, actually."

The Doctor: "I mean, basically the code came from nowhere, but then so did the universe and no one complains about that."

Trev: "As I told you a very long time ago, I will not let you down, sir."

The essential irony of this episode is that the part of it that's by far the best is the part they should have cut. The Anita sequence is wonderful. Absolute perfection. And it stops the story that they're actually telling stone dead for about nine minutes until we no longer really care about the bigger story. Part of me wishes that this episode had been entirely the Anita portion, but I don't think it would have stretched to an hour. It's perfect the length that it is. It's funny, it's what 'The Power of Three' was trying to be but done better by being more concise.

The episode as a whole, eight out of fifteen Doctors. The Anita sequence in isolation, several hundred Doctors out of fifteen.

As long as this review is, there's so much more that I didn't get around to mentioning. If you're interested, I recommend checking out my notes at what was Mikey thinking.

Mikey Heinrich is, among other things, a freelance writer, retired firefighter, and roughly 78% water. You can find more of his work at the 42nd Vizsla. If you'd like to see his raw notes for this and other reviews, you can find them at What Was Mikey Thinking.

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