Joy to the World

 

Chapter the 318th, in which, well, you know, a star *is* born. Literally.

Plot:

[It's an up to the minute episode, so beware spoilers ahead.] The year 4202; the Doctor has parked the TARDIS in a time hotel, which offers package deals for people to go through time windows and experience Christmasses on the first ever climb to the summit of Everest, or in World War Two, or on the Orient Express in the 60s, and so on. The Doctor sees a suspicious character at the hotel reception with a briefcase handcuffed to their wrist, and investigates. The briefcase can be passed from person to person, the new recipient coming under its hypnotic control while the old carrier dies. The Doctor tracks it to a room in the Sandringham Hotel, London in 2024, when it is attached to Joy. She is spending Christmas alone in the hotel. The Doctor opens the case and triggers a process that will kill Joy unless he puts in a code. Luckily, his future self turns up in the room and gives him the code. Joy rushes off into the time hotel with the future Doctor, who breaks the connection so the past Doctor can't follow. The Doctor hangs around for a year working at the Sandringham, and befriending the manager Anita, waiting for the following Christmas which will give him an opportunity to get back to the time hotel. After an emotional farewell to Anita, he gets back into the hotel, and enters Joy's room just in time to tell his past self the code and complete the loop. The Doctor and Joy leave, the briefcase taking control of Joy's mind. The Doctor has had a year to work it out and knows that the case contains a star seed, a quantum-contained chain reaction that will become a star.

The Villengard weapons corporation want Joy to use the hotel to put the seed in a time zone long ago, then in a more recent time-zone they can harvest the resultant custom-made star. Joy goes into one time hotel room, and the Doctor is deliberately mean to her to provoke emotions and break the conditioning. She explodes with rage about her Mum dying alone on Christmas Day during the Covid pandemic, and having to say goodbye on a iPad while elsewhere people with "wine fridges" were partying. The briefcase is no longer attached to her wrist. The Doctor is concerned that a star being born anywhere near Earth will destroy the planet, but thinks that Villengard must have got their sums wrong as they'd need to start the process 65 million years ago. Just then, they hear a dinosaur approach and realise the room they are in is about that far back. The dinosaur swallows the briefcase, and the Doctor and Joy flee. Back in the time hotel, the Doctor uses the sonic to track the signal of the seed, which is four and a half minutes from detonation. The seed is in a temple within a particular time hotel room. Joy joins herself to it, and tells the Doctor not to worry as she is not dying, only changing. She starts to turn into a star, zooming high up in the sky. The star shines down on various characters from the story, as well as Joy's Mum in her hospital room in 2020, and Ruby Sunday at home on Minto Road in the present day. The Doctor recommends Anita to become the manager of the time hotel. The time zone where Joy first became the star turns out to be Bethlehem in the year 0001.

Context:

As is customary in the period between Christmas Day and New Year (Twixtmus, Chrimbo Limbo, the Merrineum), I wanted to watch and blog a story. I've only a handful of Doctor Who stories left to do before I run out, plus probably the same number of oddball or off-piste items of less pure canonical status. There will also be at least eight new Ncuti Gatwa episodes broadcast, so he will dominate blog posts in 2025. Rather than grow next year's imbalances further, I decided to suspend random selection and blog the very latest Gatwa story, the Christmas special Joy to the World, as my final post of 2024. I watched from the BBC iplayer (we've not needed to get the aerial fixed in the last year, so everything we view or review is from a streaming service now) on the 29th December 2024.

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now closing in on the point where I finish everything and catch up with the current stories being broadcast serially. This post marks the completion of all Ncuti Gatwa's stories and specials broadcast to date (at the time of writing), but as mentioned he has at least another season in the can planned for broadcast in 2025. As well as that, I have completed the televisual eras for six Doctors (the fourth, seventh, eighth, ninth, eleventh and fourteenth) and 32 out of the total of 40 seasons to date: classic seasons 1, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10-18, 20, 21, 23-26, and new series 1, 2, 4, 5-7, 9-11, 13 and 14).

First Time Round:

This year, the In-laws came round on the 25th (the last few years before 2024, it had been Boxing Day), so we didn't watch Doctor Who, or indeed anything, on the big day. I caught up with it on the 26th from the BBC iplayer accompanied by two of the children - young man of 18, back from uni for the holidays, and middle child, boy of 15. We all enjoyed it without thinking it was anything massively ground-breaking. My initial thought on seeing the very final few frames before the end credits was that it was too much, and the programme shouldn't go near that topic. I felt that it was likely to cause complaints from religious people that a part of the bible story, the star of Bethlehem, was shown to have an extra-terrestrial origin. I googled to see if that had come to pass, but only found a couple of UK tabloid 'news' stories that Doctor Who was "woke" for criticising those in Government that had parties during Covid lockdowns. Apparently, it's less acceptable to risk annoying Boris Johnson fans than Christians.

Reaction:

As I usually do during Advent and Christmas, in 2024 I watched a number of old favourites of festive films and TV. Something leapt out at me this time in a couple of places. In a song in The Muppet Christmas Carol, there's the line "If you need to know the measure of a man, you simply count his friends"; and, in a note shown at the end of It's a Wonderful Life there's "Remember, no man is a failure who has friends". Although in both instances the texts had the best intentions, highlighting this metric as more meaningful in comparison to any counts of material wealth, I couldn't help but be uncomfortable about the sentiment being expressed that way. Some people, for whatever reason (for example, those that are neurodivergent), find making friends more difficult than others. Christmas films and TV often highlight that Christmas can be lonely. A Christmas Carol (in whatever version, but obviously the Muppet one is the best) has Scrooge isolating himself from others at the start; It's a Wonderful Life has George Bailey feeling alone with all his troubles. The endings of both stories, though, suggest that the solution is a pre-existing group of friends or family. If one doesn't have such a support group to hand, as Joy doesn't in this Doctor Who story, then even the most uplifting of Christmas tales could be depressing. It's therefore a good thing that Joy to the World does something different. It starts with two characters - as well as Joy, there's Anita working alone at the Sandringham Hotel - who are lonely not because they are misguided, or in despair, or in any way bad, but just because. And they find a way out of loneliness without the more obvious festive fallbacks of family or a large society of friends.

Nicola Coughlan is great playing the one-off Christmas companion role, with a deft mix of feistiness and vulnerability. The most affecting scenes for me, though, were those between the Doctor and Anita, played by Steph de Whalley. The Doctor befriends her during the year where he has to stay in the hotel; there are no big adventures to be had to help them bond, just kindness and conversation. This seemed to me to be the heart of the piece. Writer of Joy to the World Steven Moffat has written many a timey-wimey narrative in the past; indeed, he invented the term. Such tricks here are not for their own sake, though, but to add to the overall meditation on human interaction. The near future Doctor's sudden appearance providing his past self with crucial information seems to be a narrative curveball at first, but once he's spent a year waiting to become that Doctor, it's a throwaway piece of business. The Doctor knows the code to give to himself, because he remembers being told it first time round - it's the bootstrap paradox (as riffed on in many a Moffat script, and as made famous in a story from the period of time when he was Doctor Who showrunner). It doesn't matter how the Doctor comes to have the information, the only point is that he spends a year with Anita. It does also give us a great scene where the Doctor gets to upbraid himself about how irritating his faux enigmatic schtick is for everyone suffering it. The opening sequence - where the Doctor visits many different timezones attempting to deliver room service - wouldn't suffer from only being run through the once when the viewer knows what's going on, but it does give the story an arresting opening (a mild shame, then, that it was a bit thrown away by being used as a sneak peak clip earlier in the year).

Is the kind of trickery in repeating scenes from different POVs the story's own faux enigmatic schtick? Perhaps, but it works to keep things interesting during a sleepy, postprandial broadcast slot. Some reviews I read said that the story was still too confusing, so perhaps showing some sequences more than once was necessary (how much more confused would those reviewers have been if only seeing them once?). Still, what stands out most is the selection of lovely character moments brought to life well by the performers. It seems odd to say that about something that is clearly trying to dazzle with non-chronological storytelling and other narrative devices, but what I remember best from the story are the fun moments with Joel Fry's Trev, or the proud moment where Jonathan Aris's Silurian talks about working his way up to be the time hotel's manager. Given that such nice characters get bumped off with such regularity, one probably foresees a terrible fate in store for Joy as soon as the briefcase attaches itself to her. She goes out on her own terms in the end, though. The scenes of her righteous anger at people who did not follow the rules, when she was not able to say goodbye to her mother in person during Covid lockdown, is another great moment. It's a brave choice to make Covid a thing that happened in the Doctor Who universe, as the series has assiduously avoided it before now. It feels like the soonest point - four years on from the pandemic - that the subject could be broached, though, and it is handled sensitively (despite it apparently upsetting some in the right-wing media).

It's a bit odd that the Doctor comments a few times about being alone and not adjusting well to his companions leaving, when it was his idea for Ruby to stay behind to get to know her birth mother. There's no real reason he couldn't phone her at least once during the year with Anita (that's why I feel it was a good choice for them to have Millie Gibson cameo at the end). I still feel that the revelation that the star seed (was it just me that had to hear that said out loud four times before he realised the characters weren't talking about the Stasi?) has bloomed into the Star of Bethlehem was a sticking point, but it was a little less sticky second time round. The ending has to be big to top the emotional climax of the Doctor and Anita subplot happening at the halfway point. Also, this time I noticed that the Doctor's funny line early on when hearing that the time hotel offers rooms at all the most significant moments in human history, "No wonder there was no room at the inn", nicely tees up that final revelation. It's just one of many great gags in the script - the in-joke for people in the UK of a certain age that the time hotel's outfitters is called Mr. Benn's was cook's kiss (Mr. Benn was a kids' show in which the character donned a different outfit at a costume shop every week, then emerged into a different time and place for an adventure, with the episode where he put on a toque and apron was called The Cook rather than The Chef). There's no real logic I can see as to why Joy's Mum's life force at the point of her death appears to join with the Joy star, nor why everyone entranced by the Villengard tech would talk about how "the flesh will rise" when that only has meaning as part of Joy's very non-Villengard plan at the end. It's Christmas, though, and everybody wants the happiest ending possible, I'm sure.

Mr Benn as 'The Cook'

Connectivity:

Both Dalek and Joy to the World are stories broadcast in the first full year of a Doctor that was a 'season one' relaunch of the show exec-produced by Russell T Davies; both were penned by commissioned writers to provide a specific boost to the year (a mid-season 'tent pole' story in the former, a festive special for the big day in the latter). Both stories feature an appearance by a single member of a recurring alien species that hadn't been seen on TV for a good few years (the Silurian hotel manager in Joy to the World is, I think, the first one seen in Who since Deep Breath in 2014, over a decade earlier).

Deeper Thoughts:

Predictions for the space year 2025. In the last few years I've taken to making predictions for the coming year in the Deeper Thoughts section of a blog around the New Year period; as if that wasn't foolhardy enough, I've also made a point of looking back and checking how well my predictions turned out. I'm quite proud of one I made in the blog post at the end of 2023. It's nothing to do with Doctor Who, though. In the Deeper Thoughts of that post for The Church on Ruby Road, prompted by online discussions of the performance of The Goblin Song when it was released as a single, I predicted that Last Christmas by Wham would be the UK Christmas number one forever more. In 2024, just as in 2023, it did indeed make the festive top spot. I still can't see anything that will stop it being number one for the Christmas week in 2025 and thereafter, short of a change in how the chart is put together. The number of streams a song gets far outweighs any other measure in dictating a song's chart position, and Wham's song gets streamed a lot in the UK over Christmas. A concerted boycott would be impossible, it's on every Christmas compilation and playlist out there; indeed, as I mentioned last year, it is a song that many people do actively try to boycott individually - but to no avail - in the Whamageddon game. I also made the following statement when musing about the UK Christmas number one becoming boringly predictable: "At least we will have a Doctor Who special annually to make up for it". I was more certain of that statement in 2023 than I am in 2024, but I'll stand by it. Whether the co-production deal with Disney+ endures or not, I think Doctor Who will still continue, and even if it's not on TV any other time it will be on at Christmas. Joy to the World was sixth in the top ten of the day's programmes based on overnight ratings (i.e. not including streaming, where Doctor Who tends to pick up more viewers). It's earned its festive schedule spot, and I hope it keeps it for many years yet.

Other predictions were in the Deeper Thoughts section for the first blog post of January 2024. I correctly thought that Gatwa's first series would mostly concentrate on the new, but there would be a couple of appearances from the established UNIT family. I correctly suspected that there would be more supernatural antagonists, and also that there would be a return of a foe from the past. I namechecked Daleks and Cybermen, but Russell T Davies managed to return a less predictable old foe in Sutekh, without falling back on those mainstays. I mentioned a rumour about a spin-off with an eight word title; in 2024, that was officially confirmed to be The War Between the Land and the Sea, which will air in 2025, and will also feature the return of an old foe and the UNIT regulars. Will Gatwa's second series be able to avoid the temptation to feature Daleks or Cybermen? The point of these annual Deeper Thoughts is to go out on a limb, so I will: I think at least one will feature in 2025, probably Skaro's finest. On the home video front, I correctly predicted both Blu-ray collection boxsets for 2024, which were season 15 (Tom Baker's fourth run) and season 25 (Sylvester McCoy's second). This wasn't clairvoyance, I'd just picked up whispered rumours about both earlier in 2023. The Blu-ray team surprised everyone by branching out to cover Blakes 7 releases, no whispers about that had reached my ears. I have similarly heard nothing about the Collection releases next year. One Doctor Who box set has already been announced for 2025: Jon Pertwee's first year of stories, the 1970 season seven, will be released early in 2025. I expect we will also see Blakes 7's second season too. That will probably mean only one other Who boxset, but which one will it be?

With season seven slated for release, there are nine seasons of the classic series left for the Collection treatment. The number of black and white seasons left is outnumbering the colour ones for the first time, five to four. I think that it's unlikely that we'll get a monochrome set, though. The only season from the first six B&W years released to date has been William Hartnell's second run from 1964/65; that year has only two missing episodes that form 50% of a single story; the remainder of the season comprised of eight other stories made up of 35 extant episodes. As such, representing two out 39 with reconstructions (using the soundtrack and offscreen photographs) was barely a blip in the scheme of things. All the other 1960s seasons have more missing episodes than that, and those missing episodes form larger gaps in their stories (most seasons having at least one story that is 100% missing). It is theoretically possible for, say, season five to be released nonetheless, with two-thirds of story The Wheel in Space represented by four reconstructed episodes; but, the subsequent box set would then have an odd mix of animation and reconstruction used to plug the gaps, as other stories in the run have had some or all of their episodes animated (as is the case with each of the five remaining monochrome seasons). As such, I think that it's more likely that the next season will be a colour one, with the other seasons kept back until there is animation to consistently represent all their missing episodes. There's only a choice of four colour seasons for which I could plump; only three, if one assumes that the BBC wouldn't want two Jon Pertwee sets in a single year. I'll guess from those remaining three that it will be season 13, Tom Baker's second run, that will be next.

Going back to animation, I incorrectly predicted that a second animated story (joining the already announced The Celestial Toymaker) would be released in 2024, and that it might be The Smugglers (based on earlier speculation in a UK newspaper). I was wrong on both counts: no other story was released, but one was announced for 2025 - it wasn't The Smugglers, but The Savages (a similar enough title to suggest that that speculation might just have been based on a mishearing). I've picked up, very late, a pattern in the stories being selected for animations. Since the full story animations started in 2016, none of them have been purely historical stories (and even before that, only two episodes of a historical story have ever been animated). The sci-fi tales that were instead converted to cartoon were likely less problematic to animate, and more marketable. I think the trend will continue. From the trailer, The Savages animation looks to have been done by the team that worked on 2023's The Underwater Menace, meaning The Celestial Toymaker's team is free to be working on another story. It might not be released in 2025, but I'm guessing it will at least be announced. My guess is that the story will be The Space Pirates, meaning that a box set of season six, with The War Games in colour as an extra, would be a contender for 2026. In my previous predictions, I guessed that the 'In colour' re-edit and colourisation treatment would be applied to The Tomb of the Cybermen. I didn't think that anyone would have the silliness / courage to edit 10 episodes of story into 90 minutes (and pretty successfully, at least in my opinion). I'll guess that they want to stick with relatively significant stories, and will alternate between Hartnell and Troughton, so The Dalek Invasion of Earth will be next, on TV around the 23rd November 2025. How clownish will my guesses turn out to be? Time will tell; it usually does.

In Summary:

Never mind the narrative - or stellar - pyrotechnics, this is really about people being nice to one another. As such, I feel I must maintain that spirit, and wish you the Happiest of Happy New Years!

Eve of the Daleks

Chapter the 289th, it's recursion all over again.

Plot:
New Year's Eve in a storage facility in contemporary Manchester; owner Sarah is on duty because her colleague Jeff has let her down. Her only customer Nick comes in just before midnight as he does every year; he clearly has a massive crush on Sarah but she hasn't realised. The TARDIS materialises in the building, and the Doctor, Yaz and Dan leave it to rebuild itself after the ravages of the Flux. A Dalek arrives and exterminates Nick, Sarah and the three time travellers. They then all find themselves alive again; it's eight minutes to midnight and they are back where they started with major déjà vu. Despite their efforts to avoid it they all get exterminated again, and find themselves alive again at seven minutes to midnight. It's a rapidly deteriorating time loop caused by the TARDIS rebuilding itself, the next loop starts at six minutes to midnight, then five, then four, and so on. Two more Daleks end up materialising in this temporal fold in later loops, as they learn how to navigate it: they want to kill the Doctor because they blame her for the Flux destroying millions of Daleks. There's a Dalek forcefield around the building to prevent escape. Through the different loops, the Doctor and friends find lots of contraband items Jeff has been storing including a big pile of fireworks, and an alternate exit not covered by the forcefield. The Doctor's plan involves tricking the Daleks into shooting at the fireworks to cause an explosion that allows their escape and ends the time loop. A passer-by sees the firework display and thinks it's just been laid on for him. Sarah realises that Nick likes her, and that she likes him too. 

Context:

This one came up randomly towards the end of the year, but I held it back to watch on the afternoon of December 31st 2023. The majority of the episode is set, as indicated by the title, on the last day of the year leading up to midnight fireworks, so it makes more sense to watch it on a New Year's Eve rather than New Year's Day as it was initially broadcast. I viewed the story from the iplayer, starting off on my own; but, one by one, each of the children (boys of 17 and 14, girl of 11) came in and started watching alongside me.

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now closing in on the point where I finish everything and catch up with the current stories being broadcast serially. Eve of the Daleks is the final one of the four Jodie Whittaker episodes / specials shown on New Year's Days between 2019 and 2022 to be covered for the blog. With this story, and recently having blogged The Snowmen and The Church on Ruby Road in quick succession, I have completed all the Doctor Who festive specials as at the time of writing. Another such special is planned this year, though, already having started production in late 2023, so - presuming I haven't run out of stories by the end of 2024 - this won't be the last time the blog visits the Yuletide period.

First Time Round:

I watched this go out live on its BBC1 broadcast on January 1st 2022 accompanied by the same people as eventually joined me for this latest watch, i.e. all the kids but not the Better Half who still didn't take the opportunity to see the story this time despite my encouragements that she'd like it. I remember enjoying the story very much at the time, but there was one minor thing that I do remember everyone commenting on back then, and indeed they also repeated their comments this time: nobody knew who the bloke at the end watching the fireworks was. Both times, everyone assumed that it was Jeff, the unseen employee of Sarah's storage company who is mentioned many times in dialogue. That would make more sense than who it actually turned out to be, and I needed to look it up online to find out who that was: Karl, a fairly minor character from the first ever Jodie Whittaker story. I guess it's nice to know that he's still out there somewhere, albeit wandering the streets of Manchester alone on New Year's Eve, but it didn't feel particularly necessary or apt.

Reaction:

I'd very much enjoyed Flux, the season-wide story that preceded Eve of the Daleks, running from October to early December 2021, and which I'd just rewatched over the holiday period that year (I covered it in a bumper blog post published on December 31st, the day before the Eve of the Daleks was broadcast). With this Dalek festive special only a few weeks later, it felt like Chris Chibnall's version of Doctor Who was on a hell of a roll. Alas, it only had a couple of stories left, but the era built to a high point. Eve was probably my favourite story of the Whittaker years; no major pyrotechnics, but a good, simple idea well constructed and well realised. The series had featured time loops before, but never made one the sole focus of a story (Heaven Sent doesn't really count, as it features a spatial prison, time is still passing even if the Doctor isn't immediately aware of it); it has also featured comic and romantic subplots before, but had never properly done a full-on rom-com plot either. Combining the two makes something unique for Doctor Who. It may not at first glance look unique in the wider world beyond Doctor Who; the time loop romantic comedy is a reasonably well established subgenre, certainly since the movie Groundhog Day (which is namechecked in a funny moment where it's Dan's go-to phrase to explain the situation he finds himself in). Around when Eve of the Daleks was likely being written, and it may or may not have been an influence, there was a different take on the same template in the 2020 movie Palm Springs.

What both those movies did though, and what Heaven Sent did too, was forefront the sheer length of time, the number of repetitions, that the characters go through. It's a key point in all three, as they are about being stuck trying and improving before finally achieving a goal. Eve is not like that at all; the time loop deteriorates at a steady, rapid rate, with the characters reliving one minute less before midnight each time; as such, the loop becomes the 'ticking clock' that any action narrative needs, and the story is propelled efficiently through escalations towards its climactic sequence. To do that in 60 minutes and find time to fit in a romance plotline (well, two romance plotlines, more on that in a moment) is some good storytelling. Chibnall got a lot of stick for any writing flaws in his Doctor Who work during his years in charge, so it only seems fair to give him his dues for putting together something so enjoyable. The only even slightly duff note was making love-interest Nick a little too creepy, storing the items left at his place by his many ex-girlfriends. It seems only to have been included to set up the later gag about the therapeutic power of the Daleks for Nick when they destroy all those abandoned possessions (his exs are terminated, geddit?). Even this didn't feel so bad on this watch; the performances of guests and regulars alike are of such quality that their combined efforts sell even that less convincing moment. I really do believe in Sarah's realisation that she cares for the "good-hearted weirdo" that is Nick, and I believe in the echoes that phrase has for Yaz and Dan thinking about another potential relationship.

Given that the story had such a limited set of characters, it's essential that they are cast well, and Eve of the Daleks is cast impeccably. Aisling Bea is phenomenally good in this, a major star turn, but Adjani Salmon matches her. The sudden realisation, after a careless word from her, that he's caused her to be in danger, and his decision to sacrifice himself, is a powerful but understated moment. Nick Briggs's vocal work as the voice of the Daleks should not be overlooked either, he even gets to deliver a couple of jokes (including, in the line "I am not Nick", an in-joke). Even a small role like Pauline McLynn's performance as Sarah's Mammy, who wishes her daughter a happy new year just before midnight (as she's convinced, and won't be told otherwise, that the lines will be busy later), is perfect. The regulars are on top form too. Yaz's feelings for the Doctor have been such a slow burn across the previous three years that to have them suddenly acknowledged by Dan was almost shocking. It was great to have both the characters prompted by Dan face up to their long-term denial. It nicely sets up the episodes to come where this is explored in more depth. That those later episode's slightly fumble the emotional arc of their relationship shouldn't reflect badly on Eve; it should also be remembered that this episode, as well as those in Flux that proceeded it and the following two specials of 2002, were made under the most difficult circumstances of any modern Who, with ever-changing Covid restrictions impacting everything.

I think that the stories in 2023 have tied things up neatly and retrospectively fixed any loose ends of the Doctor and Yaz subplot, anyway. Clearly the Doctor is restless and needs to be constantly moving, and has concerns about how this may impact any close relationship; she explains this to Yaz in Legend of the Sea Devils; after that, she wants to regenerate alone to protect Yaz from the loss of her Doctor, and that regeneration starts a process of healing. By regaining an old face, the Doctor knows that he has to go back and fix another relationship that didn't get closure, and in doing this and then going through bi-generation, the restlessness and constant movement can stop and the Doctor is able to sort their mind out and have some settled time, with friends rather than in a romantic relationship. This then allows the fifteenth Doctor to be free of any baggage. It's a shame for Yaz, of course, but she has the ex-companion network from The Power of the Doctor to help her get through it. It wasn't perfectly presented, but as an emotional arc crossing multiple stories, multiple showrunners and multiple Doctors, I think it is pretty amazing (but maybe I'm just a good-hearted weirdo). Eve of the Daleks kicks all that off, and also has action and comedy and some wonderful emotional moments ("Not many people would have done that - some close friends and family included, actually" "I've never told anyone... not even myself"). Lovely.

Connectivity:

Both Eve of the Daleks and The Church on Ruby Road are festive specials of the 2020s set in a city in contemporary England.

Deeper Thoughts:

Time Travel: back and forward. The last couple of years, I've had a go at predicting what will unfold in Doctor Who's year to come, as well as validating how well (or how badly) my predictions turned out for the year just gone. This post early in 2024 covering a New Year story seems like a good place for this exercise. If you want to play along at home, my guesses for 2023 were in the Deeper Thoughts section of the Robots of Death blog post here. I started strong, as I was bang on the money in predicting that the Doctor Who festive special would return to Christmas day. Perhaps it looks like a fairly obvious move with hindsight. Doctor Who had trialled being a Sunday night heritage brand for the whole of Jodie Whittaker's time playing the Doctor, and its festive specials moving to the first of January slot fit with that. Bringing back Russell T Davies suggested, given that it was something he'd done with much fanfare before, a return to Who as a shiny Saturday night and Christmas day proposition, and so it has come to pass. There have been some grumblings online about the overnight ratings not being as good as they should be for Ncuti Gatwa's Christmas special, but it nonetheless did very well, with the consolidated weekly ratings even better - I can't see it being moved from Christmas Day in 2024. I didn't make many other predictions about the content of the 60th anniversary specials as most of it had already been heavily rumoured (the Meep, the Wrath Warriors and the Toymaker were all spoilered in 2022). The one thought I had would be that any other returning elements would likely be from stories in the era from 2005 onwards rather than the 20th century stories. I was completely wrong there; the only other significant return was from Bonnie Langford as Mel who is resolutely classic era (bar a brief cameo in Jodie's last story).

For 2023 home video releases, I didn't predict (nobody really predicted) the return of missing episode animations, which had seemed to on indefinite hiatus from reports in 2022. Only one - The Underwater Menace - came out in the year, but this was one more than expected. William Hartnell story The Celestial Toymaker, backstory of the third of the 60th anniversary specials The Giggle, is slated for release sometime in early 2024. The different animation style seen in the animation's trailer suggests it is not being worked on by the same team as Underwater Menace, so I would hazard a guess that they'll have moved on to another story - I'll take a punt and suggest this will be the long-awaited version of Patrick Troughton Cyberman story The Wheel in Space (a short section of one episode was animated as a test years back, and it would be good to have the whole thing done). There was also a 2023 newspaper article in the UK that reported rumours of two stories being animated, The Celestial Toymaker and another Hartnell, The Smugglers. If the report was right about the former, could it also be right about the latter? Another thing that nobody predicted for 2023 was a completely new range of classic stories: colourised and re-edited versions of older stories. The Daleks in Colour is also slated for release early in 2024 after its broadcast and iplayer debuts in 2023. It's been confirmed that another story is being worked on; my guess would also be a Patrick Troughton Cyberman story, The Tomb of the Cybermen. I predicted three Blu-ray collections sets for 2023, but only two were released, perhaps because there's less room in the schedules with all the other stuff mentioned above. My guesses for the specific seasons were 6, 13 and 20 - only one of the three being correct.

As well as the 20th anniversary year set, there was also Jon Pertwee's third run, season 9, to enjoy in 2023 Blu-ray glory. I'll assume two sets for 2024 too; I'm the least well-connected fan ever, but I have heard a whisper that season 25 (Sylvester McCoy's second year) is imminent, so I'll go with that for one; for the other, I was going to pitch season 13 (Tom Baker's second year) for the third year running - I've got to be right sooner or later - but then a rumour circulated that it's going to be season 15 next (Tom's fourth year) so I'll have to go with that instead. What about predictions for new Doctor Who on the box? Another curve-ball that's been thrown at anyone trying to predict 2024's new broadcast content is the possibility of spin-offs. There's a persistent rumour about a spin-off with an eight word title (I'm not going to reveal it here), but aside from the probable potential for one old monster to feature the stars, structure, number and length of episodes are a complete mystery. Not much more is known about Ncuti's first series, either. I don't know why, but I'm getting a feeling that the stories are going to accentuate the new. A new UNIT 'family' has now been developed including Kate Lethbridge-Stewart as played by Jemma Redgrave, Ruth Bradley's scientific advisor Shirley Anne Bingham and the aforementioned Mel; I would guess there will be a couple of stories back on Earth where one or all of those characters appear. Will we see old monsters too? Davies has hinted at further supernatural threats, which might allow for creatures with some built-in brand recognition (like Goblins, say) without them having to be from Doctor Who's heritage. I doubt it will be too long, though, before Ncuti gets to face the Daleks or the Cybermen or both. That's about enough guesswork, I think - check in back here in a year or so to see how well I did!

In Summary:

Eve of the Daleks. Of the Daleks. The Daleks. Daleks! 

The Church on Ruby Road

Chapter the 288th, in which some goblins try to eat a baby, and they don't half make a song and dance about it.

Plot:
[It's an up to the minute episode, so beware spoilers ahead.] Ruby Sunday is a foundling, left by a church on her birthday, Christmas Eve 2004. Nineteen years later, all attempts to trace her birth parents, including going on to TV programme Long Lost Family with Davina McCall, have led to nothing. Ruby lives with her adopted mother Carla and grandmother Cherry in a London flat. Lately, she's been having a run of bad luck caused by inter-dimensional Goblins, who are secretly engineering accidents, all part of their scientific language of coincidence and luck. In the run-up to Christmas, she meets a mysterious man called the Doctor. On Christmas Eve, Carla is looking after a newborn. The Goblins snatch this baby from an upper-story bedroom, but Ruby gives chase across the rooftops, following the Goblins onto a rope ladder that leads up to their floating ship. The Doctor is also up there and joins her on the ladder. They climb up to the Goblin ship. The Goblins sing a song as they present the baby to their enormous Goblin King to eat, but the Doctor and Ruby (also joining in with the singing) escape with the baby. Back in the Sundays' flat, the Doctor realises lots of coincidences (like Ruby and himself both being foundlings) and this powers the Goblins to go back in time nineteen years and snatch Ruby as a baby, changing the present. The Doctor follows them, and manages to put things back to how they were. The Goblin ship falls onto the church, with the steeple skewering the Goblin King, killing him. The ship disappears back into the either, and the Doctor returns to the present day. Ruby joins the Doctor in his TARDIS travels.

Context:

I viewed this for the second time on my own during the Chrimbo Limbo between Christmas and New Year's, the Merrineum. I watched on the BBC iplayer: we discovered something was wrong with our aerial just before Christmas, too late to get it fixed, so this was my first Yuletide ever without traditional, multi-channel terrestrial TV, and my first since 1984 where I didn't have a method of recording the programmes to watch later (the trusty PVR is still functioning perfectly, but was not connected to any signal). Of course, I didn't need such a method, as everything I was interested in seeing I could either watch live or catch up with later using an online streaming service. I was seeing a theme emerging of the ascendence of streaming compared to programmed TV channels like BBC1, or purchased media. None of the trailers I saw for The Church on Ruby Road - before or after it was shown - mentioned that it was being broadcast on BBC1 or when, they all just told me to head to iplayer. More on this theme is in the Deeper Thoughts section below.

First Time Round:

We sat down to watch this as a family from the iplayer, a little after its broadcast on BBC1 on Christmas Day 2023. The In-laws didn't visit until Boxing Day this year, so it was just the five of us (Me, the Better Half, and three kids, two boys of 17 and 14, girl of 11) and everyone was in the living room to watch. Alas, I was the only one of five who enjoyed it on this first watch; I thought it was a little slight but fun (and I always give something of a pass for a slight story at Christmas if it also manages to be fun); the others though presented a range of reactions from slightly to greatly negative. The Better Half thought it was too cheesy, and announced that she was going back to her boycott of new episodes of Doctor Who (which started two-thirds of the way through Jodie Whittaker's era, and only ceased for the three David Tennant specials, which she liked). Eldest child liked the Doctor but thought the Ruby character was a "blank... just like Yaz" and as for the story, he couldn't believe that Russell T Davies had written it, "If Chris Chibnall had written it, it wouldn't be so surprising". Middle child thought the Doctor was "too cheerful for a Doctor travelling on his own"; youngest said that "the companion's too modern" and really hated the new sonic screwdriver "It's not a screwdriver anymore, it's a disc". Looking online afterwards, and checking in with other fan friends via Whatsapp, I found a similarly diverse range of reactions. Some hated the song but liked everything else, some vice versa.

Reaction:

I'll admit that for my first watch of The Church on Ruby Road I'd had a few festive glasses of wine; so, I was interested on this second watch whether without that buoyancy aid the story would fall flat. I watched and waited, and made it to the end of the hour feeling exactly as positive about the story as I did on first watch, but this time I was stone-cold sober. It starts well with a sequence that instantly establishes atmosphere: a silent, snowy, night, and a mysterious cowled figure carrying the baby Ruby to the doors of a church, all accompanied by Ncuti's voiceover narration and a sinister-sounding Carol of the Bells. This sets up the mystery of Ruby's parentage that I'm sure will run through the next season. I'd only be a little surprised if that cowled figure turned out to be Millie Gibson's older Ruby herself, and that scintilla of surprise would only be because I would doubt that they'd go there as Red Dwarf has famously done such a plotline already. There was also a mystery at the end that one assumes will be paid off at some point too, where Ruby's neighbour Mrs. Flood played by Anita Dobson knows what a TARDIS is; again, time will tell as to whether this is part of next year's Bad Wolf style arc plot. Another presumably recurring element is Ruby's family, Michelle Greenidge as Carla and Angela Wynter as Cherry. Both characters were well performed and - as one would expect from the story's writer Russell T Davies - well drawn (both Cherry grumbling as she waits and nobody makes her a cup of tea, and Ruby sarcastically noting that at Christmas the shops are closed for all of one whole day, resonated with me based on similar exchanges that happen in our family).

Greenidge's moment where history has been changed and she's become harder and more mercenary in an alternate life without her daughter was the best and most emotional moment of the story ("Why are you crying?" "I don't know; why are you?"). The climax of the story being the Doctor going back nineteen years to fix Clara and Ruby's personal history might seem a bit timey-wimey for a Christmas special, but it worked for me because it was reminiscent of Yuletide perennials like A Christmas Carol and It's a Wonderful life. It means that the second half of the narrative is quite different from the first (conflict on an internal emotional level after the more knock-about, almost slapstick action of the scenes of Goblins causing mayhem in the first half). The transition between the two styles is smoothed by the intriguing concept of the Goblin's science of chance. There's an effective sequence where the sky darkens as the Doctor realises more and more coincidences between Ruby's backstory and his own (building on the Timeless Child plotline from Jodie Whittaker's stories) that then powers the Goblins to travel back and snatch Ruby. The only issue, and it's probably the only significant flaw in the story structure for me, is it takes a bit too long to get from the song and dance battle and rescue of the baby to the cracks appearing and time being changed, and a lot of that is spent on exposition to feed into the moment of realisation of the coincidences. The conflict gets less and less taut, and is in danger of becoming flaccid for a while there; if that section was half as long it would work better, That could be achieved by having the Doctor find out a bit more about Ruby when he is tailing her in the earlier sections.

Those earlier sections are fun, giving lots of opportunities to show the Doctor in different contexts as an introduction to this new version of the character: dancing in a club, observing moodily from doorways, joking about being a gin and tonic inspector, being brave and saving people from a collapsing giant snowman, encouraging someone to go ahead with proposing to their fiancee. All of these moments are pitched perfectly by Ncuti Gatwa who is instantly perfect as the Doctor, an engaging and charismatic presence. His look is striking throughout too, with a few costume changes but still within a coherent visual theme for the character. Millie Gibson is good as Ruby, though she doesn't get quite such a range of material to get her teeth into: we've seen she can do plucky and funny, and I've no doubt she'll run the gamut of other emotional states in stories to come. The running gag in the early sections of Davina McCall continually being injured is nice too, and McCall is very natural performing these for a non-actor. It's interesting to see Davies sample real world media not for global scope as he has tended to do in the past, but here for character depth in establishing Ruby's search for her birth parents. There's some fun jokes, nice set pieces, and good character design - the Goblin King's a bit static, but he looks great. The song and dance number is something a bit different or the show; musically it's strong, but the lyrics were a little less good. I like that they're keeping going the gag from the 60th anniversary specials that gravity is called mavity in the current Who universe. Will this turn into a plot point later on, with the divergence between the old and new universes righted in a finale? We'll see. Overall, this story set up such intriguing ongoing questions in my mind while also delivering a silly, funny Goblin story with a little bit of seriousness in there too. What more could one want at Christmastime?

Connectivity:

Both The Church on Ruby Road and The Snowmen are Christmas specials set in London that feature the Doctor meeting a new female companion whom he invites to join him in his TARDIS travels, following a sequence where that companion has climbed up a ladder to an unseen craft high above in the sky. For the third blogged story in a row the new companion is seen working in a pub or club, and in two out of those last three that work has been as a musician.

Deeper Thoughts:

Will Wham be Christmas number one every year now? In the words of Homer Simson, I'm just a big kid and I love Christmas so much. I like the rituals, and the return of the ritual of watching a Doctor Who special on the big day was very much appreciated. Another ritual coming back after a few years away was wondering what the UK Christmas number one would be. I've been interested in the UK Christmas number one since 1987 when my favourite band of the time, Pet Shop Boys, landed the festive top spot with Always on my Mind. In those days, and for most of the history of the UK chart, the honour would be earned by a good pop record (and Always on my Mind is a good pop record), or a Christmas-themed hit, or a novelty song of the moment. Sometimes, the winning song could be a mixture of the three. For the previous five Yuletides before 2023, though, it wasn't any source of mystery and certainly not wonder. Youtuber Ladbaby cornered the market between 2018 and 2022, exactly the period that Doctor Who's specials were missing from Christmas Day coincidentally, with versions of songs with the lyrics changed to talk about sausage rolls (yes, really) released for charity in the immediate run up to Christmas. It was very successful, and the top spot was achieved each of the five times attempted. As well as being successful, it was also tiresome - variety is the spice of life and all that. There was no fun in guessing as the answer was always the same.

There had been periods of ubiquity before; the Beatles in the 1960s, the Spice Girls in the 1990s, but they are hardly comparable as they were at least offering original songs. The only similar period of frustration was probably just over a decade earlier than Ladbaby, when each year's winner of the UK TV programme X Factor, a singing competition televised in the autumn, would tend to grab the festive top spot. This pissed off some people that weren't watching that programme, or who didn't appreciate the - very samey - style of record created each year, so much that an online campaign was successful in getting Rage Against the Machine's Killing in the Name (with its forceful refrain about not doing what one's told to do) to Christmas number one in 2009. Like Ladbaby, X Factor had been using its built-in audience to put power behind a song climbing the charts, which some felt was gaming the system. The online campaign of 2009 showed though that something more grassroots could be effective, but nothing like that has really been successful at Christmas since despite a few attempts over the years. This year there was something of an online push for Fairytale of New York by the Pogues and Kirsty MacColl to get to number one, as a tribute to Pogues singer and cowriter of the song Shane MacGowan who had died at the end of November 2023. It is a well-loved song, and many people feel it was unfairly robbed of the festive top spot when first released in 1987 by being kept at number two by the hi-NRG frippery of a couple of arch Northerners with synthesisers (see above). But it only made it to number six in 2023.

For Christmas 2023, another TV show was pushing its own song, with proceeds going to charity too, and that was Doctor Who. The Goblin Song from The Church on Ruby Road was available to stream and download in December 2023. It got to a reasonably high position in the top 40 sales chart in the UK, but didn't break the UK top 40. What's that you're saying? You weren't aware that the UK sales chart and the UK top 40 are different things? Me neither until I found out, like I would guess many a Doctor Who fan did, when there was a brief social media kerfuffle about it. A Doctor Who Magazine journalist replied to the singer of the Goblin Song Christina Rotondo, without knowing it was her or he might have been more polite, pissing on her parade in an 'Actually, I think you'll find' manner, She'd been celebrating the song reaching number 12 in the UK top 40 for the week before Christmas. He pointed out that it was at that position in a UK top 40, but not the UK top 40 (the definitive article you might say). So much for Christmas cheer and goodwill. It begs the question, though, that if the official chart is not charting sales, then what's the use of it? What dominates it is streaming. Television, as noted above in the Context section above, is more and more about streaming, and that journey happened for music even earlier. Unfortunately, this means the chart it is no longer fit for purpose as a test of what current song people are excited by in the Christmas period. The majority of the songs in the official UK top 40 in Christmas week of 2023 were all the songs - from any era - that tend to get streamed at Christmas every year, from Slade to Bing Crosby to Mariah Carey to Ariana Grande to Wham, who made it to the Christmas 2023 number one spot with their 1984 record, Last Christmas.

Ladbaby had opted out of the race in 2023, but he may not have managed to get a sixth consecutive number one anyway. The sales chart (where The Goblin Song was hanging in there at 52 in its second week) was very different to the UK top 40, and had more new recordings. This makes sense: if someone is going to pay to download something it's more likely to be something new (and it's more likely that if a song is for charity that it will be paid for rather than streamed); if a song's an old one that someone wants to have on in the background as they make mince pies, it's more likely to be streamed. As honourable as is the charitable aim, and as catchy a ditty as is the Goblin King song, it is not - like Ladbaby's efforts - going to form part of anyone's festive playlists in years to come. This cannot be said for Wham's Last Christmas, a song played so much at Yuletide that people have made a challenge out of avoiding it before the big day. It's charted every December since 2007, reached the top ten every year since 2016, and has made the top spot twice before, but not quite for Christmas week, in 2020 and 2022. With no Ladbaby in its way, it finally did it, but what will now stop it doing the same every year from now on? I can't foresee a new Ladbaby phenomenon arising that would dent its dominance. Even with the boost of people wanting to pay tribute to MacGowan, Fairytale of New York (a song that gets streamed lots anyway) couldn't make the top five. Mariah Carey's All I Want For Christmas Is You could challenge it, I suppose. But whether it's Wham every year, or Wham alternating with Mariah, either way it's not going to be very interesting. If the worst happens and the Christmas number one becomes a one or two horse race, finally ending that ritual of wonder, at least we will have a Doctor Who special annually to make up for it. Happy New Year!

In Summary:

The Church on Ruby Road seems to have split audiences as much as the church on Ruby Road split the Goblin King; I liked it a lot. 

The Snowmen

Chapter the 287th, where it's Snow Joke for the Doctor and Clara at Christmas...

Plot:
London, England 1892. Disillusioned after losing the Ponds to the Weeping Angels (though they did get to die of old age, so that's alright then!), the Doctor is hiding out in the TARDIS on top of a cloud reached by an invisible spiral staircase (yes, really). Vastra, Jenny and Strax are trying to engage him in helping people again, but he's resisting futilely. He meets a governess and sometime barmaid Clara Oswald, while investigating telepathic alien snow that can form itself into killer snowmen. The head of the G.I. institute Doctor Simeon has had a telepathic link with the snow since he was a child, and now is aiming to make the intelligence corporeal. To achieve this, he needs the icy body print of a human that exists at Clara's employer Captain Latimer's house, as the previous governess a year earlier drowned in a pond that then froze over. Snowmen surround the house, and the ice governess comes to life, but Clara protects her charges (a young girl and boy). The Doctor, and then Vastra, Jenny and Strax arrive to help out.

The Doctor and Clara lead the ice governess to the top of the house, then both escape up the invisible staircase to the TARDIS, where the Doctor believes the governess will not be able to follow. Just as he's inviting Clara to travel with him in the TARDIS, the governess arrives, and pulls at Clara and they both fall down to Earth. The governess is smashed to smithereens, and Clara is mortally wounded. The Doctor brings her in to the Latimer house where the others try to save her, while he goes to confront Simeon. With a nice little bit of the old Doctor flim-flam, he manages to wipe Simeon's memory, but instead of removing the link to the snow, it allows the snow to animate the blank Simeon. Suddenly, though, it starts to rain, the snow melts, and Simeon collapses. The telepathic signal caused by the Latimer children crying has created rain, and they are crying because Clara has died. In the aftermath, the Doctor realises that the G.I. in the institute's name stands for Great Intelligence, so maybe the disembodied force behind the snowmen might have survived. He also realises Clara is someone he's now met twice and both times she has died, He goes off into time and space to investigate that mystery.

Context:

Watched on a Sunday afternoon in the lead up to Christmas 2023, accompanied by the eldest and youngest child (boy of 17, girl of 11). The Better Half and middle child (boy of 14) were elsewhere in the house rewatching Good Omens season one, the David Tennant-loving genre traitors! I watched from the BBC iplayer, rather than bothering to get the Blu-ray set down from the shelf.  

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now closing in on the point where I finish everything and catch up with the current stories being broadcast serially. The Snowmen is the final (at time of writing) new series Christmas Day special to be covered. There was a good run of these from The Christmas Invasion in 2005 to Twice Upon a Time in 2017. After that, the Who festive specials moved to January 1st and didn't look like they were ever going to come back to December 25th. Missing them, I decided then to hold back a few of the older ones, exempting them from selection during the rest of the year, to blog about annually - but in a random order, natch - just before the big day. Luckily, now that I've run the old ones out, Doctor Who is back on Christmas Day again from 2023 onwards. Exciting!

First Time Round:

I can't remember much about Christmas 2012. My In-Laws were round during the day, and the youngest's first Christmas was a bit rubbish as she was ill with an ear infection, poor thing. I definitely watched The Snowmen on the day, probably time-shifted a little into the evening as its 5:15pm broadcast time would still have been a bit busy in the house.  The only clear memory in my head from around this time is reading the Christmas Radio Times listings magazine, which introduced Jenna Coleman as the new companion Clara. I'm struggling to remember whether it had leaked that she wasn't the real Clara, and that this was to a certain extent misdirection with the Victorian Clara dying during the special. (Like in many a show since it was done - spoiler alert for old telly - by Spooks in the UK, writer Steven Moffat is pulling the trick of introducing someone who appears to be a regular and therefore plot-armoured, but then killing them off as a surprise.) I don't think I had heard anything about this, so when reading about Clara I would have thought that she was to be a Victorian in the TARDIS, and I probably thought that wasn't the greatest idea.

Reaction:

When The Church on Ruby Road is shown on the 25th December 2023, it will make it fourteen specials in total for the new Doctor Who broadcast on BBC1 on the big day. It's rare for something that isn't a light entertainment show, soap or monarch's message to rack up such numbers. Fourteen specials is equal with Only Fools and Horses's total (the popular sit-com being something of a benchmark for festive ubiquity). As OFAH's writer John Sullivan found earlier (the most popular Only Fools Christmas special is set around August Bank Holiday weekend), it's hard to keep coming up with ideas that feature significant festive trimmings. The Snowmen marks the point that Moffat pretty much gives up, and - with the exception of the cracked / genius / both idea to include Santa Claus in a Doctor Who story a couple of years later - all of his Christmas specials from this one onwards barely feature any festivities, and could be set at any time of the year. That's fair enough, as it is a hard ask of anyone, and there would have been diminishing returns in sticking with killer tinsel monsters, or whatever, year on year. The Snowmen is at least wintery, and the central idea of semi-sentient carnivorous snow telepathically connected to a formless intelligence is an interesting one. The visuals pop, whether it's deep and crisp and even backdrops to dialogue scenes, or the moments where razor-toothed snowmen form instantly, or of Simeon using a machine to create an artificial blizzard in the Latimer house.

The title makes it seem like this is the third and final one of a series of Moffat Christmas specials loosely based on literary texts associated with the season, following the use of A Christmas Carol and The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe the previous two years. Was The Snowmen in any way alluding to Raymond Briggs's The Snowman singular, the animated short film of which has been a festive fixture on UK channel 4 for decades. There is a sequence where the Doctor and Clara are literally walking in the air (the refrain of the famous song featured in The Snowman) so it's possible. It could, though, just be a coincidence. My money's on the latter, as Moffat seems to be much more interested in riffing on texts that are closer to home, creating an origin story for a classic monster from the early days of the show - the Great Intelligence. As would be expected of the writer, it's very clever: in one short programme with a few other things going on, the Doctor accidentally gives freedom and agency to the floating snow intelligence, as well as giving it the ideas for its first two battles with him in his Patrick Troughton persona (The Abominable Snowmen and The Web of Fear). This is summed up in some slightly glib but funny (for a long-term fan) dialogue shared between Vastra, Jenny and the Doctor towards the end - a wink to the audience. Of course, this means that the defeat the alien invasion plot is not resolved during the special. The Great Intelligence will turn out to be the Big Bad of the episodes broadcast in Spring the following year.

One might think, and I agree, that the defeat the alien invasion plot is not the main point of The Snowmen. The real story is about the introduction of Clara. Jenna Coleman is perfect in her first appearance (well, sort-of, she had an unexpected teaser appearance earlier in 2012, but this is the first time she's properly interacted with the Doctor). She's sassy, assertive, cheeky, brave, clever; the character clearly passes the audition, for Doctor and for audience alike. But it's all misdirection: this Clara dies, and the Doctor then realises it's the same person as he talked to in the Dalek asylum. There's a mystery to solve and - perhaps - a prime Clara to find somewhere in the universe. So, again, the plot is unresolved and leads in to the episodes the following Spring. With The Snowmen being all so much set-up, how does it manage to engage the perhaps more flighty Christmas day audience? Maybe a lot of people watching don't care about the resolution of plot arcs - they'll either be watching in 2013 anyway, in which case they'll find out how things pan out, or they won't, so they won't care. They are rewarded during their hour's worth of Yuletide attention with comedy at least, and that might well be enough to get them through it. This is one of those Doctor Who stories blessed with more than its fair share of funny lines, and a lot of them are thanks to Dan Starkey's performance as Strax. The combination of his delivery and the material Moffat provides him is a winning combination (that the show would regularly milk over the next couple of years). The memory worm scene alone justifies the entire episode. In fact, even if the other 59 minutes and 50 seconds were fuzz and white noise, it would be worth it just for the line "Do not discuss my reproductive cycle in front of enemy girls."

  

Starkey is not the only one delivering; everybody's giving it their all. Richard E. Grant is as good as you'd expect as a restrained baddie, Neve Mackintosh as Vastra and Catrin Stewart as Jenny are not going to let the Sontaran have all the fun ("I'm a lizard woman from the dawn of time, and this is my wife"), Tom Ward and Liz White are memorably great too, without a huge amount of screen time. Murray Gold's music is sublime, there are some great set piece sequences like the interrogation scene where Vastra makes Clara form her answers as a single word only. There's a nice new beginning title sequence with Matt Smith's face appearing (for old times sake as the 50th anniversary approached); there's a wonderful new TARDIS control room set (possibly the best ever since 2005). As every parent knows, some years you can't find one big, perfect present for a child, and you have to instead give them lots of little things. The Snowmen is like that, a stocking full of individual, small pleasures rather than one solid plot. Sometimes, that's enough. If you stuff every gift you can think of into a stocking,  inevitably not everything will be liked. I didn't like Clara forcing a kiss on the Doctor without consent, and I didn't like the Doctor's borderline bullying of Strax, making many disparaging comments about his appearance. I don't think those moments would be handled in the same way if this story was made today.

Connectivity:

Both The Snowmen and The Ultimate Adventure feature the Doctor meeting a new female companion who works in an establishment that serves drinks. Both stories also see the Doctor with a cute alien sidekick (Zog, Strax).

Deeper Thoughts:

The Year of the Whoniverse. In the approach to Christmas Day, it's appropriate to look back on the year just gone. The biggest part of Doctor Who in 2023 will be forgotten, maybe already is forgotten, and that was a long wait. The longest period ever between new episodes on television since the programme returned in 2005 elapsed between the Power of the Doctor in October 2022 and The Star Beast in November 2023. The stretch of time was a miniature version of the so-called wilderness years between the classic and the new series, and like those years it didn't exactly live up to the name, not being particularly barren. For a start, there was excitingly new Doctor Who being made. There were frequent press releases throughout the year announcing new guest stars, or featuring photographs of the new main stars of the show Ncuti Gatwa and Millie Gibson in different outfits (the wardrobe budget certainly seems to have been expanded with the influx of Disney+ money). I don't think there's ever before in its 60 year history been a period when Doctor Who has had so much in the can ahead of broadcast. All of Gatwa's first season has completed production and is into post before a single story of his has been shown. At the time of writing in December 2023, his 2024 Christmas special is being shot before his 2023 Christmas special has aired. After having two years on the trot with only a few specials, an effort's clearly being made to ensure in future there will be a regular season and special broadcast annually, without gap years.

There's also lots of delicious rumours of spin-offs that might well be entertaining us between seasons. A little taste of that was the Tales of the TARDIS series of shorts that landed on the BBC iplayer at the start of November 2023, but I'd be surprised if there weren't plans for bigger things in 2024. Those Tales of the TARDIS were the start of a flood of new stuff from the start of November that helped fans forget being patient for the first ten months of the year. There was an exclusive new scene for Children in Need for the first time in simply ages, and there was a colourised and re-edited version of classic story The Daleks. Again, it's been confirmed that another such programme will be coming in the next year. The main event for the anniversary, though, was a trio of specials featuring David Tennant and Catherine Tate. For me, these were perfect, and I don't think I'm alone in that view. The only sane negatives I've seen were more to do with people's expectations than the stories themselves. For most viewers, getting David Tennant and Catherine Tate back was nostalgia and celebration enough, but some fans were expecting many more returning elements from the show's history. Secrecy about the nature of middle story Wild Blue Yonder, as by its minimalist nature it didn't have much to use for pre-publicity that wasn't a spoiler, led to wild theories online about appearances from Matt Smith and Peter Capaldi and such. Instead, what we got were more leftfield choices exploring the nooks and crannies of Who history, which were ultimately more celebratory.

One might think the past of the programme had been mined to exhaustion, but adapting a plot from the early years of Doctor Who Magazine, or bringing back a well-remembered one-off foe from decades before, proved that to be false. The Meep and Neil Patrick Harris's Toymaker left me wanting more, as did Tennant and Tate themselves (on particularly good form with the material they got to play in Wild Blue Yonder). I'd love to see any or all of them back, but - as Ncuti's appearance at the end of The Giggle underlined - it's all about the future now. The tantalising glimpses seen so far of Ncuti's first stories haven't included any hints of returning monsters as yet, so it may be a clean slate, Who knows. Another way of experiencing the past of Doctor Who, and another thing keeping fans entertained for the first 10 months of the year, were the releases on Blu-ray and DVD. There were another two seasons of 20th century stories released on Collection Blu-ray boxsets, season 9 (Jon Pertwee's third run) in March and season 20 (Peter Davison's second, including no less than three different versions of 20th anniversary tale The Five Doctors) in September. The most surprising release was an animated The Underwater Menace in November, when last year the animation range had seemed like it was dead. It was an enjoyable version, but was probably overshadowed by everything else going on in November. I look forward to seeing the next one (confirmed during the BFI panel for the release as being lined up - see the Deeper Thoughts section of The Tenth Planet post for more details).

The year for the blog has seen 35 stories written up. I will endeavour to get The Church on Ruby Road blogged by New Year's Eve '23 too, which will mean 36 in total, three a month, which is generally the rate I maintain every year. Of these, there was a slight weighting in favour of new series stories. For the classic series Doctors, I watched three William Hartnell stories (one wholly intact, one wholly missing, and one mix of episodes and animation to plug gaps), two Patrick Troughtons (one wholly intact, one wholly missing), three each for Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker, one each for Peter Davison, Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy (though I also snuck in a post about a stage play recording also starring Colin). For the new series, one story only for Christopher Eccleston, four for Matt Smith (though he did additionally feature briefly in a spin-off that I blogged this year too), four for Peter Capaldi, and three for Jodie Whittaker. Winning out over everyone - it really was his year - was David Tennant with seven stories. Four of these were standard stories from his original TV run from 2005 to 2010, two were animated stories shown in that same period, and one was a 2023 60th anniversary special where he returned as the 14th Doctor. No other Doctor before (or between) Tennant is adding to their total anymore; with dwindling supplies of stories to cover, I will likely run out by the end of next year, even taking into consideration the nine stories starring Ncuti Gatwa to be broadcast that year. I may well branch out and look at some more spin-offs. If you find me blogging The Airzone Solution in 2024, you'll know why (and, needless to say, apologies in advance). All that's to come in the new year, so for now all there is to say is Merry Christmas!  

In Summary:

Incidentally, a Happy and Snowy Christmas to all of you at home.