Doctor Who Reviews: "Joy to the World"

There’s been some criticism, some of it just -most of it in bad faith, that the Ncuti Gatwa era of Doctor Who in the one series it has had, is too sentimental. Particularly that the Doctor is too sentimental, that he cries too much. But by and large this has gelled perfectly well with the kind of Doctor he is and the resounding thesis Russell T. Davies has brought to this new era of Doctor Who. There may be moments that don’t quite justify the emotional extremity on display, but more often it is earned. The complaint is overblown anyway. The Doctor barely sheds a tear in “Joy to the World” and it is probably the most sentimental episode of Gatwa’s run so far. And that I don’t mean as a bad thing.

The episode comes courtesy of Steven Moffat, the first time the annual holiday special has not been written by the present series showrunner -though of course Moffat is an old-hand, having written seven of these himself. Yet as with his standalone outing last series “Boom”, he feels a bit freer here, the episode is more boisterous than just about any of the specials he previously produced. Maybe it’s the infectiousness of Gatwa’s charisma as the Doctor or the more nebulous nature of the antagonist -albeit tied to an entity that Moffat is clearly interested in continuing to explore. Or else it’s just the general spirit of the season, the final moments feeling more distinctly like Davies’ or Chris Chibnall’s work. I don’t doubt Moffat’s authorship though. Sometimes you need these stories to just be sweet.

And certainly it feels plenty Moffat in its desire to muck about with concepts of time travel, the action of much of the episode centred on a Time Hotel, with rooms that are entry-points through all of human history, where figures of those eras can also intermingle in a zone outside their span of time. It is a fun idea, if the aesthetic is perhaps a little much of a white-coated version of Loki’s TVA. The Doctor, some time after leaving Ruby, turns up here in his best Arthur Dent get-up (a nice little nod to Douglas Adams and his role with the show back in the 70s). He of course very quickly notices something is up with a curiously motionless guest at the check-in counter with a briefcase cuffed to his hand. Wrangling an awkward employee Trev, played by a perfectly silly Joel Fry, the Doctor tries to ascertain this person’s room once he leaves, dropping in with a toasty and pumpkin latte on several time periods before finding him in, predictably, a random little London hotel room in 2024 -only it’s not the same guy anymore but some random Silurian.

This is of course conveyed a little out of order, but only so much to catch our attention rather than show off. In a neat little twist, the person happened to be relatively normal -it was the briefcase that had latched onto him of its own doing. What it does is take partial control of its hosts’ minds, and when passed on to a new host the previous one is disintegrated. That is how it goes through a few people at the hotel, including Trev, before reaching the Silurian manager, whom the Doctor catches in 2024 in front of a lonely and confused guest Joy Almondo, played by a typically delightful Nicola Coughlan, the special’s designated companion. Of course the briefcase, wanting to latch onto the Doctor, instead winds up on Joy. “The star seed will bloom and the flesh will rise” is repeated by each host, and when the Doctor opens the briefcase here, he indeed finds an artificially constructed star seed before the briefcase begins to self-destruct. Joy is only saved by an amusing Bill & Ted device -i.e. a future version of the Doctor from when he knows the disarming pass-code coming into the room and giving it to them. But then, this future Doctor takes Joy and leaves the present Doctor in the hotel room, sealing the door from the Time Hotel with the instruction his past self has to come “the long way around” in order to get the code.

“The long way around” is of course a favourite device from the writer who multiple times aged the Doctor thousands of years within a single episode. Here it is just one year, he being left with a slip from the Time Hotel from Christmas 2025. In an almost complete digression from the plot at hand, the Doctor opts to stay in that very room of the little London hotel, paying for it via earning his keep as an employee. He thinks about the time hotel and the star seed and Joy, but in the play-through of his year spent there, the focus isn’t on these relevant details, but the rather casual experience it is for the Doctor, and particularly the cogent friendship he strikes up with the manager Anita (Steph de Whalley). Like Joy, like perhaps Trev, and like the Doctor himself right now, Anita is a lonely soul, and it’s a rather endearing relationship developed largely through weekly board game nights in his room. The momentum of the show slows here, but very intentionally so, as the Doctor is forced to live a linear day-by-day existence for a while and reckon once again with that fact he needs someone in his life, as necessary a thing for him as leaving them behind. It is a purely character-oriented chapter in an otherwise narrative-first story, but it works; Gatwa and de Whalley play it really well. And that genuine sweetness at their parting, especially on Anita, is keenly felt -one of the best illustrations of the Doctor’s impact.

But of course he must continue on, and on Christmas 2025, enters the time hotel again from a room in New York just in time to save Joy and his past self -the code actually came out of nowhere (despite the fact it works), the Doctor just knowing his past self needed to experience that year. But with the plot un-paused, Joy is still captive to the briefcase, if its self-destruct has been deactivated. Working off a theory, the Doctor postulates with uncharacteristic cruelty about the sadness in Joy’s life that would drive her to staying in a hotel room alone on Christmas. In angry outbursts gradually freeing her from the case’s control, Joy fights back with defenses of how her mother died on Christmas and she can’t stand to be with family anymore because of it; because of her own regret in not seeing her before she died and her blaming herself for the whole thing too. The Doctor doesn’t mean any of it of course, but it is still troubling to see -as much as it was from David Tennant or Peter Capaldi when forced to be callous. As to Coughlan taking it all, it is perhaps a case of a writer (and director -Alex Sanjiv Pillai) knowing their talent. The sequence plays very well into the strengths of high emotion Coughlan has demonstrated on Derry Girls and Bridgerton. The way she very organically demonstrates how each awful remark and supposition from the Doctor sinks in deeply on her -it’s really effective, both as drama and plot device, as sure enough the briefcase becomes detached once they’ve taken their heated talk into a prehistoric room.

There we find that the architect behind this star seed and its briefcase is Villengard, the same intergalactic weapons manufacturing company Moffat introduced in “Boom”. Through its previous hosts absorbed into its mainframe, it explains that its purpose is to be planted far enough back in the past that it can explode in the future and be used as an energy source -no care at all being given for the many who would die by its explosion. Evidently Moffat still has some thoughts on weapons capitalism and I’m all for him getting to express them here.

His time travel shenanigans are also legitimately fun with the device of the Time Hotel making jumps between eras easier than it might otherwise be. A T-Rex eats the briefcase in the prehistoric room only for the Doctor and Joy to find it in a  shrine centuries later, concealed behind heavy rock. The way they get to it is very amusing: the Doctor going back to the rooms he visited before, stealing a rope and hook off of some Everest mountaineers and pulling the rock loose by connecting it between rooms via hooking it onto the railway behind the 1960s Orient Express. Before he can get back to it though, Joy steals the star seed and takes it out into the open from the time period of the room it was in.

And here is where that sentimentality comes in, with an earnestness that is only matched by its corniness. In a rather unusual solution by Joy, she has absorbed the seed herself -how she did is not shown, but her chest glows with the inkling star inside. It looks very goofy, but just the right side given the scope of Doctor Who, to be acceptable (The T-Rex was not). She intends to become the star herself, as she acquiesces to everything the Doctor said but didn’t mean about her, quietly turning it back on him though -he had claimed he could deduce much of it from her willingness to stay in that hotel room over Christmas; what does it say about him doing the same for a whole year. For a second time in the episode, he is told he needs somebody. Even though Joy rejects that she is going to “die”, she still claims this will allow her to see her mother again, and the act has every hallmark of a sacrifice. And while Joy wasn’t established nearly enough for us to be moved by this alone, Coughlan is so warm a personality in the role, that you feel for her regardless. The entities of the past hosts are enough through this choice of Joy’s to overtake Villengard’s programming, and they rise her up far into space to explode.

The star that is created shines bright, and I wasn’t expecting to be as affected by what we see as its endurance and representation. It becomes a fixed point across all time periods -a singular star of hope to the couple in Manchester being bombed during the Second World War, the single lady passenger on the Orient Express writing to her lesbian lover, the mountaineers dispirited in their quest (perhaps owing to their equipment being nicked). It shines for Anita, as she looks out from her hotel alone again thinking of the Doctor. It shines on Joy’s mother, who we see died in 2020 -likely from COVID- her death was really her joining her daughter in the star. And it shines for Ruby Sunday, who spies it herself at her Christmas birthday. Lastly as the Doctor notices and which is maybe too quaint -but I’ll allow it- this distant star, Joy, is the Star of Bethlehem shining over the very first Christmas as the episode closes.

I suppose when so many other Christmas tales and tropes have had their day from Doctor Who in the past two decades, that it was about time they got to Jesus -thankfully left only as an end note and symbol more than anything. But it’s a powerful symbol for Christmas, and I think Moffat as well as Davies were intuitive enough to know its value now of any time. Accompanied by Murray Gold’s great music, the ending of this episode is more than a touch saccharine sure, but its the most I’ve appreciated the ending of a Doctor Who holiday special in a long time. Though I appreciated the episode a lot anyway. 

Beyond the exposition-heaviness at the start of the third act, there was nary a point in the episode I felt dismayed by. The concept of the Time Hotel is a very “Restaurant at the End of the Universe” kind of idea, and though that wit of Adams isn’t present, the hotel setting and bits of the episode outside of it, lived up to those whimsical connotations. It’s a funny episode and a decently smart one (that microwave callback I thought was quite clever). There’s a pride to how unabashed it is at the end, and a boldness to what it does in its second act entirely for the Doctor’s sake beyond the confines of the story. The fact the digression is such a human one is really comforting too. Maybe it suggests a continued exploration of the Doctor’s human side going forward, after so much time teasing out the mystery of this figure’s alien-ness -which I of course like just as much. He is ideally a balance in that Last Temptation of Christ fashion -to evoke a figure this episode also does in its last shot.

“Joy to the World” lives up to its title -very pleasant and affirming in nature, and the best holiday special the show has done in years. A very Merry Christmas from Doctor Who. I hope you all may see that star of hope tonight.

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