Doctor Who (2023) - Christmas 2024: Joy to the World

Episode:

884

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Serial:

312

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Writer:

Steven Moffat

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Director:

Alex Sanjiv Pillai

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Air Date:

25-Dec-2024

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The good news is that Sci-Fi Adventures has finally returned to cover a brand new episode of Doctor Who! The bad news is that it's been six months since I last wrote a full scene-by-scene review like this and I've forgotten how to do it. Honestly it's lucky I remembered I'm supposed to take notes.

Anyway, this is a Steven Moffat episode and that's a pretty big deal, seeing as he's written some of the best stories in Doctor Who history. They haven't all been winners, but that's no surprise considering how prolific he's been. By my calculations this is the 50th episode that Moffat has been credited for writing or co-writing for Doctor Who, which is even more than Russell T Davies' 41. He's still way short of Classic Who writers Robert Holmes (72), Terry Nation (62) or Malcolm Hulke (54), though, and I doubt they'll ever be beaten...

... unless you count full stories instead of episodes, in which case those numbers become Robert Holmes (18), Terry Nation (11), Malcolm Hulke (8), Russell T Davies (33) and Steven Moffat (40... ish). (It's hard to know what to count as a two-parter sometimes.) So Steven Moffat has set an almost unbeatable record here, especially considering how seasons are getting shorter and further apart. At least, it would've been if RTD wasn't so close to catching up.

I should warn you that this review will contain SPOILERS for every minute of this episode and certain minutes of previous stories.

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The episode begins in 1940s Manchester, with the Doctor returning to the horrors of the Blitz to offer this couple a ham and cheese toastie with a pumpkin latte. He's doing a really good job of balancing that tray with one hand, I'm impressed.

It's nice to see that they were still able to get hold of Christmas trees and decorations with a war on. Not a lot of decorations out in the street this year however, probably because you don't want to advertise where your roads are to the bombers flying overhead.

The couple are a bit disturbed by the Doctor appearing in their hotel room to offer them room service, but that might be mostly because he came from the locked door. You know, the one that connects two rooms to make a larger area contains secrets that no mortal knows.

Damn, are they sure Chris Chibnall didn't write this one? The story's jumping around everywhere as the Doctor comes out of magic doors like the bloke in Flux. It's even got the Chibnall-era big text on screen telling us where we are.

The Doctor offers a toastie and latte to a woman reading Murder on the Orient Express on the Orient Express, and to some climbers in a tent on Everest in 1953, and then the episode jumps to most interesting place in the universe, at least when Russell T Davies is running the show: present day London.

This time they definitely have the Christmas lights on in the street as a woman comes into a hotel to awkwardly acquire a single room for Christmas Eve. It's Nicola Coughlan, from a bunch of stuff I haven't seen.

Something about the way this scene is shot is reminding me of Eve of the Daleks, which also began with someone coming in to rent a room, at night, during the holidays.

Eve of the Daleks

Except Joy isn't giving off creepy stalker vibes.

Oh, I already know that the woman is called Joy Almondo (no relation to Almond Joy chocolate bars), and that the episode is named after her. I haven't been watching the trailers or anything like that, it's just impossible to be on YouTube with Doctor Who videos in your history and not pick some of this up.

But someone bursts into her hotel room through the mysterious locked door and it's...

... a Silurian with a briefcase chained to his wrist?

He look a lot like a Silurian at least, though he also looks like a hotel manager. Damn, it's funny how staring at a picture of a bed can make you aware of how tired you are. It looks so comfortable... so cosy...

The Silurian's less comfortable at the moment as he's mistaken Joy's hair dryer for a gun. I suppose their planet wouldn't have them, on account of them not having hair. Hang on, their planet is Earth, they live here! I can't judge him too harshly though, as anyone who's seen Dalek knows how easy it can be to get ray guns and hair dryers mixed up.

"The star seed will bloom and the flesh will rise", he explains. And then the Doctor arrives with his tray. Cut to opening titles.

Here's an insightful observation for you: Nicola Coughlan's name doesn't really try to hard to make room for the TARDIS in the intro. Millie Gibson's name jumped right out of the way and Catherine Tate's name made at least a bit of an effort, but here the C drops slightly and that's all you get.

The rest of the credits remains unchanged this time. I thought there might be something different about the logo, but after further investigation... nope.

Then the episode jumps to Christmas 4202 (which is 76 years after the Ood were freed in Planet of the Ood and a hundred years before Moffat's first Christmas story, A Christmas Carol). It's basically doing that "24 HOURS EARLIER" thing that I hate, where a story starts in the middle of an exciting moment and then goes back to explain how the characters got there. But it doesn't say "24 HOURS EARLIER" so I'm less annoyed.

London's looking pretty stylish right now. A bit monochrome, but the vibe I'm getting is that it's closer to a utopia than a dystopia. There are a few adverts on rooftops, but it's a long way from Blade Runner. And one of them is a holographic T-Rex I noticed. Judging by all the bridges is seems like they haven't got flying cars yet, but they do have a lot of of red buses.

This is way down the river from the Houses of Parliament and the London Eye, but you can see Tower Bridge, the Tower of London and the HMS Belfast down there at the bottom. The shiny new UNIT HQ building would've been around the 4 and 2, so that hasn't survived 2000 years. But very few buildings do.

The Doctor turns up at the Time Hotel and is stopped by security guard Trev, who wants to know if he's a guest. He's wearing a dressing gown, carrying a newspaper and holding two mugs, so personally I would've have assumed 'yes'. He's not though, he just parked here for some milk, and the two cups are because... he hasn't got used to Ruby not being there.

It took me a second to notice the graphic on the paper. I guess it's supposed to be the Gallifrey Times? Nice to see they're still around despite the decline in print journalism and the complete annihilation of their world. Also Prisoner Zero from The Eleventh Hour has been found, apparently.

Man, the Fifteenth Doctor's theme sounds so good in this. This is a pretty nice set as well. It reminds me a bit of Starfleet Command in Star Trek: Discovery, except without being cold, blue and miserable.

You know, like this.

This TARDIS interior is actually one of my favourites, but when you know the walls change colours it looks a bit dull when it's switched to white. It's also become very obvious to me that there's absolutely nothing in here but a console, curving walkways and the jukebox. Dude really needs some furniture.

The Doctor's not sticking around, though it takes him a moment to catch up to his brain and figure out why he's putting his coat on. There was something weird out there in the Time Hotel lobby: a man with a briefcase handcuffed to his arm.

Each Doctor is the same person, but for each regeneration different traits come to the fore. 10 was the hero, 11 was the mad man with a box, 12 was cranky, 13 was socially awkward, and 15's making a good case here for being the charming Doctor. He pulls an Axel Foley, claiming to be from the head office and convincing Trev that he's being recruited for a secret mission.

It seems like Trev isn't particularly bright and he's getting dumber by the minute, though maybe I just read him wrong at first. He's smart enough to ask if they're going to follow briefcase guy and the Doctor's dumb enough to say 'no'. He hates following people and he'd rather learn what this place even is.

It turns out that it's a hotel where every room is in a different period of history.

• You can go join the first people to climb Mount Everest. Or at least use their tent after they've gone.
• You can go to the O.K. Corral and witness one of the worse serials in Classic Doctor Who.
• You can go to Pompeii and witness one of the better episodes in Modern Doctor Who.
• You can go to Hiroshima or WWII Britain and experience the thrill of having bombs dropped on your head.
• You can go to Area 51 or the Monaco Grand Prix.
  
• You can go see Lincoln and Kennedy getting murdered!
  

Though you can only visit a room after the current occupants have left, so it doesn't seem like they can just rent the same day out people over and over. So that's a potential flaw in the business model. Also they're bringing diseases from all of history into the same place.

Wow, Mr Benn! There's a reference I didn't expect to see. If you aren't familiar with him, he's a children's character who dresses up in different costumes and then travels to the appropriate world through a magic door, which is exactly what's going on here. In fact his first outfit was of a red knight.

Speaking of firsts...

These guys look a lot like the cavemen in Doctor Who's first serial, An Unearthly Child (aka. 100,000 BC)

Anyway, you'd think the Doctor might have some concerns about all this, seeing as it's basically what was going on in the classic Ray Bradbury story A Sound of Thunder. You know, the one where someone steps on a butterfly and changes the future? Which is exactly what Ruby did on her first trip into the past. The Doctor and Donna had one conversation with Isaac Newton and people are still using the word 'mavity' to describe the attraction between two bodies 11 episodes later. But nope, no concerns!

Also we just saw something like this a few episodes ago, with the historical cosplayer birds in Rogue. Though these guys don't murder people, they just pay to watch assassinations.

Hey it's the ham and cheese toastie and pumpkin latte!

The hotel uses time travel to prepare your order before you've ordered it, which sounds like something out of a Douglas Adams novel. Hey are those guys in the background visiting the 2012 Olympic Games? That's an event with a bit of significance to Doctor Who as well, as it was featured in Fear Her, which is currently banned from streaming services for reasons completely unrelated to how bad it is.

The Doctor decides to go investigate where the guy with the briefcase wants to go, the time portals, using the tray as a disguise, and Trev assures him this will be the least he's ever let anyone down. So that's reassuring.

Unfortunately Doctor's gone in completely the wrong direction and is nowhere around when the mysterious stranger reaches his objective: some dude working at the suspiciously empty bar. The handcuff detaches and swings around to grab him, possessing his mind. The star seed will bloom and the flesh will rise.

The former host seems a bit confused and asks what he should do now, and the bartender basically says he should go sit down and die. Turns out that carrying the briefcase comes with a death sentence.

Now I'm curious about what the Bartender is going to do with it. Why did the briefcase seek out him in particular, what it's mission here.

Oh it just wanted him to give the briefcase to Trev to upgrade its access. Oh no, I liked Trev. It's way too early in the episode to lose Trev. He was on a mission for the Doctor!

With his job complete, the bartender explodes into glitter, just like the previous host. Well, the episode got rid of briefcase guy and the bartender in a hurry, but that just means that mind-controlled Trev gets more time as the main antagonist.

Oh seriously? Trev's only job was to hand the briefcase to the Silurian manager? Now he's going to explode into glitter too, after achieving absolutely nothing. Talk about a completely senseless death.

The case has been upgrading its access by working its way up the staff and now that it has the manager it access to all the time portals, including ones that are occupied by contemporaneous occupants... like Bilbo Baggins, judging by that door.

The Doctor has been visiting random rooms (and occasionally tents) all this time, but fortunately he catches sight of the manager with the briefcase and switches to an unconventional plan: following the man he wants to follow. Just think of how many lives could've been saved if he'd done that from the start instead of wandering into other people's hotel rooms (and occasionally tents) for no reason at all other than to set up an interesting hook.

Alright, 15 minutes in and we've actually reached the beginning of the episode! This means the Doctor has finally met Joy, not that he's all that interested in acknowledging her existence right now, due to the mysterious briefcase situation.

Joy finally gets sick of being ignored in her own hotel room and grabs the briefcase herself. Which is good, because I thought the Doctor might end up with it on his wrist, and bad, because now she's doomed. Man, I did not expect Joy to be the villain in this.

The woman who works at the hotel appears to have no idea what's going on, she's not an undercover Time Hotel agent, but she seems satisfied that it's all within the realms of reality as she understands it, and she can just carry on with her day unfazed.

The Doctor does his best to keep the Silurian from sparkling away and when that doesn't work he turns his attention to the briefcase. It has a glowing star container inside it, and also a 20 second countdown before the case holder is disintegrated! Joy snaps out of her mind control and freaks out, as the Doctor wants to stare at the contents for a bit before closing the case and cancelling the countdown.

But it turns out that she should be more concerned about the 15 second countdown that comes on after she closes the case! This should be easy for someone with a sonic screwdriver to solve... but it's not, and the Doctor's genius mind can only tell him how many possible combinations there are. There are 10,000 of them, which isn't actually an impossible amount to brute force. Type in a combination a second and you'd get it done in under 3 hours, with a 50% chance of being done in less than 90 minutes. But, you know, 15 second countdown.

Fortunately they're connected to the Time Hotel, which means if the Doctor stays behind and enters the hotel through another time portal, he can arrive there earlier in the day, with enough time to give himself the code. Which he does!

There have been plenty of multi-Doctor stories, but it's very rare for him to meet himself in his current incarnation, just because the whole point of those stories is to bring back previous actors. This time it's just Fifteen and Fifteen, but the end result is pretty much the same however: insults. In fact, there's a surprising amount of hostility here considering that Fifteen is one of the most relaxed and charming incarnations, and he's supposed to have already worked out these issues during his time spent living with Donna's family as Fourteen.

The Current Doctor's main point is that the Future Doctor is living a lonely life and doesn't even have one chair in his console room for guests to sit in. (That's what I've been saying too!) But the Future Doctor just tells him that he has to get where he is the long way, and breaks the portal's connection, like in The Girl in the Fireplace.

You know what this means? It means that the Doctor is the one who ultimately gets to have the ham and cheese toastie and pumpkin latte.

The Doctor decides to get a job at the hotel in 2024 while he waits for the next portal to open to 4202. Which I've just realised is the same number backwards.

Usually in this situation the Doctor's companion ends up getting a job to support them while he's busy doing sci-fi stuff (and usually that companion is Martha), but he's travelling alone right now so he has to just get on with it. Now the episode is getting a bit The Lodger, with the Doctor having to pretend to be a human for a while. The guy is way better at it than he was when he was Eleven, though maybe less than you'd expect considering all the time he spent with Donna. In fact, he acts like he hasn't taken time off from adventuring for ages, which is just making me confused. Is he the Doctor that comes after Fourteen sorted himself out or not?

The Giggle

I know he said his soul was torn in half, or whatever, but he also said he was fine because they'd done rehab out of order.

Also Fourteen's TARDIS is right there! He could just go over and ask for a lift to 4202, and it wouldn't even be messing with the timeline. Then again, he might not want to run into Sutekh again as it'd be a bit awkward.

Hang on, is he controlling this wooden broom with the sonic screwdriver? Because it doesn't do wood and Moffat knows that! Oh hey, Girl in the Fireplace mention on the newspaper! The Doctor's reading a lot of newspapers in this episode.

The hotel receptionist, Anita, is well aware of everything that the Doctor's up to, but remains entirely unfazed throughout this montage. It's funny, when I saw the hotel receptionist at the start I assumed she'd be in maybe two scenes and then the episode would focus on Joy. Instead Joy is the one who disappeared and we keep seeing Anita instead! They should've called this Anita to the World.

Then there's a plunger joke for all the folks watching this run who know what a Dalek is... a villain that Ncuti has not faced yet. The Daleks have only missed four years since the show's 2005 revival, so their absence for his first season is pretty notable.

But I'm sure a lot of the viewers he pulled into the show went back and checked out the 2005 series during the 6 month break. Incidentally, during that first year they worked really hard to rehabilitate the Daleks as a serious antagonist. They're not so bothered these days it seems.

I'm not sure about this joke about the Doctor changing Anita's car so that it always takes her where she needs to go instead of where she wants to go. It kind of diminishes the TARDIS's choice to use its vast knowledge of time and space to bring the Doctor to where he can do the most good, when he can just reprogram a Sat Nav to do the same thing automatically.

I am glad that he painted it a proper TARDIS blue though, instead of turquoise or whatever colour the box is these days.

I asked a website and it called that colour 'faded cyan'. I just want to mess with the colours and fix it, but when you get the TARDIS the right hue everything else looks wrong.

The little TARDIS models the Doctor collects seem closer to the right colour. Though they're not exactly the right shape.

Apparently people are really into police boxes in this world as the Doctor discovered that there are loads of people selling them online for some reason. It's nice that the episode shows that he's really missing his box, he's not just moving on without it.

He's also filled the walls of his hotel room with sketches of the briefcase he saw, but Anita's not even freaked out by that.

In fact he's able to convince her to stay and sit in the other chair, which leads to a whole montage of chair-related activities, like eating and playing the most emotional game of Snakes and Ladders I've ever seen.

It's nice seeing the Doctor making a friend who won't end up getting dragged into incredible danger and lost in an alternate universe, or turned into a Cyberman, or killed by a bird. He's become her companion instead, joining her world of normality and making her less lonely, and he's actually happy. Chair night is her favourite night of the week too.

And now the Doctor finally knows what it's like to just stay in one place, something he's never done before. Except in The Power of Three and The Time of the Doctor and The Pilot and The Giggle and the entire Third Doctor era...

But it couldn't last forever, as he has to go save Joy. Hopefully he's got himself a passport and saved up enough for a trip to New York to reach the 2025 portal. I suppose UNIT could help with the first one, not that he needs the help.

It's so weird how the episode has spent so long on this detour. The main plot last for 20 minutes, but then the door slammed shut and trapped the Doctor in this side story for almost 10 minutes. Anita has had more screen time than Joy or Trev and it's not even close!

Though the weirdest part is that this has been my favourite part of the story.

Then we catch up to the scene with the Doctor giving himself the code to disarm the briefcase, and it turns out we haven't missed any adventures. He wasn't off investigating, working out the code for himself, he just remembered what he told himself the last time. So cross "bootstrap paradox" off your Steven Moffat bingo card. If fact his side of the conversation all came from nowhere, as this is the rare case of a past Doctor retaining his memory of a meeting with his future self. Future Doctor is just saying the words he heard himself saying a year ago, like Ten reading off his Autocue in Blink.

It's kind of ironic that the past Doctor is ranting at him for being lonely and having no chairs, now that we know he spent a year with Anita. He looks over at the empty chair in the room that means so much more to him now. And there's that toastie and latte again on the table.

Now I'm imagining an alternate version of this where the Doctor keeps telling himself different codes each loop until they hit the right one and save Joy.

With the crisis averted, Joy is back under the case's control and she heads through the oldest portal she can find. She just walks inside, no sonic screwdriver or manager's access card required, and the room is not currently occupied. You know what this means? It means that no one needed to die at all, briefcase guy could've just gone straight here.

The Doctor has decided that cruelty is the best strategy here and has been assaulting her with a barrage of put-downs and comments about what that terrible hotel room she picked says about her. I'm giving the episode minus points here because people don't pick hotel rooms like that, but I'm also adding points because the Doctor chose to live in that same room for a year and he's channelling some of his own self-hatred at her.

It turns out that the reason she goes to a hotel on Christmas is that she can't bear to be at home after a traumatic experience where her mother died of Covid and she couldn't even see her. Well that's something fun to bring up in a fun Christmas special. But riling her up did the job, breaking the case's spell over her and making her drop the baggage. Hopefully without her sparkling to death like the other hosts.

It turns out the villain of the week is... the Villengard Corporation! Which has been referenced in Steven Moffat's last three episodes, along with his very first one. It's like he wants to bookend his time on the show with it, but keeps coming back afterwards.

You can now cross 'person resurrected as a digital ghost' off your Moffat bingo card, as the Silurian's image and personality has been appropriated for the UI, a lot like what happened to Vater in Boom 885 years from now. It's not that his consciousness has been moved into the device, like what happened with River Song and Danny Pink and Bill Potts... probably. I'm not even sure about them to be honest.

The star seed is an actual seed for an actual star, which will take a few million years to cook. That's why they took it back in time. Of course it'll blow up the Earth and kill everyone when it finally hatches. The briefcase dismisses its atrocities in some pretty good corporate PR speak, saying that Villengard "Respects the collateral sacrifice made by all participating innocents life forms regardless of race, species or belief system."

And then it's eaten by a T-Rex, which is a bit of an inconvenience for everyone. This thing is charging up a new star and it'll finish cooking in 65 million years or so, which means they really need to get their hands on it so they can drop it off in space. You don't want a star to appear right on top of the Earth; no one needs that much of a tan.

It's not all bad news however, as it turns out that Trev's digital copy is in the case as well, and he's been working for millions of years to find a way to use the psychic interface the thing is emulating in order to send a message to the Doctor's sonic in 4202. Because he was given a mission and he really doesn't want to let another person down.

The Doctor asks Trev to find clues to where the briefcase is and the guy gets to work on that. Though he also tells him exactly what room it's in, because he apparently just knew that!

Wow, this is a very well-lit cave. This hasn't been the most cinematic episode of Doctor Who so far, but now it's really looking a bit fake.

It turns out that they have a new problem as the case's psychic field has influenced people to build a shrine for it. The thing's been through a time portal, through a dinosaur, and through 65 million years of history, so I can think of worse objects to obsess over, but it's maybe not wise to build a religion around a bomb that's going to go off and destroy the Earth in... around 4 minutes.

The Doctor needs to get the stone blocking the shrine open so he steals vital climbing equipment from that tent he visited in the teaser. C'mon Doctor, these aren't time tourists, this is Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, the first team to reach the summit of Everest! You didn't have rope in the TARDIS?

Incidentally, I hate that this is a thing I can be thankful for now, but I noticed and appreciated that the two of them kind of look like who they're supposed to be. The series didn't pull an Isaac Newton this time.

The Doctor explains that he's stealing the rope "Because it was there", which flew right over my head at first. It's a quote from George Mallory, who was one of the first people to attempt to reach the summit. He was also quoted as saying "What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life."

The Doctor uses the rope on the shrine and then combines the rope with the hook to make an anchor to throw off the back of the Orient Express. I kind of love the idea of him threading a rope through two time portals so he can use a train to pull the stone away, but he is really bloody lucky that it doesn't end up derailing the train, smashing the hotel and slicing a few people in half. Don't try this yourself at home.

Oh, he also runs into that woman reading Agatha Christie on the train and criticises the letter she's holding.

The credits call her Sylvia Trench, which just happens to be the name of the first Bond girl in the movies. She's the one that gets him saying "Bond, James Bond" by introducing herself as "Trench, Sylvia Trench" first. The dates match as well, as this is 1962, the year that Doctor No takes place in. It's also a year before An Unearthly Child.

They throw in a twist here where it turns out she's the one writing the letter and it's for her girlfriend, which probably isn't a part of James Bond lore. The Doctor's faster at reading than me, in fact I'm struggling to read it at all, but it says something like:

"A choice needs to be made.
Sitting on this train, that is
taking me somewhere new. While
I survey the frosted countryside
that passes me by, I
become aware of the choices
that have brought us here,
continents apart. Mine and
yours. Good and bad, old and
new. I think about the fact
that parallel tracks will never
cross. Instead, they continue
endlessly and aimlessly on
their journeys to nowhere. I
cannot help but question if"

I've got to agree with the Doctor on this one.

The Doctor returns to Joy and the briefcase but find that he's too late. She ate the sun and now she's glowing and can also turn into the people who died. It's bit like how all the heads of everyone who died in The Husbands of River Song were still alive inside the robot at the end. I don't even know if that's something that'd be on a Steven Moffat bingo card, but it's definitely familiar. It's also kind of absurd, but that's kind of what Doctor Who has been going for lately. We're lucky this wasn't a whole musical number.

So I guess Joy and the AIs conquered the Villengard programming with the power of love or whatever (bingo card) and now when the star seed blooms the flesh will rise and fly off 400 light years to become a star. Which is absolutely a good thing and not a billion years of hell for everyone involved. Well, good luck to you Joy, you were certainly one of the characters in this episode. In fact you're most of the characters in this episode at this point.

Oh cool, Ruby made a cameo! The Doctor doesn't actually call her or anything, it's her mum she talks to on the phone, but it's a good sign that I'm glad we got to see her again. It means she's far from outliving her welcome.

She's pretty happy herself right now as she stares out of the window at the Joy star. It also brings hope to the folks struggling through the Blitz and the guys climbing Mount Everest. It's just a big happy point of light. To be honest, the way the episode was going I was almost certain they were going to make it into the star that led the wise men to Jesus' stable. I think we've escaped though.

Meanwhile Anita gets a visit from a manager at the Time Hotel who's literally called Angela Grace. She can quit her lonely job at this London hotel and go work at a different London hotel! Where guests are sometimes eaten by dinosaurs and there's a two-for-one offer on witnessing assassinations.

Personally I'd have questions before disappearing through a time portal to live in the future, the main one being: "What kind of future? Star Trek, Blade Runner or Fallout?" And then I'd go anyway, whatever the answer, because when time travellers come to pull you out of history it's a pretty clear sign that you're either going to live a pointless life or a very short one.

Some people might think a trip to 2020 to watch Joy's last conversation with her mother as she lies dying from Covid might be a bit soon. Personally I think the episode could've actually ended sooner.

It's not as grim as it seems though, as the Joy star locates her mother's exact position from dozens or hundreds of light years away, disintegrates her into sparkles, and then drags them across the galaxy so she can live forever as a nuclear explosion in a void. You know what doesn't have chairs for visiting guests? The empty endless nothingness of outer space.

Though I'm sure Villengard will feel more than welcome to take the energy to continue their weapon production, because they actually pretty much won here it seems.

Oh, of course. Why did I allow myself to believe for a moment that they could resist doing this? Probably everyone saw this coming, especially after so much set up. I guess the Villengard psychic field must still doing its thing then!


CONCLUSION

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Man, it's so weird watching an episode of Doctor Who which doesn't have Sutekh tagging along. He's been a part of the series for 50 years, always hanging onto the TARDIS in secret, unseen, but now he's gone. We're in the post-Sutekh era.

I did kind of assume I'd be seeing a lot of Joy though, when she showed up in the teaser of an episode called Joy to the World. And in all the publicity material. And the YouTube thumbnails. Instead she's only the third of the Doctor's three companions in this story.

The first was Trev, and I was shocked he only lasted 10 minutes before turning into sparkles. That's not how these things usually go, especially as he hadn't done anything yet and the Doctor wasn't even aware that he'd died! It's a shame really as he become a pretty likeable character in that time. Then there was Anita, whose chapter is the heart of the Doctor's arc for this episode, while being completely irrelevant to everything else that's going on! That doesn't seem like a sign of a well-structured story. Or at least, it wasn't this time.

And finally we got to see the true villain emerge:

Mrs Flood! Of course it was her, who else could it be after she stood on a rooftop in the snow last episode telling us about how the Doctor's story would end in utter terror? How could this shot be anything other than a teaser for the Christmas special coming later that year?

I mean look at what she's wearing!

Actually the true focus of this episode was the Doctor himself, and good for him. Ncuti Gatwa deserved a bit more screen time after all the episodes he barely appeared in and he got an opportunity here to show he can do more than smile and cry (though he does that too). He's got that Moffat wit here and he's surprisingly vicious to his future self... which was a bit weird actually. It wouldn't have been so strange with earlier Doctors, but Fifteen's gimmick from the start is that he's the healed Doctor, the Doctor that hugs his previous self, and that's not the guy that shows up here. Well, except for at the end I guess. Sure was great that he had all that character growth to get back to where he was supposed to be when he started.

But my biggest issue with the episode is the same one I have with this era: they're really leaning into the silly fairy-tale nonsense. I don't mind if an episode's about the Doctor playing Snakes and Ladders instead of running from a monster, Doctor Who can be sci-fi or horror or all kinds of things, but when it goes too far into farce or fantasy it starts to lose its magic for me. I love Legends of Tomorrow, but I don't need this to turn into it.

Granted, a story about a woman recovering an evil mind-control briefcase full of AI ghosts that had been swallowed by a T-Rex which turns her into the Star of Bethlehem and lets her save her mother from Covid feels kind of tame after 'the Moon is literally an egg'. But if I saw that synopsis for a movie I'd be like 'nope!' and I'd go watch a sci-fi show like Doctor Who instead.


RATING

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Joy to the World is a structurally messy episode that looks as goofy as its premise sounds, it's made from 100% recycled Moffat tropes, and it never stood a chance of getting a good score from me because I just don't want Doctor Who to be this. That said, I liked the bit with Anita, so I'm going to give it the same score I gave to The Church on Ruby Road:

5/10

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COMING EVENTUALLY

I gotta be honest with you, I've got no immediate plans for Sci-Fi Adventures' future as my attention is mainly focused on getting Super Adventures rolling again. So, I have no idea what's coming next, or when it's coming. But if Doctor Who comes back around March, I'll be there to... share my joy.