Joy To The World
Merry Christmas everyone, we’re back with another annual Doctor Who special. Will this one be a Christmas cracker? Or a smelly, mouldy Brussel sprout? Lets crack on and find out!
We begin the episode with a flurry of different locations, as the Doctor prances through with a pumpkin latte and a ham and cheese toastie. Eventually we make it to 2024 in the Sandringham Hotel. Here, we meet Joy, a depressed singleton who’s spending Christmas alone. She ends up talking to a fly buzzing around her face, until the Doctor shows up alongside a strange Silurian.
We then cut forward (back?) to Christmas 4202 in London. The Doctor touches down at the Time Hotel, where he dives into a new mystery involving a man with a suitcase handcuffed to his wrist. Now, the Time Hotel is actually a place that holds rooms that serve as time portals. Essentially, all of human history is available as mini-breaks. This is, perhaps, a nod to the Titanic in Voyage of the Damned but a far more sophisticated and advanced model of time-hopping.
The Doctor believes there’s something sinister going on and enlists Trev, one of the workers, to help. The Doctor explains that there’s a top-secret mission involving this briefcase and they need to look deeper into this.
The crux of the Doctor’s (and Joy’s) mystery stems from a strange door that always seems to be available in hotel rooms. For those who travel often, this is actually for guests in adjoined rooms so you can go in and out at ease. Of course, that’s not the explanation here, as the Doctor believes this is a portal to the Time Hotel. The Doctor gets his pumpkin latte and toastie, which explains all those jumps through time, and then cracks on with his investigation.
At the same time, we see a bit more of this briefcase and the mystery surrounding it. The briefcase changes hands several times, before passed from Trev to the Silurian manager. Apparently every time it passes on, the suitcase is looking for an “upgrade”. Those left behind are disintegrated.
The Doctor sees the Manager in the hallway and tries in vain to radio through to Trev. He doesn’t follow through though and instead, heads on inside Joy’s room, happy as can be.
The Doctor ignores Joy and presses on with the Silurian, until Joy ends up with the briefcase handcuffed to her. With Joy just standing in the doorway, the Doctor listens to the Silurian’s final story before he cries and passes away. The doctor also cries here too, of course.
the Doctor believes the briefcase is “mansplaining” to Joy and decides to open it up and see what’s going on. Inside, there appears to be a star seed, but when he closes it up, there’s a timer that counts down in order to shut the case properly.
Our Doctor doesn’t know the code of course, so the future Doctor shows up and manages to close it, snatching up Joy in the process and taking off. This current Doctor, however, now needs to go the “long way round” (nod to ‘Blink’ here) to obtain the code.
So the Doctor just hangs about in the hotel, working, and using his Sonic willy-nilly. He continues to draw the Tardis and even has little figures in his room too, which he’s picked up from online. Anyway, the Doctor and the hotel worker, Anita, continue to get along well, and even have a “Chair Night” where they sit and play games together.
Eventually we cut forward to December 2025. The Doctor is ready to go and explains to Anita that she’s proper lucky to live the way she does and that she’ll always be here at the hotel.
The Doctor completes his cycle and rolls round to grabbing Joy. The Doctor tries to help Joy fight this and riles her up in the hallway. You see, Joy is alone and she’s angry too, given her mum died during COVID and she wasn’t able to go visit her.
The Doctor continues to lash out and intentionally riles her up, making her angry to wake the girl up. It does the trick and the handcuff uncuffs itself from her. According to the Doctor, this is like post-hypnotic suggestion, closing it down without causing death. However, they end up in the dinosaur times where a T-rex eats the briefcase.
Before this occurs though, The Doctor notices its been created by Villengard, who happens to be the largest arms manufacturer in the galaxy. The Doctor didn’t bank on the suitcase being eaten which could well cause a huge explosion that will destroy everything. However, the Sonic starts buzzing back in the Time Hotel, and it happens to be Trev’s hologram.
Trev claims that he’s continued his mission and his consciousness has been upgraded into the star. Which is inside the briefcase, inside the dinosaur. He’s connected to the briefcase software in order to project across this message. Using Trev’s position, they head into Room 48, where the dinosaur appears to have “deposited” the star.
In this new room, they happen to be inside a temple. The Doctor uses a whole load of rope and a grappling hook, and the force of the Orient Express to hook it to the tracks, which causes a chain reaction and eventually opens up an iron door in the temple.
When The Doctor returns, he finds the briefcase and Joy both gone. He follows Joy up top, where Joy decides to take on the Star herself to save others. The star seed will bloom but it’ll be far away from Earth and nobody will be hurt. Joy is saving the world and that’s because she has nothing to live for.
Joy tells the Doctor that he needs to change and find a friend; something she was unable to do herself. She’ll be watching while he does, and with that, she launches into the air and blasts off to the edge of the cosmos where she explodes. As she does, the Doctor cries.
Meanwhile, Anita is offered a job at the Time Hotel, while Joy’s mum receives a message from her daughter on her iPad and then eventually disintegrates to join her, with the implication being that she’s turned to star dust. And of course, Joy, being this big star in the sky, is actually the North Star over Bethlehem too.
The Episode Review
On this joyous day, Doctor Who’s latest uplifting message is to listen to negativity and kill yourself to make the world a better place. How lovely! I appreciate this might sound pedantic but when you examine the parts of Joy’s character, she’s actually one of the most tragic companions we’ve had and the Doctor barely cares. In fact, I wish he’d stayed in the hotel with Joy for a year to be honest to make things more effective and deepen the bonds between them.
As it stands, Joy is bitterly alone, single and has no friends. She shows up at a hotel alone and talks to a fly, only to find herself thrown into this big mystery. She’s belittled by the Doctor as a way of riling her up and making her angry, but Joy does take onboard everything the Doctor said about her following rules and being a disappointment etc. and decides to sacrifice herself to make the world a better place.
That’s before mentioning how the show is hastily cobbled together using plot points from other episodes, al whilst valuing spectacle over substance, depth or characterisation.
The Doctor was more torn up over a Silurian manager dying than he was Trev, who actually helped the Doctor, and in fact he doesn’t even bother to check on him at any point in the Time Hotel, despite giving him his mission to help out.
The editing in this episode is pretty poor too and we definitely didn’t need the whiplashed opening with four different places, nor did we need the redundant Ruby Sunday or Blitz scenes. The attempt to humanize the Doctor and have him hang around the hotel is not bad but again, he does so with the wrong person. It should have been Joy to give her some, well, joy in her life rather than this horrific end.
Unfortunately, this Christmas special exemplifies all the problems rife with this series now, rounding out a disappointingly poor episode.
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Episode Rating
(2)