"The Church on Ruby Road" Is a Joyful New Beginning for 'Doctor Who'
Though Doctor Who technically introduced Ncuti Gatwa during its recent 60th-anniversary celebrations, it is the Christmas special "The Church on Ruby Road" that makes the official start of the Fifteenth Doctor era. Firmly established in its new streaming home on Disney+, the show has never looked more expensive or well made, now led by the first Black man to play the Doctor and a former-turned-current showrunner who has big ideas about where this franchise should go in its sixth decade. Maybe some people don't believe that lighting can strike twice, but I promise you in the world of Doctor Who, it absolutely can, as Davies not only delivers a cracking first adventure for Gatwa's Doctor but manages to craft an hour that feels both incredibly familiar and refreshingly new at the same time.
Christmas specials are always a bit of a ridiculous beast. The slightly over-the-top feel, the often very overt cheesiness, the in-your-face festive vibes, it can all be a bit much. But there's also something almost indescribably magical about these installments, a sense of unbridled fun and joy that Doctor Who dearly missed during the years when showrunner Chris Chibnall was at the helm. (For whatever reason, he preferred to air a "New Year's special," an hour that was essentially a regular episode that happened to air on a holiday rather than a holiday episode, if that makes sense.) But now that Davies has returned to the Whoniverse, Christmas specials are back — with the best sort of bang.
Like several episodes before it — Season 5's "The Eleventh Hour" and Season 11's "The Woman Who Fell to Earth" offered similar entire cast changeovers and fresh slates for new viewers — "The Church on Ruby Road" is something of a soft reboot for the series. There's plenty of fun for those of us who know our Whovian history, but it makes for an easy entry point for this new era of the show, which has so deliberately scrapped some of the trauma and baggage of previous incarnations.
