'Doctor Who' Christmas Special "Joy to the World" Is Heartfelt & Bittersweet

Doctor Who Christmas specials are a unique beast. Current (and former) showrunner Russell T. Davies introduced the concept to the franchise when he brought the show back in 2005, and he loves nothing so much as a big, bombastic holiday spectacle. One of his first moves upon regaining control of the franchise was to reinstate the annual Christmas Day episode; it's an hour that traditionally tends to stand apart from the franchise's larger storytelling aims and simply delight in the festive excess of it all.

Teeming with tinsel, Christmas-themed monsters, and the occasional big-name guest star, Davies' holiday episodes are usually ridiculous, aggressively festive, and generally more nonsensical than usual (remember when Kylie Minogue was a maid on the space Titanic?). These elements were on full display in the 2023 special "The Church on Ruby Road," which kicked off the Ncuti Gatwa era with everything from Christmas foundlings to singing goblins. But this year, Davies has passed the reigns of the holiday outing to another former showrunner, Steven Moffat, whose stories have a decidedly different and seemingly more complicated relationship with the emotions of the Christmas season.

"Joy to the World" is the former showrunner's ninth Who Christmas episode and his first since 2017's Twelfth Doctor finale "Twice Upon a Time." It bears many similarities to his episodes that have come before: There's an intriguingly complex central premise that doesn't quite get the room to breathe it deserves, not one but two charming one-off companions, a few timey wimey twists that work better if you don't look at them all that closely, and an ending that's somehow intensely cheesy, strangely melancholy, and surprisingly perfect.