'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. 

As a writer, Moffat has always seemed to love the idea of Christmas, and his holiday outings generally go all-out in terms of the festive vibe. The Eleventh Doctor special "A Christmas Carol" was a literal retelling of the Charles Dickens classic set in space; the Twelfth Doctor adventure "Last Christmas" featured an actual appearance by Santa Claus. His Christmas episodes lean hard into the sentimentality and heightened emotion of the season, but what makes them such great television is how easily they often hold seemingly contradictory themes --- joy and sorrow, love and loss, grief and renewal--- at their centers, without sacrificing either. 

Friendship is magic, and love is the answer, but time is finite, even for Time Lords. Every Christmas is the Last Christmas, after all, and even in a universe with unlimited possibilities, there are only so many days that can be shared between two people. 

"Joy to the World" is an unabashedly sentimental hour of television, but perhaps not in the way you might think. It's an entertaining adventure in a setting I hope this show revisits someday. But the real power of the episode lies in its willingness to acknowledge the bittersweet edges that accompany holiday cheer for so many. 

The episode kicks off with a banger of a premise: The Doctor finds himself at the Time Hotel for the holidays, a paradox-resistant vacation locale that lets its guests bounce between eras using temporal portals and those weird locked doors to nowhere that you've almost definitely seen in any room you've ever booked. Intrigued by a mysterious briefcase that seems to be fatally swapping between hosts, Fifteen sets out on a time-jumping quest to figure out its origins, initially bouncing between Manchester during the Blitz, Edmund Hillary's 1953 Mt. Everest base camp, and the literal Orient Express in 1960s Italy. 

He ultimately finds himself in a room at the Sandringham Hotel at Christmas in 2024, where he meets a young woman named Joy who is determined to spend her holidays alone. But when she unwittingly becomes a carrier of the briefcase herself — and starts muttering weird sayings like "The starseed will bloom, and the flesh will rise" — the Doctor's quest takes on a much more urgent and personal air. To save Joy's life, Fifteen creates a time loop that requires him to spend a year at the Sandringham Hotel, living on the slow path until the next known portal to the Time Hotel reopens, and he can return to the episode's main plot. 

Forcing such a chaotic figure to remain in a single place and time place, gives rise to some genuinely hilarious moments as Fifteen realizes he doesn't have access to things like "money" or "a place to live" in the everyday human world and has to work as a handyman who slaps futuristic improvements on all the hotel appliances. However, it also offers a chance for the necessary personal introspection that the Doctor is loathe to face. 

In the wake of companion Ruby Sunday's (Millie Gibson) departure from the TARDIS at the end of last season, Fifteen is freshly on his own, and recent enough that he's still automatically prepping two cups of tea of a morning. It's a story we've seen before: the Doctor at sea emotionally in the aftermath of saying goodbye to a friend, even when said BFF is down the street hanging out with her birth mother and not, say, trapped in a parallel dimension or mind wiped. 

However, it's not through Joy that Fifteen confronts this familiar problem, but through his budding friendship with Anita (Steph de Whalley), the kind but lonely receptionist who runs the Sandringham. The pair spend a year working together, and the offbeat, quiet friendship that grows between them is a refreshingly different sort of bond than we usually see between the Doctor and humans. (After all, he's not showing her the stars, but suddenly bigger on the inside coffee mugs.)

If there's one problem with this story — which almost every Doctor has, ranging from David Tennant to Peter Capaldi — is that it's unnecessary. The Fifteenth Doctor left behind the emotional baggage that defined the series' initial reboot. It makes for an awkward thematic fit since he connects easily with others and his emotions. Even here, Fifteen immediately bonds with Time Hotel concierge Trev (Joel Fry) and tears up over the passing of Silurian manager Melnak (Jonathan Aris)*. This isn't a Doctor who has problems feeling things. The episode's insistence he shouldn't travel solo feels like a vestigial tail of the lonely god vibes of yesteryear rather than the fresh, forward-looking feel of this new era.

(*Gatwa remains an outstanding cryer!)

But it's the impetus Fifteen needs to crash back into the main plot, reunite with Joy, and put his year's worth of thinking on the briefcase problem (and the proto-star hidden inside it) to good use. The subplot only gets a fraction of the episode's focus. Hence, its resolution is predictably clunky, involving a bunch of technobabble, a quick reference to an old Doctor Who enemy (Villengard returns!), and a convenient excuse for why Joy and those who previously held the briefcase are somehow able to interact with and even control its contents. 

The fact that Coughlan's character only appears for about a third of the episode somewhat dampens the power of Joy's sacrifice at the episode's end, which seems to be an atonement for allowing her mother to die alone in the hospital at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Whether this is a redemption her character needs is a question the show doesn't broach — and I'd argue that those COVID restrictions kept many people safe despite the painful necessity of forcing loved ones apart — but it's an opportunity that Joy herself seemingly embraces wholeheartedly. 

The idea that the star, now spread throughout human history through the Time Hotel, has made Joy part of not just the Christmas she missed with her mother but literally all Christmases everywhere ever, including the very first one, is completely bonkers and quietly beautiful. (Yes, I cried when the Bethlehem title card popped up. I'm not made of stone!) It's such a peak Moffat-style ending to the story, a bittersweet loss that reminds us that maybe we're never really alone on Christmas after all. 

"Joy to the World" is now streaming on Disney+ along with all The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Doctor episodes. Doctor Who Season 15 is expected to arrive in the first half of 2025.