******TARDIS-SIZED SPOILERS!******

Okay, I know I’m very late to the party on this one (by nearly two weeks or so), but the holidays have been very busy for my wife and I (see: my last post on the “Duran Duran” concert in Las Vegas), so without further ado, let’s check into the ‘Time Hotel’ of the latest Doctor Who Christmas Special, “Joy to the Worlds.”

The special was written by longtime Doctor Who writer, producer and former showrunner Steven Moffat, and it shows. A few calling cards of the Moffat era are present; magic portals (“The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe”), heavy Christmas sentiment (“A Christmas Carol”), and a few scenes of the Doctor simply relaxing for a change (I really do love and miss those quieter moments of Doctor Who).

“Joy to the Worlds” had many of the familiar ingredients to make a sweet, fluffy Christmas Special, yet somehow it comes off a little half-baked…

“Joy to the Worlds” (2024)

The story opens with the Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) arriving in multiple points through Earth’s history (1960’s Orient Express, an expedition to Mt. Everest, etc), where he carries a tray and offers his stunned onlookers a “ham and cheese toastie with a pumpkin spice latter?” We also see a lonely young woman named Joy Almondo (Nicola Coughlan) checking into the nondescript Sandringham Hotel on Christmas Eve, 2024.

We then see the Doctor arriving with his TARDIS in 43rd century London, in the lobby of a “Time Hotel,” where guests can book a time portal ‘room’ where they can relive various moments of Earth’s history, paradox-free. The Doctor seems surprised that Earth acquires such finite control over time-travel, and he uses his psychic paper to convince an insecure hotel security worker named Trev (Joel Fry) to aid him in his ‘secret mission’ for the company. Trev promises never to let the Doctor down in their mission. Together, they spot a seemingly catatonic man in the lobby, with a briefcase chained to his wrist. As Trev walks up to speak with the catatonic man, the briefcase’s handcuff jumps from the man’s wrist and onto the wrist of Trev, who enters a similar hypnotic state. The catatonic man then snaps out of it, only to dissolve into embers before vanishing. The briefcase then leaps from Trev’s wrist onto the wrist of the hotel’s Silurian manager (Jonathan Aris); the Silurian becomes similarly possessed, as well. Trev, more saddened at letting the Doctor down, also disintegrates. The Silurian manager himself then falls into his own trancelike state, as he heads to a portal of the Time Hotel that leads to Joy’s 21st century room at the Sandringham…

Note: Poor Trevor might as well have been wearing a redshirt; too nice and sweet to live. The 43rd century is about 900 years before the Doctor and his ‘granddaughter’ Susan’s native 52nd century, as revealed in the original Doctor Who pilot episode, “The Unearthly Child” (1963).

As the spellbound Silurian enters Joy’s 21st century room at the Sandringham, the sight of his reptilian facial features terrifies Joy, and she aims a blowdryer at him in self-defense. At this point, the Doctor enters to talk the Silurian down. The briefcase’s handcuff then jumps onto Joy’s wrist, and she falls under possession. Meanwhile, the frightened Silurian realizes he’s going to die, just like the man in the lobby. The Doctor struggles to save the manager, but fails, and the Silurian vanishes into embers as well. Realizing the same fate awaits Joy, the Doctor opens the briefcase and sees a strange, glowing, orb-like device inside.

Note: A touching moment as the Doctor futilely tries to help the Silurian hotel manager will himself against dying, reminding him he is a member of a proud race; the first dominant intelligent species of Earth. This reminder is a callback to the Third Doctor serial “Doctor Who and the Silurians” (1970). The Silurians would reappear in slightly different forms for “The Sea Devils” (1972) and “Warriors of the Deep” (1984), before returning to modern Doctor Who (2005-present) in the two-part story “The Hungry Earth” and “Cold Blood” (2010). The Silurians are now seen more often as allies these days, rather than foes.

Just as Joy is set to disintegrate after the Doctor opens the case, a version of the Doctor from one year into the future arrives, and gives his current-self a combination code to override Joy’s destruction. With Joy free of the briefcase’s influence, future-Doctor takes her with him, leaving current-Doctor stuck in 2024, with his TARDIS parked in the Time Hotel’s 43rd century lobby. Current-Doctor asks how he’ll return, and his future-self enigmatically answers “the long way around,” meaning the current-Doctor must remain at the Sandringham for an entire year before he can leave, and that it’s important for him to do so.

Note: One imagines that a year would seem more like an hour to an immortal entity such as the Doctor, just as months begins to feel like weeks as we humans head get older.

Realizing he has to stay at the hotel, but has no money with which to rent a room, the Doctor humbly offers whatever services he can to the seemingly aloof manager, Anita (Stephanie de Whalley), who accepts his offer of work for lodging. We then follow the Doctor over the course of a year, working and living day-to-day at the Sandringham hotel, and becoming close friends with Anita, who similarly warms up to the Doctor, as each allows the other to experience their more silly and carefree sides. Having never had chairs aboard the TARDIS, the Doctor learns their significance as a means for two people to simply sit together in a room and talk, or share a meal. The Doctor gets to experience a human’s linear existence of getting up in the morning and going to work each day; a common-enough experience for most of us that is completely foreign to the Doctor, who experiences time as a hectic, dangerous jumble. Soon, the year is up, and on the following Christmas, the Doctor is forced to leave the comfort of the Sandringham (and the warmth of Anita’s friendship) to return to the Time Hotel.

Note: This was easily my favorite part of the episode, as Anita (well-played by Stephanie de Whalley) and the Doctor perfectly complement each other. Steven Moffat writes some eloquent dialogue about hotels reflecting their occupant’s truest selves, minus the flourishes of a true home. There is already speculation that Anita may be a younger version of the enigmatic, 4th wall-breaking character, Mrs. Flood (played by Anita Dobson–clever). Whoever she is, all I can say is that after their year together was up, I was sad for the Doctor to leave Anita’s company. It was like pulling a warm blanket off during a cold morning.

Upon returning to the Time Hotel in the 43rd century, the Doctor immediately sets about giving his past-self the code to disable the briefcase, before leaving himself behind once again. With Joy at his side, they realize the briefcase contains a small protostar that will require many millions of years before it can go nova and burst into existence. The star is being ‘grown’ by the aptly-named “Villengard” (“villain-guard”) corporation as a future energy source for their weapons manufacturing business.

Note: Clearly the ‘future-Doctor’ wanted to give his past-self the benefit of experiencing a linear existence and the value of befriending Anita, if only for a year. That year-long experience of the Doctor working and living with Anita could’ve made for an entire episode, as far as I’m concerned. The Doctor’s return to his hyperkinetic, time-jumping shenanigans with Joy afterward almost felt anticlimactic.

Realizing the seedling star would need to be ‘grown’ millions of years in the past before it can be harnessed in their present, Joy and the Doctor check into the Time Hotel’s Cretaceous Era room of 65 million years ago. The Doctor is able to break the briefcase’s hold over Joy by triggering her painful memories of her mother’s death several years earlier, during the COVID pandemic, as she was forced to die alone on Christmas Day in hospital; only able to speak to her daughter via an iPad. That painful memory serves to break the case’s possession of Joy.

Note: The Doctor using a painful memory to break the case’s hold on Joy reminded me of Kirk using racial slurs and taunts hurled at Spock, who was under the influence of mind-altering spores, in the TOS Star Trek episode, “This Side of Paradise.” While I appreciated the use of COVID in the Doctor Whoniverse as a story point, I’m also a bit tired of today’s sci-fi characters (see: most of modern Star Trek, Star Wars, et al) being largely defined by a single traumatic moment in their lives. As someone who’s dealt with traumas in my own past, I can safely say we survivors prefer not to be defined by a single traumatizing event, as it gives that event undue power over us.

Before they can grab the case and boogie back to the 43rd century, the Doctor and Joy are attacked by a rampaging Tyrannosaurus rex in their treehouse quarters in the Cretaceous Room of the Time Hotel. During the attack, the briefcase is swallowed whole by the T-Rex, as Joy and the Doctor are forced to flee the crumbling treehouse (better call the Time Hotel’s housekeeping). Fortunately, an AI hologram of the late Trev then appears, keeping his earlier promise not to let the Doctor down. The Trev-hologram then gives Joy and the Doctor the briefcase’s current location. The Doctor tells his former ‘partner’ Trev that he loves him, as he and Joy rush off to retrieve the briefcase…

Note: Poor Trev… we hardly knew ya. The T-Rex of the Cretaceous Room is nicely rendered, though it (and most dinosaur CGI these days) still lacks the tactile authenticity of the T-Rex from the original “Jurassic Park”; a movie that’s coming up on its 32nd anniversary this year, as of this writing.

With hologram-Trev’s timely information, the Doctor and Joy enter another a Bronze Age portal, where they find the briefcase inside of a massive stone shrine. Unable to pull the stone shrine open by himself, the Doctor finds a long coil of rope from the Mt. Everest Room, and carries it throughout multiple periods in Earth’s past; the resulting force of various time periods all pulling at once on the rope forces the shrine open. There, Joy and the Doctor open the briefcase, before taking it outside. Under the starlight of a desert night, the seedling sun proceeds to enter Joy’s body. After being scared or hypnotized for most of the story, Joy suddenly finds peace, as she allows the newborn star to be spread throughout multiple points in history.

The bright light of the protostar’s novae throughout time gives comfort to many, including Joy’s dying mother on Christmas Day in 2020, where she sees the star just before she passes. The star is also seen by Balthasar, Melchior and Gaspar in ancient Bethlehem in the year 0001; as it guides them to the baby Jesus…

The End.

Note: Ugh. That ending, literally spreading “Joy to the world(s)” is waaay too on-the-nose and uncharacteristically religious for this series to suit my taste. Not to mention the “Back to the Future”-like use of 0001 A.D. as the year of Jesus’s birth, when modern scholars (Biblical and secular) have long concluded that old approximation to be false. I think I prefer my Doctor Who Christmas specials to use Christmas as a seasoning (forgive the pun) and not as a main course. Individual tastes and deity worship may vary.

Summing It Up

While longtime veteran Doctor Who writer (and former showrunner) Steven Moffat certainly knows the Whoniverse like few others, I found this particular Christmas special to be rather so-so. It’s certainly not unwatchable, and it’s clever enough in many of the right places with some fine character bits (sadly, they’re from characters we’ll probably never see again). However, I also found it strangely uninvolving–like a fully decorated Christmas tree fenced in to keep cats out; it’s pretty to look at, but it also kept me at a certain distance. Its too-predictable, too-literal ending didn’t help, either.

Despite my own misgivings for this episode, I will say there is also much to enjoy about “Joy to the Worlds.” The Time Hotel of 43rd century London is a great storytelling device (much like Star Trek’s super-specific time portal, the ‘Atavachron,’ from TOS’ “All Our Yesterdays”), and I wouldn’t mind seeing it return in a future episode, even if it arguably makes the TARDIS herself a smidgen less special. And I especially loved the midsection of this 56-minute episode, where Ncuti Gatwa’s Doctor spends a year working as a maintenance/service person in a hotel for a year, and in the process, he becomes close friends with Anita Benn. The Doctor can be surrounded by companions, yet they either leave him to make lives for themselves, or they die; such is the nature of mortal relationships. The Doctor’s year spent at the Sandringham allows him to stop, take a breather, and live in linear time, as we do. It’s my favorite part of the story.

Anita Benn is the initially aloof Sandringham hotel manager who befriends the Doctor over the course of their year together. Actress Stephanie de Whalley lets us credibly experience Anita’s thaw, and one could easily imagine her as the kind of deep, platonic workplace friend who would take a shift for you, or give you a little something extra in your pay when times are rough. Workplace friendships can sometimes run as deep as combat buddies. I have friends from my retail days, decades ago, whom I’m still close to and spend time with whenever possible. Anita epitomizes those kind of friendships; the people who come to know us as well–if not better–than our lovers or spouses. There’s online speculation Anita is a younger version of Mrs. Flood (who’s played by actress Anita Dobson. Coincidence?); the enigmatic, 4th-wall breaking neighbor of former companion Ruby Sundae. Whoever Anita is, I appreciate what Stephanie de Whalley brings to this episode, and she has excellent chemistry with Ncuti Gatwa. I hope “Anita Benn” merits a future revisit, now that she works in the Time Hotel.

Popular “Bridgerton” actress Nicola Coughlan is the episode’s titular “Joy,” aka Joy Almondo, who is eventually spread throughout spacetime and across multiple worlds. However I didn’t find Joy Almondo as compelling a character as Anita Benn. Joy bears a tragic past (because nearly every modern sci-fi TV character has to be identified solely through their traumas now), as she’s still grieving for her dead mother, lost in isolation to COVID several years earlier. While the COVID pandemic (and the millions dead from it) makes for worthy new subject matter in the Whoniverse, Joy herself spends most of her screen time scared, confused, or possessed by the briefcase. Joy only finds serenity in her final moments, when she realizes she’s destined to spread ‘joy to the worlds’ as the Star of Bethlehem, in what has got to be the hokiest, most predictable ‘twist’ I’ve seen for this series in a long while. Coughlan certainly does what she can with what she’s given, but we really don’t get to know her character very well before she novas away.

Overall, the interesting bits and character moments of “Joy to the Worlds” are worth watching, though they don’t really cohere into an enjoyable whole. The special is certainly not a waste of time (excuse the pun) by any means, but it’s also not among the Doctor’s, or Steven Moffat’s best. A night at this Time Hotel might merit a decent Yelp review, but five stars might be pushing it.

Where to Watch

Doctor Who is available on BBC in the UK and Ireland, and is streaming globally on Disney+ and Britbox. You can also purchase individual episodes of Doctor Who on iTunes and PrimeVideo. Most of the series is also available on physical media (DVD/BluRay) from BBC Home Video as well.