The best part of Doctor Who’s 2024 Christmas special has nothing to do with the plot

This article contains Mild spoilers In the Doctor Who Christmas special, “Joy to the World.”

As a Steven Moffat fan who was disappointed with the writer Returning to “Doctor Who” last season with “Boom,” A corny episode with some great moments, and the new Christmas special (“Joy to the World”) was fun. It was exactly what I was hoping for from Moffat last time around: a smart story with a lot of heart. And because Moffat is no longer burdened with the responsibility of running the entire show, there’s no sense of fatigue here. You get the feeling that Moffat had a lot of time and energy to rewrite some of the beats and smooth out some of the edges.

More importantly, Moffat had the opportunity to try something new here, and he took it. The concept of a time hotel certainly sounds like a typical Moffat-y twisty plot device, but it paves the way for a surprising twist around the doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) and his seemingly unimportant hotel owner Anita (Stephanie de Whalley). The rest of the episode may revolve around the Doctor’s attempts to stop a briefcase from killing Joey (Nicola Coughlan), but in one beautiful scene, the episode puts that entire story on pause and gives us something better.

The only reason the Doctor and Anita story happened in the first place is because Moffat couldn’t resist another introductory irony. About thirty minutes later, the Doctor needs to put a 4-digit code into a villain’s briefcase to prevent him from killing Joey, but with only seconds to discover it and an almost infinite number of combinations to choose from, in the present day. The doctor has no idea which numbers to press. Fortunately, the future doctor knows the answer, and bursts into the room to give it to the present doctor. How does the future doctor know the composition? Well, because the current doctor actually heard him say that.

This is one plot device that Moffat always seems to love; 90% of what the Eleventh Doctor went through was at least partly the result of an introductory paradox, and of course, Moffat’s most famous episode of all time (“The Flash” in Season 3) It’s about a time loop that either doesn’t make sense or makes too much sense, depending on how you look at it. My personal favorite bootstrap paradox in “Doctor Who” actually comes from A.J Small unknown episode “Space and Time”, Which deals with silliness just as “Joy to the World” does.

The difference is that while the loop in “space and time” lasts only a few minutes at most, the Doctor’s time loop here lasts an entire year. Future Doctor saves Present Doctor’s life, but also takes Joy with him and coldly tells him that he needs to go “the long way”. The Doctor must spend an entire year living among ordinary Earthlings, experiencing life one human day at a time.

It’s not a new situation for the doctor – in fact, Due to the events of “Laughter” We know there’s another version of the Doctor going through a similar situation just a few blocks away – but this is the first time in a while that we’ve seen how things play out. “The Giggle” left us to imagine what the Doctor’s time was like as an ordinary civilian, while “Joy to the World” shows us the reality.

When Anita was first introduced, she felt like a joke character. She is polite to Joy when she introduces her to her hotel room, but her main quality is her strange reaction when the Silurian and the Doctor show up in Joy’s room. “I’m so sorry, this has never happened before,” she says, before politely putting her things away and leaving. At the time it seemed like this was all we saw of the character, but in hindsight, it’s clear that this was the beginning of the arc for her; Anita in this scene is closed off and withdrawn. She is not interested in getting involved with the people around her and simply wants to go about her day in peace.

But when the doctor has to spend the year hanging out at her hotel, Anita begins to open up. We get some silly humor when the Doctor fixes her stuff by making it more like the Tardis, and Anita takes all his weirdness in stride. She’s not that curious, which would normally be a flaw in a companion, but since the Doctor can’t go anywhere, it works great here. She is not afraid of the Doctor’s strange behavior but she does not demand answers from him either.

They settle into a comfortable dynamic, which escalates a bit when the two develop a “Chair Night” ritual, where they hang out in the doctor’s room every week to play board games and chat. The subtext of Anita’s earlier scenes soon becomes impossible to ignore: this woman is lonely. She is desperately lonely, until the moment the doctor becomes her friend.

It’s one of the most realistic depictions of loneliness we’ve ever seen in “Doctor Who,” an emotion typically depicted in the extremes of science fiction. But Anita isn’t alone because she’s been left on a ship for thirty years or because she’s an immortal Time Lady whose planet is lost; She’s lonely in the same quiet, easy-to-miss way as so many ordinary people everywhere around the world. She’s also the type of person who would never have met the Doctor in any other circumstance; She doesn’t seem to have any desire to cross the stars, and there are no plans for Russell T. Davies (RTD) to bring her back as a companion. If the doctor had not been forced to spend a year in her hotel, how long would it have taken for someone to tell her they were lucky to know her?

Outside of Anita, “Joy to the World” is an episode that deals explicitly with the lingering trauma of the coronavirus lockdown era. Joy is still grieving over the way coronavirus restrictions prevented her from being with her mother when she died in hospital, and this ends up being a major plot point in her story. Meanwhile, the story of Anita and the doctor doesn’t mention the coronavirus at all, but it still kind of feels like that’s what the story is about.

Like a lot of people in early 2020, the Doctor in this episode has to unexpectedly put his plans on hold and just sit down. He was angry about it at first and still suffers from impatience all year, but around spring, he clearly found the silver lining. There has been a hidden benefit to quarantine for many people, as it has offered them an unprecedented opportunity to slow down, reflect and rethink their entire approach to life. This was a phase when many people decided to switch careers, try new hobbies and realize that they needed to meet new people.

We can see this reflected not only in how the Doctor learns to embrace everyday life, but also in how he cares for Anita, a woman who would have been an afterthought to him in any other situation. “Joy to the World” finds the Doctor branching out into a completely different kind of “companion,” valuing them just as much as the young adrenaline junkies he usually hangs out with.

This little shadow the coronavirus episode casts on us feels powerful because “Doctor Who” has largely avoided the topic. the Chris Chibnall’s final season I never had a chance to process it, and then production of “Doctor Who” was in relative disarray throughout most of the early 2020s. But returning showrunner Russell T Davies has always been a showrunner who cares most about staying true to the present day; Its first run took place very clearly from 2005 to 2009, clarifying the dates in a way that rarely bothered the Moffat era.

It was only a matter of time before the era of the right to development grappled with how people in 2024 are still kind of grappling with the chaos of Covid, The epidemic is still ongoing Whether some of us want to admit it or not. The fact that it was this episode written by Moffat that dealt with it, and not the RTD episode, is a pleasant surprise.

The most charming thing about Anita’s story is that it breaks a lot of the standard rules of screenwriting. It’s not completely unnecessary, as it sort of ties in with the Doctor’s overall character throughout the episode, but with a few tweaks it could have been removed entirely and the audience would never notice anything was missing.

Moffat could have had the Doctor solve the briefcase code easily with some explanation of a screwdriver, or he could have made the time loop last a day or two, not a full year. Instead, he pauses the plot and gives us the sweetest short story in the world. It’s not something any screenwriting class would advise a student to do, but the selection has elevated Joy to the World to the status of one of Moffat’s best Christmas specials. In his already strong group.

Reading through some of the other early reviews of this special, I see that some critics are already pointing to Anita He would make a lovely companion. As fans watch and discuss the episode, I imagine there will be some disappointment The next companion has already been announced And it’s not her. However, I’m not really looking forward to Anita traveling with the Doctor, nor do I need her back anytime soon. I think her scenes work great as a nice one-off surprise. It’s evidence of something Doctor Who often argues but rarely shows, which is that just because someone isn’t “important” in the grand scheme of things doesn’t mean they aren’t important. As of this special at least, Anita has almost nothing to do with the plot of Doctor Who and likely never will, but we were lucky to meet her nonetheless.