It feels like Steven Moffat just really wanted to make a “joy to the world” pun, then built the rest of this episode’s plot backward from there. I don’t think that makes for the strongest story, but also, this is a Christmas special. It’s not that Doctor Who’s festive episodes can’t be memorable; “The Husbands of River Song,” “A Christmas Carol,” “The Runaway Bride,” and more beg to differ. But I know it’s a holiday tradition in the U.K. (and elsewhere!) for people to tune into this show with their families on Christmas Day, even if they don’t watch the regular seasons. Considering that expanded audience, I have a higher-than-usual tolerance for things feeling a little cheesy or convenient.
So, what’s the setup for this extended punchline of an episode? The Doctor has parked the TARDIS inside the key plot device of this episode, the Time Hotel, which allows guests to stay in rooms that are portals to different moments throughout history. (At one point, he foreshadows that one of the doors could lead to the night of Jesus’s birth by quipping, “No wonder there was no room at the inn.) But the Doctor’s not here to be a time travel tourist. He just wants some milk. In a glum reminder that he doesn’t have a companion at the moment, he accidentally grabs two mugs. It’s fun to see his body move before his brain catches up — he’s grabbing his sonic screwdriver before he realizes that he wants to investigate a Time Hotel guest with a briefcase chained to his wrist.
The Doctor enlists the help of quick-to-trust and eager-to-please hotel employee Trev, who doesn’t take offense when the Doctor says it might not be necessary for him to clear his mind. Trev is tasked with letting the Doctor know via psychic graft if the briefcase carrier leaves the bar, where he’s been told to wait until a room opens up. Trev promises that this will be the least he’s ever let anybody down, and the Doctor goes off to scare people throughout history by popping through portals and pretending to be delivering a room-service snack prepared by the Time Hotel kitchen (which operates 30 minutes in the future).
Meanwhile, we’re seeing a pattern with the briefcase. It makes people’s eyes flicker, and they say, “The star seed will bloom, and the flesh will rise.” But once they get someone else to take the briefcase, they die by disintegrating. The briefcase has already moved to a bartender, then Trev, and now his Silurian manager.
The Doctor follows the Silurian into a hotel room in present-day London that is already occupied by Joy (Bridgerton star Nicola Coughlan). She’s the type of person who says Merry Christmas to a fly, and she’s freaked out by these strangers. (Hotel receptionist Anita also walks in, but after a moment of surprise, seems to decide that it’s above her pay grade to worry about what’s going on.) Joy is frustrated that the Doctor and the Silurian ignore her to discuss the briefcase, and grabs it herself in an effort to be included. Despite a teary speech from the Doctor, the Silurian dies. Joy and the Doctor banter about mansplaining before he opens the briefcase to see a glowing sphere. This prompts a countdown to Joy’s disintegration, which will only be prevented with a security code. Luckily, a future version of the Doctor bursts in to deliver said code.
This is when it starts to feel clear to me that loneliness is a major theme of this episode. We already know that Joy was planning to spend Christmas alone. And with his future self refusing to give him clear instructions, the Doctor is now yelling about how nobody likes him and people always leave him. He has no choice but to ask Anita, yet another person who seems to spend a lot of time on her own, if he can help out at the hotel and stay for a year.
Anita really doesn’t seem as surprised as I’d expect when the Doctor does things like turn her car blue, get a mop to clean by itself, or make a microwave bigger on the inside. She also doesn’t press him too much about all the TARDIS figurines he’s started collecting. He does open up a tiny bit, briefly mentioning Ruby after he explains the meaning of “Auld Lang Syne.” But the real turning point in this friendship is when he asks Anita to sit in the other chair in his room. Chairing is caring! This is a big step for a guy who doesn’t have chairs in the TARDIS. We get a montage of them playing games on “chair night,” having drinks outside in sunglasses, and agreeing that they don’t need boyfriends.
Anita obviously knows the Doctor’s on a mission — he asks her to let him inspect a door in an occupied honeymoon suite — but she’s still sad when she sees him getting ready to leave on Christmas Day 2025. During a tearful goodbye, the Doctor says he’s always wondered what it would be like to live days in the right order and that it was amazing because of Anita. She sends him off with a request to think of her sometimes, for auld lang syne. The Doctor returns to the Time Hotel through a portal that he knew would open thanks to a brochure he took with him. He gives his past self the code, closing the loop. We watch a familiar scene play out again, with one extra detail — he looks at the extra chair in the room before pulling Joy into the Time Hotel.
The Doctor explains that the briefcase is being used to create a custom-built star as an energy source. Opening it in a different timezone is like microwaving it to speed the process up. In order to try to break the briefcase’s control over Joy, the Doctor starts psychoanalyzing/insulting her in a way that feels reminiscent of Moffat’s writing on Sherlock. Apparently, you can tell everything about someone from the hotel room they pick. Joy must be a “human train wreck” because of how sad and lonely the one she was going to spend Christmas in was. Hey, I thought that room looked fine. Cozy, even! And I don’t think I hate myself…
Anyway, the Doctor keeps pushing, wondering if Joy’s mom was having a laugh when she named her people-pleasing, rule-following daughter. This crosses a line for an already upset Joy because her mom died alone during the COVID lockdown, and she was only able to see her over iPad. Now in a new room, Joy gets angry enough to start shoving the Doctor. She cries and reveals that she spends Christmas Day alone because that’s the day her mom passed, and all this emotion breaks the briefcase’s grip on her.
It turns out that Villengard, the arms manufacturer we heard so much about last season, is responsible for this briefcase. Speaking through the Silurian’s uploaded consciousness, an interface acknowledges that the star could potentially burn everything on Earth by saying that Villengard “respects the collateral sacrifice of all participating innocent life forms” in its quest to create an infinite energy source. Just cartoonishly evil, this company.
The Doctor points out that it would take 65 million years for this to work. Of course, that’s when an angry dinosaur’s cue to swallow the briefcase. The Doctor and Joy rush back into the Time Hotel, where good old Trevor — who has also been uploaded to Villengard’s interface along with his psychic graft — tells the Doctor when and where the star will be done cooking. When they find it locked inside a safe in a shrine, the Doctor doesn’t notice Joy’s eyes glow because he’s busy devising a plot to open the safe and fling the star into space.
He hops back to get tools from the relevant Time Hotel destinations (the Orient Express in 1962 and Mount Everest’s base camp in 1953), leaving Joy alone with the briefcase when the safe opens. She wants the star to live, and absorbs it. When the Doctor catches up to her, she and all the other characters we saw disintegrate explain that the star seed will bloom, but far away where no one will be hurt. Joy seems, well … joyful about this.
But before she floats into space, she points out that while the Doctor was right about his hotel room analysis, he also stayed there for a whole year. “You need to find a friend,” she advises. I understand that this is probably meant as a nudge for the Doctor to travel with a companion again. But to be fair, he wasn’t always alone in that room. He did find a friend in Anita (who I’m frankly surprised didn’t get an offer to see the stars with him). Joy’s explosion creates a star that makes people across all time zones, including Ruby, smile. Anita sees it before she finds out that the Doctor has recommended her for a job at the Time Hotel, and Joy’s mom sees it in the hospital and seems to recognize her daughter before she disintegrates.
And finally, finally, we’ve arrived at the big reveal Moffat’s been building to. The Doctor looks out and realizes something, declaring, “Joy to the world!” And the camera moves to show us three camels and a distant city, which on-screen text confirms is … Bethlehem in the year 0001. Joy is the Star of Bethlehem, which some believe pointed the three wise men (and their camels) to baby Jesus. Joy to the world, the Lord is come. Hey, you can debate whether this special fully utilized its characters or had satisfying enough emotional payoffs, but you can’t say that it wasn’t on theme. What’s more Christmas-y than Jesus Christ?
Cut For Time (Lord)
• The best line delivery of the episode is a horrified Doctor asking Anita if a plunger is armed, though I’m also quite partial to Joy’s little reprimand when she thinks the star-seed-and-flesh phrase is some sort of sexual innuendo.
• I know some people think Fifteen cries too much, and I’ll admit that I wasn’t quite as emotional as him when the Silurian died and Joy rocketed off because I’d basically just met those characters. But I actually think it’s very on-brand for the Doctor to feel so deeply about anyone dying, regardless of how long he’s known them. And personally, Ncuti’s crying is moving enough that I do feel more upset once he gets going.
• The woman writing sapphic love letters (and reading Murder on the Orient Express on the actual Orient Express) isn’t named in this episode, but the credits identify her as Sylvia Trench. She’s intended to be the James Bond character of the same name, Moffat confirmed in an interview with Mashable about his take on her backstory.
• There are references sprinkled throughout the episode, like when the Doctor describes Weeping Angels or continues the mavity gag from the 60th-anniversary specials. He also alludes to his fluency in rope, which we saw firsthand in last year’s Christmas special. I like these quick asides; they’re a nice way to reward fans without confusing casual viewers too much.
• Along with the Christmas special, a teaser trailer for the next season is now out. It looks like we’ll meet more villains who defy the laws of this universe because they are, in fact, not from this universe. I’m particularly intrigued by a shot of a cartoon coming out of a screen. We get a glimpse at Ruby, plus a new companion played by Varada Sethu (who you might recognize for playing a different character in “Boom”). And is that Mrs. Flood?
