TV Review: ‘Doctor Who’ Christmas Special “Joy to the World” Collapses Under the Weight of Its Own Ambitions

I’m a little later than I normally am with my latest Doctor Who review for the show’s recent Christmas special “Joy to the World.” I had to spend some time thinking about this one because, frankly, I have to admit that I didn’t understand the ending. And, after talking it over with some friends of mine who are big Doctor Who fans, I found that I wasn’t alone in being confused about this one.

The Christmas special marked the second return of former showrunner and writer Steven Moffat, a controversial figure in Doctor Who fandom. Moffat, as I’ve stated before, is my favorite writer and showrunner in the show’s entire 60-year history, including the late, great Douglas Adams, and I often feel like I’m the only one who feels this way because fans love to hate on Moffat (although they simultaneously love the things he created, which makes no sense to me). Moffat left the show in 2017, handing it over to the even less popular showrunner Chris Chibnall, but returned in 2024 with an episode called “Boom” which was simply brilliant.

Moffat wrote “Joy to the World,” which marks the very first time in the show’s history that the Christmas special was written by someone other than the current showrunner, who is currently Russell T. Davies. Moffat has stated that he wanted a chance to write another Christmas special because he was unsatisfied with the final one he wrote in 2017, “Twice Upon a Time,” which also served as the final episode for the 12th Doctor, Peter Capaldi. I have to agree with Moffat that “Twice Upon a Time” was a bit lackluster.

The plot of “Twice Upon a Time” didn’t really involve an enemy or even a particularly dangerous situation. The Doctor essentially encounters a completely benevolent organization, suspects that they might be up to something sinister, but then finds that he was wrong, and they were doing good all along. It also served as a multi-Doctor episode in which the 12th Doctor ran into the first Doctor (played by a different actor, David Bradley, as the original first Doctor, William Harnell, died in 1975). I felt like Moffat completely missed the characterization of the first Doctor and portrayed him as more misogynistic and backwards than the character really was in the 1960s. Thus, I was happy to hear that Moffat was coming back to write one more Christmas special and take one more stab at getting it right. But, after watching “Joy to the World,” I kind of wish Moffat had just left “Twice Upon a Time” as his final Christmas special.

In “Joy to the World,” the 15th Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) has just departed from his last companion, Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson) and is, once again, traveling on his own. While trying to track down milk for his coffee, he accidentally stumbles into The Time Hotel, a hotel that allows guests to stay in a hotel room in any time period in Earth’s history, with every door in The Time Hotel serving as a portal to a real hotel somewhere in human history. This ends up becoming the answer to one of the oldest mysteries in mankind’s history: Why does every hotel have that one funny door that’s always locked and doesn’t lead anywhere? Apparently, that’s the door to The Time Hotel.

While exploring the rooms in The Time Hotel, the Doctor meets Joy (Nicola Coughlin), a lonely young woman who is staying in the Sandringham Hotel, a sad, cheap little hotel in England, on Christmas. Meanwhile, someone has brought a briefcase to The Time Hotel which is attached to a handcuff that locks itself onto whichever person is most likely to be able to take the briefcase to where it needs to go. But what is inside the briefcase, and why does every holder of the briefcase keep repeating the phrase “The starseed will bloom, and the flesh will rise”? And, when the briefcase attaches itself to Joy, it’s up to the Doctor to find a way to save her.

The villain of this episode, if you can call it that, is Villengard, the largest arms manufacturer in the galaxy, who were also the villains of “Boom.” Putting Villengard in the episode gives Moffat another chance to take potshots at the Military Industrial Complex, something he frequently likes to do in his episodes.

That’s not the only target of Moffat’s satire in this episode, though, as a speech from Joy reveals that she had to say her last goodbyes to her dying mother over an iPad because of the restrictions at the hospital due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and Joy complains about the rich people who flagrantly broke the rules during the pandemic while she followed them and missed her chance to say goodbye to her mother in person. Moffat has said that he meant this as a direct jab at Tories (the conservative party in England) who broke the pandemic rules. It also marks the first time that the pandemic has been directly addressed in a canonical episode of Doctor Who (although there was an adorable non-canon mini-episode with the 13th Doctor at the beginning of the pandemic where she gave an inspirational speech to children who were scared about what was going on with the lockdown).

This is the point where I have to get a little spoilery, so don’t read on unless you want to know the ending. It turns out that, in the briefcase, is a “starseed,” the beginnings of a star that, when planted in the right place, will eventually bloom into a manufactured star that will give Villengard a source of unimaginable and infinite power. Much like in “Twice Upon a Time,” though, the Doctor’s original suspicions that Villengard is doing something sinister turn out to be somewhat unfounded, as the star actually ends up being some sort of positive force for humanity. In fact, the star seems to have become the Star of Bethlehem itself and, for whatever reason, as people looked up at the star throughout history, they were filled with joy.

However, the star did basically have to take the life of Joy and everyone else who carried the briefcase, but the Doctor seems to be OK with their sacrifice in the end for some reason.  That’s the part that gets really confusing because it wasn’t made entirely clear why this star was a net positive for humanity, such that the Doctor didn’t mind all the lives that were lost to make it. I mean, I guess it’s a good thing that it became the Star of Bethlehem, at least if you’re a believer in the Christian religion. But the Doctor has usually been disdainful of religion, so it seems strange that he would consider that a positive.

Despite the fact that the ending didn’t quite make sense, there were a lot of fun and whimsical elements to the episode that are trademark Moffat style. In one twist in the episode, the Doctor has to figure out the code to stop the briefcase from blowing up within the Sandringham Hotel. To do this, he essentially creates a bootstrap paradox in which a version of himself from the future tells his past self what the code is, but to do that, the Doctor is forced to spend an entire year from Christmas 2024 to Christmas 2025 living and working in the Sandringham Hotel. He befriends the hotel’s manager, the lonely Anita (Steph de Whalley), and the two become very close friends for that year, and at the end of the year, he gives Anita this beautiful speech about how wonderful she is and how anyone who knows her is so lucky.

Having the Doctor spend a year doing something in the course of an episode is a very Moffat-esque idea, as there have been Moffat episodes that have spanned thousands, and, in one case, even billions of years. And the Doctor being a generous friend to a lonely hotel manager is very Moffat, as his version of the Doctor always sees the best in every person he meets. It’s a beautiful little aside that adds a lot of flavor to the episode and, even though it’s inherently paradoxical, that’s kind of Moffat’s style as well.

Also, the very notion of The Time Hotel is just classic Moffat. It’s a whimsical idea that instantly sparks both the viewer’s interest and the interest of the Doctor himself. In The Time Hotel, the Doctor meets a dimwitted but loyal employee named Trev (Joel Fry) who he befriends and puts to work for him, which just adds another level of sweetness to the episode. Trev is funny but also endearing and makes the episode just that much more fun.

Also, as someone who lost her mother to cancer at a very young age, and who was forced to say my last words to her over a phone, I could really relate to Joy’s backstory. Sure, you could argue that killing off a mother to motivate a main character is somewhat of a tired trope, but it’s also an effective device. Furthermore, the trope is usually used to motivate male characters, which makes the women seem like props in the hero’s origin story. At least, in this case, the woman dying motivated another woman and didn’t act as a prop for a man.

But, while the episode had some absolutely beautiful and truly endearing moments, I just can’t get past the fact that the ending doesn’t particularly make sense. There’s a lot of balls in the air in this episode, and I feel like Moffat didn’t catch them all on the way down. For me, Moffat’s best Christmas special (and my favorite Doctor Who episode of all time) is “The Husbands of River Song” from 2015, and not just because it revolves around the Doctor Who character that I partially named myself after. The episode is full of whimsy and adventure and fantastical ideas, but it ultimately follows its own logic and comes to a perfectly satisfying conclusion.

In the end, “Joy to the World” sort of collapses under the weight of its own ambitions. Moffat hasn’t made any statements indicating that he has plans to write any more episodes in the future, and, in fact, most of his statements have implied that “Joy to the World” is likely to be the last Doctor Who episode he ever writes. But, for the sake of the great writer’s legacy, I really hope he changes his mind (like he did before) and returns again so that his final episode can be something better than “Joy to the World.”

Rating: 79/100

“Joy to the World” is currently streaming on Disney+.

Photo courtesy of Disney+