Review: Doctor Who, “Joy to the World” | 2024 Christmas Special
Steven Moffat brings his best and worst impulses to this year’s Christmas special
We often talk about parasocial relationships in terms of the famous faces who fill our social media feeds. But there’s nothing quite like the parasocial relationship you develop with the behind-the-scenes creators of your favorite TV shows. And I’m not sure I’ve ever had a relationship more complicated than the one I have with Steven Moffat. Alternately the bane of my television existence and the love of my sci-fi life during the 2010s, my once white-hot love-hate relationship with Moffat’s writing has settled into a kind of cozy nostalgia for a different era of TV. And since Moffat has hinted “Joy to the World” could be his last contribution to the Doctor Who universe, it’s fitting that it manages to squeeze in all the high highs and low lows of his writing in just 55 minutes.
“Joy to the World” has all of Moffat’s screenwriting staples: ingenuous sci-fi concepts, an absolutely insane depiction of women, bafflingly wasted supporting characters, clever closed loop storytelling, some genuinely moving emotional moments, and a big-swing ending so cheesily over-the-top it made me laugh out loud in shock. But while past me might have focused mostly on my frustrations, I’m a little more inclined to accept the bad with the good here. If “Boom” was a tribute to those perfect, eerie Moffat scripts like “Blink” and “The Empty Child” / “The Doctor Dances,” “Joy to the World” pays homage to the overstuffed, overwrought side of his writing that gave us “A Good Man Goes to War” / “Let’s Kill Hitler” and “The Pyramid at the End of the World.”
The biggest issue with “Joy to the World” is that the set-up is incredibly strong while the payoff is only so-so, which is a classic season-long Moffat storytelling weakness reduced down to a single episode. I love the concept of a Time Hotel with different doors to the past, love Nicola Coughlan and Joel Fry as our main supporting cast, love the idea of the Doctor spending a year living a normal human life with Steph De Whalley’s Sandringham hotel manager Anita, and especially love how I never, ever knew where this episode was going next. But, looking back, I’m not sure those compelling pieces ever really added up to more than the sum of their zany parts, especially when it comes to our returning big bad, the weapons manufacturer Villengard, and their mysterious briefcase.