Spoilers follow for “Happiness to the World.”

If there’s one thing Steven Moffatt loves to do Doctor Whoit is to find a monster buried in the mundane. He created statues, shadows, lost children and even the idea of ​​silence in some of the show’s most terrifying villains. Unfortunately, the mysterious extra door you often find in older hotel rooms isn’t such a universal concern, but it’s a rich seam for him that I am. That is the inspiration for “Happiness in the World,” Doctor WhoChristmas special in 2024. Light, fun and a little scattershot, just like Christmas, right?

When Doctor Who returned, the show was woven back into the UK’s cultural space in a way that had never been done before. Part of the process was the addition of the show to the BBC’s A Christmas Day schedule, making it a universal cultural staple. For most of its post-2005 run, it aired episode after episode You Dance Strictly and EastEnders’ special festivals. Think of the British equivalent of those all-gathered-around-the-TV events like the Super Bowl or the Macy’s Day Parade, but on Christmas Day. Even if you don’t like any of the fare on offer, you are expected to sit down with the family and consume it.

With these specials, the prestigious timeslot, longer runtime and bigger budget are burdens as much as benefits. The show must play to a wider audience than usual, with diehard fans sitting elbow-to-elbow with elderly relatives filling every silence with gossip about the garden project. their neighbor. Because of this, the story should be a little looser, with less need for the audience to pay full attention to what is happening. And it should be an oasis of entertainment in the melodramatic drudgery that is the BBC One Christmas Day schedule.

Usually, the festive special is the sole province of the showrunner but Russell T. Davies handed over the reins to Steven Moffatt. Moffatt replaced Davies as showrunner for the first time, co-creating Sherlock and is widely regarded as the best writer of the 21st century. With a pedigree as impeccable as that, and already written “Boom” For Ncuti Gatwa’s first season on the title road, expectations are high.

Moffatt is an arch farce writer and has a strong grasp of structure, so it’s no surprise that we open in medias res. The Doctor has offered room service to various people in various time periods including Edmund Hilary’s Everest base camp and the Orient express before Joy stumbles upon a miserable London hotel room in 2024. Afterward in the credits, we return to the Doctor arriving at the Time Hotel, which allows visitors to take a vacation through history. Don’t worry about the reason or anything A Voice of Thunder shenanigans, the Hotel is somehow built to protect guests from destroying the timeline.

The Doctor is looking to steal some milk for his coffee from the hotel buffet, but his eye is caught by something sinister: A man carrying a briefcase with handcuffs on a chain tries to check a room . The Doctor recruits Trev, one of the employees, to keep an eye as he scouts ahead to find out what the plot might be. As it turns out, the case is sentient and evil, jumped from crowd to crowd and owned each one. Once it jumps to the next host, the latter is broken.

Here the Doctor runs into Joy who, by usanks, is handcuffed to the case instead of the hotel manager. When the Doctor opens the case to try and find a solution, the case threatens to kill anyone connected to it unless it gets a four-digit code. Who will provide the code? The Doctor, emerging from his own future, takes Joy with him while leaving “our” Doctor stranded in 2024 without the TARDIS. As the hotel door closes, the Doctor abuses his future self, why he is always alone and people always leave him. He was doubly angry because he no longer usually traveled “the long way,” one day after another.

And so, the episode actually stops to give us a long sequence of the Doctor befriending Anita, the hotel manager. The Doctor gets a job as a hotel handyperson, and slowly lets his guard down, spending more and more time with Anita until they become a platonic couple. It’s a sequence you don’t see in a regular episode, with the Doctor and Anita’s lives being torn apart. He enlarges the microwave inside, repaints the TARDIS in Anita’s car blue and they even sit and talk to each other in the seats – a key visual given the lack of seats in the TARDIS. But as the year passed and it was time for the Doctor to return to his own show, he said goodbye to Anita.

Returning to the time hotel, the Doctor flashes back to the events of a year ago, shares the code and takes Joy on new adventures. The Doctor creates the briefcase that holds the embryonic form of an artificially created star that will grant a source of imaginary power to whoever owns it. But unless you are the owner of the Hand of Omega, the stars take a long time to develop, much longer than anyone can wait and try their experiment. Unless, of course, you hijack a time hotel and send it back to dinosaur times, waiting for when human history begins when it works.

Joy, still held by the case, makes her way to the dinosaur’s hotel room as the Doctor tries to break its hold on her. To do that, he provoked an emotion that poisoned the link between the case and its host before erasing it. He bullies her, prompting her to reveal why she’s staying in a downmarket London hotel. He was saddened by the loss of his mother who died of COVID-19 in an isolation ward and Joy was unable to say goodbye to her in person. Unfortunately, before the Doctor can deactivate the star seed, it is eaten by a dinosaur, out of his reach.

The Doctor and Joy return to the hotel and, 65 million years later, find that the star is ready to explode. It was locked inside a stone structure with a heavy stone door that none of them could move, and time was running out. So, the Doctor, who boasts that he’s “good with rope,” steals a rope from Everest base camp, hangs it on the back of the Orient Express to haul the rock. the terrible CGI when Gatwa is standing on the train. often Doctor Who: It can make convincing dinosaurs, but now it can’t make a convincing train.

This is where things lose their coherence, as Joy’s eyes glow with the power of possession, but when the Doctor returns, Joy… eats the star? Absorbed it somehow? Making friends and bonding with it? He finds her standing on the edge of the cliff, where Joy says that she will unite the star and take it to heaven, where it will not harm anyone. At this point in my notes, I wrote “Don’t let this be Bethlehem,” when the camera panned out to reveal that they were exactly where they were, complete with three camels parked outside a stable. Oy.

Joy reunites with her mother and the Doctor returns to travel, but not before he gets Anita a job running the Time Hotel. We also get a small shot of Ruby Sunday, who will be returning to the show for her second season proper.

As I said above, you can’t judge “Joy to the World” on the merits of a regular episode because it serves so many masters. But I don’t think we can call this the strongest episode of Steven Moffatt’s oeuvre or the show’s various Christmas Specials. Like all Disney seasons, it has a slightly inconsistent quality where the pacing sags and zips in all the wrong places. I am for the long outside where we can see a “normal” year in the life of the Doctor, but the story framing it should be tighter to balance the slowness. It’s a fun way to pass an hour with a belly full of holiday turkey (or your preferred equivalent) with just enough mawkishness to make you think you’re seeing something deeper. But I don’t think I’ll go back to watch it again as much as I would, say, “The Christmas Invasion.”