We open on the London Blitz, and like Dr. Sam Beckett at the start of every Quantum Leap episode, I mutter “Oh boy…”
Recap
It’s the London Blitz and the Doctor enters in on a couple, asking if they need a ham and cheese toastie and a pumpkin latte. They don’t appear to, so he moves on, arriving on the Orient Express in 1962, a Mount Everest basecamp in 1953, and the Sandringham Hotel on Christmas 2024. Before he arrives there, though, a woman named Joy (Nicola Coughlan) gets a room from the proprietor, Anita (Steph de Whalley). Right after she checks in, a Silurian (Jonathan Aris) holding a briefcase appears. He tells her “The star seed will bloom and the flesh will rise.” The Doctor enters and quickly knows he’s found the right spot. It turns out that the Doctor is at the Time Hotel in London on Christmas, year 4202. He arrives to get some milk for his coffee and is spotted by Trev (Joel Fry), who works at the hotel. The Doctor heads back into the TARDIS, but notes that he’s put on his coat and grabbed the sonic—he noticed something.
He emerges into the hotel lobby and sees a man with a briefcase (Joshua Reese) chained to his wrist—and Trev wants to know what he’s doing here. The Doctor claims that he’s a special investigator and that Trev works for him now. He figures out the conceit of the Time Hotel, orders his toastie and pumpkin latte, and lets that fellow with the briefcase head off to the bar. Mr. Briefcase hands the case off to the barman (Liam Prince-Donnelly), who is now chained to the case and possessed. He tells the man that he’ll be dead shortly. The barman calls Trev into the bar and hands off the briefcase to him as the first man disintegrates. As the Doctor heads into different rooms and offers his snack tray, Trev heads to reception and hands the briefcase to the Silurian hotel manager—the case is trying to upgrade its access. Trev dies, disappointed that he’s let the Doctor down. The Doctor meets Joy and hotel manager, and he wants to know what the briefcase is, but he also knows that the manager is far too keen for him to take it. Joy gets irritated that everyone is ignoring her and grabs the briefcase instead.
Joy is now possessed and tells the manager that he’s dying. The Doctor talks the manager through his death, then opens the briefcase to find a star seed inside. The briefcase says that the wearer will be disintegrated if it’s not closed, but then demands a security code that they don’t have. The Doctor from the future bursts in to give them the code—he takes Joy and tells himself that he needs to go the long way around to get the code. The current Doctor starts yelling at himself that this is the reason why everyone leaves him, and that he lives in a spaceship with chairs and doesn’t even notice because no one comes around. The future Doctor locks him into the hotel room and breaks the connection. The Doctor goes downstairs and asks Anita if she needs any help around the place. He works at the hotel for a whole year, becoming close friends with Anita and upgrading everything with Time Lord tech. He eventually asks her about the door in his room that’s always locked; she says that most of those doors lead to cupboards, but the one in the honeymoon suite isn’t.
At the end of a year, the Doctor has to leave, but he tells Anita that he enjoyed this sample of the slow path in life because he got one whole year of her. They share a tearful farewell and the Doctor finds another door to the Time Hotel in New York City. He breaks in on himself to give the code and breaks the connection so previous him has to take his year-long break. The Doctor learns that the thing possessing Joy is looking for the right time zone to leave the star seed in; the Doctor realizes that a corporation is using the Time Hotel to get their own custom-made star for a energy source in no time at all. The Doctor starts tweaking at Joy about what kind of person would choose the hotel room he found her staying in, insisting the hotels are mirrors that show how people truly think of themselves. He starts to tease her for her name, saying that it doesn’t suit her at all, and wondering why her mother named her that. Joy begins to get angry and tells him that she couldn’t see her mother when she died because of the “rules” in the hospital during the covid pandemic. She said goodbye to her mother on an iPad on Christmas.
Joy breaks down, not realizing that the Doctor was trying to get her roused because her emotions broke the connection, and the suitcase is no longer attached to her. He figures out that the people behind using the star seed is Villengard (the same arms manufacturer from “Boom.”) all over again, completely fine with destroying the Earth to get their star. He also didn’t notice that they walked into a room linked to the late Cretaceous Period: a T-rex eats the briefcase, giving the star seed time to mature. Back in the hotel halls, the Doctor panicking, but the sonic starts buzzing—Trev and all the victims of the briefcase have been uploaded into the Villengard systems, and Trev has been working from the inside to help the Doctor locate the star seed. He leads them to the next time period, and the briefcase has been buried in a temple millions of years later. The Doctor drags rope from the Everest crew through several time periods within the hotel and attaches it to the temple wall to free the briefcase.
The Doctor gets back to the temple, but he can’t find Joy or the briefcase. Ascending a staircase, he finds Joy outside glowing. She’s absorbed the star seed (along with the fellow occupants who held the briefcase), and plans to take it away far enough that it won’t hurt anyone. Joy is happy to be saving the world, and doesn’t mind becoming a star. She ascends into the heavens and is reborn. Everyone across the timelines sees her shining, including Ruby, at home, who calls her mom. A representative (Fiona Marr) from the Time Hotel comes to see Anita and offer her a job, with a card from the Doctor. During the pandemic in 2020, we see Joy saying goodbye to her mother, but after they get off the phone, the star shines on her mother and the two join together. The Doctor sees the star and realizes the importance of it: She is the star shining over Bethlehem on the day that Christ is born.
Commentary
When “Bethlehem: 0001” flashed on the screen, I shrieked “noooooo” at my television like Darth Vader learning that Padmé died.
Wow, I hate it so much? And that’s without getting into niggling pedantic things like—the hotel is supposed to be Christmas everywhere you go, but if you do believe that Jesus was one real-life person who was born on planet Earth, it was absolutely not on December 25th. Or other pedantic things like—Joy absorbs the star seed (somehow) and once she does that gives her the ability to fly into space, billions of lightyears away in an instant and also for the star’s light to reach Earth IMMEDIATELY.
Oh fine, it’s Christmas magic? Yeah, let’s go with that because it’s super meaningful that this woman, whose only characteristics are “plucky” and “lost her mom during the pandemic in an extremely traumatic way” is now a shining star that makes people feel things. Anita actually gets more character build-up than their major guest star (Nichola Coughlan deserved so much better than this), and it turns out that wasn’t part of the original plan either: Anita’s character originally had far fewer lines, but the production team liked her so much that the part was expanded.
As a result, we have an incredibly unbalanced episode where the Doctor forms this sweet bond with a woman he gets to take the slow path with for a year. We don’t know enough about her either, but we know more enough that it feels as though she should be the co-star of this tale. Her story is this lovely little microcosm of the bonds the Doctor sometimes forms with people, and how that bond can be both painful and uplifting at once. But again, we have no idea why anything in Anita’s life is this way, and why she’s so alone with only this hotel to look after. If her character and Joy’s had combined, we’d have had one solid piece of plot and a whole character to enjoy.
Look, I was ready to get swept away. When we started on the London Blitz, I assumed Moffat was having a dig at himself, and I appreciated the impulse. But then we immediately get into the bit about how one hotel door is always locked and no one ever asking why or where it goes. Which is Moffat 101 for creating horror: name a normal thing that people don’t realize is extremely creepy, then give it a reason for existing.
The problem is, people do usually ask what that locked door in a hotel room is about. I always asked. I’ve never known a person to not ask on entering a room. And the two primary answers are boring and pretty obvious—they’re either cupboards full of cleaning supplies, or they’re doors that connect private rooms, so that large parties can bug each other without having to head out into the hallway. This is not much of a mystery or an effective way to build tension.
Then there’s the whole speech from the Doctor about Joy’s room, and how a hotel room is actually “you without makeup.” Which, yes, he’s trying to upset her, but he should be doing that by saying something true? Hotel rooms don’t indicate anything about a person aside from economic status—if you’re in a crappy room, it’s what you can afford, and maybe you were also really bad at researching to boot. Turning it into a chance to psychologically evaluate someone into losing their temper doesn’t come off clever here. It feels like a sloppy deduction from the BBC Sherlock days, but at least Sherlock was frequently told he had it wrong.
But moreover, this episode manages to be neither comforting, nor sad enough to be a moving experience. If the episode had been more silly or more serious, we might’ve had something to enjoy. As is, this felt like a sizable train wreck of cringe after cringe after cringe. The first ten minutes were far more enjoyable than the rest of the episode. Give me a new version that’s just the Doctor and Trev bumbling about the place, and we’ll have something to work with next time.
Time and Space and Sundry
- Special Agent Clint Rock? Really, sweetie?
- The never-ending mansplain joke is at least a decade too late, and not well executed in the slightest. Sigh.
- Jonathan Aris made a great Silurian, and it was sad that he and Frenchie from Our Flag Means Death both died so soon. RIP, Trev, you were a real one.
- I do love the idea that there are little TARDIS sculptures all over the world that people make because they see it all the time without entirely knowing it. And that does play into the religious aspect of the episode in a way that doesn’t feel forced and gross—the TARDIS as this emblem of faith that people don’t even realize they’re perpetuating.
- It’s been a while since we’ve had a full romp with dinosaurs on Who (“Dinosaurs on a Spaceship” is a dozen years old, if you can believe that), but I’m a little disappointed that they’re still going for the old standbys when they could be the folks who tried to conceptualize dinosaurs with feathers? Doctor Who is a perfect place to try that out, and it would’ve made for great paleontology jokes.
Here’s hoping that next year’s holiday special will do anything else…
This was a typical Moffat episode, with some really clever and imaginative ideas, some rich and moving character work, some needlessly silly bits, and some rehashes of the same old bad habits. It was entertaining enough while I watched, but I had some big “hey, wait a minute” reactions afterward.
The main one is, why is the Doctor still portrayed as this lonely guy who’s never settled down to live a normal life for any length of time? I thought the whole point of Fifteen was that he was the Doctor from the future after Fourteen had lived with the Nobles for a long time and healed emotionally from his traumas, so he was more well-adjusted and friendly and open. (“I’m fine because you fixed yourself. We’re Time Lords. We’re doing rehab out of order.”) But this reset him to his previous personality without explanation. It feels like it’s an earlier Doctor’s story grafted onto Gatwa without reconciling the contradiction. (Though I had a “Yes, thank you” moment when the Doctor realized there were no chairs in the TARDIS. I was hoping the final scene would be the Doctor putting the armchairs from his hotel room in the console room. But that’s also a continuity error with “The Giggle,” because Fifteen specifically told Fourteen that he needed a chair in there.)
I agree it’s also oddly structured and unfocused, that Joy is set up as the featured guest character, with the episode named after her and all, but then it turns out to be more a story about the Doctor and Anita, while Joy is little more than a plot problem to be solved.
Plus the whole general implication that all the people murdered by the heartless evil corporation had actually turned out to be happy and fulfilled was a bizarre tonal incongruity. It didn’t seem to me that the Doctor did anything to save the victims — rather, they took control and saved the day themselves, and the Doctor didn’t do anything but move a rock out of the way. Which is rather bizarre, setting up Villengard as doing this evil thing and victimizing all these people, only to have it turn out to be okay after all.
But the biggest problem is the ending. It shows us a depressed woman who’s alone on Christmas and tells us it’s a good and beautiful thing that she decided to kill herself at the end so she could be reunited with her late mother? I think that sends an incredibly dangerous and ill-conceived message, given how high the suicide rate is during the holidays. This was incredibly irresponsible and I can’t believe nobody told them what a bad idea it was. It really ruins the episode for me.
I think you’ve targetted a couple of Moffat’s interesting quirks in this. We’ve seen him valorise the idea of sacrifice by suicide as something heroic a couple of times in the series before. I don’t know if at some level he believes this, or if it’s more that he’s one of those writers who thinks a death raises the drama but he doesn’t like to show people being killed?
Which ties into the second one, which is that he doesn’t seem interested in writing villains, so we get a faceless corporation whose ambitions we only ever hear secondhand.
The third is, this long way home thing, which has never made sense as the Third Doctor (and probably the First, if not on Earth then on Gallifrey) had periods of living one day after another , so why does the Doctor act like it’s the first time each time?
I will say that Gatwa’s incarnation took to his enforced sabbatical a lot better than I think most previous incarnations would have done, so he’s clearly healthier than he was before, if not entirely healthy. However, it was already clear that he still had baggage, or had at least acquired new baggage, in his third proper episode, when he had a PTSD-like panic attack after realizing who the villain was.
My issue isn’t whether he has baggage, my issue is that the special claims that he’s never settled down despite “The Giggle” making it explicit that his previous incarnation settled down for a long time before finally turning into him, and that his whole personality is the end result of having settled down for so long and found peace. It’s like they took a story Moffat wrote for an earlier Doctor and just ignored what a poor fit it was for this Doctor.
I think, given everything we’ve seen, that the best explanation for what happened in “The Giggle” is that when Fifteen split off from Fourteen, he left behind a lot of trauma for Fourteen to work out, but he didn’t experience Fourteen working it out, regardless of what a lot of people (including myself) assumed going off of the line about “doing therapy out of order.” This is currently a massive point of contention among the fans.
But the whole point of their dialogue in “The Giggle” is that Fifteen is healed because Fourteen did the long, slow work to heal. Somehow, the Toymaker bent reality to bring the future Fifteen back from the end of Fourteen’s life and have him manifest in the present. If they’re both starting from the same place psychologically, then that crucial difference doesn’t exist, so that interpretation makes no sense.
And I’m not “assuming.” I base my conclusions on evidence, not assumptions. IIRC, I read a statement from Russell T. Davies or someone behind the scenes clarifying that that was the intent. Although I can’t track it down, since when I search for RTD’s comments on bi-generation, all I get is his suggestion that it happened to all the Doctors retroactively.
I can’t speak to what RTD said about it. I tend to ignore most of what writers say about their work (no offense intended). I just think there’s more than one valid way to interpret those events, apart from the obvious. If they simply split off from one another, then the crucial difference would be that Fifteen left much of his trauma with Fourteen along with his trousers. Does that totally make sense? Nope. But this IS Doctor who.
I don’t recall if it was RTD or someone else, but I read it somewhere. I didn’t just “assume.” Heck, I needed that explanation, because I didn’t understand it myself from the episode alone. So it certainly didn’t come from me.
Anyway, the problem remains, because Moffat himself did a story where Eleven had to live in normal time with the Ponds for weeks or months, so he’s even contradicting himself to claim that the Doctor’s never done that before.
I do remember him staying with the Ponds to watch some cubes, but I don’t think it went well, and he snuck off after less than a week. He stayed on Trenzalore for centuries, but he had daily monsters to fight.
Of course, the Third Doctor spent years in exile on Earth, though he implicitly lived in the TARDIS rather than having a home to go to or anything. And the First Doctor and Susan spent a fair amount of time living in 1963 London before Ian and Barbara barged into their home, though the Doctor lived more or less like a hermit during that time. And there’s the whole “Human Nature” chameleon arch thing where he lived as a human for a while, which he remembered afterward.
IIRC, the Virgin New Adventures novels posited that the Doctor owned a house on Earth that he maintained for his use but rarely occupied. The Virgin anthology Decalog 2: Lost Property was built around the theme of the Doctor’s various homes.
I’ve never read most of the VNAs (the exception being the original “Human Nature,”) but in the Big Finish audios he’s got a house on Baker Street. The Eighth Doctor has a whole series called “Stranded” where he ends up stuck there for a while. Fortunately he gets his TARDIS working again by the end of the first box set, so I don’t know why the other three are also called “Stranded”…
Oh, and there’s also the Nest Cottage audio plays which were intended to feature a Fourth Doctor who somehow retired to a cottage in Sussex after his regeneration. Most people dismissed that notion, but now that bigeneration is a thing, who knows?
Thanks for this post, Emmet, you’ve covered a lot of my thoughts on this episode. If it was the first Doctor Who Christmas special I’d seen, I might have thought “wow, this is a crazy show, I wonder what else it can do” but because I’ve seen everything before, I go “oh, it’s that bit from the Lodger, oh it’s that bit from when Amy and Rory were written out, oh it’s that bit from…” It’s all a bit forced and repeats things that I thought we were moving past. I know RTD has said he asked Moffat because he didn’t have time to write the episode, but I can’t help wondering if it would have been better to ask someone else like Gattiss, who might have turned out a ghost story, or Jamie Matheson, who has the clever high concepts of Moffat but not the need to write how the Doctor needs to be worshipped into every story he writes.
Did I enjoy it? Yeah it was okay. It wasn’t the worst Christmas special. The acting was fine. The story was sort of diverting. The partygate stuff was interesting, though felt like a last minute effort to give Joy some character.
Also, it’s interesting that in some of the promo stuff, Moffat has said things like the episode is about what the Doctor is like when he’s got no one to be the Doctor for – well, seems like it’s the same as when he’s got someone to be the Doctor for. I think the Runaway Bride did a better job of that. I’m slightly more worried that like the Eleventh Doctor, this version of the Fifteenth Doctor talks about things as if they’re new experiences when he’s done the same thing several times before. I’m also not sure that I believe that the Doctor travels the universe stealing milk and making coffee for people who aren’t there.
One of the big downsides of the revival’s format has been that it’s never had any space to explore the concepts raised in an episode in any great detail, but I think Moffat uses that to have his cake and eat it. So there’s a Time Hotel, what are the ramifications of that? None if this episode is to be believed. What about Villengard? Why is it so relentlessly evil? No reason. (That might be realistic in relation to real world corporations but it’s a bit dissatisfying in a drama.)
I always assume that Evil Corporations – in Fiction and, alas, anywhere else – come with their key motivation pre-established.
PROFIT.
I’ll give the episode this, it had what is CLEARLY a Hobbit door in the Time Hotel (Also the Time Hotel itself was a rather fun idea and setting, which might well be worth a revisit): I also rather enjoyed The Doctor being obliged to take some time.
The rest, alas, was very mid.
This was a step up from a mediocre season so I wound up liking it despite its flaws. I had zero problem with the lack of backstory for Anita — nothing about her was so unbelievable she needed an origin. But yes, she was way more interesting than Joy.
If one approaches the story as entertainment and don’t try to read much more into it than that it’s perfectly enjoyable – the Time Hotel idea is fun and worth a return trip (so that won’t ever happen) and yes there’s a sort of Big Hits revisited – but the last sequence was what made me cringe. There’s a good reason why the life of Christ is usually a taboo area for Time Travel(lers). I can think of a couple (‘Behold the Man’ by Michael Moorcock – and a short story by Arthur C Clarke ‘The Star’) which both are less than satisfactory… At least here the star doesn’t end a complete civilisation – but it makes no scientific sense to have the new star so conveniently fulfilling the rôle it assumes here – and the title is a very, very bad pun…
4/5 for me: an excellent episode, perfect for Christmas Day.
I finally decided to try posting something other than my actual comments on this thread and it worked but when I attempt to edit it with said actual comments it won’t save so I just leave these words instead with utter confusion.
Ooh! Maybe I’m not allowed to name Jesus even though the original post did?
Edit: Nope. That’s obviously not it…
Did you take a long time to write your comments? I find that if you spend too much time on a page, something expires and it won’t let you post anything. I often have to select my whole comment, cut/copy it to the clipboard, reload the page, and paste it in before it will go through.
I did not. Some time back when having trouble with Blogger comments, I adopted the recommendation of a friend and began composing nearly all of my comments offline for various sites if they’re of any real length. I have been pasting my desired comments on this post into the box periodically over the past couple of days, in both Safari and Chrome, regular and private-browsing windows, signing in fresh; nothing has helped so far including removing certain words.
For the record and to the webmasters: I paste in my comment and get the brief “ellipsis caterpillar” animation but nothing happens — the page clearly doesn’t reload, etc., no matter how long I leave it be.
3 months later… I decided to try again with the new season here. Success! Not that it’s anything life-changing.
***
The Doctor / Anita stuff is great but, yeah, it maybe shouldn’t be such a revelation to him. I agree that given the experience the Doctor had both in becoming Fourteen — that he can say he loves his people now (I know, they/their, in the larger scheme) — and in living out Fourteen’s span before his regeneration into Fifteen means that his self-chastisement for having “a spaceship with no chairs” (this review accidentally dropped the “no”) comes off weirdly; it’s a darling that should’ve been killed.
I agree with a lot more in the post and comments above, including that people choosing hotel rooms like them is awfully suss and dating Jesus’ birth to Dec. 25th in the Year “0001” is just all kinds of wrong.
The plunger gag was funny.