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Who is the doctor? Fans are getting an extra special treat under the Christmas tree today with the arrival of this year’s “Joy to the World.” Special holiday episode. But they are getting better gifts inside This: Because beyond the episode’s elaborate festive wraps, this big-on-the-inside adventure has a side story that could stand alone as a great episode. WHO in his own right.
“Joy to the World” takes a side step about a third of the way through its run time. After setting up the Time Hotel where the Doctor is staying – now a business of countless gateways to send guests to every Christmas in history – we quickly jump through a bunch of those doors as he follows a strange suitcase wearing handcuffs, seemingly empty host Doctor and The briefcase’s current host, a Silurian manager of the hotel, walks through a door at Christmas 2024 in London, where they both meet a young woman named Joy at his run-down hotel. met in the room After some confusion, the Doctor discovers that the suitcase has somehow been turned into a new one after the hosts were dislodged: The Silurian dies and Joy is implicated as the last carrier of the briefcase, causing a star seed to utter ominous warnings about its blossoming. Before the Doctor could truly realize what was going on with the suitcase… the Doctor walked through the door.
This Doctor, from some time in the future, overcomes his predecessor’s annoyance by not giving any information on how to solve the mystery of the briefcase, as he begins to usher Joy out of the room and obliges “our” Doctor. About the long way out of things. The door closes, and we’re in the perspective of “our” Doctor, who realizes he’s now stuck in 2024 with no TARDIS and no way back. A whole year.
What follows is an extended sequence full of potential to be a killer episode Who is the doctor? With no money or place to stay in his own right, the Doctor has to offer his services to hotel manager Anita (Steph De Haley, in a truly superb supporting turn), doing odd jobs, paying rent. was house of victory The Doctor is trying to figure out the suitcase in his downtime, sure, but he’s still forced to sit in one place momentarily and actually live a life he doesn’t normally get to experience.
It is not an idea Who is the doctor? Completely unfamiliar with, of course. Much of the first half of the Third Doctor’s entire existence was built on the premise that the Doctor had been exiled to the contemporary world and forced to fend for himself, but he still went on regular adventures in his capacity as UNIT’s scientific advisor. The Fourteenth Doctor’s arc ends with him being granted the grace to live with Donna and her family and freed from the need to become the Doctor. Steven Moffat in particular, who wrote “Joy to the World”, was fascinated with the idea throughout his tenure as showrunner; Episodes like “The Lodger”, “The Power of Three” and even an earlier holiday special, “The Husbands of River Song” all deal with the idea of the Doctor, either by choice or circumstance, momentarily leaving his life “as normal”. Wandering in the fourth dimension for survival.
But unlike this sequence in “Joy to the World,” those past episodes only examine them in the abstract, the fact that the Doctor is spending a disproportionate amount of time in one place, one moment, essentially in the background. Its real reason. And that, really, is why Who is the doctor? A show that we all see as the Doctor traveling through time and space, fighting monsters and saving the world from catastrophic destruction. It’s a rarity to have him live a normal human life, as the Doctor initially flaunts himself here, which is a bit boring for a sci-fi action adventure show.
And yet, for a good third of the episode—and arguably the episode’s best—we’re asked to sit with the Doctor as he lives this year, getting to know Anita better, getting to know what it’s like to be alive. like thisEven better, when the time comes that her year ends and she has to say goodbye to her new friend, it’s almost as heartbreaking as losing a partner. There’s no great threat or mystery, the Doctor isn’t even particularly counting down the clock, even if he knows Joy’s room at his hotel is only booked for a year, instead the entire sequence becomes an exploration of the potential of this different lens. In the doctor’s sense of life and being
Crucially, it is a necessary period of healing for this particular doctor, making a friend and then parting ways with them. Not just because of last season Who is the doctor? Really struggling with Its domestic component To make the Doctor and Ruby feel like the friends the series constantly told us they were, but not because it’s with Joy, the Fifteenth Doctor’s special “companion” in her loneliness process after breaking up with Ruby. It is only with Anita, and it is her connection and motivation that pushes him forward in the context of losing his first friend, one of the first people he imprinted on in this incarnation. Again, it’s something that’s also touched on past holiday specials—”The Runaway Bride” and the Tenth Doctor’s feelings for Rose, and “Voyage of the Damned” and the Tenth Doctor’s feelings for Martha—but their final conclusion is reminiscent. Doctor Who needs someone to share adventures with.
For a moment, and most brilliantly, “Joy to the World” asks us, and the Doctor alike, whether life is an adventure he must share with someone rather than time and space.
You can see now Who is the doctor?“Joy to the World” on Disney+ worldwide and BBC in the UK and Ireland.
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