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Doctor Who Fans are getting a very special treat under the Christmas tree today with the arrival of this year’s “Joy to the World.” special holiday episode. But they get an even better gift wrapped within it: Because beyond the celebratory shell of the episode, this larger adventure has a side story that could stand on its own as a fantastic episode WHO in his own rights.
About a third of the way through, “Joy to the World” takes a sideways step. After setting up the Time Hotel where the Doctor is staying – a shop with countless gates currently designed to send guests to every Christmas in history – we are quickly led through a series of these doors as he follows a strange suitcase, who appears to be handcuffed and hops between free hosts. The Doctor and the Briefcase’s current host, a Silurian hotel manager, enter through a door at Christmas 2024 in London, where they both meet a young woman named Joy in her shabby hotel room. Some chaos later, the Doctor discovers that the suitcase somehow disintegrates after jumping to a new suitcase: the Silurian dies and Joy is left as the last bearer of the briefcase, causing her to chant ominous warnings about the blossoming of a starseed . Before the Doctor can really understand what’s going on with the suitcase, the Doctor comes through the door.
At some point in the future, this Doctor brushes off his predecessor’s annoyance at his failure to provide information on how to solve the briefcase mystery by starting to take Joy out of the room, forcibly leaving “our” Doctor behind to find her things in the long run. The door slams shut and we are left in the perspective of “our” Doctor, who realizes that he is now stuck in 2024, with no TARDIS and no way back a whole year.
What follows is a lengthy sequence that has the potential to be a killer episode Doctor Who in his own right. Since the Doctor has no money or accommodation, he has to offer his services to the hotel’s manager, Anita (Steph de Whalley, in a truly fantastic supporting role), by doing odd jobs and renting out things Was Joy’s room. The Doctor may be working on figuring out the suitcase in his free time, but he’s still forced to sit in one place from moment to moment and actually live a life he doesn’t normally have to experience.
That’s not an idea Doctor Who is of course completely unknown. The first half of the Third Doctor’s entire existence was based on the premise that the Doctor was exiled to present-day Earth and forced to fend for himself, but he still went on regular adventures in his role as UNIT’s scientific advisor. The Fourteenth Doctor’s story arc ends with him being granted the grace to exist and live a life with Donna and her family, freed from the need to be the Doctor. In particular, Steven Moffat, who wrote Joy to the World, was fascinated by the idea throughout his time as showrunner; Episodes like “The Lodger,” “The Power of Three,” and even a previous holiday special, “The Husbands of River Song,” all deal with the idea of the Doctor temporarily leaving his life as a doctor, either by choice or by circumstance gives up wanderer in the fourth dimension to live “normally”.
But unlike that sequence in Joy to the World, these past episodes explore only in the abstract, namely the fact that the Doctor spends a disproportionate amount of time in one place, in one moment, largely in the background of the real reason for it . And to be honest, that’s why Doctor Who is a show we all watch to see the Doctor travel through time and space, fight monsters and save worlds from catastrophic destruction. Getting him to live a normal human life is a rarity because, as the Doctor initially resists here, it’s just a bit boring for a sci-fi action-adventure series.
And yet, for a good third of the episode – and arguably the best episode – we’re asked to sit with the Doctor as he lives this year, getting to know Anita better and experiencing what it’s like to live like thisBetter yet, to the point that when his year is over and he has to say goodbye to his new friend, it’s almost as heartbreaking as losing a comrade. There’s no major threat or secret, the Doctor doesn’t even particularly count down the clock even though he knows he only booked Joy’s room at the hotel for a year, instead the entire sequence revolves around that, the potential of this other lens to explore the doctor’s life and sense of being.
Crucially, too, finding a boyfriend and then breaking up with him in this way is a necessary time of healing for this particular doctor. Not just because the last season of Doctor Who really had problems its domestic element to make the Doctor and Ruby feel like the friends the show has always told us they are, but because it’s not with Joy, the special’s de facto “companion,” the Fifteenth Doctor processes his loneliness after breaking up with Ruby. It’s only with Anita, and it’s her connection and inspiration that drives him to keep going after losing his first friend, one of the first people he shaped in this incarnation. Again, this is something that past holiday specials have also touched on – “The Runaway Bride” and the Tenth Doctor’s feelings towards Rose and “Voyage of the Damned” and the, er, Tenth Doctor’s feelings towards Martha – but is their ultimate conclusion Reminders that the Doctor needs someone to share his adventures with.
For a moment, and at its brightest, “Joy to the World” asks us and the Doctor alike whether life itself is the adventure he has to share with someone, rather than time and space.
You can watch now Doctor WhoJoy to the World on Disney+ around the world and on the BBC in the UK and Ireland.
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