Who's Thoughts: Joy to the World

The typo is intentional; this will be the title for the short(?), spoilery Doctor Who reviews that I guess I'm doing for next year's Season Two/Series 15/Season 41 (don't ask). Those will be Patreon-exclusive, but this one will be going up on the site. Happy holidays!

Nicola Coughlan got shafted by the marketing, let's make that clear. All the promos sold this as a spotlight piece for one of the beloved stars of Derry Girls, a Doctor Who Christmas Special in the vein of The Runaway Bride, The Doctor, the Widow, and the Wardrobe, or The Return of Dr. Mysterio, where the Doctor crashed into a guest actor's story. Instead, we have a special in the vein of The Waters of Mars or The Time of the Doctor, which are ultimately character pieces with the Doctor at the center. With Coughlan's Joy only present for around half the episode, she remains largely an unknown quantity until late in the game. She nails all of her big moments, especially her building rage and grief as the Doctor attempts to free her from the happy bubble of her mind control, and she and Ncuti Gatwa have great energy in their interactions. But there's still a sense of missed opportunity to the casting.

Part of the problem is the ending, which is mis-pitched. Joy's sacrifice is bittersweet. The Doctor outright fails to save her or provide her the choice to go back to her ordinary life, with whatever good things she had to live for there. There is as much tragedy as there is cosmic beauty in the ending, but the way the sequence is presented sells only the Christmas-magic angle of it. This isn't the first time in twenty-first century Doctor Who that the direction and the mixing of Murray Gold's scores have leaned toward flattening the complexity of a moment, nor where the tone has gone for crowd-pleasing sentiment at the expense of actually working as scripted. But if we'd had time to delve into Joy's character more beforehand, there might have been room for the end to land better.

The perversity is that the left turn the special takes, away from being a character piece for Joy, also turns out to be its highlight. The critical consensus already seems to be that the year-in-brief that the Doctor spends at the hotel managed by Steph de Whalley's Anita is the best part of the episode, and that's because it's true. It's an absolutely flooring sequence that takes a character who would usually stay in the background and has the Doctor become her best friend for the year he's there. There are equivalent sequences in past television stories, but none of them were pitched like this, where the Doctor throws himself into his enforced domestic grounding with gusto and ends up truly enjoying it. In the past, the Doctor would have looked for adventures to break up the mundanity. Here, living a simple life day-to-day and connecting with the people around him is an adventure, one the Doctor is genuinely sad to leave even as the character could never stay in one place permanently. It's a beat that feels like it extends smartly from the Doctor's arc in the 60th specials, and underlines the way that Gatwa's version of the character has, and hasn't, changed from his predecessors. The Fifteenth Doctor feels fully developed after this, if he hadn't already.

That Joy to the World finds new ground to explore with the Doctor is doubly significant considering who wrote the script. This is Steven Moffat's second new Doctor Who script after his last-ever work on the show back in 2017, following Boom earlier this year. Boom largely felt like a parade of Moffat's greatest hits, his thematic obsessions and tics smartly repackaged for Ncuti Gatwa and Millie Gibson to bring a fresh take to. It worked marvelously and was a highlight of the season, but the episode definitely felt like a late piece by an author refining their craft rather than innovating within it, especially compared to the brash and effortlessly queer feeling of the other episodes. Joy to the World similarly showcases many of Moffat's expected tropes, both good ones (the Time Hotel is a familiar sort of concept that will have children asking their parents what's behind the locked doors in their hotel rooms for years) and minor annoyances (the moments of sitcom-style gendered dialogue and visibly heteronormative assumptions that I'm sure has already sparked a bunch of tedious Discourse from the familiar crowds, though let's face it, the Doctor's "mansplaining" observation is a bit right-on regarding the character's role in the show). But this time, long after most writers would have burnt out on a given subject, Moffat cuts through familiar territory deeply enough to find something new, aided by a leading man who's at the top of his game.

And more to the point, it's brilliant. I enjoyed The Church on Ruby Road last year, but Joy to the World is the most fun I've had with the Christmas specials since their sustained peak from 2013-15. It might not be Moffat's best work, but it crackles with the energy and panache - and yes, soppy, sentimental heart - of the writer's peaks from 2005 to early 2011 and late 2013 to 2017. Whatever its flaws, Joy to the World is, in fact, a joy to watch. Lord knows Doctor Who desperately needs fresh writing talent if it's going to survive into the future. But in the meantime, whether or not this is Moffat's last major contribution (I somehow doubt it), new Doctor Who from him is a delight to have.

I really need to watch Douglas is Canceled.