It’s a year since Ncuti Gatwa took over as the Doctor properly in the last Christmas special, The Church on Ruby Road, and by and large it’s been a successful if occasionally puzzling tenure so far. Successful in that Gatwa makes for an appealing Doctor, with charisma and charm and a certain elusiveness that is put down to past trauma. An interesting take that separates him from the openly distressed David Tennant.
But it’s puzzling in that the writing has often made him so elusive that he’s been marginalised in his own show. In the 60th anniversary special, The Giggle, where he took over from Tennant, he promised a renewed devil-may-care confidence after Tennant’s weariness in which he was bearing the weight of the Universe on his shoulders.
But instead, the writing as often had the Doctor playing second fiddle to the excellent Millie Gibson as Ruby Sunday, and in one instance, 73 Yards – which also happens to be the best episode of last season – barely in it at all.
This new Christmas special attempts to delve a little deeper into Gatwa’s Doctor, dealing with the character’s intrinsic loneliness, and this is the chief interest in what is a disappointing stand-alone special written by Steven Moffat, one that veers into mawkishness and ends with the kind of twist that leaves you gasping not in exhilarated shock but with a spine-breaking cringe.
It begins well enough with the Doctor skipping around various moments in history to deliver coffee to someone. Turns out, he’s in the year 4202 at the Time Hotel, where tourists can open doors to time portals instead of rooms, and “all of human history is now available as mini breaks”.
The Doctor notices a strange man holding a mysterious briefcase and upon further investigation realises the briefcase is somehow sentient and taking over the mind of each successive person it attaches itself to. Once rid of it, that person dies.
This leads the Doctor to meet Joy, who is through one of the time portals. Played by Bridgerton’s Nicola Coughlan, she’s in a prosaic hotel in 2024 and is heartily surprised when a Silurian hotel worker with the briefcase comes into her room, followed by the Doctor.
The hotel receptionist, Anita (Stephanie de Whalley), enters too for some nice exchanges. “Why is there a lizard man in my room?” asks Joy. Anita replies as any hotel worker would, “I’m so sorry, this has never happened before.”
Joy takes the briefcase from a Silurian hotel worker who then dies on her bed. “The star seed will bloom and the flesh will rise,” Joy starts saying, as they all do. The Doctor has a peek inside the briefcase, which seems to be some kind of star, but has to lock it again before it explodes – though he doesn’t have the code. But wait, in comes the Doctor from the future, to tell him it. That future Doctor takes away Joy with him, leaving our Doctor TARDIS-less in the room.
Thereafter comes the central and best section of the episode, in which the Doctor has to stay in the hotel for a full year until the time portal comes back around again. Eventually he realises that if he’s to get through it, he should make friends with Anita, and the pair of them embark on a friendship that has a lovely simplicity to it – based around playing board games – that makes an effective case for simple human one-on-one connection.
After which, we’re off back to the Time Hotel where the Doctor gives himself the code in the hotel room (see?) and grabs Joy. Which is where things go downhill.
There’s some business with a T-Rex in one of the rooms. The Doctor starts teasing Joy about her lonely life and even her looks in quite an unpleasant manner; it’s in order to make her angry enough that the briefcase drops from her, but it’s still a cruel way to go about things.
Joy explains that the reason she goes to a hotel room each Christmas Day is because she obeyed Covid restrictions and didn’t go to see her dying mother in hospital, only saying goodbye on an iPad. She wishes she had done a Partygate and gone to see her anyway – sure about that?
Neither character comes off well in these exchanges and there is nothing like the warmth or spark we saw with Anita.
And then comes the end, which will not be spoilt here, but suffice to say is the type of twist that leaves your incredulous and which despite its sentimental motives actually has dark and disturbing implications once you start thinking about it.
Anyway, this uneven episode ends on a low as Gatwa’s Doctor still fails to find his groove. After getting somewhere in that central section, he reverts back to his elusive self, which comes across as oddly cold; and this is the chief problem.
Gatwa’s Doctor cries a lot. And this is made much of each time he does it. We are made to understand that he is very emotional. Yet he cries so much – three times in this episode, including over the death of the Silurian he’s just met – that it has started to come across as meaningless. Especially when he lacks warmth in many of his actual exchanges and can even be a bit mean.
This episode is an attempt to resolve the contradiction of a sensitive soul who has no friends, but fails to do so by its end. Instead we are still tripping through time with a Doctor who we have yet to relate to. He needs a new companion, quick. If Ruby Sunday isn’t coming back, how about Anita? Just somebody, anybody…
Streaming now on BBC One and iPlayer
