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Joy to the World
It seems customary in my Internet bubble to preface reviews of Christmas Specials with a general disclaimer apologising for the genre as a whole. I quite like them, though there was a point where I wearied of Victorian Christmas planet.
Joy to the World is an odd one within the genre. The first not to be written by the current show-runner, slightly off-kilter pacing, sudden biblical references... No Victorian Christmas planet though - so that's a plus!
I enjoyed it. It does what is needed from a Christmas special, but like many people, I particularly enjoyed the segment in the middle where the Doctor spends a year in a hotel and then wondered why the high profile guest star was getting so short-changed. I gather this was a mixture of budgetary constraints and then liking the performance of Steph de Walley so much that the hotel segment was expanded, but it does feel like the whole plot grinds to a halt for a bit and then doesn't have enough time once it resumes.
I liked the dinosaur, thought the Star of Bethlehem bit was a bit naff (once I caught on to it, which was I think about 2 minutes later than the rest of the family), and enjoyed the concept of the Time Hotel in a don't-think-about-this-too-hard sort of a way. I cried generically over the Covid-19 references. I'm glad they were there but would have liked it underscored that ultimately Joy did the right but hard thing.
There are at least three Christmas specials I would rate below this and at least three I think are easily better than this. So middling?
Joy to the World is an odd one within the genre. The first not to be written by the current show-runner, slightly off-kilter pacing, sudden biblical references... No Victorian Christmas planet though - so that's a plus!
I enjoyed it. It does what is needed from a Christmas special, but like many people, I particularly enjoyed the segment in the middle where the Doctor spends a year in a hotel and then wondered why the high profile guest star was getting so short-changed. I gather this was a mixture of budgetary constraints and then liking the performance of Steph de Walley so much that the hotel segment was expanded, but it does feel like the whole plot grinds to a halt for a bit and then doesn't have enough time once it resumes.
I liked the dinosaur, thought the Star of Bethlehem bit was a bit naff (once I caught on to it, which was I think about 2 minutes later than the rest of the family), and enjoyed the concept of the Time Hotel in a don't-think-about-this-too-hard sort of a way. I cried generically over the Covid-19 references. I'm glad they were there but would have liked it underscored that ultimately Joy did the right but hard thing.
There are at least three Christmas specials I would rate below this and at least three I think are easily better than this. So middling?
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Personally I want more of the year Fifteen spent in the hotel. Just what all did he get up to?
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I think several people feel that the writing of the fifteenth Doctor, both here and in Boom! was slightly out-of-kilter with the trajectory of the character and I have a feeling that Moffat had relatively little awareness of what was going on around this when it was written (which I think was before The Giggle had even aired - though I could be wrong). The fact he was only writing it because RTD was too busy, possibly also explains why RTD was not, perhaps, excising as much of an editorial hand to keep the overall story consistent as one might have liked.
Personally, I put The End of Time in my bottom 10 of modern who, so this easily beats that. I also wasn't keen on Time and the Doctor which I thought got bogged down in tying up too many loose ends, nor Voyage of the Damned which felt too misanthropic for Christmas Day. I'd rate this somewhere around Twice Upon a Time which I also enjoyed, but it struggled a bit with what it wanted to say about the afterlife and for many fans suffered from a depiction of the first Doctor which was more about people's experiences of dealing with elderly relatives than the actual character Hartnell was portraying.