I’m always more forgiving of excessive cheesiness when it comes to Doctor Who Christmas specials than I am the rest of the year. If you can’t get together at Christmas with a message of joy in life, when can you? However, Joy to the World stretches my reception to the breaking point because it’s desperate to cram as much cheesy emotionality into my face as it can.

It’s such a contrast to how the episode opens, which is such a quick and fun introduction to the situation that it put me in such a good mood to watch the wild adventures of Doctor Who. When Steven Moffat last wrote an episode for Gatwa’s Doctor, he limited it to a single location and took a very serious tone, so I’m glad we got to see another side of Moffat’s writing style here, where he lets 15 be his living self out of the world to go, deal with what is wrong and how to solve the problem, with a smile and a series of great jokes that cracked me up.

It makes you stop and think when the episode suddenly slams on the brakes after 20 minutes and we spend a moment on a side adventure that is the most impressive part of the episode and has absolutely nothing to do with the plot.

It’s always fun to see the Doctor forced into a situation where he has to live like a normal person. I enjoyed the ten minute or so sequence where we see him living day to day for a change and doing a lot of mundane things around the hotel while somehow still making everything a little more magical in his own way. I enjoy seeing 15 just “hang out” without a crisis more than any other Doctor, and this part of the episode is a perfect example of why.

I just wish it mattered at all to the main plot of the episode. I get that it’s thematically aligned with the Doctor’s larger arc that we’ll see explored in the 2025 season, but aside from a few lines that loosely tie it together at the end, it has nothing to do with anything else going on here. . I still enjoyed it, but it felt out of place.

As for this main plot I ignored, it’s pretty simple, but about what I expect from a Christmas episode. This isn’t the time to get bogged down in complex plots or intense showdowns, we just need a simple excuse for the Doctor to run around and stop the end of the world for an hour, and that’s exactly what Star Seed does.

The opening section gives us a solid mystery as the briefcase keeps changing hands and the pace at which every little detail is revealed is great as it keeps giving you new things to think about.

It shows Moffat’s great ability to come up with fun yet simple sci-fi concepts and then do weird and weird things with them. Time Hotel is a great idea – one that will set your imagination free as soon as you hear it. Each door leading to a different time zone gives you endless possibilities to play with, and the episode makes the most of it, as the Doctor uses a train in 1962 to open an ancient tomb in 1AD using a rope from 1953, and runs the whole thing. via a futuristic hotel – this is the silly but enjoyable thing that keeps me coming to the Doctor Who Christmas special.

When an episode tries to be serious, it starts to lose me. Joy is an instantly relatable character, performed with this great awkward energy where you can see she’s hiding how she really feels about the situation for fear of rocking the boat too much, but she fades into the background precisely because of that fact. a bit whenever the Doctor is there to assert himself in a scene.

It means that when he decides to take the Starseed into himself and sacrifice himself, I didn’t feel attached enough for him to hit as hard as he should have. Plus, we drop all pretense and straight up tell the Doctor that he’s too lonely, even though the episode does a pretty good job of showing that up to that point.

Still, if it had ended with Joy accepting her fate and walking out with a smile, I would have accepted the dose of cheese and found it to be a sweet ending. However, it then continues with a series of scenes that desperately try to drive home the point and there is just too much of it. Okay, have a little scene with Ruby calling mom because it keeps things on the boil for the upcoming season, but did we really need random one-shot characters from every time zone talking about how great everything is all of a sudden?

Then there’s the scene with Joy’s mother in the hospital. Everyone’s going to have a different but strong reaction whenever the Covid pandemic is used for a tragic scene like this, but for me it’s still in the “too soon” zone where it feels menacing and cheap to bring it up to get a reaction. audience. We don’t need any more emotional reflections on the pandemic, Bo Burnham has made one for everyone and no one else needs to try.

Speaking of scary scenes, I absolutely howled with laughter at the revelation that the final scene took place in Bethlehem in 1 AD. It’s such a downright ridiculous way to end an episode that I almost respect it, but if Moffat really thought this would be some kind of emotional or poignant way to end an episode, then I don’t know what to say. Maybe he just felt bad about how much his episode earlier in the year dipped into religion, but this is pretty overcompensation.

The ending was perhaps too heavy-handed, but I enjoyed almost everything that got us there. The detour with the Doctor being stranded on Earth was the part of the episode that resonated with me the most, but it loses points for lack of cohesion. It shouldn’t feel like we’re taking a break halfway through the episode. However, it did make me smile a lot, with fun action scenes, good jokes and a brisk pace that never let my attention wander, which is all I really ask for from a Christmas special.

Score: 7/10