The Best Part Of Doctor Who’s 2024 Christmas Special Has Nothing To Do With The Plot

This article contains mild spoilers for the “Doctor Who” Christmas Special, “Joy to the World.”

As a Steven Moffat fan who was disappointed with the writer’s return to “Doctor Who” last season with “Boom,” a cheesy episode with a few great moments sprinkled in, this new Christmas special (“Joy to the World”) was a delight. It was exactly what I’d hoped to get from Moffat last time: a clever story with lots of heart. And because Moffat’s no longer burdened with the responsibility of running the entire show, there’s no sense of burnout here. You get the sense that Moffat had plenty of time and energy to rewrite some beats and smooth up some edges.

Most importantly, Moffat had the chance to try something new here, and he took it. Sure, the concept of the time hotel sure seems like a typical convoluted Moffat-y plot device, but it paves the way for a surprise tangent about the Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) and the seemingly insignificant innkeeper Anita (Stephanie de Whalley). The rest of the episode might be about the Doctor’s attempts to stop a briefcase from killing Joy (Nicola Coughlan), but for one beautiful sequence, the episode puts that whole storyline on pause and gives us something even better.

The only reason the Doctor and Anita’s storyline happens in the first place is because Moffat couldn’t resist another bootstrap paradox. About thirty minutes in, the Doctor needs to put a 4-digit code into an evil briefcase to stop it from killing Joy, but with mere seconds to figure it out and a near-limitless number of combinations to choose from, the present-day Doctor has no idea what numbers to press. Luckily, Future Doctor knows the answer, and he barges into the room to give it to Present Doctor. How does Future Doctor know the combination? Well, because Present Doctor already heard him say it. 

This is one of those plot devices Moffat’s always seemed to love; 90% of what the Eleventh doctor went through was at least partially the result of a bootstrap paradox, and of course, Moffat’s most acclaimed episode ever (“Blink” in season 3) revolved around a time loop that either makes no sense or makes too much sense, depending on how you look at it. My personal favorite bootstrap paradox in “Doctor Who” actually comes from a little-known mini-episode “Space and Time,” which handles the silliness almost exactly like “Joy to the World” does. 

The difference is that while the loop in “Space and Time” only lasts a few minutes at most, here the time loop for the Doctor lasts an entire year. Future Doctor saves Present Doctor’s life, but he also takes Joy with him and coldly tells him he needs to take “the long way ’round.” The Doctor must spend an entire year living amongst regular earthlings, experiencing life one human day at a time. 

It’s hardly a new situation for the Doctor — in fact, given the events of “The Giggle,” we know there’s another version of the Doctor going through a similar situation just a few blocks over — but this is the first time in a while where we get to see how it plays out. “The Giggle” left us to imagine how the Doctor’s time as a regular civilian went, whereas “Joy to the World” actually shows us.  

When Anita is first introduced, she feels like a joke character. She’s polite to Joy as she introduces her to her hotel room, but her main quirk is her oddly understated reaction when a Silurian and the Doctor show up in Joy’s room. “I’m so sorry, this has never happened before,” she says, before politely putting her things down and leaving. At the time it seemed like this was all we’d see of the character, but in hindsight, it’s clear this was the beginning of an arc for her; Anita in this scene is closed off, withdrawn. She’s uninterested in getting involved in the people around her and simply wants to get through the day in peace. 

But when the Doctor is forced to spend the year hanging around her hotel, Anita starts to open up. We get some absurdist humor with the Doctor fixing her things by making them more like the Tardis, and Anita takes all his weirdness in stride. She’s not that curious, which would usually be a flaw in a companion but, considering the Doctor can’t go anywhere, works out great here. She isn’t scared off by the Doctor’s oddball behavior but she doesn’t demand answers from him either. 

They settle into a comfortable dynamic, one that ramps up a notch when the two develop a “Chair Night” ritual, in which they hang out in the Doctor’s room each week to play board games and chat. The subtext of Anita’s earlier scenes soon becomes impossible to ignore: this woman is lonely. Desperately lonely, that is, up until the moment the Doctor becomes her friend. 

It’s one of the more realistic portrayals of loneliness we’ve ever seen on “Doctor Who,” an emotion that’s usually portrayed in sci-fi extremes. But Anita isn’t lonely because she’s left on a ship for thirty years or because she’s an immortal Time Lord whose planet was lost; she’s lonely in the same quiet, easy-to-miss way that so many regular people are everywhere around the world. She’s also the sort of person who never would’ve crossed paths with the Doctor in any other circumstance; she doesn’t seem to have any desire to traverse the stars, nor are there any plans for Russell T. Davies (RTD) to bring her back as a companion. If the Doctor hadn’t been forced to spend a year at her hotel, how long would it have taken for someone to tell her they feel lucky to know her?

Outside of Anita, “Joy to the World” is an episode that explicitly deals with lingering trauma from the COVID lockdown era. Joy’s still grieving from how COVID restrictions prevented her from being with her mother when she died in the hospital, and this ends up being a major plot point in her storyline. Meanwhile, Anita and the Doctor’s storyline doesn’t mention COVID at all, but it still sort of feels like that’s what it’s about. 

Like a lot of people in early 2020, the Doctor in this episode has to unexpectedly put his plans on pause and just sit around. He’s pissed about it at first and still struggles with impatience throughout the year, but around spring it’s clear he’s found the bright side. There was a hidden benefit to quarantine for a lot of people, in that it provided them with an unprecedented opportunity to slow down, reflect, and rethink their whole approach to life. It was a point where many people decided to switch careers, try out new hobbies, and realize they needed to meet new people.

We can see that reflected not just in how the Doctor learns to embrace day-to-day life, but in how he takes an interest in Anita, a woman who would’ve been an afterthought to him in any other situation. “Joy to the World” finds the Doctor branching out to a completely different type of “companion,” and appreciating them just as much as the young adrenaline junkies he usually hangs out with. 

This little COVID-esque tangent the episode throws at us feels potent because “Doctor Who” has otherwise largely avoided the subject. The final Chris Chibnall season never got a chance to address it, and then the “Doctor Who” production was in relative chaos throughout most of the early 2020s. But returning showrunner Russell T. Davies has always been a showrunner who cared a lot about staying true to the current day; his initial run very explicitly took place from 2005 to 2009, clarifying the dates in a way the Moffat era rarely bothered with. 

It was only a matter of time before the RTD era grappled with how the people of 2024 are still sort of grappling with the chaos of COVID, a pandemic that is still going on whether some of us want to admit it or not. The fact that it was a Moffat-penned episode that addressed it, not an RTD one, is a pleasant surprise. 

The most magical thing about the Anita storyline is that it violates a lot of the standard rules of screenwriting. It’s not completely superfluous, as it sort of ties into the Doctor’s general character arc throughout the episode, but with a few tweaks it could’ve been removed entirely and audiences never would’ve noticed something was missing. 

Moffat could’ve easily had the Doctor solve the briefcase code with some handwave-y screwdriver explanation, or he could’ve just made the time loop last a day or two, not an entire year. Instead, he put the plot on pause and gave us the world’s sweetest short story. It’s not something any screenwriting class would advise a student to do, yet the choice elevated “Joy to the World” to the status of one of Moffat’s best Christmas specials in his already strong collection.

Reading through some other early reviews of this special, I’m seeing some critics already point out that Anita would make a lovely companion. As fans watch and discuss the episode, I imagine there’ll be some disappointment that the next companion’s already been announced and it’s not her. However, I don’t really long for Anita to travel with the Doctor, nor do I need her to return any time soon. I think her scenes work great as a lovely one-off surprise. She’s proof of something “Doctor Who” often argues but rarely shows, that just because someone’s not “important” in the grand scheme of things doesn’t mean they don’t matter. As of this special at least, Anita has almost nothing to do with the plot of “Doctor Who” and she likely never will, but we were lucky to have met her all the same.