There are so many things to love about Christmas: twinkly lights, desserts to set on fire and, of course, Doctor Who specials. But while I am in cheerful mood, wearing a Christmas jumper and having followed breakfast with advent-calendar chocolates, I am aware that for many people this is the loneliest time of year. So it is for Joy (Nicola Coughlan), the new addition to the Doctor Who family, whom we meet checking into a spartan hotel room by herself for a week over the festive period. Fortunately, she is about to make a new friend in the form of the Doctor, who enters her room in pursuit of a green-skinned alien from the future, grinning from ear to ear as he offers her “a cheese toastie and a pumpkin latte”.
While Ncuti Gatwa’s first Christmas special, The Church on Ruby Road, was a delightful proper introduction to the show’s radiant new star (previously, he had briefly appeared in The Giggle, starring David Tennant), the stakes on that outing were markedly lower. In Joy to the World, rather than being tasked with rescuing a baby from pop-singing goblins, the Doctor is trying to prevent the end of planet Earth – though explaining what he is saving it from would enter serious spoiler territory. Suffice to say that most of the action takes place over the festive season in London in 4202, where residents of a glitzy hotel can visit key moments in history, chasing up their mulled wine with a trip on the Orient Express in 1926, or to Everest’s base camp in 1953 or, for some bizarre reason, the London blitz. Joy’s present-day Christmas interruption escalates quickly and the only way to buy the pair enough time to stop the apocalypse leaves the Doctor trapped in London for a year while Joy is in 4202 with his future self.
If that sounds ludicrously complicated, it’s because it is, but it unspools slowly enough to let viewers keep up and – despite further twists and turns – the internal logic holds up. But what makes this a proper Doctor Who Christmas special for the ages is not only the action sequences and the great comic timing of Coughlan and Gatwa (plus some brief but truly scene-stealing one-liners from Joel Fry as a time-travelling hotel employee), but also the warm beating heart at its centre. At no point does it feel like an regular episode with a few Christmassy things thrown in. Instead, it speaks to things so many of us have grappled with over the past few Covid-marred years: loneliness, disease and the shame that sets in when Christmas Day doesn’t resemble the joyous images that marketing departments shove down our throats. With such wonderful specificity, this Christmas special articulates what it means to feel unloved and wretched during a period of celebration, waiting for a phone call or a moment of kindness that never comes.
It is a despondency we see exist just as much in the Doctor as in Joy and hotel employee Anita (Stephanie de Whalley), each of whom have stunning moments when they reveal how much they long for more human connection in their lives. Gatwa is astonishing at showing how the Doctor slowly evolves over the year when he is stuck in 2024, befriending Anita and charming customers with a new job that provides enough money for his expenses as he waits out the 366 days. Some of his lingering abandonment issues, which were exacerbated when he said goodbye to Ruby, his companion in the previous series finale, are healed. He emerges kinder, more empathic and humbler, which speaks to something truly beautiful about the nature of Christmas – that we can only hope to come to each 25 December having inched forward and become better people than we were the year before. And that, like Joy, the Doctor and Anita, we can hope that we are more open to love and brave enough to admit when we need help.
Watching Gatwa’s first Christmas special in 2023, I said it marked the start of a “delightful new era” and likened his performance to “a shot of pure dopamine”. It has been a long year with plenty of reasons to feel impatient and miserable and to lean into cynicism, for us and the Doctor. But I hope that, like the Doctor, I’m getting better each Christmas. Gatwa certainly is.
• Doctor Who: Joy to the World aired on BBC One and is available on iPlayer.
