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Physician Who fans are getting an extra special treat below the Christmas tree today with the arrival of “Joy to the World,” this year’s special holiday episode. However they’re getting an even larger latest wrapped interior it: because past the broad festive wrappings of the episode, this greater-on-the-interior adventure has a facet yarn that may well stand alone as a fantastic episode of Who in its gain rights.
About a third of the way into its accelerate time “Joy to the World” takes a sideways step. After developing the Time Hotel the Physician is staying at—a enterprise of myriad gateways at the 2d area to ship company to each Christmas in history—we’re immediate whisked via a bunch of these doorways as he follows a strange suitcase hopping between handcuffed, reputedly vacant hosts. The Physician and the briefcase’s latest host, a Silurian manager at the resort, discover themselves going via a door into Christmas 2024 in London, where they each meet a younger woman named Joy in her accelerate-down resort room. Some chaos later, the Physician discovers the suitcase is by some means disintegrating hosts after it hops to a recent one: the Silurian dies and Joy is latched onto as the briefcase’s latest carrier, making her chant ominous warnings about a star seed resplendent. Sooner than the Physician can bag a real grasp of what’s happening with the suitcase… the Physician walks via the door.
This Physician, from some level sooner or later, brushes off his predecessor’s annoyance at him no longer providing any information about how you can clear up the mystery of the briefcase, as he begins to plug Joy out of the room and leave “our” Physician, forced to figure issues out the prolonged way around. The door slams shut, and we stay on the perspective of “our” Physician, who realizes that he’s now caught in 2024 without a TARDIS and no way back for a total year.
What follows is an prolonged sequence that is brimming with the potential to be a killer episode of Physician Who in its gain accurate. And not using a cash or place to stay, the Physician has to offer his services and products to the manager of the resort, Anita (Steph de Whalley, in a if fact be told fantastic supporting turn), doing strange jobs, renting out what was Joy’s room. The Physician is working on attempting to determine the suitcase in his downtime, certain, but he’s tranquil forced to take a seat 2d to 2d, in one place, and actually dwell out a lifestyles he usually doesn’t have to expertise.
This is no longer an idea Physician Who is totally unfamiliar with, of course. The primary half of remarkable of the Third Physician’s total existence was constructed on the premise that the Physician was exiled on contemporary Earth and forced to make invent for himself, but he was tranquil regularly happening adventures in his capacities as UNIT’s scientific adviser. The Fourteenth Physician’s arc concludes with him being granted the grace to exist and dwell out a lifestyles with Donna and her family, freed from the desire have to be the Physician. Steven Moffat in particular, who wrote “Joy to the World,” was fascinated with the idea at some stage in his tenure as showrunner; episodes esteem “The Lodger,” “The Energy of Three,” and even a prior holiday special, “The Husbands of River Music,” all tackle the idea of the Physician, either via want or circumstance, momentarily giving up his lifestyles as a wanderer within the fourth dimension to dwell “normally.”
However in contrast to this sequence in “Joy to the World,” these past episodes most life like really examine them in abstract, the fact that the Physician is spending a disproportionate amount of time in one place, in one 2d, largely within the background against the actual reason for it. And that is, honestly, because Physician Who is a demonstrate we all watch to discover the Physician traveling via time and space, preventing monsters, and saving worlds from calamitous destruction. Making him dwell a normal human lifestyles is a rarity because, as the Physician initially bristles himself here, it’s accurate style of a bit lifeless for a sci-fi action adventure demonstrate.
And yet, for a appropriate third of the episode—and arguably the episode at its simplest—we are asked to take a seat with the Physician as he lives out this year, attending to understand Anita larger, attending to understand what it’s want to dwell esteem this, larger, to the level that when the time comes that his year is up and he has to say appropriate bye to his recent pal, it’s almost as heartbreaking as shedding a companion. There may be no longer any grand threat or mystery, the Physician isn’t even particularly counting down the clock, despite the fact that he is aware of he has Joy’s room at the resort booked for accurate a year, instead the total sequence turns into about exploring the potential of this various lens into the Physician’s lifestyles and sense of being.
Crucially too, it’s a necessary length of healing for this particular Physician, to make a pal and then part ways with them in this way. No longer merely because the last season of Physician Who really struggled with its domestic ingredient to make the Physician and Ruby really feel esteem the traffic the sequence constantly informed us they had been, but because it’s no longer with Joy, the de facto “companion” of the special that the Fifteenth Physician processes his loneliness after parting ways with Ruby. It’s most life like with Anita, and it’s her connection and inspiration that pushes him to scramble forward within the wake of shedding his first pal, one of the first folk he imprinted on in this incarnation. Again, here is one thing past holiday specials have touched on too—”The Runaway Bride” and the Tenth Physician’s feelings over Rose, and “Voyage of the Damned” and the, uh, Tenth Physician’s feelings over Martha—but their ultimate conclusion are reminders that the Physician needs somebody to share adventures with.
For a 2d, and at is brightest, “Joy to the World” asks us and the Physician alike if lifestyles itself is the adventure he needs to share with somebody, rather than Time and Space.
You can now watch Physician Who‘s “Joy to the World” on Disney+ around the arena, and on the BBC within the UK and Ireland.
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