"The star seed will bloom and the flesh will rise."
IN THIS ONE... A visit to the Time Hotel puts the Doctor on the trail of a dangerous briefcase and a sad girl called Joy.
REVIEW: If Joy to the World doesn't exactly work, it's ironically because of Joy. (My friends who loved it just walked in to say "yes, because you're incapable of feeling that emotion".) Joy Almondo (are you kidding?), by virtue of being cast as Nicola Coughlan, seems part of Russell T Davies' fandom for, or need to synergize with, Bridgerton, and so was perhaps pushed as a necessary ingredient to Iron Chef Stephen Moffat. She's certainly distinctive in her red outfit, but the episode introduces us to two other pseudo-companions who have a greater impact on the audience - the self-effacing Trev and hotel clerk Anita, who takes part in the episode's one true emotional crescendo - while Joy herself is possessed by an evil briefcase for part of it, and ends up making a strange choice at the end so we can get a hokey Christmas Star ending. To snap Joy out of the briefcase hypnosis, the Doctor has to be mean to her in a way that feels wrong for Doc15, and he says things that can even be interpreted as COVID denialism. Look, it's Christmas, the show is allowed to be cheesy on that day, but it does mean her fate is both obvious (I think the audience is definitely ahead of the Doctor there) and criminally undersold. And that's too bad because otherwise...
I'm not gonna act like the Time Hotel or Villegard's plot don't have any plot holes. There are plenty. Just how this establishment doesn't pollute the timeline in a way that should distress the Doctor, or how the valise is ready to kill its bearer if it's ever opened given the plan... But again, this is a Christmas episode and it's lively to a fault. You hardly have time to think about those things because we're already moving on to the next joke, effect, or cool dialog. Moffat brings back "what did I see?". Things are bigger on the inside, or take you where you need to go. They bring back the bleedin' CHAIR AGENDA. And Moffat and the production have a lot of fun WITH the Time hotel, full stop. There's a clothing store named after the Mr. Benn time travel cartoon (thanks to UK peeps for filling me in on this), a door to the Shire, and a very Moffat notion that connecting doors in hotel rooms hide something, if not sinister, at least magical. The various portals bring us the cheese toastie opener and various characters across time who can later look up at the Christmas Star. Among them a less-than-New-Zealander Sir Hillary on Mount Everest (oops) and what the credits tell me is first ever (movie) Bond Girl, Sylvia Trench on the Orient Express (they both appear in From Russia with Love, but she wasn't aboard, nor do I understand what's going on with her character here, like, at all). The doors allow for a whopping big bootstrap paradox which seems more outrageous than usual (see Theories for why it really isn't), and Moffat makes good on the "slow path" from The Girl in the Fireplace.
Let's talk about that because it's easily the best part of the episode. The Doctor spends a whole year at the Sandringham Hotel, where he becomes friends with Anita Benn (note the last name), a hotel clerk who takes things as they come, and very obviously falls for the Doctor. They have a pretty cute friendship, and through the slow path, the Doctor gets to understand the value of chairs (and who knows, refrigerators), and ultimately recommends her for a job at the Time Hotel. It's mostly montage, but it's charming as all get-out, and audiences reacted about as well to Anita as they did to Donna Noble back in The Runaway Bride, leading to conjecture as to her return. After all, the Doctor does say that the TARDIS "likes her too". My mind went to a season where the Doctor loses access to the TARDIS and houses himself at the Time Hotel, going on adventures with the staff (that is to say, Anita) through the various portals. Shame press-ganged companion Trev didn't make it cuz I would include him too. But Trev is part of the star seed...
Which brings us to Villengard for the second time this year, and once again they've been defeated by their own A.I. As with Boom, their tech uploads the minds of people it kills and they end up hijacking the system. Does this mean Joy et al., as the Christmas Star, never fall under the arms manufacturer's control? It would seem so, or else the ending is bleaker than it plays. Everyone at the end talks about hope, Joy's mother turns into particles and joys her daughter in the sky, Christ is born (on a dubious date), and we're warmed by a Ruby Sunday cameo. It can't possibly end with Villain-guard having its way.
THEORIES: So the bootstrap paradox... How can the Doctor give himself the right briefcase code when he never learns the code? It's a nice little logic puzzle. There are thousands of possible combinations, but he "guesses" exactly the right one. It's not so much a question of "how?" as a question of "what happens if he doesn't?". The wrong combination would have killed Joy, but the Doctor has already seen and experienced Joy NOT being killed. So any number he gives therefore MUST be the right code, or else the whole situation would implode. He had the right code because he had the right code. Is this really any worse than Blink or After the Flood? It's just a quicker, dirtier, more compressed version of such instances. If the universe somehow cannot stand a paradox, then it (or quantum physics of the Web of Time) fixes the code to match the only possible answer. If the Doctor didn't give himself the correct one, then he would never have walked in with that code. The universe can't have that!
VERSIONS: Disney+ promos flew an "s" at the end of "World" as if to raise the stakes. It perhaps relates to the different time periods represented in the Time Hotel.
REWATCHABILITY: Medium - Moffat throws in a lot of good ideas, but the Christmas Star/Joy is the weakest (and yet most important) part of the script.
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