Capaldi's first Xmas Special, and it's Alien meets The Thing meets Inception meets Santa... Mind-bending and awesome!
The Doctor makes a refrigerated woman spend her last remaining days of life with two complete strangers in this Christmas Special
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Amy and Rory are busy enacting anachronistic sexual role playing games aboard a starship when they literally fly into a Sharknado.
The Doctor travels ahead to save the day, but it turns out the storm is controlled by Kasran Sardik, the planet’s leading misanthrope.
Now Doc needs to Ghost of Christmas Past him by forcing him to fall in love with the woman in his dad’s freezer.
Listen to our review of the 2010 Doctor Who Christmas Special now!
So I didn’t really like this one. Can’t quite figure out why. Was it the lack of Amy and Rory? Was it the bleak set design throughout? The implausible fish plot elements? How were they able to defy gravity, just how? Was it the bittersweet ending for Kazran and Abigail? Maybe it felt too easy for the writers to simply copy this classic story. Or maybe I just love the Muppet Christmas Carol too much to get behind any other version of the story. Regardless, this one didn’t really do it for me. I’ll give it my standard dislike rating of 0.5 and see you folks next week when we can get back to a proper story arc episode.
Things I liked:
1. Grumpy baddie!
2. Flying Jaws! (Until they ride it on a sled, booo!).
3. Doctor-only episode with Timey-Whimy stuff. Though there is something sinister in the Doctor changing people’s persona by interfering in their timelines.
4. A moving, feel-good vibe.
Beefs:
1. It’s just supposed to be a screwdriver!
2. So, did she, erm, die on Christmas Day? Sort of puts a downer on it all.
2. Was it an overly-tame episode? It lacked a genuine threat and a really malevolent baddie, equivalent to the Racnoss, Sycorax, murderous servant robots, the Master, or a giant stomping mecha-Cyberking of previous Christmas outings.
Summary. A safe, enjoyable and entertaining, and tear-jerking, yarn. Though it would have been better if the shark had eaten a few people and not pulled a sled.
3.3/5 flying snark infested clouds.
Doctor Who does A Christmas Carol. Why not?
As we’ve seen in the past, Doctor Who can effectively pull from books (See The Brain of Morbius for Doctor Who does Frankenstein). But this is definitely the best Doctor Who has done. Heck, it even kinda works as an adaptation of Charles Dickens’ classic.
The Scrooge character was wonderfully done. Definitely felt like Scrooge. The bits where the Doctor is with the younger Scrooge (I’m calling him Scrooge because it’s easy to remember) were done so well.
This is Matt Smith at his finest. He is funny when he wants to be funny and serious when he needs to be serious. He acts like a kid with the younger Scrooge (He is not a responsible adult), but is dead serious with the older Scrooge. If I had to recommend a perfect Eleventh Doctor episode, it would be a fight between this and Vincent and the Doctor (I gave that episode a 4.3).
Even though this episode is called “A Christmas Carol”, the episode doesn’t spend time shoving that Christmas feel down our throats. I mean, The Christmas Invasion (David’s first Christmas Special) was filled to the brim with stupid Christmas stuff like robot Santas and killer Christmas trees! This was more subtle with it’s Christmas. I mean, we get those Christmas elements, but they aren’t meant to be played for laughs like in Christmas Invasion. The tone here is a bit more serious with the comedic elements sprinkled in.
Overall, this is the perfect Doctor Who Christmas special. It’s not super serious or a comedic pantomime. We find that middle ground that this episode needed to have. Matt is brilliant, it serves as a great adaptation of A Christmas Carol, and I would feel comfortable watching this in the middle of July! Definitely earns it’s 4.0/5.