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| The Doctor investigates a life form that has taken possession of Joy (Nicola Coughlan). |
1 episode. Running Time: Approx. 54 minutes. Written by: Steven Moffat. Directed by: Alex Sanjiv Pillai. Produced by: Alison Sterling.
THE PLOT:
The Time Hotel is a very special tourist attraction. Instead of rooms, the hotel has portals that take guests to points throughout Earth's history. This is enough to impress the Doctor, who remarks to hapless hotel employee Trev (Joel Fry) that it's no wonder the rooms are sold out.
The Doctor is about to leave when something catches his eye: a man handcuffed to his briefcase who doesn't react to anything around him. The man is actually being controlled by the case as it "upgrades" from him to other people in the hotel. Each upgrade gets the case closer to its goal - and each switch results in the death of the previous host.
The Doctor follows the suitcase through a time portal to the room of an ordinary London hotel on Christmas, 2024. The room has just been booked by Joy (Nicola Coughlan), an ordinary woman who is spending her holiday both sad and alone. Then the suitcase transfers itself to her, leaving the Doctor racing to stop whatever force is behind all this before it kills her!
Though before he can manage that, he'll first have to wait for access to the Time Hotel to open again. Which won't be until the following Christmas...
CHARACTERS:
The Doctor: He's still adjusting to being alone again. He stops at the Time Hotel for some milk, and he takes two cups before remembering that he has no one to share with. During his year-long wait, he takes a job at the hotel run by Anita (Steph de Whalley) and befriends her, which results in what I found to be the most heartfelt moments of the episode as they bond - only for him to attempt to quietly slip away when the year is up, seeming relieved to find her desk empty for him to just quietly leave a gift behind.
Joy: As the Doctor observes, Joy (Nicola Coughlan) seems to have been almost ironically named. She presents a cheerful front, but it's entirely unconvincing. The Doctor takes the measure of her hotel room and describes it as "the worst, loneliest, saddest hotel room in the world." She's reluctant to let go of the briefcase because it makes her feel "beautiful." We eventually learn that her sadness is driven by guilt, a feeling that she let her mother down when she was dying.
Anita: The Doctor's companion during his year of normal life. Anita notices him glancing at the telephone and realizes that he's keeping himself from calling someone. When he tells her about Ruby, stating that he won't call because he needs to let her get on with her life, Anita relates: "You and me, letting people get on with their lives." She and the Doctor share "chair time," in which they talk in his room once a week, and they both eventually admit that it's their favorite time of each week. Steph de Walley is very good, and the genuine-seeming friendship between the Doctor and Anita became my favorite part of the episode; I wouldn't have minded one bit if the entire episode had been about that.
Trev: A security guard at the Time Hotel, he meets the Doctor when he's getting milk. Trev tries to stop him, because the refreshments are exclusively intended for guests - and, true to form, the Doctor responds by flashing his psychic paper and enlisting him to follow the man with the suitcase. We never learn much about his life, but he gets a revealing line early on. He promises to help the Doctor and adds, simultaneously amusingly and sadly: "This is going to be the very least I've ever let anybody down."
THOUGHTS:
Joy to the World is a Steven Moffat script, and as with last season's Boom, his era echoes strongly. There's a high concept in the hotel whose doors all open to other time periods. There's the idea of the Doctor not necessarily liking himself, prevalent during Matt Smith's tenure and recycled here in a bit in which the Doctor meets and berates his future self. Oh, and that scene itself is a direct lift from Moffat's Space/Time skit.
As you'd expect in a setting like "The Time Hotel," games are played with chronology. The teaser shows four different periods, each a vignette featuring characters living in those times, with the final setting being Joy's room. The episode then rewinds, showing the events leading up to this from the Doctor's viewpoint. Lest the opening vignettes be dismissed as just some additional color, the climax and epilogue rope these same characters back in, utilizing elements of each in a way that's clever while building momentum. All that's missing to make this 2010 again is the Eleventh Doctor's theme music.
The story moves fast, with plenty of frantic activity. This makes the roughly ten-minute sequence with the Doctor and Anita stand out all the more, because it's the one point when the episode stops. The Doctor is forced to wait before he can return to the big threat, leading to a mini-episode within the episode. The pace slows, the focus narrows to the quiet friendship between two lonely people, and the writing and acting creates a real sense of attachment. Their final conversation feels all the more authentically emotional for its muted tone, and it moved me more than the "big" moments in the episode's Third Act.
The script offers a recurring theme of characters who feel that they've let others down. Trev promises not to let the Doctor down, alluding to a sense that he feels he's disappointed others in the past. Joy feels that she let her mother down, which makes her particularly vulnerable to the briefcase's effects. When the Doctor leaves Anita, he tries to slip away to avoid dealing with emotional fallout, which disappoints but does not surprise her. When he meets his future self, he takes himself to task for being aloof and secretive: "That's why everyone leaves you, that's why you are always alone!"
The big emotional moment at the end doesn't connect for me, with the emotional manipulations a little too on-the-nose for me. Still, the script puts in the work so that it feels thematically cohesive with the rest of the episode. Because of that, the ending works well enough to avoid a letdown at the end of an entertaining hour. I can appreciate how it fits with the story well enough to forgive that it doesn't actually move me.
OVERALL:
Had I shared that ending emotion, I would easily award Joy to the World a "9." It's a thematically cohesive episode that moves fast and has fun playing with its "time hotel" concept. It also successfully switches both pace and tone for the ten-minute Doctor/Anita sequence, which stands distinct from the main episode and yet still fits with the larger story.
Most of the humor lands, and enough of the emotional moments work that I can't begrudge the couple that didn't. Even though I wasn't moved by the ending, I'd still label this as one of the series' better Christmas episodes.
Overall Rating: 8/10.
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