[00:00:00] DRI: Joy to the World, a perennial Christmas message, and this year, the title of the 2024 Doctor Who Christmas Special. As we wrap up 2024 and head into 2025, join us for this, the second of our two part look at the 2024 Doctor Who episodes, joined once again by our guest Doctor Aiden Buckland. If you haven't listened to our episode by episode review of the full season, please check out the previous episode in the podcast, but if you're willing to check out the Christmas Special, Stay tuned.

We're going to get right into it on this episode of the Implausipod. And welcome back, Dr. Buckland, joy to the world. 

[00:00:39] AB: Yeah, thanks for having me. It's always great to talk about the Christmas specials. 

[00:00:43] DRI: Yeah, and we had again, a Christmas special that I just got through watching, and I think this is my introduction, you know, or my second year running, and you say, once, once is you know, a starting point, but after that it becomes tradition, so we now have our tradition of running with Christmas episodes.

And I really enjoyed this one. There was a lot going on and a lot to unpack, but maybe we'll just have a kind of an abbreviated 15 to 20 minute talk about this one and we can look into what happened with Joy to the World. So we see the doctor showing up in a robe in a time hotel and Grabbing drinks for two, unbeknownst to him, or just out of habit, and then when he's called out on it, he realizes he only needs the one, and we realize he's in a rather fantastic hotel at Christmas time.

A hotel with access to pretty much anywhere in the way, in the universe through time, or anywhere on earth through time. It's the old notion of the cross time saloon, if you remember reading, was it Spider, oh gee, Spider Robinson had the cross time saloon. And a number of other authors have had this kind of conceit throughout the years, whether it's Michael Moorcock and Hall of Many Worlds we even saw it within the first Doctor Strange movie, that idea of multiple portals and multiple realms.

But what was your overall impression of Joy to the World? 

[00:02:01] AB: Ah, for Ncuti's second Christmas special, I thought that this one was better than the last. And again, I think the last, the previous season's Christmas special just had a lot of, kind of, place setting to do. So we had the Introduce Judy as the doctor on his own, and we had to introduce this Ruby character, so it had a lot of other narrative work to do, whereas this one felt much more like Doctor Who Christmas Special, I think, you know, in terms of the specials that have happened since the new series launched.

It would definitely be in the top half for me. Could even be in the top three. I'm a big fan of the the, shoot, I forget the name of the episode, but it's based on The Shepherd, which is a story about World War II pilots flying over the channel and following a star, basically, which is the Christmas star.

Doctor Who does a version of that which is really well done. But in terms of Christmas specials, this definitely feels much more like a Doctor Who Christmas special, which often you get new people because usually the Christmas special is either in between companions or, you know, the companions are somewhat occupied in some way.

So it's always the kind of thing where the Christmas special is a standalone, it's new people, you get to see the Doctor in a new environment, and then, of course, You get the connection to Christmas, and I thought that all of those elements were really on point in the way that this episode came together.

So getting the Nicola Coughlin joy character was fun. I actually appreciated the Anita, Anita Ben from Sandringham, Stephanie DiWally's character you know, very well done. And again, great chemistry with Shudi. I thought throughout the side characters, Trev was fantastic you know, just the layer of sadness and tragedy he, he just adds to the episode when he goes into that bar and, you know, he comes to the realization that he's failed the doctor.

It was just fantastic to add weight to it. And seeing Jonathan Aris he played the hotel manager. It was fantastic. The hotel manager, of course, a very small part in the episode. He's the Sylarian, which is the original inhabitants of Earth. That's a different episode of Doctor Who for sure. But he is an actor who's been in the Doctor Who universe a number of different times.

In a number of different characters, so seeing him hearing him of course immediately I, I recognized the voice, so, you know, realizing that it was him in particular, I thought was was nice to see him back. 

[00:04:25] DRI: Yeah, that's amazing. I, I didn't have that history, but I, I did appreciate that there was definitely some gravitas to the appearance of him.

Now, within, and you mentioned Trev, who I thought was actually a standout character and had a really strong redemption moment later on in the episode, and that was fun, I think there was a few main themes that were coming through in this one, and I think one of the things that I saw, like, briefly online, I was trying to avoid spoilers for it, but it's really an episode of Doctor Who that's addressing what we, and like, I mean, we as in the collective here, I've been dealing with since 2020 and Joy's particular role within this episode and how she had to deal with her mother and COVID and the whole situation there where she was talking to her mother through an iPad.

I think really, Yeah, it lent a lot of weight to like the episode and I hear what you're saying earlier on about how it's kind of moored in time and date, but it seems like it's really kind of essential to discuss this one through this lens, you know, whether it's through a mirror or a lens, however you want to look at it through this framing of Dr.

Who, how we can kind of process some of what's gone on over the last four to five years. And as we mentioned in the previous podcast episode to this one, that's you had mentioned how this is one of the things that sci fi really allows us to do and does well, is that processing. So, yeah, I thought that was a fantastic little bit as like an overarching theme.

What did you take away from it there? 

[00:05:58] AB: Yeah, I thought that that was one of the more interesting elements of this particular Christmas special. Because again, it's not, it's often the case, especially in a. Show about time and space that the episodes seem kind of timeless, even though they're set in a specific context.

That context can be used to kind of tell a story that's timeless in any particular place. Whereas this one, Joy's character, you need to have experience what it was like to have gone through COVID. So I'm interested to see in the years to come how this episode ages for those people who were too young to remember.

Or those people who weren't, you know, really. Forming a lot of key memories while this COVID stuff was going on and then for the rest of us, you know, I thought, and this is, you know, a particularly very British thing, you know, the anger, not that the anger post COVID is particularly British, but the specific pointed anger at the betrayal of, you know, government officials telling people to follow these very strict rules when, you know, At the same time, they weren't, and they were living their kind of luxurious lives with, you know, their wine fridges and all that.

I thought that that line from Nicola Coughlin landed really, really heavily for me in terms of putting a finger on post COVID rage in a way that doesn't push us down any particular path in terms of, you know, The various rabbit holes that you can fall into, or the various conversations that now come up post coven where, you know, again, this is a once in a century thing.

It happened once at 20th century. Now, once at the beginning of the 21st century, it seems as though looking back now, those 2 years, you know, we really didn't know much more of what to do this time around than we did 100 years prior. So, you know, I think it's. Okay, if people are a little bit angry about that, and her anger in particular, I think is the most distilled version of it.

The person who followed the rules and really did lose something. And this is the kind of thing that, you know, I think it's going to resonate for not just those people who had loved ones who may have passed during COVID or had loved ones who had gone through the ventilator phase and those really rough things, but, you know, those people who have missed all sorts of things.

So, again, those, those kids who, you know, missed out on a couple of years of socialization at school that. You know, are really key to their development and, you know, the knock on effects of that are going to be unfolding for decades as those kids move on and have trouble with various social situations.

Or, you know, a lot of the students I get in my classes now are the ones who graduated while covid was happening. So those moments that you only get once in your life of going to your senior prom or walking across the stage for your 1st graduation. These are things that they'll never ever have because they were taken away for the safety of everybody according to authorities and whether or not those steps needed to be taken or, you know, kind of whether or not the people in power were working from the best information is the thing that is debatable and the thing that, you know, starts a lot of thorny conversations, but.

Regardless of how you see what happened during the effects of what happened during are certainly something that our feelings are valid about. And I think that the show did a really interesting way of getting us there and reminded me and I could not think of an example. From this show in particular, but reminded me of that wave of indelible marks that happened in pop culture in the moment post 9 11.

so the blowing up of Florida and Star Trek or the dramatic shift of C. T. U. In Fox's 24. These moments that got kind of appended on to narratives that had already been conceived before the moment that mark those forever. 

[00:10:05] DRI: It's a point well taken that we haven't necessarily seen enough of them.

There's a couple, like, concurrent things that are happening within both pop culture and society. Like, when you look at 9 11, that was a very acute, you know, singular thing, right? It happened, and, you know, there was some fallout over the weeks, whereas the pandemic and the pandemic response lasted much longer.

And so there was a lot more of a disruption to the regular production of media. And then during that, or near the tail end of that, we also had the strikes in 2023 with respect to Hollywood also halting and disrupting production. So there's a lot going on there that would Whereas normally we kind of see those elements showing up within our media.

Some of the stuff that's been put, put out has been in production for a long time, or has been in the can, or we haven't had enough time in the production cycle for that stuff to actually, you know, be created. And we talked in the previous podcast episode about the idea of the serial nature of production, having those filler episodes or episodes of the week where if something drastic occurs, you can, you know, during the production course of a season, if it's 20, 20 plus episodes, you can fit in something that's a direct response. 

Whereas a tightly planned eight or 10 or 12 episode season, where it's all about an overarching narrative that you're kind of trying to stick to, you don't necessarily have the flexibility to integrate that commentary into say the current production season, even though it's, it's been out for some time and it may have to come down the road in, you know, season one or season two or in a Christmas special, much like we're seeing now. 

So yeah, there's definitely like the political economy or production economy kind of elements that go into play about that, that I think we see reflected in Doctor Who and the nature of production for Doctor Who doing the annual specials allows them that opportunity to kind of get in there in much the same way we can see with like a, a South Park is able to, just the way they do production allows them to be the, like one of the most responsive shows for fictionalized narratives on television, you know, a few other media properties have that ability outside of, say, a newscast or a comedy cast, right?

Anywho, there was a few other elements there, but I think the other thing I noted from what you're saying, that there was really this response we saw with how Joy was dealing with it, is that the Doctor Who episode kind of presented us with two options, two paths. And the one path was seen with the briefcase holders.

When they reappeared at the end, they're all kind of dealing with, you know, being one with the star seed and, you know, kind of becoming in that as being children of that star seed. And then the other one was the 15th doctor spending a year in the hotel and learning how to live one day after the next.

And this is a theme that tied back to the specials in 2023, where the 14th doctor learned how to live in time, how to become embodied. You know, day to day, serially, as the rest of us live our lives, and not bouncing all over the place. And for a year, we see Ncuti Gatwa kind of calm down, chill out, you've just got to get through it, there's no other way, you've got to close the loop.

And, you know, the way to deal with the loop is to get through the loop, you know, to draw it until it tightens and disappears. And I thought that was a really effective response, and we'll, I think, see some more of that forth. But, In my notes, I kind of say this is how the 15th Doctor became chill. Because when we had that introduction of him to the 14th doctor, he had a similar message.

I seem to recall that, you know, he, he told David Tennant's 14th doctor that, you know, you need to, we noted that it was a markedly different kind of chill doctor that we were finally encountering and that there was a a way to, to, a way that this doctor became chill. And I think we're seeing an element of that here in this episode.

[00:14:12] AB: So, yeah. I liked that again, the way he's presented in the beginning is that he is the post trauma doctor, that, you know, all of the doctors that we've had in the new series up until him, up until the Bi Generation, it is very much, you know, a doctor that is dealing with the trauma of the Time War which is really kind of a post Cold War doctor so, You know, he's presented 1st as this doctor who kind of has no baggage and then, you know, right from the beginning of the Christmas episode, we actually get a reminder.

We'll actually know. Every doctor has baggage and they all have kind of the same baggage, which is this, this kind of lonely doctor trope. It's the, it reminds me of the Freddie Mercury the soundtrack from Highlander who wants to live forever, which is this notion that, you know, being alive as long as he has been or she is really the loneliest.

Thing, and this is the biggest challenge the doctor has to face. Constantly is this idea that, you know, they will never be anything but alone at the end of the day because the companions leave or they get trapped or something happens to them. So the return to the lonely doctor trope. I thought was really welcome here.

So this is something that. We've seen from every doctor in the new era Eccleston, it's really his introduction is that he's the only doctor when he needs rose the for tenant. I think it happens at a number of times, but probably the most pronounced is the runaway bride where we first meet Donna is the when he first meets Donna and he's left his first companion.

At that point, he's very much. It's your tenant. He's very depressed. He doesn't want to hang out with other people. He doesn't want to take on another because they always leave them, which is the kind of depression. And then Matt Smith, you know, I think that you get is in kind of 2 doses. The 1st comes from the beast below, which is 1 of my favorite episodes of the show entirely because it is.

Where the companion actually worked out that the doctor is lonely and that it is loneliness that drives his kindness that that makes him want to help people because if you're the very last one. And, you know, you have nobody else in the galaxy, then, you know, what can you be other than kind to other beings you encounter?

So, you know, it's a trope that we see every doctor play with at some point, and I know I'm leaving out Capaldi and Whitaker here, which both have dealt with the same trope at various points. But seeing should you do it and the way she does it again is very different than other doctors. 

So the idea that he walks out with 2 cups and then Trev encounters him and he has that moment of realization that, you know, Ncuti seems to be the kind of doctor that is so wrapped up in whatever he's doing that he can forget all of the stuff that has happened to him. So it's not that he's post trauma. It's that he's able to dissociate from his trauma, and then it will come back to him.

So walking out with two cups is that, you know, trauma reasserting itself, even though he doesn't necessarily seem to be acknowledging it in the way he walks out of the TARDIS. And then, just the automatic nature of putting on the coat, grabbing the sonic, and leaving, and not knowing. Openly questioning himself.

Why am I putting on my coat? What did I see? Which is, I think one of the interesting things that shooting is bringing to the role is that it's almost as though the doctor is a thing that's in him and it's doing its own thing. It's solving problems is moving on to the next adventure, even though. He's kind of being dragged along.

He's very much the passenger in that moment, which I thought was quite clever in this particular episode. 

[00:18:03] DRI: No, it was an episode filled with clever moments and clever elements. I mean, just the seeding within the Time Hotel as like a site of infinite possibilities, going through these doors, oh here's Mesopotamia, here's Pisa, you know, it's a straight up and down.

the tent on the Himalaya and, and the way to connect all these various elements together. So we get some fantastic, some fantastic points and some very British ones as well seeded throughout, but I guess that is the nature of Doctor Who. For me, I think also was the callback near the end of the episode to Valengard, which showed up in Boom during the season as kind of like this corporation that was you know, interested in, you know, machinery of war, and they're the ones that are empowered this briefcase and the various technologies within it to create this seed that will start this reaction.

And so having that call back to not just that, but also like the, digital, for lack of a better term, like the avatars or the representations of everybody who had been disintegrated or became part of the Starseed was a mirror of the technology that we saw in that earlier episode within Boom. So I thought that that callback was really effective, that we are seeing a bit of that continuity from the season into, like, The Christmas specials as well.

I appreciated that connection. 

[00:19:29] AB: Yeah, it almost seems as though they're building Valengard to be kind of a new Doctor Who villain. And I have to be honest, I'm not sure if Valengard is something that's popped up in the old Doctor Who. I've watched quite a bit of it, but not every single minute, and I can't remember all of it, so.

It could be that this is something that has popped up in Doctor Who before, but it definitely feels as though this run of the Doctor, Valengard is going to be something we come back to maybe another couple of times as we go, which I like. I like that kind of, that binding agent when we see it unfold in a Doctor Who narrative.

[00:20:01] DRI: Yeah, and I don't know if the Time Hotel has ever appeared before, but again, I feel like we're going to see that back as well, especially with the way we ended with the hotel manager taking on the position, or sorry, the hotel manager from Earth taking on the position within the Time Hotel. And so I don't know if it'll just be a Xmas special conceit, or if it will be something in the mainline season.

But again, we have that call back in that looking forward to. The possibilities that this particular locale presents itself. So yeah, fantastic there. 

[00:20:35] AB: It is nice. They, they often, they don't do it often, but they, they will introduce alternative ways of traveling through time every once in a while.

So there is a time authority and they have little wristwatches that basically allow them to jump around in time or you know, other characters that'll, you know, slip somehow into the time vortex. So I thought at the time Hotel was a cute little invention, very Moffat esque in that, you know, it's, it's boundless possibility and minimal explanation.

So everything we know about Doctor Who and paradoxes and crossing your own time stream just gets suspended because this is a physical place somewhere, and all these holes in time just go to their places which I thought was cute. And it gave us, I thought, some of the, the funnest moments in the actual episode itself, so the ham and cheese toasty sequence, seeing that twice.

I think is one of the things that Doctor Who often does quite well, and I think it does it twice in this episode, and I have to give credit Ellie Littlechild at WhatCulture was the person who I saw first present this kind of analysis, but the idea of seeing something from one perspective when you don't know what's happening, and then coming back to it once you do know what's happening I think happens twice in this episode, and both times are just deliciously fun.

So, the beginning sequence, we don't really know what's going on, and then we see him grab the ham and cheese, the toastie, and the latte and go and do it. The 2nd time we see it, we now have that context. And the 2nd time is the bootstrapping scene, of course, where we have the 2 doctors talking to Nicola Coughlin, which is, I thought, was a hilarious way.

Of getting around the problem and Moffat does this quite often in his writing and some people find it frustrating. I usually find it quite delightful. You know, how did the doctor figure out what the code was? He heard him tell himself what the code was, but he didn't ever figure it out. He just waited a year and then burst in and told her what the code was.

[00:22:35] DRI: Yeah, fantastic stuff. Overall, yeah, wonderful episode. So I'm looking forward to. Getting together and talking about this one again in 2025. We will see what the year ahead brings us, but again, Let's just wrap it up there. Any final thoughts quickly before we go? 

[00:22:51] AB: The, the last thing that kinda struck me about the episode was the, the notion that we got both a why and a how.

So there's always kind of a binding agent in a doctor who story and in this one of course, the Christmas star becomes that, that binding agent. The fact that everybody sees the star and that 1 scene at the end, and, you know, they're all given hope by looking at the Christmas star and then finding out that it is the star that guided the 3 wise men at the very end of the episode.

Brilliant little reveal. But, you know, we also had the how of it. Which was the Time Hotel. It was kind of the first time, for me at least, where we've really kind of smashed those two together. We've got this binding agent, but we've also got this vehicle for actually making it happen. So going back to the dinosaur and letting it cook until Bethlehem and all of these sorts of things was kind of a neat little breakdown of the MacGuffin for the whole episode, which I thought was kind of fun.

[00:23:46] DRI: I like Trev coming back and kind of helping out there and fulfilling his quest as well. So a little bit of redemption arc there, and I thought that was enjoyable. We were introduced to a number of people that could be in a different season companion for Doctor Who, but they all did fantastic parts with their role in this one.

So, overall, once again, thank you for joining us, Dr. Aidan Buckland, and we will talk to you soon about other things, I'm sure. You take care, and be well, alright? 

[00:24:14] AB: Thanks for having me. And a Happy New Year. 

[00:24:16] DRI: Yeah. Happy New Year to you too.

Once again, thank you for joining us for these special episodes of The ImplausiPod. I'm your host, Dr. Implausible, and our guest has been Dr. Aiden Buckland. As we've talked about the 2024 Doctor Who season, This is our final episode for 2024, so we're looking forward to 2025 with some new material for you.

In January, we have three episodes on deck for you that we were hinting at in episodes 38 and 39, as we look at what roads are for, what world models are, and what cyber Ascension is. We also have a couple media episodes coming up, with a return to Appendix W, as well as a look at Andor Season 1, before the launch of Andor Season 2 in March, and maybe just maybe an interview or two as well.

2024 was a great year for us, with 18 episodes released, and we're looking forward to at least doing that much in 2025, so we hope you stay with us. Episodes are released under a Creative Commons 4. 0 share alike license, and while there is no cost for you, there is a buy me a coffee link included with every episode, which goes towards our hosting costs and server fees.

There's also no advertising on this show, but if you like what you're hearing, please share it with a few friends and help us grow through word of mouth. Once again, it's been fantastic having you here with us. Have a safe and happy 2025 and a New Year's Eve. Take care and have fun.