TV: Doctor Who - Last Christmas

Doctor Who often works by having The Doctor turn up in other peoples’ stories and own them.  So it was quite amusing seeing a Doctor Who story briefly invaded by Father Christmas in ‘Last Christmas’.

The last Christmas in Doctor Who terms was ‘The Time Of The Doctor’ and was a horrible mess.  (I first watched it recovering from a seizure, but further watches didn’t improve matters)  What was going on in it was anyone’s guess – it included the worst of Steven Moffat’s writing (the self-referential continuity, kitchen-sink plot) and I for one only kept watching to get a glimpse of Peter Capaldi as the Doctor – by then, all that Trenzalore stuff I just didn’t care about at all, and that’s speaking as a fan.  It being a Christmas episode we were sat around watching telly as a family I was expected to translate this into comprehensible drama terms for my parents and then fiancé.  Perhaps that has coloured my opinion of it as an episode, but I remember it as being something of a nadir.

Well it’s been a year – since that brief glimpse of Capaldi we’ve seen him in his successful first series and now in this, his first Christmas Special.  As with the episodes in this year’s series the plot in ‘Last Christmas’ is much more focused.  The story is set in a scientific research centre at the North Pole, but takes place in dreams, that turn out to be dreams within other dreams. There are aliens where you have to avoid even thinking about them (which gives ‘Blink’ and ‘Listen’ a run for their money in terms of Moffat's list of abstract threats) and there is Father Christmas.

I was deeply sceptical of Father Christmas being in Doctor Who like the Mr Grinch McScrooge I am, and if he had been in last year’s end-of-year pantomime any scepticism probably wqould have been justified as being a cheap gag.  However, in this episode Father Christmas meant something and I liked it.  Father Christmas represented dreams, and in this story dreams weren’t stable or safe – dreams were mercurial and potentially lethal.  To put it bluntly, if you were dreaming in ‘Last Christmas’, the chances were you had a face-hugging monster eating your brain.  Father Christmas strolled into a normal(ish) Doctor Who story to completely disrupt things the way the Doctor normally would.

 

"And a Merry Christmas to all of you at home!"

Doctor Who often works best when it’s in unchartered waters like this and has successfully messed around with dreaming and the unconscious from ‘The Mind Robber’ to the Dream Lord in ‘Amy’s Choice’.  ‘Last Christmas’ succeeded by setting up the audience for that most predictable and generic of Doctor Who stories, the base-under-seige, and then successfully throwing something as bizarre into the mix as Father Christmas and still getting away with it.

Nick Frost’s Santa was judged perfectly right – it was actually about as understated a performance you could ask for when the performance in question is Santa.  Peter Capaldi didn’t make any concessions to sentimentality just because it’s Christmastime, oh no – but he did show signs of his Doctor slowly thawing out as time goes on (oh, and grinned and whooped whilst driving Santa’s sleigh).  Clara was excellent as ever, although the weakest scenes seemed to be based around her, for instance the first dream sequence reuniting her with Danny seemed to just be going on for the sake of it; and the scene where the Doctor went back to save her but she had aged…  But then it turned out it was all a dream and she hadn’t!  Yep, it was a story about dreams but that was one little dream too far.

Those are very uncharitable quibbles though from a fan who was left happy.  This was a good episode of Doctor Who which didn’t patronise its audience (regardless of age or level of fan-knowledge), was scary, clever and funny – oh yes, this year Steven Moffat showed that guy who wrote last year’s show how it’s really done.  (Ho, ho, ho…  Oh please yourselves.)

It also showed that this supposed 'dark' direction that the show has taken is just as capable of lightness as earlier eras, but that lightness comes in chinks and comes with sadness - perhaps ironic that the Doctor Who Christmas Special with the least fairytale-like plot in some time should also be the one that gets to have Father Christmas.