Story 254: Last Christmas

 

In which Clara is woken up during the night of December 24th by noises on her roof. She goes up to it and finds Father Christmas and a pair of Elves - Wolf and Ian. They try to pretend that they are ordinary people who have gotten lost, but Clara sees a reindeer fly past.

The TARDIS materialises and the Doctor ushers Clara inside - telling Santa that he knows what is going on.

As they leave, the Doctor tells Clara not to trust anything she sees or hears.

At a scientific research base at the North Pole, some of the crew are watching their colleague Shona attempt to traverse the infirmary. She plays music to take her mind off the figures who are sleeping in the bunks. The TARDIS materialises in the room and Shona thinks the new arrivals to be figments of her imagination. She urges them not to think about the sleeping figures, but they all start to rise up. They are humans, but with crab-like creatures gripping their skulls and covering their faces.

The Doctor realises they are deaf and blind, but see what is going on via telepathy - connecting with those who observe and think about them. Everyone is attacked by more of the creatures which descend from the ceiling.

The attack is suspended when a lot of clockwork and mechanical toys burst through the wall, followed by Santa, Ian and Wolf. Santa orders the affected humans back to bed.

The Doctor deduces that the creatures are Kantrofarri, otherwise known as Dream Crabs. They attack their victims by lulling them into a deep dream state whilst attached to their heads. They then feed off them by liquifying the brain. He realises that the presence of Santa Claus must mean that they are dreaming - and so are currently being attacked by the creatures.

One of the creatures is captured and kept in a glass container for study. It escapes and latches itself onto Clara. She finds herself back at home on Christmas morning, with Danny Pink. Her subconscious tries to warn her she is dying, but she is too happy to be home with Danny to notice.

In order to save Clara, the Doctor decides to enter her dream and allows one of the Kantrofarri to be attached to his head. He helps her accept that her life with Danny is a dream and both wake up. The Kantrofarri which had attached themselves to them both fall to the floor and die, crumbling instantly to dust.

Clara tells the Doctor that she has a pain in the side of her head, and Shona confirms that she also has one there. The Doctor realises that the reality they have awakened into is itself another dream. They were all attacked when they first came into the infirmary, and have been dreaming since then with Kantrofarri attached. They wake up and escape the room.

The Doctor notices that there are four staff manuals in the base, despite there being eight crew - the four awake - Shona, Albert, Ashley and Bellows - and the four in the infirmary. He decides to use an experiment called the Helman- Ziegler Test as he has a theory as to what is happening. Each of the crew must read the first word on a certain page. One of them differs as the words they read out are "very", "very", "very" and "dead". They should all have been the same, coming from the same page of the same manual, so they must all still be dreaming.

The people in the infirmary are images of themselves. One of them attacks Albert through the CCTV monitor, killing him. They rush outside into the snow where the TARDIS stands, but Clara points out that this is not the real TARDIS. The affected people from the infirmary appear but in growing numbers like an army. The Doctor decides to use the dream to their advantage, getting everyone to imagine a means of escape. They are all rescued by Santa and taken into the sky on his sleigh. Within a short space of time they are over London. Each of them starts to wake up in their real life, their Kantrofarri dying as they do so. Bellows is wheelchair-bound, about to have Christmas with grandchildren. Shona will be having her Christmas with her boyfriend watching DVDs.

Clara finds herself at home being visited by the Doctor on Christmas Eve, but she is now an old woman. This proves to be yet another dream, and the Doctor arrives and saves her.

Earlier both had admitted that they had lied to each other - he had not found Gallifrey, and she was not reunited with Danny. She elects to go travelling in the TARDIS with him once again...

Last Christmas was written by Steven Moffat, and was first broadcast on 25th December 2014.

Whilst it is Peter Capaldi's first festive special, it is the third to feature Jenna Coleman.

The title comes from the 1984 Wham! Christmas hit.

It had been planned that Coleman was to have left at the conclusion to Death in Heaven, but Moffat agreed to keep her on as she wanted to stay longer. This was the second time that Moffat had been in the process of writing Clara out of the series, only to have to amend the scripts to retain her. The first time Coleman had asked to stay, and this time Moffat and Capaldi had asked her to stay on.

The character of Shona was the planned new companion.

The inspirations for the story are pretty much explicit rather than hinted at. Several movies are referenced, and Shona just happens to have them on her Christmas DVD viewing list. These are Alien, The Thing From Another World and Miracle on 34th Street.

From Alien (1979) we get the look of the Dream Crabs as "Facehuggers". One of these spider-like creatures attaches itself to John Hurt's face to impregnate him with a baby Xenomorph. This film is actually referenced verbally within the episode as well, as a character actually describes the Kantrofarri as looking like "Facehuggers".

The Thing From Another World is the 1951 sci-fi movie which had already been one of the inspirations for The Seeds of Doom. It features a group of scientists at a remote scientific research station at the North Pole, who are threatened by an alien menace. 

Miracle on 34th Street involves a New York department store Santa Claus who claims to be the real thing. In this episode we are left wondering for a time if Santa really is Santa. I presume that Shona is going to watch the superior original 1947 version starring Edmund Gwenn, rather than the 1994 remake with Richard Attenborough.

The guest cast can be divided into two groups - Santa and his Elves, and the crew of the scientific research base. Previously seen midway through the closing credits of Death in Heaven we have Nick Frost playing Santa Claus. Dan Starkey, who has previously played Sontarans (including Strax), plays elf Ian, and Nathan McMullen is Wolf. McMullen was well known from the E4 sci-fi series Misfits, about a group of community service young offenders gaining superpowers.

The base crew comprise Michael Troughton - son of Second Doctor Patrick - as Professor Albert; Natalie Gumede as Ashley; Maureen Beattie as Bellows; and Faye Marsay as Shona. Marsay had a notable role in The Game of Thrones (which also just happens to be on Shona's list). She played the bullying Waif opposite Maisie Williams' Arya Stark in seasons 5 and 6.

The character of Shona would have made for a great new companion, though we've no idea who might have played her had it been an on-going role.

This episode marks the departure of Samuel Anderson as Danny Pink.

Overall, an entertaining enough Christmas Special, but really an episode that would have worked just as well - if not better - as a standard one, without the Christmas trappings. Santa and the Elves are simply not needed.

Things you might like to know:

• The Doctor has encountered Santa Claus on a couple of occasions in the past: 
• The First Doctor met him at the North Pole and discovered that children all over the world wanted TARDISes for Christmas. A Demon Magician was also hampering Santa's efforts to deliver toys. The Doctor used the TARDIS to duplicate toys for Santa and the Demon was lured away into space. This was all in the 1965 TV Comic strip "A Christmas Story".
• In the 2010 Christmas Special, A Christmas Carol, the Doctor attended a party in 1950's Hollywood at which Father Christmas was supposedly a guest. The Doctor claimed that Santa's real name was Jeff.
• The Doctor is offended to hear that there is a sci-fi horror movie called Alien, which he thinks is racist. However, he had previously recommended that someone see the film in the 2009 animated adventure Dreamland.
• Moffat considered having K9 feature in this story.