Like his first festive effort, Steven Moffat really couldn't be bothered hiding the inspiration for his second Christmas episode.
CS Lewis wrote The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe in 1950. It was the first of seven books known collectively as The Chronicles of Narnia - the fantasy realm visited by the young heroes.
Like Moffat's story, the book tells of some siblings who are evacuated from the city to a large country house thanks to German bombing raids. It's home to a scientist named Digory Kirke.
The youngest of the children discovers that a wardrobe in the house is really a portal to a magical realm - Narnia - which is populated by talking animals and mythical creatures like fauns. The land is in permanent winter, thanks to an evil witch.
Lewis died on 22nd November 1963 - the day before Doctor Who made its debut.
There are four Pevensey siblings (Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy), so Moffat reduces his evacuees to a more manageable two - Cyril and Lily. Whilst the house in the book belongs to someone called Digory, it's an Uncle Digby in the Doctor Who version.
The Doctor equates to the Lion, and the Widow (Madge Arwell) to the Witch (though only in terms of the sound of the words - she's nice) and the TARDIS, obviously, is the Wardrobe - a cabinet which can transport people to fabulous realms.
However, it isn't the Wardrobe / TARDIS which leads to Narnia here - a snowbound planet.
The Doctor instead sets up this visit to another world as a Christmas present to the children, so the portal is through a large gift-wrapped box.
One of the reasons for adapting an existing story was that Moffat was tied up with Sherlock, and had little time available to concentrate on this episode.
The story is mainly set at Christmas, and on the trees on the planet we see egg-like growths which resemble Christmas tree baubles. Moffat knew that the festive episodes tended to be watched by people who did not necessarily follow the usual series, so it could be standalone.
The wooden king and queen derived from a childhood nightmare of Moffat's. He had dreamed of a wooden king telling him off.
Amy and Rory had been effectively written out of the on-going narrative in the latter part of Series 6, so they did not need to be included other than a cameo. Arthur Darvill was busy in the theatre anyway.
In their place would be a new one-off companion figure which Moffat decided should be "the ultimate mother".
Madge is played by Claire Skinner, best known for family-based sitcom Outnumbered.
Reg Arwell is a Lancaster bomber pilot. These aircraft are best known for their role in the Dambuster raids of May 1943 (Operation Chastise, which employed Barnes Wallis's bouncing bombs). This was the subject of the 1955 movie The Dam Busters, starring Richard Todd.
However, if there's one film which has inspired this sequence of the story it is Powell & Pressburger's A Matter of Life And Death (1946), in which the pilot of a doomed bomber is saved by angelic intervention.
Moffat had likened the Doctor in Christmas episodes to a festive angel.
Reg is played by Alexander Armstrong, who had been voicing computer Mr Smith throughout The Sarah Jane Adventures.
The snowbound planet is visited by woefully unfunny harvesters from Androzani Major. This planet first featured in, funnily enough, The Caves of Androzani - Peter Davison's final story.
They are supposed to provide light relief - but don't.
Billis was named for exec-producer Beth Willis, and Venn-Garr for Piers Wenger.
Next time: more Daleks than you can shake a plunger at and, boy, are they mad...
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