Story 312: Joy to the World

In which the Doctor travels through history to deliver a ham and cheese toastie and a pumpkin latte - including the 1953 Everest Expedition, the Orient Express in 1926 and an elderly couple in war torn Manchester. No-one he approaches is the right person, however.

Meanwhile, a young woman named Joy Almondo arrives at the Sandringham Hotel in London, asking receptionist Anita for a room for the week. It is Christmas 2024. Joy notices a locked door in her room, and assumes that most hotel rooms have one of these. It opens and a Silurian in a business suit emerges, with a briefcase chained to his wrist.

The Doctor then appears with his drink and snack...

London in the year 4202, and the TARDIS materialises in the Time Hotel so that the Doctor can get some milk. He is challenged by employee Trev Simpkins after spotting a man approach the reception desk and request a room on the third floor. He has a briefcase chained to his wrist.

The hotel allows guests to visit any period in Earth's history.

The Doctor tells Trev that he is suspicious about the briefcase man as he hasn't reacted at all to anything going on around him - despite guests dressed in various historical costumes.

The Doctor has deduced that the reason hotels always have a locked door in each room is because it links to this place. He leads Trev to believe that he is a special investigator, and co-opts him onto his mission.

The man with the briefcase, meanwhile, has gone into the bar. Approaching the barman, his eyes glow and he makes a cryptic comment: "The star seed will bloom and the flesh will rise".

He passes the case to the barman, whose eyes react in the same way - the chain transferring itself to the new carrier by itself. The first man becomes confused, as though freed of some hypnotic influence. The barman tells him not to worry as he will be dead soon. He now repeats the cryptic phrase.

The barman goes outside and meets Trev, and the case is then passed on to him. The original man dies - his body disintegrating -  and then the barman perishes in the same manner.

Trev approaches the manager of the hotel, Melnak, who is a Silurian. He is looking for someone who has access to all the rooms and their various time portals. Stating the cryptic phrase, Trev passes on the briefcase to Melnak then disintegrates.

The Doctor, who had ordered a ham and cheese toastie and pumpkin latte for lunch, follows Melnak - and this is how he comes to find himself in the Sandringham Hotel facing Joy and a Silurian...

Anita walks into the room, and is surprised to see the group - though not unduly so, considering one of them is a reptile man. The Doctor attempts to question Melnak, but he will only say that if the Doctor takes the briefcase then he will learn what he wants to know.

Fed up with everyone ignoring her, Joy grabs the case - and it transfers itself to her. She now states the phrase about the star seed. 

The Doctor tries to save Melnak - hearing of how he found himself in the far future after stumbling across a doorway in a cave - but the Silurian dies like the others.

The Doctor decides to open the case, and sees inside an orb emitting an intense light. An automated message warns them to close the case within 20 seconds or its current holder will be disintegrated. The Doctor notes that Joy appears not to be too troubled about dying.

They then get a second announcement that a four digit code must be entered within the next 15 seconds or the same fate will befall Joy. The Doctor claims that he cannot use the TARDIS again as it will split the causal nexus but before they run out of time a second version of the Doctor rushes in and tells them the code - 7214. The second Doctor - who hails from the future - leads Joy away into the Time Hotel, leaving the original in 2024. 

He is told that he will have to get to his future the long way round - by spending the next year here until he can complete the time loop.

With nowhere to go, the Doctor asks Anita for a room for 12 months. As he cannot pay for it, he agrees to work at the Sandringham.

As the months go by, he and Anita become good friends. She has developed a crush on him even though she knows he cannot reciprocate. Soon Christmas comes round again and the Doctor must depart. 

The loop is completed and it is he who now turns up and takes Joy to the Time Hotel.

He tells her that he has had the time to work out what the star seed might be, and why its owners need the Time Hotel. Joy is compelled by the briefcase to find a particular door, leading to a specific time zone. The Doctor tells her that the star seed is just that - a single atom which will detonate to create a sun. Someone wishes to harness the energy of a star by creating one of their own, but to do this they need to begin the process in the distant past so that it is ready for them to exploit in the future. This can only be some very large and powerful business.

The Doctor learns that Joy has been depressed following the death of her mother at Christmas during the COVID-19 pandemic, unable to visit the hospital and say goodbye - which is why she almost allowed herself to be killed by the case.

Such strong emotions allow her to free herself from the case.

The Doctor wants answers and takes Joy and the case into a room which appears to lead to a treetop lodge, overlooking a jungle environment. He opens the case and triggers an information interface. All the carriers have had their consciousness uploaded to it, and a hologram of Melnak appears to answer their questions.

The corporation behind the star seed proves to be Villengard, the weapons manufacturers. The Doctor realises that it would take some 65 million years for the star to be ready to exploit - and they are suddenly attacked by a Tyrannosaurus Rex. It swallows the case.

Trev then appears in hologram form, able to communicate with the Doctor through a psychic graft implant. He tells him that the star seed is about to detonate and must be taken off-world. 

He and Joy go to another room in which there is an ancient temple. The star seed has now found its way here The Doctor realises that he will have to use the TARDIS to throw the device into space, and so visits some of the other time zones to get equipment he can use - such as ropes from the Everest campsite. This he feeds through the Orient Express to link the case to his TARDIS.

By the time he is ready and gets back to the temple, he finds the briefcase empty.

Joy is outside, her body beginning to glow as she has absorbed the star seed into herself, along with the consciousnesses of all the people who carried it.

She reveals that she will not die - merely change - and that Villengard will not be able to get what they want. She soars into the sky and a new star is born. This is witnessed by people throughout history, including Anita and Ruby Sunday. Anita is then surprised to be approached by someone from the Time Hotel, offering her a new job.

Joy's mother also sees it from her hospital bed, before she too is absorbed into the star as she dies.

The Doctor then travels back over 2000 years to see the star shining in the sky above the city of Bethlehem...

Joy to the World was written by Steven Moffat, and first broadcast on Wednesday 25th December 2024. Festive Specials were always the work of the current showrunner, but in this case Russell T Davies was too busy writing the next series. Moffat had returned to the series to write Boom, and was approached to help with the Christmas episode.

Moffat claimed that one of his inspirations was the fact that most hotel rooms had a locked door in them. (Not in any I've ever stayed in, but then I'm more of a B&B person myself).

I'll state it now, right at the start, that this is probably my least favourite festive special. Even Chibnall gave us Daleks at New Year, but this story makes the unpardonable sin of being really rather dull.

It looks good, and is full of Moffat's clever-clever touches and timey-wimey stuff, but it's totally lacking in incident. It's noticeable that the clip used to plug it was the sequence with the dinosaur attack - and that's about the only exciting thing that happens in the entire episode.

Something which I really don't like is schmaltz, and this has it in abundance. I know it's Christmas, and non-fans are watching postprandial, but the ending to this is so saccharine I'm surprised dentists and diet-planners weren't inundated with new patients and customers straight after the hols. 

Bringing the biblical nativity story into it really was the waffer-thin mint for me.

The episode takes ages to get started and another of the issues with it is that extended sojourn at the hotel with Anita. As well as taking up a huge chunk of the running time, as though there wasn't actually enough plot for an hour long special, it made no sense. The Doctor has UNIT and lots of companions kicking around in 2024. His previous incarnation might still be hanging out at Donna Noble-Temple's house. Why not go spend the time with any of them? The idea that he honestly has nowhere to go in contemporary London for an entire year is a nonsense.

The main guest artist is Nicola Coughlan, of Derry Girls and Bridgerton fame. She plays Joy Almondo - that surname being Italian for "in the Earth" or "in the world". She also played Queen Victoria as a bit of a spoiled brat in CBBC's Dodger, which had starred Christopher Eccleston as Fagin and Billy Jenkins as the titular character.

Melnak is played by Jonathan Aris, who is best known for playing Anderson in Sherlock, but who has also featured in the Moffat / Gatiss Dracula and Good Omens. He also makes an appearance in Rogue One.

Playing Anita is Steph de Whalley, who had mostly worked in theatre up to this point. We'll see her again.

From Game of Thrones and a number of comedy shows (Plebs, Twenty Twelve, W1A and Trollied) we also have Joel Fry, who plays Trev.

Millie Gibson gets a brief cameo at the end, as Ruby Sunday.

See below for some other incidental characters.

Overall, more a Hallmark Christmas themed TV movie with sci-fi trappings than an episode of Doctor Who. 14 months after the event I still have no urge to watch this again.

Things you might like to know:

• The working title for this episode came from a song - "Christmas, Everywhere, All At Once".
• When he wrote this, Moffat hadn't read the Series 14 finale - but had already read the Series 15 one...
• One of the doors in the Time Hotel appears to belong to the Hobbits from the Lord of the Rings movies.
• Another cultural reference is the Hotel's clothes store, which supplies the guests with suitable historical outfits. It's called "Mr Benn's". The cartoon series Mr Benn (1970 - 71) featured a character who visited a fancy dress shop and ended up in whatever era matched the outfit he selected. The mysterious shopkeeper wore a fez. The Loch Ness Monster one was my favourite instalment.
• And Benn is Anita's surname.
• The Hotel bar is called DeTamble's - from the novel The Time Travellers Wife, which Moffat adapted, not terribly successfully, for the screen.
• A woman on the Orient Express is named Sylvia Trench (Niamh Marie Smith). That's the name of James Bond's lady friend in the films Dr No and From Russia With Love, played by Eunice Gayson.
• The 1953 Everest Expedition is the one which first reached the summit of the world's highest mountain, on 29th May of that year - the news getting back to Britain in time for the Coronation. Edmund Hilary and Tenzing Norgay appear in these sequences - played by Phil Baxter and Samuel Sherpa-Moore respectively. The latter is actually the great-great-grand-nephew of Tenzing Norgay.
• Another of the Time Hotel doors is said to lead to the Fall of Troy, which would have been interesting to see as the First Doctor was there (The Myth Makers).
• You can also visit the Gunfight at the OK Corral (The Gunfighters) and the destruction of Pompeii (The Fires of Pompeii) - so lots of opportunities for the Doctor to meet an earlier incarnation.
• Guests can also take a trip with Nostalgia Tours (Delta and the Bannermen).
• That whole hotel interlude was a late addition as the script progressed. The Doctor was originally to have globe-trotted for the year - cut for budget reasons. The character of Anita was expanded from less than a dozen lines on the strength of Steph de Whalley's audition.