There's a fun vibe running through the first part of the story, with the Doctor popping up at various times and places, apparently looking for someone who wants a sandwich and a pumpkin latte. This is because he's at the Time Hotel, which offers package holidays to all sorts of places in Earth's history, letting people stay in hotel rooms which are accessed via that locked door that you always see in the rooms. Then we take a step back to see how he came to be looking around the hotel in the first place; namely, that he noticed something amiss with a man holding a briefcase chained to his wrist, checking into the hotel without gazing at the spectacle. It doesn't seem to be that long since the Doctor left Ruby behind, as he's still holding two tea mugs when he stops to get some milk. ("Habit," he notes with slight bemusement after Trev questions him on it.) Watching Gatwa smoothly manuever through these scenes is a delight. It's interesting; both here and in "Boom", Moffat tends to write the Doctor more like he wrote the twelfth Doctor than how others have been writing the fifteenth Doctor, being a bit more abrupt and brusque. But it's a characterisation that Gatwa seems to relish playing, tossing off lines like "I hate following people, you've got to stay at the back" like he was born to it. It also means things stay interesting as the plot runs along, dealing with a briefcase that's controlling people for some reason. We get a good sense of speed and fun, and since we're dealing with time shenanigans we get lots of crowd-pleasing elements, including a past Doctor yelling at a future Doctor after the future Doctor refuses to tell the past one how to get the code to disarm the briefcase. "Do you see? This is why nobody likes you! You have to be mysterious all the time," the past version yells to his departing future self.
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| The Doctor and Anita enjoy Chair Night. ("Joy to the World") ©BBC |
The rest of the episode, in some ways, feels like typical Doctor Who. We get a race against the clock, both with the briefcase controlling people and then killing them, and with it preparing for some sort of super-destructive action. We have a rather bemused guest star (Nicola Coughlan, playing the titular Joy) who falls under the control of the briefcase. We have a callback once again to Villengard, the weapons manufacturer last seen in "Boom", who want to create a new star that they can harness the energy of, and so they choose Earth as the location of this new star (probably because of the presence of the Time Hotel). It's fun and entertaining, and the Time Hotel gives them the opportunity to play with different times and places, including an inaccurate-but-still-impressive-looking dinosaur. Really, if there's any issue with this sequence, it's that the moment where the Doctor is harsh to Joy in order to break the hold the briefcase has on her feels a bit out of place: not so much because of what he does, but because Joy's speech afterwards, about needing to travel with a friend, suggests a harsher portrayal of the Doctor than Gatwa gives us outside of that speech. (But we do get confirmation in the main show that COVID did indeed happen in the Doctor Who universe, with Joy's mother dying in the hospital while Joy couldn't be there in person. This is important in part because it felt like the show wasn't interested in dealing with COVID during Chibnall's tenure (somewhat understandably), so it hadn't come up before outside of the Lockdown mini-episodes.)
It's not all perfect, of course. Villengard's basic scheme is straightforward enough in principle, but it's not quite clear how they intend to actually pull off the "harnessing energy" part in a way that is a) safe for them, and b) less complicated than just finding a star somewhere and harnessing its energy. And, perhaps not surprisingly, the actual logic of how Joy becomes a star doesn't really stand up to scrutiny. OK, she joins with the starseed, sure, but how does she travel away so quickly to both avoid destroying the planet and also be seen right away? Finally, the Bethlehem gag is really a bit too obvious, so it doesn't land the way they presumably wanted it to.
But overall, "Joy to the World" is an episode with more hits than misses. At the very least, it fulfills the Christmas function of being accessible and entertaining, without being too demanding. It may not be the most impressive episode ever, and it's not one that lingers long in the memory afterwards, but it's fun enough while it lasts.