May 26: "The Almost People"

I don't think that Matthew Graham was actively aping Chris Chibnall when he wrote this story; it's more that they both have similar ideas and similar old Who stories in their DNA, particularly the work of Malcolm Hulke.  But it does mean that this episode, like the last, feels familiar -- and there are little in the way of surprise moments to really wow us.

The two Doctors. ("The Almost People") ©BBC

The best part of the episode is easily the presence of two Doctors, one the original and one a Ganger who nevertheless proves that the Gangers are just as much the people they're copies of as the originals, once they've stabilized.  The interaction of the Doctor with himself is handled well -- none of your Troughton/Pertwee bickering here -- and the small tell of the different shoes is used to great effect.  The first time around, when you see the Ganger Doctor isolated from the rest of the group because of his nature and then you see him lose control and rage -- rage! -- against Amy because of the fates of all the Gangers who were slaved to their hosts, being "decommissioned" and wondering "Why?", is powerful, and it's painful to watch Amy's prejudice against what she deems to be an inferior copy.  The second time around, after you learn that the Doctors changed places (probably while behind that communications console) and it's the original Doctor who feels the Gangers' pain, while the Ganger version remains calm and collected, this becomes much more intense.  It's one thing to see a cloned Doctor lose control; it's altogether more powerful when it's "our" Doctor, and the treatment he undergoes at the hands of the humans is more uncomfortable than it already was.  But that's the point; if even Amy can't actually tell the difference between the two, how can anyone judge the Gangers as being somehow less than people?

That's the core of the story, and they do a nice job of teasing it out without being overbearing about it, but sadly we have to go through a fairly generic story on the way there.  There are some nice moments along the way, such as the Ganger Cleaves pointing out that Jennifer was "a sweet kid.  Look at you now.  The stuff of nightmares," the fate of all the Gangers that didn't quite come out right, and the resolution of the story, where the Gangers essentially say, "Stuff this, what's the point?" and stop trying to kill the humans.

But everything else feels, if not exactly comfortable, at least fairly routine.  We've seen this sort of thing before, and "The Rebel Flesh" / "The Almost People" doesn't have much new or interesting to say.  As I said, there are flashes of greatness, and I like how the story ends with a commitment to change things, rather than for all the Gangers to die, but this frequently feels like a typical runaround.  Still, we're leaps and bounds ahead of "Fear Her", so that's something at least.

Oh, and there's the cliffhanger into the next story, with Amy revealed to be a more sophisticated Ganger who the Doctor destroys (which goes against the whole point of the story, but never mind), while the real Amy is about to give birth (hence the "pregnant"/"not pregnant" readings the Ganger Amy was giving off).  TO BE CONTINUED, the ending tells us, evoking the language of a show that's going to resolve things in a few months, rather than the following week.  But I suppose they were excited about their cliffhanger and wanted to show off.

May 25: "The Rebel Flesh"

Matthew Graham's second story for the show is a lot like Chris Chibnall's last one.  In that story, we got a conflict between humans and Earth reptiles in an isolated area, where both sides do good and bad things and neither comes out as morally superior; here we get a conflict between humans and the doppelgängers they've created in an isolated area, where both sides do good and bad things and neither comes out as morally superior.

The Gangers. ("The Rebel Flesh") ©BBC

Of course, while the basics are largely similar, the devil's in the details, and those details are different enough that this doesn't come out as a pure remake, even if there's frequently a sense of déjà vu.  We get quite a bit of backstory about the Gangers and how they've been created by people to be sort of remote controlled clones, mainly so that we understand what's going on.  But that's good; they've taken enough care with this that we can sort of see the original people's point, even if the episode is set up so that we're unlikely to agree with it.

But as I said, there is that lingering sense that we've already had this story before, so it's nice to see the changes.  The underlying setup is doubly bizarre (there's an island monastery that's mining for acid for some unexplained reason, and solar storms can cause earthquakes and things), but there are some lovely moments.  Rory's treatment of the Ganger Jennifer is really lovely, as he's willing to help her even though she (sort of) tried to kill him earlier, in a fit of anguished anger.  The interaction between the two Jimmys is handled well, as neither of them seem to be violent, and the cliffhanger is the logical conclusion to all the running around with doubles that we see here.

It's not great, but it's moderately entertaining so far.  The question that the next episode is going to have answer, however, is the fate of the Gangers.  If they can avoid killing them all, this might turn into a more interesting story than it initially appears to be.

May 24: "The Doctor's Wife"

In 1983, producer John Nathan-Turner was concerned that he had a fan leak somewhere in the Doctor Who production office, so he laid a deliberate trap: on the planning board in his office, in place of The Caves of Androzani, he wrote "The Doctor's Wife by Robert Holmes" as a fake title to see who would bite.  (I've never heard if anyone did.)  But since that title entered fanlore, it's probably been only a matter of time until a real story under that name would show up.  Fortunately, the story we got was so much better than anything we could have imagined with that title.

"The Doctor's Wife" is by Neil Gaiman, who rivals Douglas Adams for the title of "most famous author to write for Doctor Who" (the other primary contenders are Richard Curtis ("Vincent and the Doctor") and Frank Cottrell Boyce ("In the Forest of the Night")), and it's likely because he's so well-known and highly regarded that they've let him play with the mythology of the show so much.  You can tell that Gaiman has fond memories of the old show -- how else to explain the use of the Time Lord distress cube that we last saw way back in The War Games? -- and that he's drawing on that to write this story.  And so we get a strange entity that tricks Time Lords and feeds on TARDISes, only it's found out that there are no more TARDISes coming, so it's time to head into the real universe from the bubble universe it's inside.

But of course, if you're hiring Neil Gaiman to write an episode for your show, it's probably because you're looking for the qualities that Gaiman brings, that sense of magic mixed with the ordinary, of fantastic situations that characters nevertheless react rationally to, and "The Doctor's Wife" doesn't disappoint on that front.  And so we get the marvelously wonderful and audacious conceit of taking the "soul" of the TARDIS (for lack of a better word) and putting it inside a humanoid body (that of Suranne Jones, who was the Mona Lisa in the Sarah Jane Adventures story Mona Lisa's Revenge), which allows the Doctor to have a conversation with his TARDIS.  But it's not just that; Neil Gaiman takes 48 years of the show's history and turns it on its head:

IDRIS: Do you ever wonder why I chose you all those years ago?
DOCTOR: I chose you.  You were unlocked.
IDRIS: Of course I was.  I wanted to see the universe, so I stole a Time Lord and I ran away.  And you were the only one mad enough.

(from The Doctor Who Transcripts - The Doctor's Wife)

Idris and the Doctor in the junkyard TARDIS. ("The Doctor's
Wife") ©BBC

A simple, quick piece of dialogue, but it changes our whole understanding of things -- and the episode's filled with lovely little touches like that.  (There's the "Pull to Open" discussion²³⁰, but my favorite bit is how Idris/the TARDIS reminds the Doctor that the first thing he ever said to her was that she was the most beautiful thing he'd ever known -- there's something oddly wonderful about imagining Hartnell saying that.)  This is a story that is absolutely in love with the show and the mythology that's been created, but it isn't so reverent that it causes everything to sink.  There's just the right balance to make this feel wonderful and special.

And while we could justly laud the other elements of this story (Amy and Rory's chase through the TARDIS corridors (ooh, TARDIS corridors!  It's been ages since we've seen any of those) is tense and scary, and the mind tricks House is playing on Amy are genuinely creepy; the way Idris thinks that Rory is the "pretty one" is wonderful; the appearance of the ninth/tenth Doctor's "coral" TARDIS console room is thrilling; the way the junkyard TARDIS is the result of a Blue Peter contest; "Fear me, I've killed all of them"; and so much more), ultimately this story is about the one thing always with the Doctor: his TARDIS, the closest thing to a wife we've ever seen him have.  "Look at you pair," Amy says at the end.  "It's always you and her, isn't it, long after the rest of us have gone.  A boy and his box, off to see the universe."  And it is.  And for one brief moment, the Doctor got to talk to his TARDIS and hear her reply.  It's mad, bold, magic, and beautiful, and more evidence that even after 48 years, the show still has the ability to surprise us, and to do so with both style and heart.  Little wonder it won the Hugo.








²³⁰ As many people pointed out after this episode was broadcast, the "Pull to Open" message refers to the door on the phone compartment, not the main door.  But that doesn't actually change Gaiman's point, which is that real police box doors did indeed open outward -- the TARDIS doors open inward because of space concerns in the '60s studio.  (Note, for comparison, that the doors of Tardis open outward in both Peter Cushing films, where floor space isn't an issue.)

May 23: "The Curse of the Black Spot" Prequel / "The Curse of the Black Spot"

The prequel for this episode is suitably tense, as Captain Avery writes of the nameless enemy that's been picking off his crew, one by one.  In fact, it might be better than anything in the episode proper...

The crew of the Fancy wait for the Siren to come. ("The
Curse of the Black Spot") ©BBC

To be fair, for much of "The Curse of the Black Spot" we get a competent episode, as we're confronted with pirates (Captain Henry Avery, in fact, last mentioned in The Smugglers²²⁸), a strange Siren stealing away crewmen, and a ship lying motionless in doldrums.  It also creates an effective atmosphere of dread, as the remaining crewmen are slowly picked off one by one by the Siren -- meaning that their allies are growing fewer and fewer and that every person left becomes that much more important.²²⁹  So there's a sense of murkiness and claustrophobia that pervades the entire episode.  (Which is why it's odd that Steven Moffat moved this episode up from the second half of the series during its filming because he felt the first half was too dark -- apparently he thought this would be a lot more swashbuckling than it actually ended up being.)

But it's an effective atmosphere, and the Doctor's realization that he's gotten wrong the way the Siren appears is rather nice, even if it leads to all sorts of logical problems (so breathing on a medallion is enough to stop the Siren using it, but opening a barrel of water in the middle of a storm isn't).  The only issue is that it's not particularly exciting.  Having them all terrified of the smallest wounds is clever, but it doesn't make for the most thrilling drama, and the sense of terror this creates isn't quite enough to paper over the problem.  You never get the feeling that these pirates will betray each other at the drop of a hat (despite the effort to convey this when Mulligan steals the keys and darts out of the magazine), which is really what this story needs: internal tensions as well as external threats.

None of this is necessarily a dealbreaker, but the story hits a major problem when they transport to the spaceship (and how is it that they weren't hooked up to hospital beds like every other person brought aboard?), and that's the problem of the Siren.  In the best Doctor Who stories, the Doctor should be one step ahead of the audience, or at least coming to significant realizations at the same time, but here we have to wait a painfully long time until the Doctor realizes that this is a hospital ship and that the Siren is trying to help, not harm.  This became pretty clear the moment they stepped into the sickbay and saw that everyone was still alive, but the script insists on having the Doctor believe the Siren is malicious for quite a while, and it makes for tedious viewing that the story never quite recovers from.  It doesn't help that there's a lingering feeling of "so what?" at the end of this -- although that might be more down to the direction than the script itself, as Steve Thompson does try to underline the threat of the Siren reaching the mainland.  But it's a bit too abstract for us the audience to really latch on to.

So there are two problems central to "The Curse of the Black Spot".  The first is that it can't decide if it wants to be a swashbuckling adventure with all the pirate clichés present and correct or a claustrophobic horror movie where trapped survivors are picked off one by one, and so it tries to have it both ways -- but the result is that it doesn't fully succeed at either.  The second problem is that the resolution goes on way too long and doesn't feel particularly satisfying when we learn what's really going on.  Bless them, they did try, but "The Curse of the Black Spot" falls rather short of the standard we've come to expect.







²²⁸ This is actually a coincidence, as writer Steve Thompson simply picked an historical pirate who disappeared without being captured, rather than trying to make an explicit connection.  Nevertheless, as the pirates in The Smugglers are obsessed with finding Avery's treasure, it doesn't seem unreasonable to assume they're talking about the same person as here.
²²⁹ Er, except for the Boatswain, who, somewhat infamously, suddenly disappears from the narrative after we see him barricade the magazine, with no explanation whatsoever.  Because this is Moffat's Doctor Who, where we've already seen last series that "goofs" are just clever bits of foreshadowing, people wondered what the significance of the Boatswain's sudden disappearance was.  But alas, it's just a continuity error, the result of his "death" scene being cut in editing.  And besides, you can see him as one of Avery's crew in their final scene.

May 22: "Day of the Moon"

As dark as "The Impossible Astronaut" seemed, with its killing of the Doctor and investigations of aliens who you can't remember, "Day of the Moon" is much darker.  There's a sense of ratcheting up the paranoia in this episode, as our heroes try to fight an enemy that are almost impossible to learn about and who have been here for thousands of years.  "They've been running your lives for a very long time now, so keep this straight in your head: we are not fighting an alien invasion, we're leading a revolution," the Doctor tells the others.  (So that's another alien species interfering with humanity's development to add to the list.)

The opening scenes are pretty tense, with Amy, River, and Rory covered in tally marks and being hunted by Canton for the last three months²²⁶, while the Doctor is kept in chains at Area 51 and slowly entombed in a building made of dwarf star alloy (with no explanation beyond the hand-wavy "Area 51" reference as to how 1969 Americans came across such advanced technology -- but at least we get a Warriors' Gate reference).  The cliffhanger is barely addressed, other than a brief flashback (to see something we haven't actually seen yet, but it's treated like a flashback) to show that Amy didn't kill the child in the astronaut suit and that Canton sees a Silent there.  It's not actually clear what we're meant to think regarding Canton -- even when it becomes clear that he was just trying to get everyone in a space that the Silents²²⁷ couldn't listen in on, it's still not obvious what his cover story was.  But fine, now it's time to go on the offensive.

The girl in the astronaut suit, flanked by two Silents. ("Day
of the Moon") ©BBC

Honestly, it's a clever plan, even if it feels a bit bloodthirsty by the Doctor's normal standards, and we get lots of moments where people confront the Silents and don't remember it -- the case of Dr. Renfrew in the children's home being particularly well done, as the Silents have been around him so much that he's essentially lost two years of his life.  But it's still rather convenient that they manage to get a recording of a Silent saying that humanity should kill them when they see them.  Nevertheless, it provides for a suitably epic conclusion, as everyone watching the moon landing turns on the Silents in the room with them.

Other parts that are entertaining involve Nixon rescuing the Doctor from various circumstances, while being rather confused by what's going on.  Still, they're fun sequences, and you can tell Steven Moffat is getting a little kick out of the Doctor telling Nixon to record everything, just in case the Silents try to get to him, and inadvertently creating the Nixon White House tapes as a result.  And there's also the exchange between Nixon and the Doctor: "Will I be remembered?" Nixon asks.  "Oh, Dicky.  Tricky Dicky.  They're never going to forget you," the Doctor replies.  Oh, and while we're discussing good moments, the final one between River and the Doctor, where he kisses her for the first time and she realizes it will be the last time she kisses him (because their lives are running in opposite directions), is heartbreaking.

This is an episode that's brimming with the same self-confidence that characterized much of the previous series, but it's also an episode that sees a definite shift in the way the long-running plot threads are treated.  Under Russell T Davies, and even last series to an extent, they were a sort of extra, a little bonus for those willing to stick with an entire run but not necessary for casual viewers to have kept up with.  Here, on the other hand, those plot threads look like they're increasingly the point.  We have an awful lot of unanswered questions here at the end of "Day of the Moon": what's the deal with Amy's pregnancy?  What was up with the lady with the eyepatch?  Who was the little girl, and how could she possibly be regenerating at the end?  Are these Silents related to the TARDIS exploding (it's a good bet they are), and if so, how?  As such it's a bit difficult to adequately evaluate "The Impossible Astronaut" / "Day of the Moon"; the story itself is told with great aplomb, but it trusts that the audience will stick with the series to find out the answers to these lingering questions -- but that puts pressure on subsequent episodes to deliver good explanations...







²²⁶ It's presumably during this time period that Amy is replaced by her double, given the pregnancy comments that (more or less) immediately follow the reunion of the Doctor and Amy.
²²⁷ Another minor controversy: Silence or Silents?  The end credits list Marnix van den Broeke as playing "the Silent", but the DVD subtitles opt for "Silence" every time the aliens are referred to.  It gets more complicated when you factor in later stories, which talk about a religious order called the Silence.  The TARDIS wiki appears to have opted for "Silence" for the order and "Silents" for members of the alien race, which is as good a distinction as any.

May 21: "Space" / "Time" / "The Impossible Astronaut" Prequel / "The Impossible Astronaut"

The TARDIS materialises inside itself. ("Space") ©BBC

Nope, we're still not quite to the official start of series 6 yet, as before we get there we've got two mini episodes (and a prequel scene) to go.  "Space" and "Time" were broadcast on 18 March 2011 as part of Comic Relief, the charity telethon that the series has occasionally contributed to.  (See Doctor Who and the Curse of Fatal Death and "From Raxacoricofallapatorius with Love" in case you've forgotten.)

It's a brief little scene, designed more to be cute than anything more substantial, and at this it succeeds reasonably well.  It helps that we're given a clever idea to play with, with the TARDIS inside itself and no way of getting out, which leads to lots of opportunities for characters to react to themselves -- most memorably, Amy seems oddly taken with herself ("Oh, this is how it all ends," the Doctor remarks.  "Pond flirting with herself.  True love at last"), but the bit where Rory asks himself if he'll have to remember all of what his future self just said is also charming.

It's a quick story that doesn't outstay its welcome, and as such is the perfect sort of thing for Comic Relief.  I suppose you could fault it for not being more ambitious, but the time aspects of this are complicated enough that it was probably a wise move not to push it too far.  A charming interlude.

And then we got a quick little prequel teaser of Richard Nixon informing a girl on a telephone that "there are no monsters in the Oval Office", followed by a shot of a strange alien standing there (although the framing of the shot erroneously suggests that Nixon is aware of the alien standing near him -- as this is Nixon we're talking about, you could be forgiven for thinking he was in league with them), and then finally a month later, series 6 properly begins with "The Impossible Astronaut".

DVD and Blu-ray releases

The episode opens with a caption dedicating it to the memory of Elisabeth Sladen (albeit with the wrong birth year -- Sladen was born in 1946, not 1948), who sadly died four days before its premiere²²⁵ -- it's a sweet tribute to one of Doctor Who's most enduringly popular actresses.  We then get a fun little sequence of the Doctor off doing various things on his own that masks an important sea change: before this point, once you started travelling with the Doctor you stayed with him until you left.  Sure, you might occasionally see him again or be able to call him to help you with your Sontaran problem, but travel in the TARDIS was, with the small exception of Pertwee's companions (who were a special case, what with the exile and all), a one-time deal.  But now we see Amy and Rory, dropped off in their own time and place and living their lives but ready to be picked up again by the Doctor at a moment's notice.  It makes running away with the Doctor less risky, if you know you can go home and then back out again without having to worry.  Of course, now we also have to wonder why anyone ever leaves the Doctor, if this is his attitude now.  (And it's not really a question that we have a good answer for -- we've only had three companions (Amy, Rory, and Clara) since this became the norm, and the show had to bend over backwards to provide an explanation for the first two, and Clara is still at time of writing traveling with the Doctor.)

The Doctor is reunited with Amy and Rory. ("The Impossible
Astronaut") ©BBC

So that's the new subtle difference.  The new obvious difference is the location filming.  Doctor Who has performed principal photography in other countries before, but never in the United States -- and as a resident of that country, it's really thrilling to see recognizable landmarks like Monument Valley and knowing that they're really there.  Doctor Who really is going global.

Now as far as plotting goes, "The Impossible Astronaut" is structured oddly.  The first third appears to be setup not for this actual story but for this series' overarching plotline: the Doctor's impending death, which (because this is a show about time travel) we see early on, as an astronaut shoots him dead in 2011, in front of Amy, Rory, and River.  Only it seems that was an older Doctor, and now a younger Doctor arrives, not knowing about what his friends saw, and they have to try and figure out how to save his life.

All well and good, but then the episode, despite the production team's best efforts to tie these two things together, seems to start again as this two-parter's specific story gets underway, as we head back to 1969 America (so it's not just a quick scene and then we're gone -- the whole story is set in the US) and the time of the moon landing, to meet up with a man named Canton Everett Delaware III.  And so Mark Sheppard makes his move to yet another SF show, after having appeared in things like The X-Files, Star Trek: Voyager, Firefly, Battlestar Galactica, Supernatural, and a host of others.  Here he's an ex-FBI agent summoned by Nixon to help track down the child who keeps calling him.  Stuart Milligan is a passable Nixon, and after a brief commentary ("Richard Milhous Nixon," River says.  "Vietnam, Watergate.  There's some good stuff, too," she adds.  "Not enough," the Doctor replies.  "Hippie!" River exclaims.  "Archaeologist," the Doctor retorts) the script wisely stays away from any controversial positions, as this story isn't about Nixon.  No, it's about some creepy aliens who look like Edvard Munch's The Scream (an acknowledged influence) and rather wonderfully dress in suits and which no one can remember the moment you stop looking at them, which is a novel and creepy idea.  The death of Joy in the restroom is both funny and frightening, and the total failure of anyone to remember them means that they seem incredibly dangerous.  (They don't appear to be working with Nixon though, as the prequel seemed to imply.)

But answers as to who they are and what they're doing will have to wait, as we've almost reached the cliffhanger.  We've seen a spaceship (presumably belonging to the aliens) that's almost identical to the one from "The Lodger" and River has told Rory about the heartbreak of meeting the Doctor ("The trouble is, it's all back to front. My past is his future. We're travelling in opposite directions. Every time we meet, I know him more, he knows me less. I live for the days when I see him, but I know that every time I do, he'll be one step further away. And the day is coming when I'll look into that man's eyes, my Doctor, and he won't have the faintest idea who I am. And I think it's going to kill me"), which is both sad and strange as we've already seen her die -- so the audience has knowledge that the character lacks, and we know that she's right: it will be the death of her.  But the actual cliffhanger involves an astronaut that we're invited to believe is the same as the one that will kill the Doctor in 2011 -- only there's a young girl inside looking for help.  But that doesn't stop Amy from grabbing Canton's gun and shooting at the astronaut.  "What are you doing?" the Doctor cries.  "Saving your life," Amy replies as she pulls the trigger.  Now that's a cliffhanger.







²²⁵ This caption is missing from the Region 1/A release of The Complete Sixth Series boxset, although a similar caption (with the year corrected) does appear before part one of The Nightmare Man on the fourth series DVD of The Sarah Jane Adventures.  It's not clear why they moved it -- maybe they didn't want the wrong year being perpetuated?

May 20: "A Christmas Carol"

Doctor Who has done Christmas specials before, obviously, but while many of them have been Christmas-y in nature, none have been quite so overt about it as the 2010 one, "A Christmas Carol".  This is emphatically about Christmas, and it makes no secret of its borrowing from Dickens to tell its tale (with Steven Moffat thus subscribing to the Terrance Dicks school of "draw attention to the issue to make it go away" writing).

But because this is paralleling Dickens' most famous Christmas story, there's a danger of this episode feeling derivative or dull -- "A Christmas Carol" may be one of the first time travel stories, but that doesn't mean it's therefore necessarily a natural fit with Doctor Who.  But this episode succeeds because it's so openly admiring of its source material; there aren't any sneers at the set-up or awkward jokes about the underlying idea (or even cracks about giving Dickens the idea in the first place), but rather a sincerity underlying everything here.  Moffat doesn't want to simply adapt Dickens' "A Christmas Carol"; he wants to use it as a starting point and a framework to tell his own version of the tale, and so the result works quite well.  (So here's another example of Moffat following in fine Who tradition.)

I like how it starts out as a sort of disaster movie, as a ship clearly designed to be a parody/homage (delete according to preference) of a Star Trek bridge -- and specifically the one from the 2009 sort-of-reboot version -- is crashing into a planet.  But then the whole story shifts its emphasis; this isn't about the crashing ship, it's about trying to make a man on the planet below a different person, one willing to save that ship.  It's about the Doctor dipping back into Kazran Sardick's past and trying to make him a better man, and having adventures along the way.  This gives Moffat the excuse to play with some time travel ideas (such as the really quite wonderful one of the Doctor leaving the "present" and then walking into the "past" of the video recording while continuing his conversation with the old Kazran) while still maintaining the core of the story.  This is a good move, not taking the mickey out of anything that might now seem too familiar, and the jokes that are present tend to be at the main characters' expense.  And so we get Amy and Rory in their policewoman and Roman costumes, respectively, having apparently just left the honeymoon suite aboard the crashing ship, while there are some great lines regarding the Doctor:

YOUNG KAZRAN: Are you really a babysitter?
DOCTOR: I think you'll find I'm universally recognised as a mature and responsible adult.
(He shows Kazran the psychic paper.)
KAZRAN: It's just a lot of wavy lines.
DOCTOR: (looks at the paper) Yeah, it's shorted out.  Finally, a lie too big.

(from The Doctor Who Transcripts - A Christmas Carol)

But what really makes this story work is the central character of Kazran Sardick.  The idea of the Doctor changing his history, causing him to start remembering new memories (which is a really weird idea if you think about it -- why wouldn't the changes be instantaneous, and why wouldn't he remember Abigail's fate right away?  On the other hand, City of Death also had some stuff involving changes to the timeline not being instantaneous, so at least there's precedent in the series), is a good one, and Sir Michael Gambon is very very good indeed as the old Kazran.  But it's the case that all three Kazran actors -- Gambon, Laurence Belcher as the young version, and Danny Horn as the teenaged one -- are very well cast, leading us easily to focus on the growing romance between Kazran and Abigail that ends up being the heart of the story.  Katherine Jenkins has such good chemistry with all three versions of Kazran that the audience doesn't have any trouble believing this is the same person at various points in his life interacting with his love.  Plus we get a fun moment from the Doctor:

KAZRAN: I think she's going to kiss me.
DOCTOR: Yeah, I think you're right.
KAZRAN: I've never kissed anyone before.  What do I do?
DOCTOR: Well, try and be all nervous and rubbish and a bit shaky.
KAZRAN: Why?
DOCTOR: Because you're going to be like that anyway.  Might as well make it part of the plan, then it'll feel on purpose.  Off you go, then.

(from The Doctor Who Transcripts - A Christmas Carol)

Abigail and Kazran watch the snow fall. ("A Christmas Carol") ©BBC

Of course, it's not love that ultimately saves Kazran so much as a desire not to be like his father -- the moments with Abigail have simply turned him bitter for a different reason ("All my life, I've been called heartless," the old Kazran tells the Doctor.  "My other life, my real life, the one you rewrote.  Now look at me."  "Better a broken heart than no heart at all," the Doctor replies.  "Oh, try it, you try it," Kazran sputters), but it's when the young Kazran sees what he'll become that a real, lasting change is made.²²⁴  Because he genuinely doesn't want to be like his father, he finally changes.  It's a nice moment, even if it's soon tinged with the bittersweet knowledge that this will be Abigail's final day alive.  But Kazran's now a better person, and while he'll have to say goodbye to Abigail he'll still get to spend one more day with her.

It really is incredibly Christmas-y at times, but "A Christmas Carol" works because it takes its characters seriously (even if it doesn't necessarily take every moment seriously) and believes in them.  At its heart it's a simple tale of redemption told less-than-straightforwardly, but its sincerity keeps it afloat.  This is an episode that will bring a smile to your face and warm your heart, as it reminds us that Christmas means we're halfway out of the dark. 







²²⁴ You can explain away the lack of an explosion resulting from the Blinovitch Limitation Effect (as seen in Mawdryn Undead) in "The Big Bang" when Amy touches her younger self by arguing that those are two different Amys -- one that grew up in a world with stars and one that didn't, among many other differences.  It's a lot harder to explain why the two Kazrans don't cause an explosion in this episode -- my best guess is that they're also two different people at that moment because the changes to Kazran's timeline haven't caught up with old Kazran yet.