[COLUMN] 'Joy to the World' is a Welcome Reminder of the Timeliness of Steven Moffat's Doctor Who | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains spoilers for “Joy to the World”, the latest Doctor Who Christmas Special.

Steven Moffat has written a lot of Doctor Who.

He has written for seven mainstream canonical incarnations of the lead character on screen: Christopher Eccleston, David Tennant, Peter Davison, Matt Smith, Paul McGann, Peter Capaldi, Ncuti Gatwa. This excludes his writing for more tangential takes such as John Hurt or a brief cameo from Tom Baker in the 50th anniversary special. This year’s Christmas Special, “Joy to the World”, marks Moffat’s fiftieth script for the show over 19 years, discounting charity specials and short stories.

There is a convincing argument to be made that Moffat is the defining creative voice on Doctor Who, given the volume and the importance of his contributions across various iterations of the show, even more than key figures like Terrance Dicks, Robert Holmes or Russell T. Davies. Indeed, through contributions like “timey wimey” or “the long way round”, there is a credible case to be made that Moffat has literally changed the language of Doctor Who.

“Joy to the World” is a welcome reminder of the firm grasp that Moffat has on the show’s narrative and thematic fundamentals. It is, on one level, a classic Moffat script. The Doctor (Gatwa) journeys to “the Time Hotel” in 43rd century London, an establishment that offers guests the unique privilege of renting out any number of empty hotel rooms across the length and breadth of human history, including historic events. “No wonder there was no room at the inn,” the Doctor quips.

“Joy to the World” is full of familiar Moffat tropes. There is a bootstrap paradox, in which a future version of the Doctor (Gatwa) arrives with a code to disarm a bomb, only for the Doctor to journey through the episode to the point where he shows up to tell his past self to disarm the bomb, only knowing the code because he already heard himself say it. “Basically the code came from nowhere, but then so did the universe, and no-one complains about that,” he offers by way of explanation.

While looping around to become his future self, the Doctor spends a year on Earth between Christmas 2024 and Christmas 2025, contrasting this mundane existence befriending hotel worker Anita Bean (Steph de Whalley) with his usual adventuring in time and space. This is a familiar Moffat concept. It was the basic plot of “The Power of Three”, and Matt Smith’s third Christmas Special, “The Time of the Doctor”, casts the Doctor as “the man who stayed for Christmas.”

However, what is interesting about “Joy to the World” is the ways in which it demonstrates that Moffat’s approach to Doctor Who remains fresh and relevant. “Joy to the World” might be packed to the brim with recognizable “Moffatisms”, but it is also a story that speaks very firmly to the current moment at a time when most major franchises seem lost in their own past. Most obviously, “Joy to the World” is a story very overtly about the legacy of the global pandemic.

The story focuses on a young woman named Joy (Nicola Coughlin), who checks into a hotel for Christmas. Over the course of the story, she explains why she would choose to stay away from home over the holidays. She remembers her mother (Fiona Scott), who died in hospital during the lockdown. She remembers how she followed all the proper distancing and safety guidelines and – as a result – didn’t get to properly say goodbye.

“I said goodbye on an iPad!” Joy admits at the climax. “Because of the rules! She died alone! And those awful people and their wine fridges, and their dancing, and their parties, and I listened to them, and I let my mother die alone! So I can never be home on Christmas Day, and I can never be with anyone on Christmas Day because I let her down.” It is a surprisingly heavy and earnest emotional moment, in a big holiday adventure featuring lizard men, dinosaurs and suitcase suns.

That moment is breathtaking, because it taps into a specifically British experience of the pandemic. Joy isn’t speaking metaphorically about how the wealthy and powerful flouted their own rules. She is talking very literally about the parties that Prime Minister Boris Johnson would host at 10 Downing Street, which were documented through photos of Johnson and his staff drinking wine, videos of the staff dancing and reports of the staff buying fridges for meeting rooms during the pandemic.

At a time when pop culture doesn’t quite know how to address the trauma of the pandemic or how to navigate its aftermath, “Joy to the World” demonstrates a refreshing candor.  More than that, this framing of the episode provides a key to understanding its larger themes. Moffat might be leaning on familiar tropes, but he is employing them in service of exploring the lingering scars left by the global pandemic and the resulting lockdown.

With this context in mind, it makes sense that the episode opens during the Blitz with Basil Flockhart (Peter Benedict) remarking that it feels like “the end of everything, you know. Everything we hold dear. Democracy itself will fall.” That sentiment resonates in the context of the show’s broadcast. Even the concept of “the Time Hotel”, a liminal space spanning the entirety of human history, will evoke a lot of people’s experience of the pandemic as time distorted and the world shrank.

This sense that Moffat’s approach to Doctor Who is somehow timeless and timely is reflected in his choice of monster for the holiday special. The plot of “Joy to the World” is driven by a suitcase that is gestating a star, in the hopes that the star can be deposited somewhere in the past and then picked up in the future, using the logic of “the Time Hotel.” The Doctor quips that this approach would allow somebody to “microwave” a star, not unlike a hotel cheese toasty.

This plot is executed by Villengard, another Moffat standard. While not as iconic as other Moffat creations like the Weeping Angels or the Silence, Villengard dates back to Moffat’s earliest work on the revival. His first story for the show, the two-parter “The Empty Child” and “The Doctor Dances”, includes a brief aside on “the Weapon Factories of Villengard.” The Doctor (Eccleston) implies that he destroyed them. “There's a banana grove there, now. I like bananas. Bananas are good.”

Moffat treated Villengard as a bookend to his run. His last script as showrunner, “Twice Upon a Time”, found the Doctor (Capaldi) visiting the ruins of “the Weapon Forges of Villengard; once the nightmare of the seven galaxies, now home to the dispossessed.” It’s a clever thread tying between Moffat’s first and last scripts. Of course, “Twice Upon a Time” was not Moffat’s last script. He has included references to Villengard in his two subsequent scripts, “Boom” and “Joy to the World.”

Again, it would be easy to write this off as a nostalgic indulgence. One of the stock criticisms of Moffat as a writer is that he is “too clever”, something that the writer has pushed back on. However, Villengard is more than just a nice inside joke or continuity nod. Instead, it serves a purpose. Indeed, one of the gentle reconfigurations that Moffat makes to the concept in “Boom”, his first script for Ncuti Gatwa, is to reveal that Villengard is not a place. It is a corporation. It is capitalism.

One of Moffat’s big thematic preoccupations is his obsession with the idea of systems run amok, prioritizing efficiency over humanity. This is perhaps why Moffat was always better at writing the Cybermen than the previous showrunner, Russell T. Davies. Indeed, this interest can be traced back to Moffat’s earliest Doctor Who scripts. The “monster” in “The Empty Child” is eventually revealed to be a hospital ship operating based on a faulty input rather than out of any real malice.

This fixation on dysfunctional systems stretches across Moffat’s work on Doctor Who. In “The Girl in the Fireplace”, repair androids looking for spare parts begin to harvest human bodies. In “Silence in the Library” and “Forest of the Dead”, problems arise from how artificial intelligence CAL (Eve Newton) “saved” the inhabitants of The Library. It’s obvious even on scripts he oversaw as showrunner. In “The Lodger”, a broken ship tries to repair itself by abducting strangers off the street. In “Smile”, nanobots misdiagnose sadness as an illness.

As Moffat’s tenure on Doctor Who continued, his scripts became more skeptical of these inhuman systems. These errors were less likely to be malfunctions, and more likely to be design features. In “Oxygen”, the literal machinery of capitalism runs amok. In “World Enough and Time”, a monstrous healthcare system deals with the screams of agony from their assembly line of patients by simply turning down the volume so they cannot be heard. Inhumanity is baked into these systems.

It is a refreshingly frank perspective, particularly following the strange conservatism of his successor, showrunner Chris Chibnall. In “Kerblam!”, one of the defining scripts of the Chibnall era, the Doctor (Jodie Whittaker) sided with an obvious allegory for Amazon, insisting, “The systems aren’t the problem!” After several years under Chibnall, it is refreshing to see Moffat revisit his central thematic idea at a time when it is truer than ever: the systems are the problem, actually.

In both “Boom” and “Joy to the World”, there is no convenient external monster to serve as scapegoat for the problem of the week. Instead, the villain is unchecked late capitalism. In “Joy to the World”, the Doctor observes how the suitcase brainwashes anyone to whom it is attached. “The case emits a psychic field,” he warns Joy. “It possesses people. It's basically how you start a religion.” It is perhaps pointed (and deeply cynical) that the star becomes the Star of Bethlehem.

This marks a thematic evolution in Moffat’s writing. Moffat has always been wary of organized religion. In his early years as showrunner, in stories like “The Time of the Angels” and “A Good Man Goes to War”, Moffat likened religion to a military operation. In both “Boom” and “Joy to the World”, he ties that idea into his critiques of capitalism. In “Boom”, the first victim of Villengard’s cost-saving euthanization is loyal soldier John Francis Vater of the Anglican Army (Joe Anderson).

In this sense, Moffat is updating his classic Doctor Who tropes to reflect the modern world. Income inequality has only accelerated in recent years. There is palpable and increased frustration over the way that the system has benefited the wealthy and the powerful. “Joy to the World” somehow manages to feel like both a classic Steven Moffat episode of Doctor Who and a refreshingly contemporary take on a science-fiction institution.

Then again, that has always been the magic of Doctor Who, the power to regenerate, to renew itself without losing its identity along the way.