Review:
Doctor Who: A Christmas Carol

Doctor Who Special: A Christmas Carol

The annual Doctor Who Christmas episode has become something of a tradition. Traditionally, this ‘special’ episode ends up being a big load of rubbish with the Doctor hamstrung into operating in a generic storyline with awful Christmas-themed monsters with a boring pay-off. This year, mercifully, sees a break from the norm as writer Steven Moffat and excellent actor Matt Smith deliver an excellent Christmas treat.

As he promised, the Doctor has taken Rory and Amy away for their honeymoon celebrations, but the ship has run into a catastrophic problem and the thousands of lives onboard are now in danger. The Doctor needs to somehow convince the vicious, controlling, angry Kazran Sardick (Michael Gambon) to relinquish control of the planet’s incredibly dangerous cloud storm system in order to safely land the ship. If only there was some way that a time traveller could show this wicked old man the error of his ways through his past, present and future – all on Christmas Eve…

It’s a cracking episode (no pun intended), because it has an advantage that very few episodes in the last series did: time. The script wasn’t simply banged out the door, Moffat had a few months to work on it. Likewise, the episode has a whole hour to play itself out, which means that lengthy scenes of technobabble-filled exposition are more spread out and seem to occur more naturally. The episode also benefits from a higher budget than normal, meaning that Moffat can pull out all the stops to write some completely bonkers ideas like carriages pulled along by sharks, or the Doctor appearing on old home video footage – while it’s being watched.

The real strength of the episode, however, isn’t in the unusually excellent CGI or the barmy myriad of plot threads, it’s in the acting. As always, Matt Smith, Karen Gillian and Arthur Darvill are outstanding, with brilliant performances and top-notch comic timing throughout. Even Katherine Jenkins is nothing less than stellar in this, her acting debut. However, the real star of the show is Michael Gambon, who is given an absolutely massive task – to play a Scrooge-esque character who is mean and villainous, but also has his memory changed to soften his rough edges during the episode. If the task were given to a lesser actor, it would be hideous. Fortunately, Gambon is more than qualified as an actor and the result is a touching, heartbreaking, emotional and turbulent performance that hits every note perfectly.