How do you do Christmas in space? Well, if you think about it, lots of planets have Christmas, just as lots of them have a North. The yearly revolution
of the Earth around the Sun and the tilt of the Earth's axis relative to the
plane of revolution is the reason for the season, you might say. Believe whatever you like, but the reason we have mid-winter festivals (and there have been loads: Hanukkah, Yule, Dongzhi, Saturnalia, Kwanzaa, Yalda, Pancha Ganapati, MÅdraniht to name just a few I found on Wikipedia ten seconds ago) is because of the cultural effect upon humans of Earth's passage around the Sun.
Or, as Moffat puts it with such poetry and economy, for people of all faiths and none, Christmas is the time when we are halfway out of the dark.
Having freed himself from the shackles of Earthly festivities, Moffat sets about spinning a special that finally manages to conjure up some Christmas magic. In previous years, Christmas has been represented by baubles and shopping and food (or, in The Next Doctor by snow and urchins). It may be true, but it's soulless. A Christmas Carol is soaked, like a pudding in brandy, in a wonderful storybook feeling, from the shadows and firelight of Sardick's sitting room to the thick fog of the town that glitters with fish.
Best of all, Moffat is able topinch draw upon a recognisable Christmas fable and use time travel to make it into a bona fide Doctor Who story.
The Ghost of Christmas Past
The longest and strongest of Sardick's hauntings is full of wonder but very little can trump the magical moment when the Doctor departs in the TARDIS only to materialise inside the old man's childhood, turning up on the very video he is watching projected on the wall. We've seen a similar trick before in The Beast Below, but whereas that felt like slight of hand, this, enormous and much more powerful, is nothing less than wizardry. It's astonishing to see the Doctor meddling in someone's memories (harking back to Moffat's first piece of Doctor Who writing, the short story Continuity Errors) and Michael Gambon - excellent throughout - effortlessly shows us a man who is changing and being rewritten before our eyes. The relationship between youngest Kasran (played by Laurence Belcher, the latest in a now long line of impressive and not at all annoying Doctor Who child actors) and the Doctor is fun and sincere, and that between Abigail and the middle Kasran scarcely stretches credulity either. Katherine Jenkins, despite misgivings in some quarters, does well as Abigail and I don't even mind her having a sing (it's not opera, which would be a different kettle of fish, and it is Christmas, so why not?). Plus all the business of whizzing from one Christmas Eve to the next is tremendous fun and makes very clear that time travel is an opportunity to experience lost wonders and crash very exclusive parties.
The Ghost of Christmas Present
A very short sequence, but so effective, and one that beautifully illustrates the oh-so-clever way in which a Victorian ghost story can be harnessed for a science-fiction adventure. Amy, thanks to hardlight holography or whatever, appears to Sardick like a phantom and delivers him a message that might as well be from the grave. The mournful singing combines the festive with the ghostly, connects us back to the seasonal setting, and allows Sardick to reject Christmas, humanity and goodwill to all one final time.
The Ghost of Christmas Future
What an ingenious twist. Once again, Moffat and the Doctor do something so clever, so unexpected that we would never have thought of it - and yet (with hindsight) so obvious that we understand it immediately; once again, a conventional narrative is revolutionised and revitalised by the application of transtemporal possibilities.
This show never used to really be about Time, but it has become a major element under Moffat's watch: Amy and Rory both have to wait and wait; River and the Doctor are crossing and missing each other, always out of synch. We've seen how memory is a kind of time travel, how the Angels make time a trap, and we'll see more of these ideas in Series Six. Here, brilliantly, Sardick is miser who hoards time and counts the seconds like pennies, only to realise that the only thing about Time that matters is how you spend it.
Best of all, Moffat is able to
The Ghost of Christmas Past
The longest and strongest of Sardick's hauntings is full of wonder but very little can trump the magical moment when the Doctor departs in the TARDIS only to materialise inside the old man's childhood, turning up on the very video he is watching projected on the wall. We've seen a similar trick before in The Beast Below, but whereas that felt like slight of hand, this, enormous and much more powerful, is nothing less than wizardry. It's astonishing to see the Doctor meddling in someone's memories (harking back to Moffat's first piece of Doctor Who writing, the short story Continuity Errors) and Michael Gambon - excellent throughout - effortlessly shows us a man who is changing and being rewritten before our eyes. The relationship between youngest Kasran (played by Laurence Belcher, the latest in a now long line of impressive and not at all annoying Doctor Who child actors) and the Doctor is fun and sincere, and that between Abigail and the middle Kasran scarcely stretches credulity either. Katherine Jenkins, despite misgivings in some quarters, does well as Abigail and I don't even mind her having a sing (it's not opera, which would be a different kettle of fish, and it is Christmas, so why not?). Plus all the business of whizzing from one Christmas Eve to the next is tremendous fun and makes very clear that time travel is an opportunity to experience lost wonders and crash very exclusive parties.
The Ghost of Christmas Present
A very short sequence, but so effective, and one that beautifully illustrates the oh-so-clever way in which a Victorian ghost story can be harnessed for a science-fiction adventure. Amy, thanks to hardlight holography or whatever, appears to Sardick like a phantom and delivers him a message that might as well be from the grave. The mournful singing combines the festive with the ghostly, connects us back to the seasonal setting, and allows Sardick to reject Christmas, humanity and goodwill to all one final time.
The Ghost of Christmas Future
What an ingenious twist. Once again, Moffat and the Doctor do something so clever, so unexpected that we would never have thought of it - and yet (with hindsight) so obvious that we understand it immediately; once again, a conventional narrative is revolutionised and revitalised by the application of transtemporal possibilities.
This show never used to really be about Time, but it has become a major element under Moffat's watch: Amy and Rory both have to wait and wait; River and the Doctor are crossing and missing each other, always out of synch. We've seen how memory is a kind of time travel, how the Angels make time a trap, and we'll see more of these ideas in Series Six. Here, brilliantly, Sardick is miser who hoards time and counts the seconds like pennies, only to realise that the only thing about Time that matters is how you spend it.
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