We can all relax; it was
entertaining.
If we’re being completely
honest, Steven Moffat’s first venture into writing a season special for Doctor
Who was ok, his second was pretty bad and his third was pretty dark and kind of
killed Christmas. I mean the Christmas specials have never been that good,
given the difficult task of working in a continuing narrative, maintaining
continuity and staying light hearted enough. The last point has always been Moffat’s
problem. “A Christmas Carol” was essentially the Doctor accidentally pushing
someone a day closer to death, every Christmas in order to save his friends.
This episode opts for a far
more lighthearted turn…with the Doctor going toe-to-toe with a genocidal cyborg.
Alex Kingston is back as River
Song, the twist; this time she doesn’t know who she’s talking to. As far as she’s
concerned, the Doctor died/will die on Trenzalore, so there’s no possible way
there could be another one of him. Err that doesn’t make sense, since that event
was rewritten by the Time Lords, so surely the history that she based her
knowledge on would have been rewritten too, meaning – you know what; it’s
Christmas; Moffat can have this one.
Kingston and Capaldi have pretty
good chemistry, which is good, given that Moffat seems to have taken to writing
scripts as character focused pieces rather than stories. This is a good
decision given the ending of the episode, although it does involve retconning a
small section of Matt Smith’s tenure.
The comic talents of Greg
Davies and Matt Lucas are much appreciated if a little underused (Davies spends
half the episode asleep).
The ending does get a little
bit serious, but in fairness, Moffat did say that he wrote this before his
contract was renewed, so you can see why he wanted to essentially tie off
everything he’s put together over the last few years.
So yeah…entertaining….
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