A Christmas Carol is completely and utterly loopy in the way only Doctor Who can be. It has fish swimming in a planet's atmosphere, clouds controlled by song, a grumpy old man having his history rewritten on the fly, an opera singer with ten days to live in cryogenic sleep who falls in love with the man who awakens her once a year, a shark-driven sleigh and at least one fez. It's also utterly joyous, bursting at the seems with seasonal spirit and funny, sad and heartwarming in almost perfectly balanced measure. In other words, it's Moffat at the peak of his powers and having an absolute ball. One of the many reasons it works so well as a Christmas special is because it has sympathy for absolutely everyone. There's no monster here, just an old man who needs to be reminded why there's value in kindness after all. The episode's repurposing of the plot of the Dickens classic is turned into a wonderful joke, where Smith's Doctor delightedly realises the similarity between his situation and that of the novel. As Kazran Sardick, the story's real main character, Michael Gambon gives an extraordinarily deep performance which subtly shifts as his history changes. He doesn't hold back at all on Sardick's nasty side, making his eventual redemption all the more affecting. Smith, too, embraces every facet of the material, and though his scenes with Gambon are acting masterclasses, it's (once again) his chemistry with the young Sardick where he shines brightest. "Come on, we're boys! And you know what boys say in the face of danger? Mummy!" Amy and Rory are largely sidelined, trapped on a crashing starliner, but Katherine Jenkins and Danny Horn fill the companion positions with sweetness to spare. Moffat's timey wimey manipulations provide the brains, but it's their love story which gives this Christmas its heart.
28-year old English writer with a borderline obsessive passion for films, videogames, Chelsea FC, incomprehensible words and indefensible puns. Follow me on Twitter if you like infrequent outbursts of absolute drivel.
