Doctor Who: Ranking Each NuWho Christmas Special

One of the lowest points of the Moffat era, The Doctor, The Widow and The Wardrobe attempted to repeat the success of the previous year’s MUCH better special A Christmas Carol. As with that episode, Moffat took a popular well known story and attempted to remould it into a Doctor Who-style story.

Unlike that story however, which was still recognisable as having the same base elements and themes of the classic Dicken’s novel, this episode has very little at all to do with the Narnia book.

Claire Skinner appears in the guest cast as Madge Arwell, a woman who has recently lost her husband during the war but has not yet had the heart to tell her children, as she doesn’t wish to spoil Christmas for them. Attempting to repay a favour from an earlier time, The Doctor installs himself as the caretaker of the country manor where they will be spending the holiday and goes into full over-the-top zany mode.

Eventually the characters wind up following one another into a wintery forest setting where they learn from a group of inept soldiers that the forest is about to burn due to a scheduled bout of acid rain. There’s a couple of wooden people who ultimately do nothing and the day is all saved when they use the magic of time travel to undo the opening tragedy that formed the basis of Madge’s character anyway. Overall this episode’s biggest crime is that it’s just dull overall, and proves that turning up the zaniness on Matt Smith’s Eleventh Doctor does not automatically make a story great.