BOOK OF LISTS: CHRISTMAS SPECIALS - FROM WORST TO BEST - PART 1

Well, it looks like the Age of Doctor Who Christmas Specials is well-and-truly over. At least this will probably be the case while Chibnall is in charge of things. I know some fans are outraged by this decision but I actually back it. The Doctor coincidentally having adventures in and around Christmas time over and over was starting to get just a bit ridiculous. He should have almost started having some sort of "Bad Wolf suspicion" about the whole thing. Like there should have been a moment where he started questioning why the TARDIS kept taking him to Christmas so much. Did another companion who really likes Christmas stare into the Heart of the TARDIS?!   

With the Christmas Special now being a thing of the past, I thought it might be fun to make my end-of-year countdown about Christmas Specials. The era seems properly cemented in the past so I can safely document it and not worry about having to alter the list, someday, because of future Christmas Specials that have come out. 

Now, there have been a lot of Christmas Specials. To try to give each of them its own entry might be just a bit too lengthy of  a process. I had a similar problem when I counted down Doctors from Worst to Best a few years back. So I listed 2 to 5 incarnations per entry. I thought I would do the same thing with Christmas Specials. 



PART 1: THE GENUINELY BAD

I'm going to get just a bit mean-spirited, here (call me a Grinch!). There were a few Christmas Specials that genuinely missed the mark.  We're going to review them in this section. And we're not going to be that kind to them.


The Next Doctor

Not only the worst of all the Christmas Specials, I consider The Next Doctor the worst episode in the entire New Series (thus far - a new episode might come out someday that's actually worse. But Next Doctor is hard to beat). Its biggest problem being that it's built around a central premise that is just a bit stupid.

But before we get to that gripe, let's look at some other stuff that makes the story so bad for me. I have quite a bit of trouble with even the first few minutes of this episode. The Cybershades look and act in an embarrassingly stupid manner. They're meant to be a product of Cyber-technology. So they should be emotionless. Instead, they react in erratic and even savage ways. That seems a contradiction in terms. Add to the fact that they are, basically, men in masks and fun-fur suits crawling around on all fours and we've got something, here, that is Myrka-worthy. I can accept something like the Myrka in Classic Who because of the terrible budget limitations. We should not be seeing nonsense like this in the New Series.

Then we get to a chase sequence that seems to ignore a lot of basic physics. The Doctor and Jackson Lake get dragged across a wooden floor for quite some distance. They manage to stay on their butts for the whole ride (which is, sort of, impossible in itself - they should have fallen over onto their stomachs). When the ride is over. They are laughing at the whole jolly adventure and feeling a bit stiff. They should have been in endless pain. Their clothing and flesh being dragged along a wooden surface for so long and so quickly should have been torn to shreds from the friction and actual splinters that such a journey would have produced. While we point out such obvious inconsistencies, lets also mention that Rosita would have never had the time to make it to that window sill with the ax. The Cybershade had scaled the wall by the time she noticed the ax. He was running quickly across the floor while Rosita would've been running up several flights of stairs and then getting over to the far end of the building. No matter what sort of logistics you apply to this, she's just not able to get to that window anywhere near fast enough.

So, in just the first few minutes, we're ignoring important elements of aesthetics, logic and even basic physics. It's pretty hard to bounce back from this. But if the rest of the story had been amazing - I could've forgotten these problems.

Unfortunately, the plot is pretty uninteresting and even a bit preposterous. Why would the Cybermen build a giant mech to take over the world? It seems to me there's about a hundred more effective ways to convert a primitive human population. Slowly but surely just abducting people and converting them until you have the advantage of numbers would be the smartest most logical way to go about things. A big nasty dreadnought traipsing around seems almost kinda stupid. Humans everywhere will see the giant from miles away and flee. Is this really what you want when you want to zombify a species?

And then there's the whole central conceit of the story. Is Jackson Lake actually the Doctor? We don't know, at first, of course. But RTD had a track record, at this point, of teasing us and then revealing that the tease wasn't what it seemed. He had foreshadowed the death of both Rose and Donna during Series 2 and 4. But then, as the seasons ended, he gave us a big "Just kidding!" and arranged their departure from the show in a different manner that only seemed, sort of, like death. So when he's suddenly hinting that we're going to meet the next incarnation of the Doctor before the current one regenerates - we're pretty sure he's going to use the same tactic.

I might have been okay with any other tactic to dismiss the next Doctor except the one he uses. RTD could have actually made him a future incarnation - but from an alternative dimension or an aborted timeline. Or he's a special clone or even an android. Or maybe he's an alien superfan trying to assume the Doctor's identity. I would have been okay with any of these ideas. But an 18th Century human in a fugue state that somehow had an info stamp backfire into him seems over-contrived to the point of being ludicrous. It might have just been easier to just cast David Morrissey as the next Doctor and made this a proper multi-incarnation adventure. It would have been pretty awesome, actually, if RTD had not tried to subvert expectations and, for once, delivered on what he'd promised. But, instead, we got this mess.

Re-watching Doctor Who is one of my favorite pastimes. But Next Doctor ruins even this. The real central premise of the story is finding out whether or not this man that's claiming to be the Doctor is actually him. The Cybermen stuff is actually pretty peripheral to the whole thing. So, once it's revealed that this isn't the next Doctor, there's little appeal left to the story. With the mystery solved, there's not a lot of motivation to ever watch this again. This is the problem with giving a Doctor Who adventure a sort of tabloid appeal. Once we find out that the attention-grabbing headline isn't the truth, there's little purpose in wanting to re-visit the article. It was all just a dumb trick. Why remind ourselves that we fell for the sensationalism? 

Sadly, there's more that I could go on about. But this review is already getting long enough. So I'll try to find a positive point in my final paragraph:

Is there anything I enjoyed about Next Doctor? It's the first story to use a flashback sequence showing all of the Doctor's previous incarnations. That was nice.

Other than that, I got nothing.





The End of Time - Parts One and Two

During my Top Doctor Who Story Countdown from Days Gone By, I wrote an extensive entry on why I love Logopolis so much. To help illustrate its effectiveness, I compared it to The End of Time -  a story that had to accomplish the similar task of writing out an extremely popular incarnation of the Doctor. You can read what I said here: https://robtymec.blogspot.com/2015/12/book-of-lists-top-ten-who-stories-10.html..

Just in case you bother to read it, I'll try not to do to much of a re-tread, here. I will also include both parts - even though the second episode was, technically, a new year's special.

The End of Time, for me, was probably the weakest of all the "swansong stories" for an incarnation of the Doctor. As I did mention in the review of Logopolis, it relies too heavily on just being a big sentimental event and doesn't give us enough plot. We're just meant to be content with watching the Doctor run around and be angsty. We're not supposed to notice that there's really not much of anything going on. Gallifrey is trying to return and the Master wants to take over the world. Both end up failing when there's still a good twenty minutes left in Part Two. So we end the story with just a series of pained expressions on the Doctor's face as he visits different people from his past but doesn't say much to them.

The story handles the Master in a pretty horrible way, too (something I go on about in my Ranking the Master series - https://robtymec.blogspot.com/2017/11/book-of-lists-ranking-masters-part-2.html. Again, I'll try not to re-tread too much). Flying through the air as the Renegade Time Lord shoots power beams from his hands just doesn't seem like the sort of thing you're supposed to have in a Doctor Who story. It all feels really out of place. I don't even blame John Simm for going so OTT in the story. How else can you perform that sort of material?

There are other little nitpicks I have. Donna being able to produce what appears to be a wave of regeneration energy that knocks all the approaching Masters on their asses requires more explanation than it gets. Time Lords being able to smell each other also seems really silly. Even Part One seems to lack enough content to fill the episode and we have to stare at endless shots of carbon-copy Masters overtaking the world.

Was there anything I enjoyed? The scenes with the Doctor and Wilf chatting were brilliantly performed. The Doctor's mother getting him not to make the wrong choice with Wilf's gun was very moving. The final revelation of what "He will knock four times" means was quite clever too.

And this is why End of Time ranks a bit higher than Next Doctor. It does have a few strong moments in it. Not enough to redeem it. But at least I can enjoy certain sequences.



As you can see: those Specials in 2009 didn't, necessarily, sit too well with me! 

In the next entry, however, I will become a bit kinder. I'll be listing some Christmas stories that I consider fairly weak but are still, overall, enjoyable. Naturally enough, as we get closer to the top rankings, my praise will get stronger....