11/9/2022 0 Comments Watch doctor who specialsThe Doctor pops into Kazran’s house down the chimney. If you thought the Who specials were Christmassy in the past, then even discounting the Dickens stuff this was off the scale. At Christmas people always talk about the Greatest Story Ever Told in other terms, but this is a sumptuous triumph from start to finish. It’s about the kind of warm and shameless sentimentality in which this episode deals, a time where it always snows and love always saves the day.Ī Christmas Carol riffs magnificently and faithfully on the beauty and simplicity of its source material. Which feels right – because Christmas isn’t really about those things. And while we don’t want to belittle the lives of 4004 people, the stakes are remarkably low – no threat of enslavement of a population, no nuclear Armageddon circling the Earth, no madmen flirting with the end of reality. Because we need a behind-the-sofa sequence there’s the flying shark, but “Clive” (as she was dubbed by the production team to ward off spoilers) turns out not to be a baddie after all. There’s no malevolent alien invasion force – just Michael Gambon perfectly cast as a lonely old man with a grudge against the world in general and Christmas in particular. Moffat scripts are always ingenious, but A Christmas Carol is a remarkably small-scale caper. Finding the obvious parallels irresistible, the Doctor decides to use the Tardis to play out his old mucker Dickens’ most famous story.Īnd that, basically, is it. On a human colony sometime around the year 4000, the Doctor must make Michael Gambon’s Scrooge-like miser Kazran Sardick mend his ways and prevent the crashing of the doomed starliner carrying Amy, Rory and 4002 others. A Christmas Carol is so audacious that if it wasn’t done so well it might amount to blasphemy. Instead, we found ourselves on the road to the giant Cyberking stomping all over London. It was the most perfect Who Christmas special you could imagine – except, of course, it wasn’t. In The Unquiet Dead, the third episode of series one, the Doctor and Rose met Charles Dickens, on Christmas Eve, and were visited by ghosts. “That ship needs to land, and it can’t land unless a very bad man decides to turn good just in time for Christmas Day …”īack in the wilds of 2005, when it was by no means clear that the revived series would be a hit, let alone get a Christmas special, the Doctor Who production team might have missed a trick.
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