Doctor Who: “The Doctor, The Widow and the Wardrobe”/”A Christmas Carol”

Part of a festive series of Christmas-themed reviews at Taking The Short View
Also: does contain spoiler details of the 2010 and 2011 Christmas episodes.

It seems that the Doctor Who special is a peculiarly difficult beast to produce successfully, with perhaps the sole exception of David Tennant’s début episode “The Christmas Invasion.” Either one ends up essentially ignoring the festive season altogether (such as “The End of Time” two-parter or “The Runaway Bride”) or else the holiday occasion seems to overbalance the whole thing and make the episode a weak or mediocre entry into the Doctor Who canon (such as “Voyage of the Damned” and “The Next Doctor”.)

This year’s entry, “The Doctor, The Widow and the Wardrobe”, certainly doesn’t stint on the Christmassy aspects; which means by axiom that it will therefore be a weak episode of Doctor Who. And sadly, this does indeed appear to be the case.

The episode is roughly speaking a game of four parts. The first is a very extended prologue and introduction, starting with joining the Doctor in mid-adventure aboard an exploding starship that concludes with the Doctor improbably (and inexplicably) surviving a trip into vacuum, re-entry into the earth’s atmosphere without burning up, and a 100,000km freefall onto solid ground without too much trouble. There then follows some slapstick Keaton/Chaplin-esque physical comedy before a switch to a country estate and the Doctor acting as a seriously madcap caretaker (perhaps he was brain damaged in that freefall after all!) welcoming a mother and her two children to a large, empty country house in World War 2. It’s all very well written, and Matt Smith is as ever utterly pitch-perfect in his performance, but this is an awful lot of frivolous and non-sensical capering about and I confess that I was starting to lose the will to live. Or at least, to watch.

Finally we get to the second part, and the plot kicks in: a trans-dimensional portal is revealed within a prematurely-opened Christmas present and everyone slips into a frozen snowscape world. Yes, it’s entirely ripped off from CS Lewis and the first discovery of Narnia through the back of the wardrobe – but given the episode title, what did you expect? Writer Steven Moffat is being entirely upfront. And the sequence is very well done, with striking sets and locations beautifully photographed and some lovely innovative touches of its own – such as the Christmas trees that decorate themselves with baubles, which turn out to be eggs that develop into impressively-realised tree people. There’s also a fun scene in which the seemingly helpless mother turns the tables on a crew of armed loggers from Androzani Major (the planet name being a lovely grace note for long time fans of the show.)

So now it’s all looking well set up for a thrilling remainder of the hour, right? Err .. Well, no. Instead it sort of all disappears in a puff of smoke in part three, with the loggers introduced in part 2 disappearing and the Doctor reduced to observing and commentating from the sidelines while the mother essentially saves the day through some not-very-well-explained or even particularly interesting technomagic. Everyone lives happy ever after, the end. Very strangely for a Steven Moffat show, there’s no tension because how everything turns out is so obvious and telegraphed well in advance, leaving no surprises or sense of achievement. All the boxes have been ticked, but without enthusiasm; it’s as if they ran out of time and just had to go with an early draft of the script. The final part is a short epilogue, and although the contents of it were a strictly guarded secret I’d been expecting an appearance along those lines well in advance, so again it seemed rather obvious. (That said, the moment that the Doctor unexpectedly sheds a happy tear for the first time in 900 years is a terrific moment, entirely sold by a brilliant touch of acting from Smith.)

In all, my immediate reaction would be that this Doctor Who outing was very much on the ‘disappointing’ side of the scale; but on the other hand, my experience with the previous Moffat-penned outing from 2010 suggests that I should reserve judgement for a while yet.

That’s because in advance of this year’s Christmas special, I decided to rewatch last year’s for the first time in almost 12 months. Another very Christmas-heavy episode (drawing extensively on a different literary Yuletide classic, this time Dickens’ “Christmas Carol”), I’d summed it up at the time as a disappointment on the grounds that it was “frankly just a little too clever and cute for its own good, and adds on strand after twist after turn to the point where really it’s just to tiring to keep up” and was consequently uninvolving and uninspiring.

Watching it again, however, I was amazed by how much my thoughts on it had changed. This time around I was utterly entranced and totally hooked on its magical lyricism. Not only do the “Christmas Carol” themes come through loud and clear and work far more effectively than I originally gave them credit for, but there’s also whole tale of love and loss, a life of grief, of dreams and the bitter disappointment of failing to fulfil them, of becoming what you fear and dread the most; and how even this can be overcome. Unlike the 2011 special, there’s no “happy ever after” resolution after, but a bitter-sweet and very poignant outcome instead. By the time young Kazran (a quite awesomely talented and natural 12-year-old Laurence Belcher) is confronted with the disappointment of his bitter older self (a magnificent Michael Gambon) and Katherine Jenkins (a decent actress in this part and not stunt casting after all – who knew?) sings the sublime “Silence Is All You Know”, all topped by Matt Smith on outstanding form as the biggest, most easily distracted kid in the room, then there really should be a tear in every eye in the house.

The whole thing becomes a quite extraordinary achievement, a brilliant work not merely of television or even of literature but of genuine art. It’s one of the most beautiful and smart pieces of television of the year – sheer poetry – and I’m embarrassed that I felt so poorly disposed toward it at the time; whatever was I thinking? It just shows the power of expectations and how badly we can take it when they’re not met, even if it’s merely because they’re massively exceeded in different ways than we had thought that we wanted.

So is “The Doctor, The Widow and the Wardrobe” headed for a wholesale reappraisal in 12 months time? It’s entirely possible. I somehow have my doubts – my complaint on the 2010 instalment was that it was too clever, and now I’ve caught up and appreciate it; whereas my issue with the 2011 equivalent is that it’s forgotten some vital ingredients, like plot and interest, unless they’re hiding away in very subtle corners of the sprawling forest. But if nothing else, I’ve learned not to underestimate The Grand Moff again quite so soon.