I Watch TV: Dr Who: Joy To The World
Dr Who: Joy To The World
The Doctor appears in the Time Hotel in London in 4202 AD to get some milk for his coffee. He spots something off but is distracted. He recruits the hotel employee who tries to stop him, orders something from room service (it appears immediately as the kitchen is thirty minutes behind) and sets off to try and track down whatever it was that caught his attention.
The Time Hotel offers rooms to various places in history, allowing guests to enter hotels (and other places) by entering through mysterious always locked doors. The Doctor finds himself on Everest just before the first ascent, in London in WW2, on the Orient Express* in the 1960s and finally in a very bland hotel room in London at Christmas 2024, where Joy has booked into the Sandringham Hotel.
The antagonist is a briefcase handcuffed to people that takes over their mind. The Time Hotel manager accidentally cuffs the briefcase to Joy and then dies. The briefcase threatens to self-destruct unless given a code; then a future version of The Doctor enters the room with the code, takes Joy with him and tells present Doctor he needs to go the long way round. Present Doctor tells future Doctor the lesson heās going to learn, that this is why everyone hates him, he just turns up and refuses to explain anything, he doesnāt even have chairs in the TARDIS.
The door shuts, and the connection with the Time Hotel closes. Present Doctor checks the Time Hotel brochure, sees the next connection is New Yearās Eve 2025. He spends a year working at the Sandringham Hotel, quirkily fixing things, making friends with the manager, the highlight of the week being Chair Night when they plays games or stuff sitting in the chairs in the room. He then goes through the newly opened portal in New York, enters the Time Hotel, bursts into the room to give the code and takes Joy away.
The briefcase continues to control her; The Doctor discovers that her personality can reassert itself when she feels strong emotions. He realises there must be something wrong, to go to the sad little hotel room, on her own, at Christmas, and digs into that. It turns out her mother died at Christmas, during a covid lockdown, so Joy wasnāt there, had said goodbye on a video call the day before.
This is the emotional heart of the story, about grief. And maybe redemption and loneliness. Anyway, the puzzle of the briefcase (it contains a starseed from the weapons manufacturers Villengard which will destroy the Earth when it blooms; but it needs millions of years to grow, hence the Time Hotel) and variously problems are solved using the time rooms The Doctor has been in earlier, and thereās a final Christmas-y ending.
Did we need Doctor Who to come along and say, you know, that grief youāre carrying around from covid, maybe you should deal with it? Or, if youāre feeling lonely, maybe make a friend? Maybe not, but since we get a Doctor Who Christmas Special whether we like it or not, I guess putting a message in there is fine. Merry Who-mas.
Watch This: Itās Dr Who, itās Christmas, thereās a lot of
fun time nonsense
Donāt Watch This: If
I wanted to be lectured about grief Iād go to the counsellor
* Where he meets Sylvia Trench from Dr No and From Russia With Love
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