Or, you know, the top seven Doctor Who specials over a seven-year period.
Or, you know, of the top seven Doctor Who specials of the past seven years. It’s all the same in this series really.
In my little makeshift family of displaced geeks, partaking of the annual Doctor Who Christmas Special is on par with Christmas communion if you swing that way or coming to blows with your loser cousin over who gets the last spoonful of grandma’s awesome stuffing.
The 2005 reboot of that bastion of British television has managed to manufacture a cultural tradition and that would really upset my tree-hugging commie-lite soul if the 2005 series wasn’t so freaking good
But like any Christmas, some specials are better than others for various reasons. To date, there hasn’t aired a single Christmas special that I’ve outright hated, but there are those that I’ve re-watched an appalling number of times, and those that I mainlined on Netflix this afternoon solely for the sake of refreshing my memory while prepping this article.
7. A Christmas Carol (2010)
In short, it was disappointing.
It was exciting at the time because the 2010 special was the first one that aired in America and the UK on the same day, thus eliminating one facet of our tradition: Virus Roulette, as we hit the internet as soon as the episode finished airing on the other side of the pond, utilizing any and all resources in order to avoid waiting for the whenever-BBCAmerica-feels-like-it air date.
“A Christmas Carol” also marked newbie Matt Smith’s first holiday outing in the big blue box. Despite my initial apprehension (David Tennant is my doctor) Smith quickly grew on me. He wears a bow tie. Bow ties are cool.
But story-wise, it was just…boring? The Doctor finds himself forced into the roles of the ghosts of Christmases past, present, and future when a curmudgeonly old “scrooge” refuses to…something about space whales…and the newly wed Mr. and Mrs. Amy Pond are in danger (surprise!) and oh look, the mysterious cryogenically frozen chick has a magical voice that controls space whales. And she’s a big musical star in real life. So that clearly wasn’t done on purpose or anything.
Matt Smith’s Doctor hasn’t reached the emo and psychotic part of his storyline yet, so this wouldn’t make sense in regard to Eleven’s characterization, but I feel like the whole Doctor-Who-does-Dickens thing would be more interesting if the Doctor played Ebeneezer. Goodness knows he has enough ghosts following him around to share Christmas duty.
6. Voyage of the Damned (2007)
Continuing the trend of making Ten’s life as miserable and lonely as possible by parting ways with every companion on the worst possible terms started in series 2 with Rose’s adventures in the alternate reality and continued in series 3 with Martha’s realization that being a companion actually sucks most of the time, David Tennant’s Doctor gets no reprieve on Christmas as Astrid Perth heroically sacrifices herself to save him. And Earth. But mostly him.
I always giggle over the fact that even on a super-advanced alien cruise-liner space ship, one plucky candidate for that recently vacated plucky companion position can take out the big bad with a forklift.
The episode clearly tries to emulate both Titanic and The Poseidon Adventure with the classism commentary and ham-fisted love story and the good old fashioned romp in a sinking ship, respectively. It’s fun, but not particularly epic, important, or interesting.
5. The Runaway Bride (2006)
David Tennant’s first outing after Rose gets sucked into the more-awesome-than-this-reality featured a lot of great foreshadowing of the headcase Ten would later be. It also introduced us to Catherine Tate as Donna Noble, the sassy ginger companion who finally dragged us away from all of that awkward sexual tension and treated the Doctor like a brilliant, but socially stunted little brother. It’s pretty much the best dynamic in the series. Donna keeps the Doctor’s emo rage in check and he crashes the TARDIS through her vapid personality to reveal the kickass person she is beneath all the hangovers and Valleygirl-wannabe tendencies.
Too bad that all gets fundamentally reset at the end of series 4.
You know what? No, it’s the holidays. The first rule of Fight Club is that we do not talk about the end of series 4.
The second rule of Fight Club is…yeah, that’s right, sit down and drink your eggnog.
4. The End of Time (2009)
Christmas 2009: the BBC gifted us with a shiny new Doctor, but not before sending the old one off to the police box in the sky with a schmoopy sweet montage of loooove.
By “The End of Time,” dark and dreary was the standard for the Tenth Doctor, so forcing the guy into a situation where he basically has to cement the demise of his people is pretty much par the course. They almost had to wack Ten at this point. No one wants to watch the Oncoming Storm guzzle cherry vodka and weep beneath the control panel of the TARDIS.
So, Ten gets blasted with enough radiation to kill a space whale and spends his final days/hours/minutes (does it matter?) visiting his ex-companions and playing Santa. He sends Jack Harkness a holiday booty-call a la Alonso from “Voyage of the Damned”. He saves Martha and Mickey from meeting an untimely demise. He pops in and gives a blissfully unaware Donna a winning lottery ticket and stalks Rose on New Years Eve 2005, cryptically telling her that she’ll have a great year.
I see what you did there, BBC.
My only real complaint is the identity of the mysterious Time Lady seen making googly eyes at Ten from Rasillion’s right hand. Initially, her identity was deliberately withheld because drama and intrigue, that’s why… and that was okay. Doctor Who has fifty years of canon to play with. She could have been anyone that the fans wanted her to be: Romana, Leela, Susan, the Rani; “Have your Christmas cake and eat it too!” the BBC seemed to say.
And then Russell T. Davies opened his big mouth, “Well, of course she’s the Doctor’s mother.”
Uh. Oh. Yes. Of course.
At what point was any indication given that Googly Eyes was the Doctor’s mom? You can’t just decide things, Russ. Well, you can, but you write them into the story. Show, don’t tell, and especially don’t tell in some random interview after the fact. Just because JK Rowling doesn’t have the balls to write a supposedly gay character as gay in the book doesn’t mean you should follow in her tradition of self-censorship and general pandering/wussiness. You’re better than that, man.
3. The Doctor, the Widow, and the Wardrobe (2011)
I was apprehensive when I learned the title of the Doctor’s latest Christmas adventure. I was never a big CS Lewis fan. He lost me at Aslan the Friendly Neighborhood Jesus Lion and I’ve pretty much let Cracked.com take over my Narnia education from there… so my whole understanding of the series is understandably skewed.
I hate when an episode is clearly meant to be an homage to something that I’m relatively unfamiliar with because I feel like I’m missing out on something. I’m sure I missed all kinds of references in “The Doctor, the Widow, and the Wardrobe,” but Narnia nods aside, it’s a strong episode. I found myself comparing Madge’s whole mission to avoid telling her children that their dad was dead until after Christmas (you know, so they weren’t traumatized into loathing merry mall musak and mistletoe) to that one MASH episode where Alan Alda and Co. lied about what time a soldier really died to spare his family the pain of associating his death with Christmas. I appreciated her intentions, but at the same time, wanted to reach into the TV and shake her because quite frankly, as someone whose immediate family has the irritating habit of kicking the bucket between Thanksgiving and New Year, waiting a day to break the news isn’t going to make a huge difference.
But hey, Madge has really noble intentions and Madge is one of the awesomest Christmas companions to ever awesome. Plus, she gets to live, her kids get to live, and her (surprise!) not-dead-after-all husband gets to live happily ever after… assuming three more years of Luftwaffe bombing doesn’t take anyone out after the Doctor leaves.
Look out, Eleven, that’s two relatively angst-free Christmas specials for you. When the BBC finally decides to crush your soul, they’re going to crush it hard.
2. The Next Doctor (2008)
No other episode ties New Who to Classic Who as well as this one. Confirming once and for all that it’s one giant continuity, including the not-as-bad-as-everyone-thinks-it-is American movie, “The Next Doctor” also marks the last time we see David Tennant’s Tenth Doctor on something resembling an even keel. The 2009 specials really stretched that “children’s program” moniker to the breaking point with how dark they were willing to get.
Furthermore, at the time of its initial airing, the exact circumstances of David Tennant’s departure, the identity of his replacement, and just when that big switchover would finally happen was still largely up in the air, so the title of this special, as well as any and all marketing materials released in relation to it, only served to launch the internet into a panicked tizzy.
When “The Next Doctor” was revealed to be none other than a clever human with amnesia, I was surprised and relieved. I was also busy flailing over the Cybermen and the TARDIS hot air balloon. (“Tethered Aerial Release Developed In Style”) and all of the little Dickensian street urchins.
Ten taking in the cheers of grateful Londoners below after he defeats the Cyberking in the hot air balloon is one of my favorite moments in the entire series. Back when he was a freshly regenerated Time Lord, Ten would have eaten that stuff up, but it’s clear now that everything he’s lost in the last few seasons has taken its toll. That line at the end, about the fates of his various companions:
“They leave. Because they should or because they find someone else. And some of them, some of them forget me. I suppose in the end, they break my heart.”
It gets me every time– even if I haven’t been steadily hitting the eggnog since dinner.
1. The Christmas Invasion (2005)
Being the first doesn’t automatically make something the best: I prefer Empire to A New Hope and the acid-dropping Beatles to the clean-shaven ones. The car I own now is better than the car I owned in high school and there is a reason that the Boeing 707 became symbolic of the jet age, and not the deHavilland Comet.
However, “The Christmas Invasion” rocked my geeky socks off in 2005 and has never entirely stopped doing so.
On the first Doctor Who Christmas Special, my true love (the BBC, in case you weren’t paying attention) gave to me:
* Homicidal Santas.
* Mindlessly violent Christmas Trees.
* One recently regenerated Doctor fencing with the Sycorax on the wing of a spaceship a mile above London. In his jammies. With bedhead. And only one hand.
* Said Doctor displaying epic badassery, cheeky quips, and only a touch of insanity.
* Murray Gold’s “Song for Ten,” which I have definitely never sung in the shower. Nope. Never.
Being the first doesn’t automatically make “The Christmas Invasion” the best, but it does set the standard against which all subsequent specials are judged. In a lot of ways, “The Christmas Invasion” served to relaunch the series in a way that the entire preceding season couldn’t. Christopher Eccleston is great and his Ninth Doctor brought a maturity and grown-up appeal that the series had been lacking since, I would argue, the 70s. But no episode in the inaugural season got me as excited for the future as this silly little holiday special did.
By the way, that “snow” is actually the charred remains of a ship full of aliens burning up in the Earth’s atmosphere. Keep that in mind the next time you’re running around outside thinking all the snowflakes are candy bars and milkshakes. Happy Holidays, everyone!
This review originally appeared on TV Geek Army.