Hotel Tardis

Prerequisites: None explicitly needed, although Season 1 gives context to the Doctor's current psyche.

Joy to the World was profoundly mediocre, and a reminder that Moffat is weirdly at his most inconsistent when writing Christmas specials. You either get something classic like A Christmas Carol, or you get something utterly inane like The Return of Doctor Mysterio. The premise here is decent enough, and the Time Hotel as a setting is relatively fun. Joy as a character soon shows some initial promise, and I'll admit to being a preexisting fan of Nicola Coughlan (Derry Girls shoutout). However, this is all irrelevant for the fact that Joy simply receives zero development, and is frankly absent for almost the entire special. For probably 95% of her scenes, she's either possessed or crying, which doesn't exactly build up a coherent character. While this is happening, the Doctor takes a detour to working in a hotel for a year (despite numerous ways he could've hijacked a ride there immediately). This segment is one I'm mixed on. On one hand, it's easily the most likable segment of the episode, and Anita is far more interesting than any other character here. But it also just does something I'm always annoyed by: it utterly ignores the show's past. This episode treats the fact that the Doctor was forced to stay in one place as something completely novel and new... but he's done it quite a lot in previous incarnations! 11 did it in the Lodger and The Power of Three, 12 did it in The Pilot, and 14 is still doing it with the Nobles. Anyway, once the Doctor gets back to the episode proper, things proceed mostly as usual. I only have two more comments here. The first is (yet another) complaint towards the Doctor crying so much. He does it three times in this episode alone! My goodness, at this point I feel nothing when he cries, and Ncuti is a good crier. Before this era, the Doctor crying was a huge thing, and usually meant things were at their worst. With the Fifteenth Doctor, him crying literally means nothing, and I frankly hate it. Finally, I do think the ending shot and implication was in poor taste. Not only was the CGI on Joy pretty bad, but the idea that a dead Doctor Who character actually being the Star of Bethlehem for the Three Wise Men just leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

In summary, Anita was sweet, Trev was fun, and the Time Hotel is a cool idea, but I dislike most everything else on display here. This isn't a terrible episode, and it never reaches the pits of the absolute worst episodes on the show, but it's consistently bad.