Oh boy, where do I even start. The story came to a close and I went, "Wait, what? That's it? But nothing even happened!" What is it with Moffat writing episodes with basically no plot? It was just so...nothing.

Who is Joy? For all the Doctor psychoanalyses her, I don't feel like we really get to know her. For the titular character, she has close to no impact on the plot, let alone on me, the viewer.

While I really like Anita, and the chemistry she had with the Doctor was fantastic and very sweet, I felt that the story took a very unnecessary detour with the Doctor staying at the hotel for a year. In hindsight, it feels like they needed something to pad out the runtime since the plot was already stretched incredibly thin. I think it says more about how naff the rest of the story was for me to say this was by far my favourite part.

We've had so many stories about the Doctor needing to find someone to spend Christmas with, and as someone who doesn't celebrate Christmas and instead spent the day watching movies and reading fanfiction and making a phone call to my health insurance company, I just don't connect to this sort of story. The older I get, the more these kinds of stories grate on me; I have a family I see for holidays too! Why is it always Christmas? Why do they always act like you can't have that without celebrating this Christian holiday?

The episode kept introducing characters that had the potential to be interesting and then unceremoniously killed them off and moved on. Poor Trev. Hell, even Joy; does she not have any other family? Is no one going to miss her?

One of the complaints I see about the Moffat era is that, as a show runner, he tends to be somewhat self-obsessed and digs himself into holes when he thinks an idea is interesting but doesn't actually have a plan to make it all pay off. I finally understand that complaint, now with Villengard. It was fun as a throwaway line in The Doctor Dances and made for a pretty good backdrop to Boom, but unless RTD has plans for them to become a big villain (which I don't think I would like anyway, because what more is left to say?), it definitely feels like he's reaching for the one thing that no one has ever complained about. Well, here I am, complaining about it.

Then comes the thing that is more than just mild annoyance: the reveal of Bethlehem. I could feel it coming as the scenery was revealed, and I hate it. I get the feeling people don't know that most of Israel/Palestine is a lot more similar to Greece than Egypt in climate and environment. It's Mediterranean. There are no sand dunes. It made me groan out loud. Not to mention, these specials get Christian enough without directly calling back to the time and place of Jesus's birth.

Honestly, I thought nothing could be worse than last year's blood libel, but at least Church on Ruby Road had, well, a plot.