Will the Doctor Who Christmas Special be the last straw for Disney?
More people watched this year’s Doctor Who Christmas special than they did last year’s. In broad and general terms, the episode also seems to have been better received than last year’s was. Normally speaking, these should both be “good things” in the context of a television show that’s yet to receive the green light for a third series from Disney. However, there are rumblings that Doctor Who’s American overlords might not be as happy with the episode as you’d imagine them to be – and the reasons for their displeasure have nothing to do with ratings.
We realise that plenty of people reading this article will have watched the Doctor Who Christmas Special “Joy to the World” already, and if you haven’t, what’s wrong with you? It’s been available for streaming since December 25th, so you’ve had plenty of time! However, for those who haven’t, here’s a brief overview: The Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) lands in a hotel where he meets a character called Joy (Nicola Coughlan), and quickly comes to realise that each door in the hotel leads to a different period of Earth history. It’s quite literally a time hotel – and it’s a hotel with a problem – there’s a sentient suitcase making its way from resident to resident, and within the suitcase is a dangerous “star seed” – literally a star waiting to be born. The suitcase, or rather the star, is looking for an appropriate person to take it to an appropriate point in history from which it can be born. If the Doctor can’t stop it, the star will explode on Earth and take the planet with it. So far, so Doctor Who – so what’s the problem?
Upsetting the Conservatives
There are two things that have got people animated about the episode, and one of them is, surprisingly, linked to COVID-19. At the beginning of the story, we see Joy check into a low-budget, drab-looking London hotel at Christmas, intent on spending Christmas Day alone. We later find out that this is because her mother died on Christmas Day 2020 due to and during the COVID pandemic. Joy feels she let her mother down by following ‘the rules’ and allowing her to die alone, while ‘those awful people with their parties and their wine fridges’ did as they pleased. This is a clear shot taken at Boris Johnson’s Conservative administration and the Partygate scandal, and writer Steven Moffat has specifically confirmed that the lines were intended to be received as such.
While powerful, the lines felt somewhat out of place in an otherwise whimsical Christmas episode, and incurred the displeasure of those who would prefer to have politics kept out of Doctor Who, and doubly so at Christmas. While the show has included social commentary since the 1960s, it’s rarely been as overt and specific as it was in “Joy to the World,” and it’s no surprise that the scene in question caused controversy. It also wasn’t the only one.
A Star is Born
Over the years, Doctor Who has had a lot of fun creating Doctor Who-based origins for everything from Atlantis to the volcano that erupted in Pompeii in the year 79. These creations are usually meant as fun and aren’t to be taken seriously. However, “Joy to the World” went further with this idea than any episode of Doctor Who before it. You’ll recall us mentioning a few short paragraphs ago that there’s a “star seed” in the Time Hotel, and it’s looking for a convenient place to explode and become a real star. In the culmination of the Doctor Who episode, Joy takes the star into herself, flies away a safe distance from Earth, and then explodes, becoming a new star in the night sky. Again, this would be standard Doctor Who stuff were it not for where and when the star appeared.
As the Doctor looks up to the new star and then down towards the ground from his hilltop perch, he suddenly realises where and when he is and says, “Oh, of course. You’re Joy. Joy to the world!” The line alone would have served as confirmation, but the show went the whole hog by having a caption pop up on screen confirming that the scene took place in Bethlehem in the year zero. That’s right – Joy became the star that heralded the birth of Christ. Discussion of this scene dominated newspaper reviews of the episode, and some Christians were offended. Those most likely to be offended are those who live in America, where Disney is. We have no doubt that Disney will have heard from some of those offended parties in the weeks since the broadcast.
A Cautious Company
Disney has always preferred to stay away from controversy. It gets accused of being “woke” (whatever that means) a lot these days, but it prefers to play it safe, keep it clean, and stay away from topics and concepts that are likely to ruffle feathers. It sometimes even does this at great cost to itself, like when it closed down all the official Marvel online slots and casino games shortly after acquiring the company. The casino games were big money makers, and casino comparison sites like Sister Sites have tracked the negative effect that the closure of the games had on the casinos that hosted them, but Disney decided that gambling was bad for its image and wanted no part of it. That’s the kind of puritanical mindset that Disney takes to its products.
Upsetting Christians and Conservatives during the course of an episode – even a successful one from a broadcast and viewership standpoint – won’t go down well with the Disney top brass. It’s long been speculated that there are cracks in the Disney – Doctor Who relationship, hence the lack of confirmation of a third season thus far. It was thought that a renewal would hinge on the success or failure of the second season, and a decision would be taken once it had been broadcast. Given these new controversies, we wouldn’t be at all surprised if Disney decided to pull out of the project before then. We don’t think that it would be the end of Doctor Who – the rights would revert to the BBC, which would carry on making it – but it would be a big bump in the road.