Day 770: A Christmas Carol

The Christmas Special has become a bit of a tradition in the worlds of Doctor Who. In the Russell T Davies years, the episodes tended to be reasonably light hearted romps that happened to be set at Christmas. Steven Moffat, on the other hand, opts for the more obvious approach: make these Christmas Specials about Christmas. And nowhere is this more apparent than in A Christmas Carol.

A Christmas Carol is one of the most heart-warming Doctor Who stories ever written. The entire concept - of the Doctor trying to stop a spaceship from crashing by teaching one man, Kazran Sardick, how to be kind - feels a bit twee as described, but it doesn't end up working that way because Moffat decides to keep that method of teaching Kazran interesting, both in terms of how it is actually performed and how it is shown on screen. The Doctor, for instance, travelling back in time to be a strong role model for the younger Kazran when he needed one is a brilliant idea, and it's also well achieved by the decision to allow much of the running time of the story to focus on this plot strand. Thus, we get to spend a lot of time experiencing Kazran's life and so we grow to have sympathy for the character, and his decision to still turn down the darker path is made all the more heartbreaking (on a side note, the acting from Danny Horn in that scene is absolutely incredible, masking his emotion almost but not quite perfectly, letting the audience and the Doctor know exactly what's happened without the dialogue truly giving it away).

And these scenes are made all the more interesting because of the fact that we see them through a mixture of methods, seeing it from the Doctor's point of view and from the point of view of Kazran reminiscing which all lends the story an extra hook to keep things interesting so that it's not just a simple story. The added scenes of older Kazran, as played by Michael Gambon, remembering his time with the Doctor are also incredibly well performed, as he's able to do so much in terms of acting to help us gain an emotional attachment to the character just through him looking at old photos. Again, this all helps to create a story that feels all the more heart-warming and lovely.

And that's perhaps what a Christmas Special should be. Although I do still enjoy the Christmas Specials of the Davies era, I feel that Moffat's are truer to the notion of the Christmas Specials I watched as a kid from a variety of sources. They're stories that are meant to be funny and heart-warming, and maybe a little bit sad. And above all else, they are stories about the power of Christmas, and how it's that one time of the year where everything feels just a little bit nicer. And A Christmas Carol works on those areas for me just a little bit more than the Davies Christmas Specials, giving an overall better feeling for me.