Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...

Day 808: A Christmas Carol

Dear diary,

I remember thinking it at the time, and it’s turned out to be true of this viewing, too: it’s hard to believe that this episode came a year after The End of Time. The style of the show has evolved so massively in that time, and I think a blind ‘taste-test’ of the two episodes to an unknowing audience would have them guess that they were much farther apart in broadcast than just a year. For starters, the entire look of the series by this point is far more filmic, and while there were several elements in The End of Time that I had to single out as simply not quite working for me (out of keeping with the majority of the Russell T Davies era, it has to be said), this one fares much better in that regard.

I spent a fair bit of time during The Big Bang calling it some of the best use Steven Moffat ever made of the whole ‘time travel’ element to Doctor Who, but I might be revising that statement already, because he takes a similar concept and does something really rather elegant with it here. I think I’m right in saying that the basic idea at the heart of this episode (the Doctor alters someone’s past to make them a nicer person) was used in an earlier Moffat short story, but it’s very nicely suited to the format of A Christmas Carol. 

There’s something really great about the way that the video of the young Kazran starts to play, and then the Doctor pops up in it! New memories forming as the Doctor changes the time stream. It’s such a simple way of really showing the process of changing history, but really effective. It doesn’t hurt, of course, that they’ve got an actor of the calibre of Sir Michael ‘Dumbledore’ Gambon to come and play the part of the older Kazran, which really means he sells the idea that his history is being rewritten in front of our eyes. When he turns to see the painting has changed, and digs out a box of photographs that didn’t exist until the second he needed them… oh, it’s all really rather lovely, and a lot better than I think I gave it credit for at the time.

Something else I’d not given credit to in this episode before now is the way that the visuals really help to inform the story, and add extra depth to it that might be missed on a simple post-Christmas dinner viewing (and certainly were, by me). Chief among them is the use of bow ties (the icon of choice for the Eleventh Doctor) to symbolise the way characters feel about the Doctor - appearing when they’re enamoured with him, and then being undone and taken away when he’s fallen from favour. It’s something simple - tiny - but my university professors would have spun entire essays on that subject alone.

One thing I do have to gripe about (well, I mean, I don’t have to gripe about it, but the more I dwell on the issue, the more it’s bothering me…): Abigail’s family. We see them at the start of the story (let’s say in ‘2010’, simply for the sake of ease), appealing to Kazran (who is 70-ish at this point - again, for sake of ease, I’m going off Michael Gambon’s age). Later, during the Doctor’s adventures with Abigail and the young Kazran (around, what, 18? 20?), she requests to go and see her family on ‘this’ Christmas Eve. It’s definitely contemporary to the young Kazran’s time, because Abigail’s sister makes reference to him being the son of the chap building the cloud machine… but the family is all exactly the same age that they were a good half century later! Am I missing something? It simply feels like a really big oversight in an otherwise very tightly plotted story, and the more I think about it the more it’s irritating me!

Still, that’s just me being picky, really, and this is certainly the most I’ve enjoyed a Christmas special in a while, now…