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BBC A Christmas Carol |
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| Story No. | 232 | 
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| Production Code | Series 5, Christmas episode | |
| Dates | December 25, 2010 |
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With Matt Smith,
Karen Gillan, Arthur Darvill
Written by Steven Moffat Directed by Toby Haynes Executive Producers: Steven Moffat, Piers Wenger, Beth Willis. |
| Synopsis: With a space liner carrying Amy and Rory in danger of crashing, the Doctor must alter a man's past to make him kinder. |
A Review by Jamie Beckwith
13/2/12
Before I get in to the review of this story proper, I would like to
note how amazing it is that I actually watched this episode on Christmas
Day. A UK resident, I was in Florida to spend Christmas with family and,
as any true Doctor Who fan worth his salt would've done, I
immediately flicked through their channels to see if they had BBC America
as part of their cable package! The show has always had a global following
(hopefully one day fans in Zambia will stop hoarding those missing
Troughton episodes!) but it's amazing to think that the broadcast of
episodes is also now going global. As a further side note, as a result of
my finding BBC America at a point when they were playing The Unquiet Dead, my 15 year old cousin is now a
convert to the show within a few episodes and seemed quite unfazed that
Eccleston became Tennant and then Smith over the course of a few days!
Okay, so my review. I like Steven Moffat's writing, not just on
Doctor Who, I still maintain that Press Gang is the greatest
children's drama of all time, and I can happily re-watch Blink or The Eleventh Hour
over and over again, but some of his episodes I find strange because every
time I re-watch it my whole opinion of it changes. Finding something new
is always great, but I'm talking about loving it one time, hating it the
next, then liking it, then being ambivalent, then bored, then loving it
again. The Girl in the Fireplace did this to me
(I'm currently on disliking it) and so does A Christmas Carol.
I accept I was still under the influence of jetlag when I first watched
it and so, whilst I liked it, I knew full well the numbness in my brain
meant I hadn't really taken much of it in. The second time I watched it, I
really loved it and thought it was the most Christmassy Christmas episode
Doctor Who has ever attempted (Take that The
Feast of Steven!). The third time however, I really took against it.
I've not watched it a fourth time yet so goodness knows what I'll think
then.
The things I loved about it first time round include the unashamed
grabbing of Dicken's text and being Doctor Who going for it full
throttle and not pretending otherwise. It's not the first adaptation of
A Christmas Carol which openly references the text upon which it's
riffing (the Bill Murray film Scrooged does it too for example), but
surprisingly it almost felt something of a cheat for the TARDIS to keep
whizzing back and forth through Kazran's timeline.
Still, focusing on the positives, Matt Smith continues to dominate the
screen with his irresistible performance as the Doctor. Many draw
parallels between Smith and Troughton or Smith and T. Baker and they are
not unwarranted for all three have perfected the unpredictable blend of
humour and steel. All three can play the clown and yet beneath all that
bluster can save the day. He can fall out of a chimney and rattle off
gags, but then when squaring off to Kazran, the menace is beautifully
understated but there nonetheless.
Michael Gambon brings his usual gravitas to the role of Kazran Sardick,
though from the off he is still somewhat more of a softer character than
the mean-spirited Scrooge and it's the glimpses of his humanity that
convince the Doctor he is a man capable of saving. It is a great irony
therefore that in enriching Kazran's life the stack of consequences are
still one in which he refuses to help save the out-of-control spaceship
crashing through the atmosphere.
Herein though lies my problem with the episode and why I disliked it on
my third viewing. Having now been satiated on flying sharks, Marilyn
Monroe and a million Christmas Eves throughout history, I was able to get
at the meat of the story rather than the trappings. In Dicken's A
Christmas Carol Ebenezer Scrooge does at least have a real connection
with Jacob Marley and the visitations upon him are given meaning because
of that. By contrast, in Moffat's A Christmas Carol, the Doctor has
never met Kazran Sardick before in his life and, whilst it is true that
his actions are motivated by a desire to save the life of his two
travelling companions and their fellow passengers on the endangered
spaceship, he takes it upon himself to go beyond simply showing Kazran the
"errors of his ways" and actively meddles in his personal timestream and
utterly changes him as a person.
It is a hallmark of the revived series that people around the Doctor
find themselves changed by his company, they are able to stretch beyond
their confines and perform great tasks. Rose Tyler is held up as the most
obvious example, the drifting shop girl who saves the universe from the
Daleks. That's all well and good being a source of inspiration, but when
the changes are unsought doesn't this bring the Doctor in to very
dangerous territory. What right does he have to interfere with Kazran's
childhood? Do the ends really justify the means? I'm hoping that there
will be repercussions to this later in the series (and knowing Moffat I
suspect there will), but viewed in isolation this is worse than the Tenth
Doctor straying in to Time Lord Victorious territory by fighting time on
Mars. The Doctor disdains that in all his 900 years of travelling he has
never met somebody who wasn't important and yet as Kazran in the universal
scheme of things is not somebody around whom time is fixed, the Doctor
feels free to fundamentally change everything about him.
It's been suggested that great trials lay ahead for the Doctor and
perhaps in context he himself may have to face his past, present and
future. A Christmas Carol may mark a point on his journey where he
went too far, where his actions need reviewing. The Doctor has always
struck the moral high ground (even if his morality is a Time Lord's rather
than a humans) and taking it upon himself to act as personal god to mould
the life of one 44th century man - even if he does as a result introduce
him to love and happiness - seems an imposition too far.
And besides, as anyone who has seen The Creature from
the Pit knows, the TARDIS has a tractor beam!
A Review by Richard Conway
9/9/12
A Christmas special on Christmas Day is difficult enough for many a
television show at the best of times. How to make it different enough that
it feels a bit special and yet somehow still the same? How to keep your
audience entertained throughout and also leave them with a warm feeling
inside on that perceived special of special days? Even more so for a
program like Who that, by definition, is different every time it
starts a new story anyway and many a time defines entertainment and
excitement by death and destruction on a massive scale, which isn't your
usual Christmas fare. The solution is to go the other way. Instead of the
usual "let's give them something different to what they've seen before",
let's give them a story they know oh so well. Instead of the usual mayhem
and monsters, let's scale it down to just one person and that story.
Having decided that, Moffatt goes one step further. Deciding to not only
wear his influences on his sleeve but, what the hell, to put on the whole
suit of clothes.
This can work a treat if you can write a strong enough character and
get a stong enough actor to play the role. Solution to this, let's pinch a
strong character from literature, E Scrooge and try and get the strongest
character actor working in this country to play him, Michael Gambon -
result! - and it works to a tee. Like it's blueprint, Charles Dickens'
original, there's not really any plot here for the story to get bogged
down in or have to work through. It's a redemption story and one man's
redemption at that. For the most part, it's a flight of fancy and can go
anywhere. One minute the main character's back in his childhood, the next
flying through the skies with a magical spirit. The story can go and be
anything at any time, very Who.
In the original, the space this story structure allowed was filled by
moral lecturing and social commentary, but this is a television program on
Christmas Day in the 21st century and that's never going to fly. So
Moffatt looks to his leading man to fill the gaps instead and what a
leading man he's got. It's been often commented on that a certain T Baker
not only made a great leading man and a great Doctor in the 70s, but, more
than that, he was born to play the role. I would humbly submit that Matt
Smith is the 21st century equivalant of said Baker. He doesn't just fill
the screen when he's on it, he owns it and it's very difficult for the
other actors, even of the calibre of Gambon to hold their own with him.
This broad and empty canvas Moffatt has constructed for himself, of a
story all the audience knows already and with just two main strong
characters to fill it, could have daunted a lesser writer, but Moffatt is
anything but a lesser writer and, by looking at his track record on the
series, is never daunted by anything. So he ties up his two main leads
with everything from flying sharks to singing hand-maidens! Indeed, the
scene of Kathryn Jenkins singing a lullaby to what looks like a drunk bull
shark has got to be one of the most ridiculous scenes ever thought up for
the program, but Moffatt's depth of imagination and deft of touch somehow
sell it to us.
To bring Moffatt's imagination to life, we have some of the most
stunning design work possible and all on a (if good) TV budget and all
ably filmed by possibly the most cinematic of the current crop of
directors working on the show in Toby Haynes. He seems to understand the
power of the performance and the look of the program in equal measure and
it would be no surprise if he went on to great things.
We should feel cheated by this story; it's not really Who fare
at all, if you look closely enough. We know the story already, perhaps too
well, and how it will work its way through. We know all the characters as
soon as they appear on screen and what place they take in the narrative,
but through all this Moffatt somehow doesn't make any of this matter. This
isn't about watching a story unfold on screen, this about having fun.
That's why he's given us a story we know already. He's saying "relax and
delight in the fun and the ridiculous of it all" and if you drop off after
all that turkey and pudding and miss 20 mins, well you know the story
already and after all isn't that what we all do on Christmas Day?
4/5
A Review by Yeaton Clifton
24/9/12
Viewing two stories on DVD made me a fan: A Christmas Carol and
The Aztecs. DVDs can erase boundaries of time and
context bring to the forefront basic questions about changing time and
people:
From the Aztecs:
From A Christmas Carol:
Of course, the Doctor did rewrite a person, but it was interesting
study of what makes a personality constant. It also had flying sharks.
Like The Aztecs (and The Caves of
Androzani), it is not an overly dramatic story with a planet about to
be destroyed. It is a simple adventure where the Doctor works to save his
companions. The exploration of how knowing the future can be used to
change a person's past makes it in the spirit of real SF (stories about
how people react to ideas that are not possible within present technology
or the known laws of the universe). The Aztecs is
also science fiction in this sense, not withstanding that is often called
a pure historical.
A previous reviewer objected to the willingness of the Doctor to act as
someone's personal god for the sake of saving his companions, and this is
a reasonable question about his actions, but it is not out of character
for him. For example, he literally encouraged Barbra to take on the role
of god, to save himself and his other companions, in the serial that I
have now mentioned several times. It is exactly this moral ambiguity that
makes the Doctor more interesting than any number of space heroes who
solve most of their problems by blasting villains with ray guns.
I believe it is the best Moffat-era story so far (I do not mean the
best story by Moffat), and if it helped make me a fan, I hope it will do
so for many other people.
9.5/10. Major classic.
"And that's how I found out there was no Santa Claus" by Thomas Cookson
17/4/18
For me, Series 5 felt like finally getting the Doctor Who revival I wanted. It impressed me enough to draw me out of my apathy and overcome my diminished expectations from having endured RTD's run and being cowed by the Cult of Russell's insistence that we surrender critical faculties and enjoy the show from a philistine perspective. Part of me would always be grateful to Moffat for that.
Whilst RTD's era had an overriding energetic excitement to it, with hyper-stimulating adventures and moments no other show could produce, Series 5 provided the best of both worlds. The old excitement, but better crafted plot-wise than RTD's fast and loose style. At this point, nearly all seemed right with Moffat's era, and despite my niggles with Series 5's resolution, I was still excited for where the show would go from here.
I do remember being somewhat disappointed by the trailer for this, which revealed the title. I'd been looking forward to that promised interstellar Orient Express escapade. The worst case scenario seemed that Moffat was knocking The Unquiet Dead out of canon and treating the fictional Scrooge like a real part of the Whoniverse, with the Doctor needing to step into the ghosts' role and ensure his story 'happens'. This sounded like playing down to kids who wanted this canon merge between Doctor Who and Dickens. I wasn't behind this at all. I wanted Doctor Who to remain Doctor Who.
Obviously this didn't happen, but something about the trailer made me lose enough faith in Moffat to believe he'd do it. Maybe because he'd already erased Journey's End from canon. Maybe because this was his first Christmas special and I worried he'd treat it like a comic relief special. Maybe as a pastiche of A Christmas Carol that didn't even change the title, it was too on the nose. Clearly pandering to undemanding children who didn't know any better, for whom our 'apocryphal' is their mega-squee. That worryingly familiar feeling of the makers' enthusiasm going the wrong way.
Ultimately, I didn't enjoy this story. At least not enough to recommend. But I know many fans found this their favourite Christmas special, and I don't want to impugn their taste or take away their love of this.
I feel it should've been great. It mostly ticks the boxes, but in the end I wasn't happy. Maybe not as unhappy as after watching Terminus, but I can only go over this and try identifying where it lost me. Maybe it's the ending. I still don't understand why Abigail had to die. Maybe it was the holiday snaps montage where young Kazran and the Doctor have holidays together, but we only get to see the postcards. Maybe I realised then that I wanted to escape this story's gloomy setting I'd endured for too long.
Maybe it's when the Ponds first appeared, apparently having been in the middle of cosplay sex. I couldn't help wonder why Amy would enjoy being intimate with Rory whilst he's dressed as the Auton who'd killed her in cold blood? Does she have a murder fetish or long for the excitement of reliving her betrayal and death? Something about this just felt uncomfortably misjudged. It's difficult to believe in Amy's character when she'll happily treat her own death this way.
Incidentally, Rory shouldn't remember being an Auton doppelganger any more than Hartnell's Doctor should remember being a Dalek duplicate. Perhaps it'd be better if Amy and the Doctor alone knew Rory was Amy's fiercely loyal protector in another life, thus deepening their affection for him for reasons Rory couldn't remember. Conveying a nice ironic undertone of ordinary Rory not knowing his full potential.
When Amy contacts Kazran to plead for their lives, Rory, in sheer pettiness, decides the most imperative issue is that Kazran might've been momentarily looking at Amy's grainy hologramatic legs.
I think the problem's Kazran. This story depends on the Doctor meeting someone on an alien world who happens to be identical to the fictional Scrooge. It's hard to believe in the fiction when it's supposed to be set in our universe where Dickens' book exists as a work of fiction, yet we know said book informs Kazran's entire existence as an artificial replica of Scrooge. It'd be different if Scrooge were a real historical figure, making Kazran an example of history repeating itself, and the Doctor having to ensure their historical downfall or redemption repeats itself. But Scrooge wasn't real, which exposes the glaring fact that Kazran isn't real.
Doctor Who's always done pastiche, featuring plenty of characters modelled from other famous fictions. Both Dr Frankenstein and Professor Solon work in their respective stories as scientists obeying their natural talents. And it isn't entirely implausible that a young Grendel maybe read Prisoner of Zenda and decided he wanted to emulate its central villain. But who'd aspire to be Scrooge? He's a miserable sad act who's blatantly wasted his life.
The implication is that Kazran aspired to be his own father, who was also like Scrooge or that it was just inevitable. That like John Hughes' movies, it's about that anxiety some have that one day we'll inevitably become just like our curmudgeonly, inflexible parents. But that's the problem. This is explicitly a character study and examination of what makes Kazran who he is, and we already know the answer. It's because he's based on Scrooge, and it's difficult to summon any interest in the fictional reasons Moffat's forced to contrive and fabricate in place of that.
Emotionalism in New Who is a much grumbled over thing, as is its absence in Classic Who, ever since RTD's sycophants convinced fandom that only his era acknowledged the companions' family life within the show (seemingly Evil of the Daleks and The Keeper of Traken never happened).
Essentially, Classic Who's frequent rush to get scripts ready often left little time for attention on character or emotional ramifications. New Who suffers the same problem, but with an insistence on crowbarring in emotional scenes anyway, no matter how sloppy, gratuitous or maudlin.
Consider the grief-stricken Fourth Doctor numbly telling Bettan how his friends 'died' in the Kaled city. It's sobering stuff. His gentle quietness challenges us to imagine what he's thinking and how he'll ever heal from this. It's about the internal of what's going on in his head, without it being demonstratively overstated. Tennant's Doctor would've snapped and roared at her to make his emotions more 'revealing', which would've been too on the nose and spoilt this binary opposition between the compassionate Doctor and his egomaniacal, ranting lunatic foe.
But the internal life of Kazran doesn't seem to bear more thought than the trite 'I'm a mean bastard because my father was', which is exhausting. We have huge, mawkish emotional displays and a tear-jerker ending, but, try as Moffat might, these characters just don't bear any real interesting insight. Which is frustrating because Dickens' Scrooge absolutely did. Scrooge wasn't an aspirational character, but he was a cathartic one who'd sometimes verbalize what nearly all of us have been guilty of occasionally thinking.
Often, we were put in his shoes of just wanting to enjoy his solitude and losing patience with people who keep intruding and forcing Christmas cheer down his throat. And there's moments where the ghosts make him relive past heartaches and we wonder are they just being cruel and hitting him where it hurts for the sake of it?
It's possible to empathise or even identify with Scrooge. Perhaps Moffat can't entertain that, which is the problem with this set up. For Scrooge, it'd make sense to donate nothing to charity. To him, starving masses will always be 'death-prone', regardless if he makes any short-term contributions or not. His money's such a part of him that parting with it's like asking him to cut off an arm or leg.
I'm just not convinced Scrooge wouldn't be horrified by 9/11 (though having said that, I've met a few anti-war protestors who weren't). Certainly, not to the point he'd have stood back and let it happen if he'd the technology to prevent it, which would cost him only a few seconds' time.
What bothers me is Moffat's treating us like we should assume any issues with Kazran's motives can be explained away by the original Dickensian source. That's the problem with plagiarising a better story. At some point in the writing process, you can't tell where your version ends and the original source begins, but what's on paper resembles enough quality stuff that scrapping it seems unthinkable, even when it's actually imperative.
Scrooge's redemption was possible because compassion was already within him beneath it all. For Kazran to allow hundreds of innocent deaths, he'd have to be a complete irredeemable monster or sadist. Scrooge was never any of those things. This is a comic strip supervillain level of callousness.
Some question why the Doctor didn't just simply go back a few hours and prevent the doomed starship taking off? Is the starship's predicament a fixed event, whilst Kazran's childhood is fair game to alter? But the moment we see young Kazran getting belted by his cruel father, this question ceases to matter. We want the Doctor to improve Kazran's life badly enough to go with that. But Moffat needs Kazran to remain mechanically stubborn, so that his redemption goes wrong. But it's hard not wondering by now why Kazran doesn't give in and say "All right, I'll save the ship if you'll bugger off and stop rewriting my life!"
Like Warriors of the Deep there's an unbearable, exhausting stubbornness about this story inorganically forcing its continued premise and moronic, false motivations. It depends on having an infantile worldview whereby it just makes sense only 'bad' people disagree with the Doctor.
But my main problem is Abigail's sacrifice. Having spent the whole story refusing to save the starship when he easily could've at no cost to himself, Kazran's redemption realistically should've ended, with him adamantly refusing again the very moment he realizes he now must sacrifice Abigail's life to save them. I mean, do the math.
I also don't understand why it must be Abigail? Weren't we told her gift of harmonising the ice crystals came from her period on ice? Isn't that why it wasn't just a coincidence that of all the frozen prisoners in the vault, she happened to be the one they accidentally released who also had the gift to calm their immediately pursuing shark? Basically, why are they treating her as the only one with the calming gift of song when all the prisoners should have this gift? Many of them having a longer lifespan than her.
Abigail seems so fine and seraphic with her fate that I just can't believe in her as a real person who's about to die. On one level, that we see her enjoy her last night alive but her death is allowed to be a private one off-screen is tastefully done. On the other hand, it ends us on an ambiguous emotional note where I don't know what to feel. The story offers no catharsis in the end. Which, for the length of time it indulged Kazran's frustrating character, is almost unforgivable.
The flying sharks were a ghastly, vapid overindulgence too, demonstrating that Moffat's writing really benefits from having more conservative budgetary limitations. Girl in the Fireplace, Blink and The Time of Angels demonstrate Moffat's natural talent for weaving plots like strands of thought into something silky, unpredictable and magical. Here he decided to weave them around an already set tale that he couldn't really budge or tamper with without committing outright vandalism. In the course of which, he often resorted to forced twists to make it artificially unpredictable.
I could only hope Moffat didn't try doing this again. After a successful first season as showrunner, it would've been petulant of me to lose hope over just this one misstep. Unfortunately this misstep felt like an eternity in itself.
When you are here, music is all around by Evan Weston
1/5/18
In my previous Christmas special reviews (excepting The End of Time, which is a story about many other things that happened to air its first half on Christmas), I've discussed the evolution of the Russell T Davies Christmas special formula and how it went from messy-but-entertaining to perfectly-refined-but-cold and then to just messy and cold. The Steven Moffat Christmas special, evidently, needed no time to evolve at all. For A Christmas Carol is perhaps the most heartfelt and astonishing episode of Doctor Who that Moffat has ever written, at once a brilliant time travel story, a faithful and innovative adaptation and an emotional spectacle not seen from his pen since The Girl in the Fireplace.
In order to see A Christmas Carol for what it really is, you need to forget that it's a "Christmas special" at all, and simply view it as a standalone. Not that it doesn't deliver the Christmas goods - the Doctor and his companions make many winking mentions to the eggnog crowd, and the holiday is actively referenced more frequently than in any of Davies' specials - but it's so much more than just "let's get the drunken parents through the night with their children." In this fashion, A Christmas Carol is a masterpiece, and a minor miracle at that.
It features perhaps the greatest guest performance the show has ever seen from Michael Gambon, who plays our Scrooge, a weathered, nasty old coot menacingly named Kazran Sardick. We know Gambon can do mean, and he's particularly good at it in the early going, but once the Doctor begins to fiddle with Kazran's memory, he delivers us a perfect emotional wreck, violated by the Doctor's presence, invigorated by true feelings of love and friendship and devastated at the loss of his newly found Abigail, whom he's only truly met in memories. It's a soul-crushing and beautiful performance, and Gambon walks us step by step through Kazran's existence with a steady hand and a teary eye. He even doubles up as the episode's villain-by-default, Kazran's father Elliot, whose presence is felt less in the two times he's on screen but more in his son's abject fear of him. In both parts, Gambon is stone-cold brilliant and possibly the best thing in an episode brimming with delights.
Of course, he gets to play a brilliant character, who is as much his own man as he is formed by the script. Kazran is three-dimensional because of the performances (both from Gambon and fantastic younger actors Laurence Belcher and Danny Horn), but he's solid as written, a miserly old man dominated by his father and then liberated from him not by the Doctor, but by his own choices. Moffat takes pains to show us that the Doctor was in the wrong for messing with Kazran's life, but he also allows the Doctor to make up for his sin and simply present Kazran with a choice - would he want to grow up to be who he is today? From the answer hope springs eternal, and that's where A Christmas Carol's emotional resonance lies.
It's also found in loads of other places, within a script that twists and turns quite quickly but, unlike the episode just before it, doesn't allow the pace and exposition to overwhelm the audience. It's a complicated story, to be sure, but A Christmas Carol stays light on its feet and gentle the whole way, even while the Doctor and young Kazran are being chased by a hungry shark. The time-bending plot is right there with The Girl in the Fireplace and Blink as one of the best Moffat has ever constructed. Watching Kazran develop new memories as he himself watches his childhood radically altered is an uncomfortable yet mesmerizing sight, and the jaw-dropping revelation of Kazran himself as the Ghost of Christmas Future set every piece, from the many Christmas Eves to Amy and Rory trapped in the sky, all into place in a beautifully complex and elegant television puzzle.
Speaking of that final moment, this is Doctor Who's first attempt to adapt source material that isn't its own (Dalek, Human Nature/The Family of Blood and The Lodger were all brought over from other Doctor Who media), and Dickens' classic tale is told with brilliant spin while staying faithful to the original text. Kazran is a wonderful Scrooge, the Doctor and Amy are perfectly presented as Past and Present, and the lingering question throughout - what is Future? - is answered in perfect step with the story's emotional climax. Moffat manages to tell a very Doctor Who version of A Christmas Carol - time travel, technobabble and all - while keeping the heart and soul of Dickens intact.
A Christmas Carol simply feels warm and inviting, even in its coldest moments. It is, for my money, one the best-shot episodes of Doctor Who ever. Long-running director/cinematographer duo Toby Haynes and Stephan Pehrsson drape the episode in a gorgeous blue hue, soft lines all over the place, every movement delicate and sweeping. The ride through the sky is, for lack of a better word, utterly breathtaking, and emotion and touch drips from the sides of the screen in every shot. It has a quality about it that clearly comes purely from the production, and that's television magic, in my book. The fish look phenomenal in general, due to the tremendous work of the visual effects team. It also features what I believe to be Murray Gold's best score in his time on the show, with lovely, grandiose numbers layered throughout the piece.
However, the real reason I lend such high praise to Gold is the inclusion of maybe the most beautiful song he ever wrote for Doctor Who (contested only by The End of Time's Vale Decem and The Rings of Akhaten's song for the Queen of Years), "Abigail's Song", sung by the unassailable Katherine Jenkins. The famous mezzo-soprano lends her incredible voice to this haunting, fragile masterpiece, wafting the words through the screen with grace. Credit must also go to Moffat for making Jenkins' singing voice central to the plot and to Haynes for directing her so wonderfully, cloaking her in soft, faded focus nearly every time. Jenkins proves herself a fine actress, though her singing voice and stunning looks are correctly put right at the forefront. If all there was to commend about A Christmas Carol was "Abigail's Song" and the effort placed around it, the story would still come highly recommended.
But there's so much more! Matt Smith cedes the spotlight to Gambon here, but Smith is enjoyable as ever as the Doctor, who learns a valuable lesson about changing the past while doing all he can to save his newlywed companions. His best moments happen to be comedic, though, and his interplay with young Belcher is often gut-bustingly hilarious. That young actor acquits himself wonderfully, and he gets a larger role than you'd expect. Karen Gillan and especially Arthur Darvill (in the main credits for the first time) don't get to do much, but Gillan is just the right amount of tender in her featured Ghost of Christmas Present scene.
The acting, though, is just one part of a big Christmas machine, one that Russell T Davies never quite got down but Steven Moffat nailed on the first try. A Christmas Carol is an emotional roller coaster, at times deeply despondent and at others terrifically joyous. It ends somewhere in the middle, and the effect is akin to taking that last sip of eggnog on Christmas night. Maybe that's why this story is so great - though I write this in mid-April, it feels like December all over again.
GRADE: A
Merry Christmas Uncle Scrooge by Noe Geric
11/12/24
When the show came back in 2005, it introduced the annual tradition of a festive episode for the show (well, by now, everyone probably knows that, hmm...). While Russell T. Davies enjoyed writing more ''relaxed'' episode for the festive slot (killer robots, time-travelling brides...), Moffat took a more Christmassy approach. The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe may be one of the worst examples: full of sweetness and nice characters and a boring situation where people are drinking lemonade or helping wood creatures. But its predecessor, A Christmas Carol, managed to be 100% Christmas cliche and still being an incredible tale.
We follow Kazran Sardick, an old and grumpy man capable of controlling the sky, as he's going to let a ship full of people crash without trying to help in any way (while he has the power to save them easily). Aboard, Amy and Rory call the Doctor to the rescue. The Time Lord will then try to change old Kazran's past, so he'll be a good man and save everyone. That's the basic idea: it's a moralising story like many others, and it doesn't seem interesting at all. After all, everyone has already heard a Christmas tale like that one before. But the episode itself is fantastic. It might actually be my favorite Christmas Special of the show!
It's a one-hour character study of Kazran Sardick, and while it's sometimes a bit cringe, it manages to be the perfect episode to watch at Christmas. There are no evil robots, no mad megalomaniacs trying to take over the world... It's a traditional tale with characters trying to be good people for Christmas. The concept of the show (time travel, remember?) is used with some clever ideas, and Matt Smith gives a sweet performance against Michael Gambon (that actor is just perfect in the role). The setting is great. The whole planet (I never remember the name, it's barely mentioned in the episode) feels really alien, and Moffat took time to add elements to make it feel ''realistic''. It isn't just a one-note world with forests or a talking volcano as interesting settings, while the rest of the planet is just an empty desert (Hello Trenzalore!)... There are sharks and fish flying in the fog, people living in steampunk buildings, a guy taking people and freezing them as a guarantee he'll get his money back...
The characters are really memorable too. Abigail sometimes doesn't feel like a real person but an angel that came out of nowhere. It's quite difficult to think that poor lady is actually her sister... But her final song is still the most memorable and sad part of the story. One of the show's greatest scenes so far, before Moffat's writing began to fall down the cliff of complexity. The idea of changing the past itself is rather silly, as Father's Day established a nest of evil time creatures would come to tear the world apart if it happened. If Cornell was there, Kazran and Abigail would've been eaten by Reapers the minute the Doctor appears. And old and young Kazran meeting and hugging is quite disorientating after watching 31 seasons of the Doctor avoiding changing the past!
I've never done it, but watching that one on Christmas night might be perfect. It has everything that sort of tale needs. If I might just point one BIG and ANNOYING flaw: the Smith era has been plagued by the ''I am the Doctor'' theme and all its symphonic variations. ACC has it played at least three times differently, at different speed, and I didn't count in how many episodes it happens. We get it: it's epic and cool music, and it really becomes tiresome at the end.
A Christmas Carol is really an odd story. It might be an excess of the worst Christmas ideas we've seen may times elsewhere, but the story is written with a careful hand that makes it a classic of the show (in my opinion). That's one of those episodes I'm never tired of watching, and a small tear slowly falls down my cheek each time I reach the end. 10/10
The Doctor to Barbra: "You didn't change history but you did
change one man."
Amy: Time can be rewritten.
Kazran: Tell the Doctor, people can't.