Reunions are an inevitable theme of December holidays, as families get together to bicker over meals, cringe when ignorant distant relatives make irritating comments, and attempt to replicate nana’s sponge (which no one really liked in the first place but everyone is afraid to admit). This theme, therefore, often shows up in holiday pop culture — and let’s not kid ourselves, by ‘holiday pop culture,’ we mean ‘Christmas pop culture,’ because that’s the only holiday most creators and producers seem to acknowledge — whether shows are doing Christmas specials or nods to the holidays, it’s highly unusual at this point for television to leave Christmas in the shadows. Both Doctor Who and Downton Abbey in particular are famous for their elaborate Christmas specials, clearly designed to broker peace between families on the edge on the most high holy day of commercialism and arguing.
For Who fans, sitting down for Capaldi’s first special was an important moment. The Christmas Special this year was very much in keeping with the Doctor’s new, harder incarnation. It had a modern setting, departing from the opportunity to show a cutesy version of the past (like the Dickensian special), and it wasn’t terribly cheerful. With an invasion by aliens, a Santa Claus who wasn’t full of cheer, and an uneasy meetup between the Doctor and his companion, the episode wasn’t precisely a merry Christmas.
With every Doctor Who Christmas Special, one question is paramount: Which cutesy trick are they going to use this year? The Moffat-introduced tradition of running a special on Christmas Day has always fallen slightly out of canon, occupying the strange space between being a fluffy part of the season and introducing potentially important elements (like the most recent incarnation of the Doctor). Miss it and you’ll feel behind when the next season starts, watch it and feel cheated, somehow. They’re always more cinematic than the rest of the season, with special guest stars and some additional flash to give viewers something to enjoy while they try to come up with strategies for not killing their family members over the goose.
This year’s special came with a second important question: What was going to happen to Clara? Viewers had been repeatedly teased after ‘Death in Heaven,’ which seemed to suggest that this Companion’s time had ended, but the teasers were nebulous, designed to lure people to the small screen for the grand reveal. The production staff and actors definitely worked the teaser angle as well, keeping the question very much open — though it would have been functionally impossible to keep a new casting secret, so the logical among us knew that Clara wasn’t going anywhere, and the question wasn’t whether she would stay, but how. The teasing worked, though: The plot of the episode was much less important that the Clara Question for most viewers.
The answer to the second question was bound up in the first: ‘Last Christmas’ used the trite and outdated ‘it was all a dream!’ narrative trick, leading viewers to think one thing until the very last moment, until it pulled a switch on them. Nice try, Moffat, but this particular trick may be so overdone that it’s impossible to try to resurrect it in a clever way, no matter how hard you try. While the episode borrowed from and made fun of an assortment of pop culture tropes and events (the Alien references flew fast and thick), perhaps to distract viewers and make fun of itself, it didn’t quite work. The same could be said, honestly, of the dynamic between Clara and the latest Doctor; the Impossible Girl and this Doctor have never seemed to quite gel, and while the series may have perhaps played this up to make the Christmas special’s ‘surprise’ turn more surprising, it really just came off as ham-fisted. We didn’t see two characters reunited for a bittersweet Christmas, but rather more of the uneasy and sometimes outright irritating interaction between the two.
Under Peter Capaldi’s Doctor, the classic show has taken an edgier, more thoughtful turn. It’s a direction the Doctor has been steadily trending in over recent years, but Capaldi represents the crystallisation of the Doctor’s more somber side; he’s short, he’s surly, he’s tormented by his past, he lashes out at the people around him. The programme in turn has furnished him with much moodier episodes, and he plays the role superbly well — he lacks the irreverence and whimsy of earlier Doctors, instead approaching the role from a meatier perspective. It’s an intriguing approach, but it comes with a dark side.
This very sardonic turn has been a frustrating aspect of the latest season, as the Doctor’s taken his issues out on Clara repeatedly. While some might describe the dynamic between the two characters as a lively back and forth, it seems less so to me; the Doctor repeatedly insults and belittles Clara, putting her down at every opportunity. One can see why she might have preferred to leave with Danny in ‘Death in Heaven,’ choosing the man she loves over the Doctor who sometimes seems barely able to conceal his contempt for her.
As we seem them join forces again, it’s time to ask a legitimate question: When will Clara start fighting back, establishing herself, and refusing to take the Doctor’s insults? Will Moffat allow her to be her own person, or is she destined to go the way of other companions, a second fiddle to the male main attraction who’s useful until her expiry date? Moffat’s long been criticised for his handling of female characters — and he clearly hasn’t learned much.