Doctor Who:
A Christmas Carol
By Steven Moffat
“I’m the ghost of Christmas
past.”
It’s Christmas time once again
and that means it time once again for another Doctor Who Yuletide special. A
Christmas Carol is the sixth Doctor Who Christmas special and the first not to
be written by Russell T. Davies. This
time its Steven Moffat’s turn and you can tell the difference. A Christmas Carol starts off with a bang as
the Honeymoon ship that Amy and Rory are on is heading for a crash
landing. It’s up to the Doctor to save
them and this time it won’t be by using cheap writer’s tricks like the sonic
screwdriver or having the TARDIS put the ship in a tracker beam.
Instead we have the Doctor trying
to convince an old heartless man to do the right thing and shut off his machine
that controls the sky in order to save all the people on the crashing ship. A task easier said than done and here is
where the story really takes off and shines.
As you probably have guessed from the title of this episode A Christmas
Carol is a take on the Charles Dickens classic. I say a take because the story mainly deals
with the past. The Doctor tries to
convince an old Kazran to be a better person by visiting him while he was a
kid. It’s at this point that we find
out why Abigail was frozen and what she means to Kazran. We also find out what makes Kazran a bitter
and mean old man that won’t lift one arm to help anyone. With the help of Amy and Kazrans younger
self the Doctor does pull it off and gives us a happy Christmas ending.
A Christmas Carol is by far the
best of the Christmas Specials. Steven
Moffat has weaved a gem of a story that had a lot of emotion to it. I really enjoyed this story as it was different
from the Doctor Who stories we have seen before. Instead of fighting aliens and monsters the
Doctor goes up against a man that is Scrooge like. I liked the Dickens influence of the
story. It was pretty clever to see the
Doctor go back and interact with the young Kazran and have the old Kazran watch
it all on the view screen of his digital recorder.
A Christmas Carol was a pretty
solid story that had a good conclusion.
It did not have to revert to a reset button or any of RTD’s cheap
resolutions. A Christmas Carol had a
true resolution that was quite shocking in away as I was not expecting to
see. I truly liked the scenes with
Kazran and Abigail on all the Christmas Eves that they spent with each other
and you could predict what makes Kazran an old and bitter person. If there was one fault to this story it was
the predictability of Abigail’s fate and the effect on Kazran.
Matt Smith has truly arrived as
the Doctor as this is one of his finest performances. You can surely tell that he is comfortable
playing the Doctor now and will solidify himself as one of the greats to ever
play the Doctor. Michael Gambon was
terrific as Kazran and the Harry Potter actor gave a performance that made you
really dislike Kazran. His scenes with
Matt Smith were very powerful and some of the best since the show has
returned. It’s too bad that Amy and
Rory were delegated to stay out of the way but this story would not have worked
if the companions had a bigger role. In
all a very entertaining Christmas Special that is so far the best in 6
Christmas’s.
Grade A
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