Moffat Era Rewatch: Notes on "A Christmas Carol"

A Christmas Carol

• ·      For me, this remains the best Doctor Who Christmas special, a truly great episode that continues the Smith Era’s golden run. It’s of personal significance to me too: it made me love Doctor Who again just when I was a sixteen-year old trying to convince myself I was too grown up for Doctor Who, sweeping me away in its joy and magic.
• ·      This episode is another huge Matt Smith charm offensive, much in the vein of “The Eleventh Hour”, giving the Eleventh Doctor plenty of screen time to be clever, heroic, and generally at his most fun to watch. My personal favourite sequence is the Eleventh Doctor’s entrance, which sees him being generally hilarious and stealing the scene, but also gives him some lovely dark moments that show Matt Smith’s gift for switching tone at the drop of a hat, and also show the building dark side of the Eleventh Doctor, that will start to be critiqued and rejected over the course of his era.
• ·      The Fairy tale nature of the Moffat era starts to pay off in a big way, in a beautiful and confident Christmas special, totally embracing its status as a Christmas story, with the opening pan through Sardicktown beautifully establishing the episode’s fairytale tone and aesthetic.
• ·      Another way the Moffat era aesthetic and approach is becoming increasingly clear and confident comes in the form of time travel being used as a source of fun and play that adds colour to the story, here in the form of the “7245” sequence, which is a cute paradox. The Doctor learns the code from older Kazran, who knows it not because of his father, but because the Doctor told younger Kazran after learning it from older Kazran. Clever and cute!
• ·      The metatextual elements of the era are becoming increasingly clear as well. The episode is explicit about the way it is simultaneously borrowing from and adapting the Dickens story, even in the narrative itself: the Doctor recognises that Kazran is a scrooge like figure, is inspired by hearing the title of the novel, and takes the opportunity to perform his own twist on the narrative to save the day in this story.
• ·      The metatextuality is also evident in the episode’s imagery and direction: As Kazran watches the night he first meets the Doctor on a screen, becoming, like the Doctor, a metatextual figure as he becomes an analogue for the Doctor Who audience, reacting as a viewer would to the events of his changing past. Of particular significance is the moment where on Kazran’s orders, the Doctor leaves Kazran’s sitting room in the present, and steps back into Kazran’s past. Because the Doctor does this by stepping from the room into the recording superimposed on the sitting room entrance, this all occurs in one take, with no camera cuts for the Doctor’s time travel. The Doctor just moves from one medium – the narrative’s reality – into a new medium: a Doctor Who episode organized by the Doctor himself, as he travels to a miser’s past in the name of saving his soul. Past and present blur into one through the episode’s use of metatextual visual storytelling.
• ·      Kazran’s final moment of redemption comes when he makes it clear that he also knows what kind of narrative he’s in: “I’ll die alone, and unloved”, but while Kazran is aware of the kind of story he’s in, the Doctor is able to subvert that story with his own anarchic twist on “A Christmas Carol”, using Doctor Who’s current approach to time travel to subvert the nature of a Christmas Carol’s use of time travel – the Doctor confronts young Kazran with the image of old Kazran, and this is when Kazran’s redemption is achieved.
• Which leaves us with Abigail, and the “Woman in Refrigerator” trope. Abigail is often called a literal woman in the refrigerator, which is a fair critique: she literally starts the story inside an ice box, and her story revolves around the tragedy of her terminal illness, but I think the episode’s invoking the trope to critique it. I write about this more here: http://scarvesandcelery.tumblr.com/post/106792016007/a-christmas-carol-and-the-problem-of-abigail, but to summarise, I think it’s rather significant that Abigail starts the episode in a refrigerator, and ends the episode out of it. She gets a chance to voice her critique of Kazran making her death about his pain, and gets to assert her own preferred terms for her death. This episode is not the best Moffat will do this: it will be more central to future stories he writes, instead of being on the margins and easy to miss and take for an uncritical application of the trope, but this is the first time we see it appear in his Doctor Who work, and the subversion is, for my money, smartly written, if a bit too quiet a part of the episode. Most significantly, it’s an example, it’s a continuation of the emergence of some valuable feminist themes that become increasingly prominent throughout Moffat’s era, one that is consistently invested in critiquing bad stories and switching them for better, more useful ones.