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Last Christmas is one of New Who’s better
Christmas specials, and a strong note on which to wrap up Doctor Who in 2014.
It has some loose edges, but overall gives some strong character development,
and while elements of it feel business as usual for the Moffat/ Capaldi era,
that in many ways summarizes just how inventive this past season has been: it’s
Doctor Who meets Santa Claus in a mash up of Alien and Inception, a glorious
combination of ideas that manages to cohere rather nicely.
Time Travel Has Always Been
Possible in Dreams
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The episode is structured as an inside out,
anarchic “Inception”. This structure is both the episode’s main weakness and
its main strength. It clearly invokes “Inception”, but there’s less of a sense
of structure, as ulike Inception, the episode doesn’t carefully lay out the
form of the dreams within dreams before going in: instead, we start the episode
deep inside the dream, with each new layer being a surprise reveal: In “Inception”,
the characters go deeper into the dream layers, whereas in Last Christmas, they
slowly move out of the dream. The characters coming out of the dreams within
dreams does get a little too repetitive after a while, even though each new
layer is actually well set up within the text, with Santa appearing on Clara’s
rooftop, the test, and “It’s a long story” all being set up before paying off
to reveal that the base crew were never at a base to begin with: Moffat never
knowingly lacks craft when it comes to story structure. However, this is also
the episode’s main advantage over Inception, as it’s less obviously carefully
ordered, so feels like it has more room to surprise you, to say things about
its characters and the nature of dreams. If a couple too many “dream within
dreams” are the sacrifice the story has to make for the scenes of the Doctor
and Clara reuniting at the end of the episode, then they’re a sacrifice worth
making.
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Also interesting is the commentary on the
narrative structure of dreams that runs throughout the episode: “Dreams,
they’re funny, they have gaps” says the Doctor, before the Dream crabs start
their final attack when they’re “sensing the endgame”: meta fictional
commentary on the logic that holds television stories together, and the way tv
logic is indistinguishable from Dream Logic.
·
This is most apparent in the part of the story
the Doctor draws attention to in order to prove he and Clara have been dreaming
since the start of the episode: Clara flying away with him, and them arriving
at the base: the Doctor tells Clara she has to come with him, that it’s
important, then we cut to credits, and the next time we see the Doctor and
Clara, they’re at the base. We are left to fill the gaps, and assume that the
base was where the Doctor urgently needed to take Clara, but the Doctor then
highlights the fact that the audience have to fill in that gap with “a long
story”: it’s a nice, subtle commentary on the way storytelling is a two way
relationship, between the audience and the author, with both helping to compose
the story being told.
So Here it is, Merry Christmas
·
This Doctor Who Christmas Special goes, finally
to probably the last popular Christmas trope not yet approached in New Who: a
story with Santa as an actual character. This can risk coming across as too
jarring for Doctor Who, but it works, thanks to a script that approaches the
question of Santa’s reality in the Doctor Who universe, and Nick Frost’s superb
guest performance, which hits the perfect balance between irony and sincerity.
·
The irony comes in the form of humourous twists
on logic that defines Santa, such as the wonderful joke that santa’s beard was
originally meant to be a disguise, or the “Second Sledge” line, a joke that
recurs throughout the episode, as Santa starts out seeming to give a
“scientific” (technobabble) explanation, then gives an ultimate answer that is
pure whimsy, another example being the line “obviously I feed them magic
carrots” when talking about the fact that reindeer flying is a scientific
impossibility. With the “second sledge” joke, Santa starts talking through the
logistics of how a team of Santas might operate and work, then just says
“Second sledge”, in a classic bait and switch. The most significant example is
the remark that the sledge is “bigger on the inside”, a joke that draws to
attention the parallels between Santa and the Doctor, highlighting the fact
that the logic that sustains Santa is the same as the logic that sustains the
Doctor.
·
And the parallels between the Doctor and Santa
are where the premise of the episode gains its sincerity, playing off the same
theme as Robin Hood in “Robot of Sherwood”. The most significant, and
understated parallel, comes when Shona asks Santa if he’s “a dream that’s come
to save us?”, and Santa replies “I think you’ve just defined me!”, a moment
that subtly parallels the Moffat era’s conception of the Doctor as being more
than the name of our protagonist, and instead being an ideal he and others seek
to live up to.
Last Christmas, I Gave You My
Heart
·
The central character thread of the episode is
based around the Doctor and Clara reuniting after their parting in “Death in
Heaven”. First, they discover one another’s mutual lies, right at the start of
the story, the episode pulling the same trick as Clara going to Danny at the
end of “Kill the Moon”, placing a character beat you’d expect to come later on
straight away, so that the story can develop this thread in greater depth, and
take it to new places, and once again, it’s a well made storytelling choice. The
parallel between the Doctor and Clara’s actions made explicit in the “I lied”
exchange of dialogue, and then Clara and the Doctor fall silent, unable to keep
talking about a difficult emotional topic, and instead start talking about the
situation at the base: they remain characters who struggle to put what they’re
really feeling into words.
·
This thread is picked up again in Clara’s
dreamscape, as she receives one last chance to say goodbye to Danny,
establishing the episode’s central theme surrounding the Christmas season: that
people see their loved ones at Christmas because they never know if this one
will be the last one. It’s a thread that covers the themes of loss and its
relation to the supposedly celebratory time of Christmas far more powerfully
and without the copout that let down “The Doctor, the Widow, and the Wardrobe”,
so good work on making up for your past mistakes there, Steven Moffat.
·
This then leads to Clara’s admission that “I’ve
always Believed in Santa Claus, but he looks a little different to me” after
the base under siege resolution, a line brings together the parallels between
the Doctor and Santa, and the Doctor and Clara’s reconciliation, as Clara makes
her first significant confession of how she really feels about the Doctor,
after neither was fully able to say how they felt about the other when coming
clean about their mutual lies in “Death in Heaven”.
·
Also worth noting is old Clara remarking “he was
impossible” when asked if she ever met anyone who measured up to Danny, a
parallel to the way Eleven saw Clara in series seven that highlights the increasingly
blurred line between Clara and the Doctor’s roles in the story. We get another
role reversal of an Eleventh Doctor and Clara story when the Doctor helps Clara
pull a Christmas Cracker in a touching callback to Clara doing the same for
Eleven in “The Time of the Doctor”. It’s a moment that’s worth noting,
considering some criticisms of the scene: Clara has become frail: which is why
she cannot travel with the Doctor anymore, not that she is “only suitable when
she is young and pretty”, as some have claimed the episode is saying, a
criticism that doesn’t hold up against the touching note that the Doctor simply
cannot tell how old Clara is, a character note that also comes up when the Doctor
calls Bellows “the sexy one”: the twelfth Doctor neither understands nor has
time for humanity’s ridiculous beauty standards, and to suggest he does misses
everything these scenes are doing. It’s also a nice continuation of the
softening of the Twelfth Doctor’s characterisation, as this lack of
understanding is no longer expressed through mistakenly negative comments about
Clara’s appearance, as they were at the start of Series Eight, and I do think
that is something the show is better for no longer including.
·
The key emotional beat that resolves the
emotional conflict of the episodes comes when the Doctor confesses his feelings
of guilt to Clara, saying “Clara, I’m sorry, I should have come sooner”: the
Doctor apologises for lying, and delaying opening up to Clara about the loss of
Gallifrey. He recognises the mistake he made, and that is when he is finally
able to wake up, and the Doctor and Clara can reunite, stealing away for one
last set of adventures.
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