Doctor Who - Joy to the World, on BBC One (UK) / Disney+ (USA)
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streaming sites: Disney+
This is the fifteenth Christmas special of the revived Doctor Who series, and the eighteenth "Festive Special". It first aired on Christmas 2024. It takes place between season 1 and season 2 (aka series 14 and 15).
The Doctor casually pops in to a random location to obtain some milk for his morning coffee (or whatever he's driking), and almost immediately returns to the TARDIS. But he's surprised to find himself putting on his jacket and picking up his sonic screwdriver, and realizes it's because he had noticed something suspicious while he was out, without thinking about it consciously until now. So he returns to this random location, which turns out to be the Time Hotel, in 4202. What he had noticed was a man holding a briefcase that was chained to his wrist, who he thought was acting a bit peculiarly. He quickly enlists an employee of the hotel named Trev to keep an eye on the man with the briefcase, while he goes to investigate the hotel. Each door leads to a different time and place throughout Earth's history. At one point, he meets a woman named Joy in 2024, who had checked into a regular hotel on Christmas Eve. Meanwhile, the suitcase changes hands a number of times, and each time the previous holder disintegrates soon after being freed from the case's possession. Eventually, the suitcase passes to Joy. The Doctor opens it, and it threatens to explode or whatever, so he has to close it again. But he also has to enter a four-digit code, with only seconds to figure it out. He can't use the TARDIS because of the nature of the hotel, which is just a hand-wavey explanation, but it works well for the plot. So... his future self rushes into the room to tell them the code to prevent the case from exploding. And his future self takes Joy with him back to the Time Hotel. After that, the Doctor must wait a full year, until Christmas Eve 2025, to become his future self and deliver the message.
He spends that year in the hotel room Joy had checked into, and befriends the manager, a woman named Anita. I found it a bit odd how much of the episode is spent on their friendship, considering I hadn't heard anything about this character before the episode was released; everything was about Joy. However, the Doctor and Anita's friendship was perhaps the best thing about the episode. But eventually the Doctor has to return to the Time Hotel and try to figure out how to deal with the briefcase and its contents, which could destroy the world. I have mixed feeling about how it all ends, but I'm not going to reveal any details about that. I'll just say this ends up being perhaps the most Christmas-centric of all of the Doctor Who Christmas specials, because of just one little detail at the end. Overall, it's not one of my favorite Christmas specials, but it was still decent. The Time Hotel was a neat concept, and there were nice little touches, often humorous, throughout the episode. The only major problem is not having enough time to really get to know Joy very well.