Doctor Who Christmas Special: The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe

Claire Skinner's Madge Arwell saves the day... but
doesn't quite trump the year. © BBC 2011

After the usual period of Doctor Who-less anguish since the barnstorming (if not quite the best ever) finale back in October, I was looking forward to the Christmas episode, as my only piece of pinned-down Christmas Day TV, with mild trepidation. Christmas episodes in the past have always been a compromise between the overarching story of the Doctor and Christmas-Day, for-the-kiddies, we’re-filming-this-in-June-but-what-the-hell-let’s-overdo-the-snow-anyway concessions to the season.

The last Christmas episode (the most epic A Christmas Carol, with the ever-regal Michael Gambon, Laurence Belcher as Kazran Sardick giving the best performance I’ve ever seen from a child actor in Doctor Who – which may have helped him gain his recent role in X-Men: First Class, Katherine Jenkins providing the least excruciating celebrity cameo I can remember, and the only Christmas episode up to then not set in London) was the best I’d seen, and gave me real hope for the future of Moffat’s series. This in stark contrast to the nearly unremittingly-with-the-exception-of-Tovey awful Voyage of the Damned (yeah, the one with Kylie and the Poseidon Adventure references… ugh) of the Russell T. Davies let’s-save-something-even-bigger-than-the-world-every-time era.

The memes are already appearing
thick and fast. Ah, fandom.

There were certainly good moments in this year’s refreshingly un-epic jaunt. Moffat’s writing for Matt Smith is highly quotable as always – this episode brought us lines on a par with “texting and scones”, including the continuation of a lyrical theme with “happy crying… humany-wumany”, the classically Eleven “do what I do – hold tight and pretend it’s a plan”, the episode’s catchphrase “I know” and another typically Doctor Who exchange with young Lily:

Why have you got a phonebox in your room?
It’s not a phonebox, it’s my… wardrobe. I’ve just painted it to look like a phonebox.
Well, what are you doing?
Rewiring.
Why would you rewire a wardrobe…?
Have you seen the way I dress?

The episode is great visually. Despite Moffat’s tenure suffering a budget cut right at the beginning, his series have included some of the most impressive visuals. Without having looked for specific evidence to back it up, I’m convinced that with the transition to making the show in HD and the visual mini-reboot at the start of his reign, Moffat’s production team must have brought in a revolutionary director of photography – the use of lighting, colour, the capacity and range of tone of the HD production process and the altogether more inventive yet transparent camera moves have been a massive step up – just think of the climactic scene in Let’s Kill Hitler or the final fight of The Girl Who Waited. In The Doctor, the Widow, and the Wardrobe (the official episode title doesn’t have it but, like Kyle Anderson at the Nerdist, I’ll be damned if I’m losing Lewis’ Oxford comma), the visuals impressed from the very start. The developments in CGI technology from the vague and undetailed days of Aliens of London and Rose are apparent – the sparingly-used effects in the new series are spot on, and integrate right into the picture.

Tight use of camera angles, zoom and finely-placed special effects (I notice Smith doing his own stunts very close to an explosion at one point) give a fast-paced opening that’s marred slightly by the Doctor apparently falling to Earth from orbit, screaming, while struggling to put on a space suit… but then very few shows have got the physics of space right (hint: no air means no sound) since Battlestar Galactica and Firefly, so I supposed we can’t expect too much.

Then the concessions I mentioned appear. Claire Skinner’s admirably unfazed mother-of-two Madge Arwell guides the disoriented and visually impaired (by his on-backwards suit helmet, here we go) Doctor back to his TARDIS – crashing a car (a women drivers joke? I’m not sure about this…) and seeing him walk into a lamppost in the process. I understand playing up to the kids, but I can’t help feeling slightly uncomfortable at brazen slapstick in the writing and direction. “Unfazed” is certainly what I wasn’t upon seeing Alexander Armstrong’s bomber pilot husband Reg delivering the immortally corny line, “Tell him… tell him we’re going home for Christmas” while struggling to control his Lancaster over the channel - in fact I felt like doing a coffee spit-take immediately after my brain appended “’n’ shit” to his speech, then immediately felt guilty as I knew where the story was going.

But then we see some true Moffat/Smith collaboration. Moffat’s joy in writing for the Eleventh Doctor clearly shines through in the tour sequence of the Dorset manor to which Madge and her children Lily and Cyril are evacuated three years later. Curiously, I was kept expecting something sinister for minutes as a certain shot of young Cyril looked like it was foreshadowing the significance of a Hobbit hole in the bank behind him, but this was soon forgotten in the bustle of Matt Smith’s enthusiasm. I’m sure we’ll all be claiming our hammocks are faulty for years to come. This gently if quickly defuses into a heartfelt conversation between the Doctor and Madge on the subject of her having kept news of Reg’s death from the kids to save their Christmas – exhibiting Moffat’s unnerving ability to give pin-sharp emotional advice.

"Hey, Cyril, looks like this is the compensation you get for wearing those ridiculous glasses." © BBC 2011

A fairly solid bit of plot development leads to the expected Narnia parallel of Cyril climbing through a mysterious glowing Christmas present to find a snowy forest beyond – with naturally-occurring baubles that hatch into wood aliens. So far, so Who. A bit of Doctory bumbling as he follows with Lily, some exposition, the golden line “this is one of the safest planets I know, there's never anything dangerous here-- there are sentences I should just keep away from”, and we’re off. But what’s this? Madge has stumbled into the wood too, and our celebrity cameos are cued, with Bill Bailey, Arabella Weir and that anaesthetist off Green Wing turning up and holding her at gunpoint. They’re apparently from Androzani Major (a reference to the original series that went straight over my head), and in five minutes the entire forest will be melted down to fuel sludge by artificial acid rain. But first, an amusing scene (that I genuinely did find quite funny even if I talk about it in a flippant manner) of bumbling (something Bailey is normally king of) with a detector that can’t tell the difference between wool and weaponry, a women’s rights protest in a hostage situation, and a turning of the worm when Madge holds up her own interrogation by bursting into tears – and then pulls a pistol on the miners.

After a nice sentimental scene with the Doctor’s observation that to cry with happiness is a very human trait (this becomes relevant later), and a bit of shaky acting by Weir and Bailey explaining the situation to Madge inside their mech walker, the Doctor and Lily have found Cyril at the top of a highly Mystesque tower made of growing trees, being crowned by a king and queen made of wood. Now the second main part of the story emerges – the trees have souls that are trying to escape before the forest is burned, and they want to use Cyril as a lifeboat. The Doctor assumes responsibility as the most advanced being in the room, but is perplexed at being rejected for lacking ‘strength’. With the clock ticking, Madge stomps over in the miners’ walker (crashing it, of course), and the properties of being female and a mother (pangs of RTD-era sentimentalist writing here) make her the best choice to save the trees.

So, logically, she absorbs the shiny souls, then pilots the snowglobe they’re sitting in off the top of the tower and into the vortex – with some wrapping up, she steers them home by thinking of her husband, but can’t stop her thoughts straying to his death. The Doctor encourages her to hold onto the good thoughts of Reg until they crash land on the lawn at home – but wait! As Madge confirms the truth to her children and apologises for keeping them in the dark, the Doctor finds him (and his Lancaster) waiting outside, having been guided home by Madge’s capsule. Well, it had to end happily, didn’t it? Though it’d be nice to know what happened to Anderson and the other chap, Steven…

Fortunately, it’s not quite the end. For me, the best part of the episode stands here. Remember where we left Series 6? The Doctor, inside the Teselecta, whispers to River to look into his eye at their wedding – allowing her to shoot his Teselecta copy on the shore of Lake Silencio and thus trick the Universe into thinking he’s dead, saving time itself? Simple. Back in the attic in Dorset, Madge Arwell convinces the Doctor he should visit his friends – who shouldn’t think he’s dead at Christmas time. At the Ponds’ front door two years after his ‘death’, he doesn’t get the reaction he’s expecting – River’s “a good girl” and told Amy and Rory over drinks after her little jaunt on the Byzantium! She reveals there’s always a place set for him at the Christmas table, ya big lug, and he’s welcome to join them. With a tear in his humany-wumany eye, Eleven bids this highly respectable (but still not as good as last year's) Christmas episode a snowy farewell until Autumn 2012 and Series 7.