Doctor Who - "The Doctor, the Widow, and the Wardrobe"

Season 6, Episode 14

“No one should be alone on Christmas Eve.”

Perhaps the greatest thing about the Eleventh Doctor era is the fact that Matt Smith’s whimsical performance has freed up the show to be more childish than it has in long time, to engage in more fanciful type of storytelling that is generally rejected by modern science-fiction. The greatest example of this obviously lies with the Christmas specials, wherein Steven Moffat has allowed the show to treat Christmas not just as an event, but as an actual thing, both in the physical sense and (more importantly) in the emotional as well.

Under the guidance of Russell T. Davies, Doctor Who was essential to the rise of the Christmas special, as more and more shows have jumped on the bandwagon in the past five years or so. (There were already plenty of show engaged in this tradition before the show’s reboot, but DW caused it to blow up in a huge way.) However, in the Davies-written Christmas specials, much like those of many other shows, the Christmas aspect was mostly tangential to the actual story, if it was even present as at all. As the “Best of the Christmas Specials” feature (which aired both Saturday night and  again after the Christmas Special) reminded us, Christmas was mostly a backdrop for some terrible force to invade the earth, and rarely did this factor into the actions in a significant way. (The most Christmas-y of the Davies era was probably “The Next Doctor” and even that connection wasn’t particularly solid.)

Moffat’s Christmas specials, by comparison, absolutely revel in the holiday and the accompanying emotions. Moffat allowed the Doctor to travel beyond Earth to locations where Christmas wasn’t just an event, but a state of mind. It of course helped that Moffat’s two Christmas episodes borrowed liberally from past literature (and that they acknowledged this fact), but it was more about populating the episodes with people and ideas that just exude the Christmas spirit. This is what made last year’s “A Christmas Carol” such a spectacular breath of fresh air, and what made “The Doctor, The Widow and the Wardrobe” pale in comparison.

The thing about Christmas specials, at least when it comes to Doctor Who, is that they are so stranded from whatever the ongoing narrative is – both in terms of the storytelling being done, and in the calendar position – that we tend to forgive the show when they give us a outing that we would consider slight. During a normal season of the show, especially in the Moffat era, it’s become fairly commonplace to think of the serialized episodes as high quality and the standalones ones as lesser, and while this isn’t anything unique to Who, it is odd to remark how a show that used to be so good at doing standalone episodes sort of left them by the wayside.

To that end, I don’t want to pretend that “Wardrobe” wasn’t a good episode, or that I didn’t enjoy my time watching it, but I don’t think it held up as well as “Carol” for a number of reasons. The first and foremost was that that unlike in “Carol”, “Wardrobe” didn’t stick as much to its original source material. Now, I recognize that “Carol” itself didn’t follow the plot of the Dickens classic all that thoroughly either, but at least it had a thematic throughline that it could easily ape, and that kept things moving along fairly nicely. “Wardrobe”, on the other hand, read like a mishmash of a few different tales, not only of Lewis’ work, but also of the traditional “family in peril” drama, some World War II historical fiction, and a plotline that I’m pretty sure I once saw in an episode of Captain Planet. Matt Smith’s performance is usually one of controlled chaos, and it should make sense that an episode is such as well, but I think it lessened the impact of any one of these angles, and they didn’t mesh into a whole as well as I would have liked.

The same could be said for the characters. Though Clair Skinner has been good in a large number of things – most recently Outnumbered – this episode failed to make use of her skills at nuance, and instead had her play a frustratingly typical and quite offensive mother type. (She can’t drive! She goes crazy when her children are in danger! She irrationally lies! She can’t seem to keep her life together!) The kids weren’t much better, as Cyril barely registered as anything other than a Macguffin, and while Lilly could have been a more fleshed out temporary companions (as well as a throwback to classic Who where there was a greater age disparity between Doctor and companion), the needs of the overstuffed hour meant that she didn’t get the proper amount of screen time to make the needed impact. (This is say nothing of the three soldiers who, while quite funny, probably didn’t need as much screen time to serve their role in moving the plot along.)

But then we come to that ending, and it’s almost impossible not to grade the entire episode on a curve because of it. (Rising tides and whatnot.) I said above that Doctor Who Christmas specials tend not to revel in continuity, and that’s always been the case in a purely plot-sense meaning of the term. (Again, there’s the exception with the two part “The End of Time”, but even that was coming off a string of non-connected holiday specials, and dealt with a character we hadn’t seen in two and a half years.) But, even dating back to the Davies era, the specials has always tried to keep the emotional evolution of the Doctor in mind, as each special tried to end with some sort of reminder of the intricacies of the peculiar, multi-faceted personality that the Doctor had developed in his 900 years of time travel. During the Davies era, these moments always felt a bit undercooked, mostly because he failed to make it enough of a recurring thematic thread, and thus they felt more like tacked-on after thoughts than actual bits of developed plot.

Moffat, however, has done a much better job of developing that through-line, to the extent that most episodes have dealt (either directly or indirectly) that the Doctor often causes pain and despair to those he encounters, and while sometimes does so accidentally, other times he’s just a cold-hearted bastard about the whole thing. It’s the reason he left Amy, Rory, and River at the end of the season, and the reason that he was convinced that he couldn’t help Madge fly the ship back to her time. He’s an old and weary traveler, and all those jaunts through space, time, and space-time have caused him to lose those more empathic sides of himself.

Or have they? The closing minutes, wherein the Doctor returns to Amy and Rory and realizes that they still set a place for him at the dinner table, confident in his eventual return, were tear-jerking for both the Doctor and the audience, but I think it’s more important than just the emotional reaction. Though the show has gone through ebbs and flows of making the Doctor softer, less aloof, more likeable (mostly in relation to each of the regeneration), this is perhaps the first time in the shows history where it has been explicitly stated that companions are causing a significant change in the way the Doctor acts and thinks. There’s no telling where this road will lead eventually, or that this change won’t be erased with the next generation, but Steven Moffat should be applauded for making the Doctor more, well, humany-wumany.

Quotes and Other Thoughts:

“It’s astronomy.” “Don’t make up words.”

“Okay, suddenly the last 900 years of time travel seem a lot less secure.”

“I’ll take your bags.” “Thank you.” “You’ll need to carry those. I have to show you the house.”

“I’m called the Doctor. Or the Caretaker. Or ‘Get off this planet.’ Although strictly speaking that isn’t a nickname.”

“This hammock has developed a fault.”

“You were lying about the panthers.” “Famous last words.”

“Why would you rewire a wardrobe?” “Have you seen the way I dress?”

“Fairyland? Oh, grow up Lilly. Fairyland looks completely different.”

“It’s that tree alive?” “Of course it’s alive, it’s a tree.”

“There are sentences I should just keep away from.”

“Please say we can tell the difference between wool and side arms.”

“Ma’am, please stop crying. I can’t interrogate you while you’re crying.”

“Do what I do: Hold tight and pretend it’s a plan.”