15 – New Series Two: Ncuti Gatwa

Joy To The World – 2024 Christmas Special

This has an interesting premise. There is a Time Hotel a few thousand years into the future (4202) where each door leads into a different point in Earth history. One of those points in history is a hotel room in London in 2024, at Christmas, and a lady named Joy checks in to the hotel and gets this room. Meanwhile, The Doctor lands his TARDIS in the lobby of the Time Hotel, and notices a Man checking in who is dressed in a suit and has a briefcase chained to his wrist. This seems suspicious, so The Doctor decides to investigate. He goes from room to room looking for clues, I suppose, though it isn’t clear that he is doing anything at all useful, but the rooms he visits prove useful later in the plot.

Meanwhile, the briefcase seems to have a mind of its own, and arranges to be transferred from one person to another, and each time says it “upgrading access”. But the problem is that the previous custodian of the briefcase always dies after this transfer. And as soon as a new custodian takes over they say “The star seed shall bloom, and the flesh will rise.” Eventually the Briefcase, The Doctor, and Joy all meet in the hotel room that Joy rented, and Joy ends up attached to the suitcase. The Doctor attempts to separate her from the suitcase, when a countdown starts, and a future version of The Doctor burst into the room to give them code to stop the countdown. It urns out that all of this was set in motion by Villengard, the evil arms merchant that has appeared in several prior stories, and they plan to use the contents of the briefcase, a Star Seed, to start a star. The problem is if it starts on Earth everyone burns up in the star. But this is a Christmas Story, after all, so what happens is that the star they create becomes the Star of Bethlehem.

This is not Moffat’s best story, but it has its elements of charm, even if the ending is a bit over the top. But it is really the germ of two stories, either of which could be developed in interesting ways. Ask yourself if it revolves around Joy, or Anita. I’d have liked more Anita, in fact.

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The Robot Revolution

The whole purpose of this episode is to introduce a new companion played by Varada Sethu. She is Belinda Chandra, a nurse, but we’ve seen her before in the Series 1 episode Boom where she played the Episcopalian soldier Mundy Flynn. And this is explicitly brought out in this story as Flynn is a 51st century descendant of Chandra, and that is a mystery that the Doctor has to uncover. In this story, we see a setup where a teenage Chandra receives a gift from her nerdy, but controlling boyfriend Alan. It is a star named for her, called Missbelindachandra. He proposes to her, but she rebuffs him. 17 years later a spaceship lands, and robots kidnap her with the purpose of making her their queen on a planet in the same star system as Missbelindachandra. The Doctor is just a minute too late, and we again see Mrs. Flood, who is of course Belinda’s neighbor, and Mrs. Flood again breaks the fourth wall by talking to us directly.

On the planet, She is told that not only is she their queen, but she is to marry the AI that controls the robots, and she has no say in this. The Doctor pops up again as the Historian on this planet, and part of a rebel gang. There is another mystery here, which is that the robots and the humans collaborated peacefully until 10 years ago when this AI showed up. Now the human rebels are being hunted by the robots. And Belinda Chandra realizes that she is the key and surrenders to the robots if they will stop hunting the humans, and she will go peacefully to be “married’/joined to the AI. But in so doing, she defeats it. And we learn that it isn’t AI at, it is “Al”, i.e., her teenage boyfriend Alan, getting his revenge for her spurning his proposal years ago.

The cliffhanger end comes when something is preventing the TARDIS from returning to the time that Belinda originally left, and that leaves something to be worked out later.

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Lux

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The Well

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Lucky Day

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The Story & the Engine

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The Interstellar Song Contest

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Wish World

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The Reality War

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