Doctor Who: Joy to the World review – a warm, moving Christmas special for the ages

Yesterday at 01:10 PM

Nicola Coughlan and Ncuti Gatwa's comic timing is impeccable, but it's the touching way this festive episode grapples with yuletide isolation that makes it a classic

There are so many things to love about Christmas: twinkly lights, desserts to set on fire and, of course, Doctor Who specials. But while I am in cheerful mood, wearing a Christmas jumper and having followed breakfast with advent-calendar chocolates, I am aware that for many people this is the loneliest time of year. So it is for Joy (Nicola Coughlan), the new addition to the Doctor Who family, whom we meet checking into a spartan hotel room by herself for a week over the festive period. Fortunately, she is about to make a new friend in the form of the Doctor, who enters her room in pursuit of a green-skinned alien from the future, grinning from ear to ear as he offers her "a cheese toastie and a pumpkin latte".

While Ncuti Gatwa's first Christmas special, The Church on Ruby Road, was a delightful proper introduction to the show's radiant new star (previously, he had briefly appeared in The Giggle, starring David Tennant), the stakes on that outing were markedly lower. In Joy to the World, rather than being tasked with rescuing a baby from pop-singing goblins, the Doctor is trying to prevent the end of planet Earth – though explaining what he is saving it from would enter serious spoiler territory. Suffice to say that most of the action takes place over the festive season in London in 4202, where residents of a glitzy hotel can visit key moments in history, chasing up their mulled wine with a trip on the Orient Express in 1926, or to Everest's base camp in 1953 or, for some bizarre reason, the London blitz. Joy's present-day Christmas interruption escalates quickly and the only way to buy the pair enough time to stop the apocalypse leaves the Doctor trapped in London for a year while Joy is in 4202 with his future self.