Doing Dickens straight would have been the obvious move and a bad one. What “A Christmas Carol” does instead is take the actual structure of the book, past, present, future, a hard man softened, and hand it to somebody with a time machine, so that the ghosts are real and the visits leave marks. It’s the best Christmas special the show has produced, and it’s the first one that’s genuinely about something.
Amy and Rory are on honeymoon, which after the wedding at the end of The Big Bang they have thoroughly earned, and their galaxy-class starliner is falling out of the sky. They’re barely in the episode, mind, which is its one real complaint. Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill spend most of the runtime on a shuddering flight deck in fancy dress, still wearing costumes from the wedding reception for reasons the script cheerfully declines to explain, relaying the passenger count over a comms link, and the story has no genuine use for either of them beyond a ticking clock. This is the Doctor’s episode and Kazran’s, and the regulars are effectively scenery. The ship is caught in the cloud belt of a human colony world, and the clouds are not weather, they’re a controlled system, and the man with the controls won’t switch them off. Kazran Sardick is a moneylender and a miser, and Michael Gambon plays him with a wonderful, weary cruelty. He owns the sky. He also owns a vault full of people, frozen as living collateral against family debts, and he is entirely unbothered by four thousand strangers dying overhead, and when a family begs him for their frozen relative at Christmas he refuses on principle and goes back to his ledger. The setting is gorgeous, a Victorian-ish colony town under a fog full of fish, actual fish swimming through the cloud layer, occasionally very large ones with teeth. It’s the sort of detail that could be twee and instead just makes the world feel properly alien.
Rewriting a man
The Doctor’s solution is the episode’s central conceit and it’s a beauty: if this man cannot be reasoned with, go back and make him a different man. So he does. He drops into Kazran’s childhood on successive Christmas Eves, befriends the frightened boy, takes him out to catch a sky-fish, and keeps coming back, and old Kazran, sitting in his chair in the present, watches his own memories rearrange themselves as they happen. New recollections arrive mid-sentence. A photograph on his desk changes. He remembers things he didn’t remember thirty seconds ago. It’s a superb piece of television, and the show plays it for wonder rather than horror for a good while, with Matt Smith at his most likeable, the Doctor as a chaotic uncle arriving through a fireplace with a shark in tow, treating a child’s misery as an engineering problem. But the episode is quietly honest about what he’s actually doing, which is rewriting a person without consent to get what he wants. Nobody says it out loud. They don’t need to. You can see it.
The mechanics are handled with real elegance as well. The Doctor doesn’t sit old Kazran down and explain the procedure, he simply hands him a recording and lets the man watch himself acquire a childhood he never had. And the show resists the obvious version in which the new memories overwrite the old ones. Kazran keeps both. He remembers being loved and he remembers being beaten by his father, and Gambon plays a man holding two incompatible lives in his head simultaneously without either one cancelling the other out.
Abigail
And then the twist that lifts the whole thing. In the vault is Abigail Pettigrew, frozen against a debt, and young Kazran falls in love with her. Every Christmas Eve they wake her, and the three of them go somewhere wonderful. It’s charming, and then the Doctor notices the counter on her casket, and it isn’t a debt tally. It’s days. She is dying, she has a fixed and very small number of days left, and every single one they spend together is one she will never get back. So Kazran stops, and not out of cruelty but out of the opposite: he cannot bear to spend her last day, so he never opens the casket again, and he becomes hard and cold and bitter across the decades because the alternative is saying goodbye.
That is a magnificent inversion of the Dickens machinery. The Doctor set out to make a miser kind, and the kindness is what breaks him. Softening a man doesn’t automatically make him good, it just gives him something to lose. It’s the same lesson the show delivered so painfully with Van Gogh in Vincent and the Doctor, that you can add something wonderful to a life and not change the ending.
The man he became
The resolution is properly clever. Old Kazran, memories thoroughly rewritten, still won’t work the machine, and then the Doctor brings the boy forward to look at what he grew into. The old man sees a terrified child flinching from him exactly as he once flinched from his own father, and it destroys him. And then the sky machine refuses him anyway, because it’s keyed to his biometric signature and he is, by now, a measurably different person. The Doctor’s meddling has worked so thoroughly that the lock no longer recognises the man it was built for, which is genuinely satisfying plotting, because the solution and the obstacle are the same act. Which leaves Abigail, on her last day, singing into a machine that resonates the cloud belt so the ship can land. She spends the day she was saving to save four thousand people she’ll never meet, and the show lets that be both beautiful and unbearably sad rather than picking one.
Katherine Jenkins is rather better than she needs to be, too. Abigail isn’t written with a great deal of interiority, existing largely to be loved and to die on schedule, but Jenkins gives her a calm, unfussed acceptance that stops the character tipping over into pure tragic ornament. She has always known exactly how many days she has left. She’s the only person in the entire story who has been at peace with it from the beginning, and she’s the one everybody else is busy protecting from a truth she worked out years ago.
What it leaves behind is Dickens with a time machine, ghosts that are real and leave fingerprints, the smartest possible way to adapt a story everyone already knows. It leaves memories changing live, Gambon reacting to his own past being edited in real time, the standout effect of the year and all of it performance. It leaves kindness with a cost, since making Kazran capable of love is precisely what makes him cruel, a far sharper idea than the redemption arc it’s dressed as. It leaves consent, unmentioned, because the Doctor rewrites a man’s entire life without asking in order to save a ship, and the episode notices and declines to comment, which is its own kind of comment. And it leaves Abigail’s last day, spent singing to a sky for strangers, the best-judged ending the show has managed at Christmas.
Rating: 4.5/5. Beautiful to look at, cleverly built and genuinely moving, with a central performance from Michael Gambon that carries the emotional weight effortlessly. Loses half a mark only because Amy and Rory are barely in it. Fish swimming through the fog, a shark pulling a sleigh over the rooftops, and a man who turned himself into a monster because he could not face a single goodbye. Comfortably the saddest thing this show has done at Christmas, and the cleverest. Best one yet.