Abigail Pettigrew

Doing Dickens straight would have been the obvious move for a Doctor Who Christmas special, and I think a bad one. What A Christmas Carol does instead is take the actual structure of the book, past, present and future, a hard man softened, and hand it to somebody with a time machine, so the ghosts are real and the visits leave marks. The last time the show went near Dickens it put the man himself in a haunted Cardiff funeral parlour in The Unquiet Dead, and this is a completely different trick. I loved it. For me it’s the best Christmas special the show has produced, and it’s the first one that feels like it’s genuinely about something rather than a big romp with tinsel on it. It still has all the Christmas stuff, the snow and the carols and a sleigh, it just has a point as well.

Amy and Rory are on honeymoon, which after the wedding at the end of The Big Bang they’ve thoroughly earned, and their starliner is falling out of the sky. They’re barely in the episode, mind, and that’s my one real complaint. Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill spend most of it on a shuddering flight deck, Amy in a policewoman’s outfit and Rory back in his centurion’s kit, for reasons the episode cheerfully declines to explain, relaying the passenger count over a comms link. 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 pretty much scenery, which is a shame after how good they were together through the back half of the series. I’d have liked even one scene where they actually get to do something.

Sardicktown and the man who owns the sky

The ship is caught in the cloud belt of a human colony world, and the clouds aren’t 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 that never once tips over into ham. He owns the sky. He also owns a vault full of people, frozen as living collateral against family debts, and he’s entirely unbothered by four thousand strangers dying overhead. When a family begs him for their frozen relative at Christmas he refuses on principle and goes back to his ledger, and you believe he’s been doing exactly that for decades. Gambon gets so much out of a single tired look.

The setting is gorgeous, a sort of Victorian colony town under a fog full of fish, actual fish swimming through the cloud layer, some of them very large ones with teeth. The town is even called Sardicktown, which tells you everything about who runs the place. It’s the kind of detail that could be twee and instead just makes the world feel properly alien, and I’d happily have spent another hour there. There’s a shark in this episode. There’s a shark pulling a sleigh over the rooftops, eventually, and the show plays it completely straight, which is the only way something that daft could ever work. It looks like a lot of money went on this one, and it shows in every frame of that town, the snow, the lamps and the big tower in the middle humming away and keeping the sky locked down.

Rewriting a man

The Doctor’s solution is the big idea and it’s a beauty. If this man can’t be reasoned with, go back and make him a different man. So he does. He drops into Kazran’s childhood on Christmas Eve after Christmas Eve, befriends the frightened boy, takes him out to catch a 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. He remembers things he didn’t remember thirty seconds ago. It’s superb television, and for a good while the show plays it for wonder rather than horror, with Matt Smith at his most likeable, the Doctor as a chaotic uncle arriving through a bedroom window and treating a child’s misery as an engineering problem. It’s funny, too, which I hadn’t expected from the setup.

But the episode is quietly honest about what he’s actually doing, which is rewriting a person without asking to get what he wants. Nobody says it out loud. They don’t need to, you can see it, and I liked that the show trusted me to notice rather than having somebody spell it out in a speech. The mechanics are handled really well too. The Doctor doesn’t sit old Kazran down and explain the procedure, he just plays him a recording and lets the man watch himself pick up a childhood he never had. And it dodges the obvious version where the new memories wipe out the old ones. Kazran keeps both. He remembers being loved and he remembers being hit by his father, and Gambon plays a man holding two lives in his head at once 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, and it’s charming, right up until the Doctor notices the counter on her casket. It isn’t a debt tally. It’s days. She’s ill, she has a fixed and very small number of days left, and every one they spend together is one she’ll never get back. So Kazran stops, and not out of cruelty but out of the opposite. He can’t bear to use up her last day, so he never opens the casket again, and he goes hard and cold and bitter across the decades because the alternative is saying goodbye. Watching the boy do that sum in his head is hard going.

That’s a magnificent inversion of the Dickens machinery. The Doctor set out to make a miser kind, and the kindness is what breaks him, because softening a man doesn’t automatically make him good, it just gives him something to lose. It’s the same thing the show did so painfully with Van Gogh in Vincent and the Doctor, that you can add something wonderful to a life and not change the ending. Katherine Jenkins is rather better than she needs to be, too. Abigail isn’t written with a lot going on inside her, she’s mostly there to be loved and to die on schedule, but Jenkins gives her a calm acceptance that stops the character turning into pure tragic decoration. She’s always known how many days she has, and she’s the only one in the story who’s been at peace with it from the start.

The boy in the doorway

The resolution is properly clever. Old Kazran, memories thoroughly rewritten, still won’t work the machine, so the Doctor brings the boy forward to look at what he grew into. The old man raises a hand, sees a terrified child flinching from him exactly the way he once flinched from his own father, and it destroys him. Gambon’s face in that moment carries the whole special. And then the machine refuses him anyway, because it’s keyed to him and he is, by now, a measurably different person. The Doctor’s meddling has worked so well that the lock no longer recognises the man it was built for, which is really satisfying, because the solution and the obstacle turn out to be the same thing. The way it folds the time travel back into the Dickens is the bit I keep thinking about.

Which leaves Abigail, on her last day, singing into the machine so the cloud belt settles and the ship can land. She spends the day she was saving on four thousand people she’ll never meet, and the show lets that be both beautiful and unbearably sad rather than picking one. Then the snow comes down on Sardicktown for the first time in years and the two of them head off in the shark-drawn sleigh for one last Christmas Eve, and the whole town looks like a Christmas card. It’s comfortably the saddest thing this show has done at Christmas, and the cleverest, and I didn’t expect to come away from a Christmas special with a lump in my throat.

Rating: 4.5/5. It loses half a mark only because Amy and Rory are barely in it. Best one yet.