A year off the air, and Doctor Who comes back with a superhero pastiche. Not a parody, a pastiche, played entirely straight, with a flying man in a cape, a plucky reporter who cannot recognise her friend once he removes his glasses, and a villain plotting from a skyscraper. It is the least ambitious thing the programme has done in some time and it is also, I think, exactly what this particular Doctor needed at this particular moment. There’s a reason he’s spending Christmas doing something this frivolous, and the special is quietly honest about it.
The boy who swallowed a gem
The setup is charming. A small boy in New York, up past midnight reading comics, finds the Doctor dangling outside his bedroom window rigging up a device. In the confusion he swallows a wish-fulfilment gem, and wishes, as he’s holding a comic, to be like the hero on the cover. Twenty-odd years later he’s Grant, a mild-mannered nanny with X-ray vision he’s deeply embarrassed about, moonlighting as a masked flyer called the Ghost. It’s a lovely, gentle joke: the show’s version of a superhero origin is a bureaucratic accident caused by the Doctor being careless with alien hardware, and the resulting hero is so anxious about the ethics of his own powers that he mostly uses them to fetch things and worry. Justin Chatwin plays Grant as decent to the point of paralysis, which is funnier and warmer than a square-jawed take would have been. The Superman riff is the whole architecture. Lucy is a journalist chasing the Ghost, Grant is her nanny and oldest friend, she has no idea they’re the same man, and the special gets a genuinely good extended gag out of her interviewing the Ghost on a rooftop while he panics about the baby monitor.
What’s cleverest about Grant is that the special takes his powers seriously as an ethical problem rather than a power fantasy. He can see through walls, and he has spent his adult life being careful not to, so the running anxiety is not whether he’ll be found out but whether it’s acceptable for him to know things people haven’t chosen to tell him. When he admits he’s used X-ray vision on Lucy, it’s played as a genuine transgression rather than a laugh, and it’s the thing he eventually gives up the cape over. That’s a more interesting note than most superhero stories bother with, and it fits this show, because the Doctor’s own recurring failure mode is deciding what other people are allowed to know for their own good. Grant, faced with the same temptation on a domestic scale, simply stops. The special doesn’t underline the parallel, which is why it works.
Nardole
The other business here is introducing a companion, and the special takes its time. Nardole was a bit part in a previous Christmas special, a head, mostly, and has now been reassembled into a whole person and installed as the Doctor’s minder. Matt Lucas plays him as fussy, cowardly and immovable, and the important thing is that he is not there to be impressed. He nags. He points out when the Doctor is avoiding something. He has clearly been given a job by somebody and intends to do it. That job, it turns out, is grief management. This Doctor has just spent twenty-four years on Darillium with River Song, the last night, the one he’d been putting off, and it has ended, and she is gone for good this time, in the direction that doesn’t come back. Nardole is here because somebody decided he shouldn’t be alone afterwards. Capaldi plays it very lightly, which is the right call. There’s no speech. There’s a man being deliberately, aggressively silly on a rooftop in New York, and a moment near the end where he admits, in about six words, that he isn’t over it and doesn’t expect to be.
Harmony Shoal, and the real ending
The plot is the weakest element and it isn’t trying very hard. Harmony Shoal are brain-swapping aliens who split their host’s skull open down the middle to move in, a good nasty image the special deploys three or four times and never builds on. Their scheme involves a corporation, a skyscraper, a spaceship, and replacing world leaders, and it is dispatched in the manner of a Christmas special: quickly, with a joke. What works is the tone. The special commits to the comic-book manner completely, with the New York rooftops and the score and the ludicrous ship hanging over the city, and treats it all with affection rather than irony. Doctor Who has always been a magpie, and a Christmas episode that borrows wholesale from Richard Donner’s Superman is a perfectly respectable thing to be. What doesn’t work is that there’s no urgency anywhere. The threat is generic, the stakes are announced rather than felt, and the special runs about ten minutes past its natural length. Charity Wakefield is better than the part deserves, too. Lucy could easily have been a Lois Lane impression, and instead she’s written as a genuinely good investigative journalist several steps ahead of everyone, having worked out the corporate conspiracy well before the Doctor arrives. The rooftop interview, in which she interrogates a superhero about his intentions while he tries not to drop a baby monitor, is the funniest sustained sequence of the special. The one thing she can’t see is the man in front of her, which is the joke the entire pastiche is built on.
The best scene arrives after the plot is done. Grant and Lucy get together, which requires him to give up being the Ghost, because he’s been using X-ray vision on a woman he loves and has finally worked out that this is not a heroic thing to do. The special lets him make that choice quietly and treats it as the most adult decision in the story. And the Doctor watches, and is happy for them, and leaves. Nardole’s closing observation is the sting: he points out, kindly, that the Doctor has spent the entire evening arranging somebody else’s happy ending because he can’t currently manage his own. That’s a good note to end a Christmas special on, and it sets up what follows in Smile and the rest of the run, a Doctor who has decided to stop travelling, park himself somewhere, and guard something. Whatever’s in the vault, he’s not going anywhere.
What it leaves behind is a superhero by clerical error, since Grant’s powers come from the Doctor being careless with alien tech near a child, which is a very Doctor Who origin story. It leaves Nardole properly, reassembled and installed as a minder and unimpressed by everything, a companion whose actual job is keeping an eye on the Doctor rather than following him. It leaves Darillium over, twenty-four years with River ended, mentioned twice and never lingered on, which is why it lands. It leaves skulls that open sideways, Harmony Shoal’s one good image, used three times and developed not at all. And it leaves somebody else’s happy ending, because he fixes a romance he has no stake in and Nardole names exactly why, which is the best beat in the hour.
Rating: 3/5. Warm, funny, handsomely made and entirely lacking in tension, with a plot that exists to hold the pastiche together and a villain nobody could describe a week later. It earns its place on the strength of Capaldi’s underplayed grief, a genuinely sweet central romance, and a companion introduction that does real work. Slight, but likeable. A boy swallowed a gem, grew up, and spent his life fetching things. And a very old man spent Christmas making sure somebody else got the ending he didn’t.