The Snowmen: The Same Woman, Twice

A Christmas special with a genuinely sour Doctor in it is a rare thing, and for its first twenty minutes “The Snowmen” is the best kind of uncomfortable: a story about a man who has quit. He’s parked the TARDIS on a cloud above Victorian London, pulled up the ladder, and told everyone who comes asking that he doesn’t do that any more. He means it, too. Watching Matt Smith play the Doctor as a sulking recluse who’s actively annoyed by the arrival of a plot is a lot more interesting to me than the plot he eventually gets. It’s also the episode that resets the show, with new titles and a new console room and a new coat and a new companion, and it does all of that while telling a small ghost story about snow that learns.

Retired

Losing the Ponds in The Angels Take Manhattan has done more damage than any previous departure, and the episode is unsentimental about how that looks from outside. It isn’t noble grief, just a man being rude to people who need help. Madame Vastra, Jenny Flint and Strax have been keeping an eye on him, and their exasperation is the funniest thing in the special. The Paternoster Gang were assembled as a one-off favour in A Good Man Goes to War and they work far better here as a standing arrangement, a Silurian detective, her wife, and a Sontaran butler who keeps offering to kill people and is repeatedly told no. Strax is broad, and occasionally too broad, but Dan Starkey’s timing is excellent and the memory worm sequence is the best sustained gag of the year.

Vastra’s one-word test is the other standout for me. It’s an interrogation conducted through a veil, in single words, in which Clara has to prove she’s worth the Doctor’s time, and it ends by handing him a word that isn’t about the case at all. Clara says Pond, meaning the frozen one in the garden with a dead governess in it, and it lands on him like a slap. It’s a lovely piece of writing, and it works because we’ve just watched him lose them.

This is also where the show quietly refits itself. There’s a new title sequence with the Doctor’s face restored to the vortex after decades away, a new arrangement of the theme, and a new console room, darker and more metallic, more machine and less coral, replacing an interior that had been in place since the Eleventh Hour. The Doctor gets a new costume too, a longer coat and a waistcoat, and the tweed goes. It’s a lot of housekeeping to do in one special, and the reason it doesn’t feel like housekeeping is that all of it is motivated. A man who has retired redecorates, and after hiding from the universe once already in The Wedding of River Song, you can believe he’d do it again.

Snow that remembers

The threat is decent, if a little thin. Snow is falling that didn’t come from anywhere, and it learns, taking an impression from the people near it and reproducing it. Snowmen with teeth appear because a lonely boy imagined them that way, and a governess who drowned in a frozen pond is being reconstituted as the template for an ice army. Richard E. Grant is very good as Dr Simeon, a man who’s been talking to a snow globe since childhood and has become something considerably colder than the thing he serves. The Great Intelligence, voiced by Ian McKellen as something patient, plummy and entirely without hurry, is a smart choice for a returning classic-series villain, mostly because the show declines to explain the reference and simply lets it be a very old thing that’s been waiting. The special looks tremendous doing it, all gaslight and frost, and another Doctor Who fan site had a second opinion on the special that’s worth a look if you want a different angle.

It helps that the Great Intelligence isn’t new to the show. It first turned up in the Yeti stories of the late sixties, where it was a disembodied thing looking for a body, and “The Snowmen” gives it exactly what it’s always wanted: a cold, patient, quietly menacing host in Simeon and a shape made of snow. If you know the old stories there’s a small thrill in that, and if you don’t, you still get a creepy voice in a glass globe saying it’s been waiting for a very long time. Either way the special doesn’t waste a word of explanation on it, which is the right call for a Christmas Day audience.

The household Clara works in earns its space too. Captain Latimer is a widower who can’t speak to his own children, and the children, one of whom is having the nightmares the snow is feeding on, have effectively been raising themselves since their mother died. It’s sketched fast, but it gives the ice something real to work with: a house where nobody says anything, a governess drowned in the pond outside, and a small girl who wants her back. The special is smart enough to make the emotional weather and the actual weather the same problem.

The resolution is the wobbly part. The ice is defeated by a family crying, salt water en masse undoing the crystalline structure, and while the episode plants it fairly the execution amounts to grief melting it, which is exactly the Christmas-special logic you’d hope this particular episode was too grumpy to reach for. I can forgive it, because the story around it is doing so much more interesting work with the Doctor himself, but it’s the part I’d tighten if I could.

Clara, twice

None of which is why anyone remembers this one. Jenna-Louise Coleman plays a barmaid in Victorian London who is also, on alternate days and in a different accent and dress, a governess in a wealthy household, a woman leading two lives for no reason she’s willing to explain and enjoying both enormously. She’s quick, nosy, and completely undeterred by a man who doesn’t want to be spoken to. Within a scene she’s climbed an invisible staircase into a cloud, which is roughly the correct way to introduce a companion to this Doctor. And she dies. She falls from the cloud during the fight, and she dies on the ground in a Victorian street with the Doctor holding her hand, and her last words are the ones he’s heard before: run, you clever boy, and remember.

I also want to give Coleman credit for how she plays the double act. The barmaid is loud, cheeky and a bit rougher round the edges, while the governess is polished and careful, and the switch between them is done with a change of voice and a straightening of the shoulders, nothing more. It tells you everything about the character in about two scenes: she’s someone who wants more than one life and has the energy to live both. After the Ponds’ long goodbye, that kind of restless energy is exactly what the show needed to put in front of this Doctor.

The gravestone

Then he reads the gravestone. Clara Oswin Oswald. Which means the girl in the Dalek Asylum, Oswin Oswald, who deleted him from the pathweb and made the same joke and said the same sentence in Asylum of the Daleks, was this woman, or a version of her, a thousand years in the other direction. The same face, the same name rearranged, the same last words. Dead twice, in two centuries, in two entirely incompatible circumstances. It’s the best possible engine for a mystery box, because the Doctor’s reaction isn’t grief, it’s delight. The retirement evaporates in about four seconds and he’s off, because for the first time since a graveyard in New York there’s something in the universe he doesn’t understand and wants to.

That’s a smart, slightly ruthless piece of characterisation. The thing that gets him out of mourning isn’t a person needing help, it’s a puzzle, and I think that tells you a great deal about him. Then comes the coda, in a modern graveyard, with a woman who looks exactly like her walking past her own headstone, and I’ll admit I wanted to see the next episode right then.

Rating: 4/5. Funny, cold, handsomely mounted and much sharper about its lead character than a Christmas special needs to be, with an introduction for Clara that does in fifty minutes what most companions get a season to establish. The snow plot is slight and the tears-defeat-the-ice resolution is soft, but the framing is excellent and the last five minutes reset the whole show.

Who do you think Clara really is, and did the same-woman-twice reveal work for you as a hook? Tell me in the comments.