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 has 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 is actively annoyed by the arrival of a plot is a lot more interesting 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. Not 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: an interrogation conducted through a veil, in single words, in which Clara has to prove she’s worth the Doctor’s time. It’s a lovely piece of writing, and it ends by handing the Doctor 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.
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.
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 has 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 has been waiting. Den of Geek was right that the special looks tremendous doing it, all gaslight and frost.
The household Clara works in earns its space too. Captain Latimer is a widower who cannot 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, since 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.
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 is quick, nosy, and completely undeterred by a man who does not want to be spoken to. Within a scene she has 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.
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 is something in the universe he doesn’t understand and wants to. That’s a smart, slightly ruthless piece of characterisation, and the AV Club picked up on it too: the thing that gets him out of mourning isn’t a person needing help, it’s a puzzle. Then comes the coda, in a modern graveyard, with a woman who looks exactly like her walking past her own headstone.
What it leaves behind is a Doctor who quit, not grieving nobly but actively unhelpful, living above the clouds and telling people to go away, which is a genuinely uncomfortable place to start a Christmas special. It leaves the Paternoster Gang promoted from a favour to a fixture, and considerably funnier for it. It leaves the one-word test, and the word “Pond” arriving like a punch he wasn’t braced for. It leaves the Great Intelligence, an old patient thing given Ian McKellen’s voice and no explanation whatsoever, which will be back. And it leaves the same woman twice, Oswin in the Asylum and Clara in the snow with the same last words in both, and a man who doesn’t mourn her so much as chase her, which tells you a great deal about him.
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. She said it in a Dalek and she said it in the snow, and both times she died saying it. Run, you clever boy. He’s running.