{"id":49138,"date":"2015-01-04T10:31:36","date_gmt":"2015-01-04T17:31:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2015\/01\/04\/on-the-doctor-who-christmas-special-2014.html"},"modified":"2015-01-04T10:31:36","modified_gmt":"2015-01-04T17:31:36","slug":"on-the-doctor-who-christmas-special-2014","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2015\/01\/04\/on-the-doctor-who-christmas-special-2014.html","title":{"rendered":"On the Doctor Who Christmas Special 2014"},"content":{"rendered":"

Having only gotten back to the DVR on Friday evening, we watched two things before calling it a night: the Doctor Who Christmas Special and the Stephen Colbert Series Finale — both of which involved Santa Claus …
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(Spoilers, Sweetie.)
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Okay, I enjoyed it. Actually enjoyed it a lot. A lot more than I thought I was going to during the trailers (Santa Claus got handled in an almost<\/del> entirely satisfactory manner). The whole Dicksian (vs Dickensian) "What is real? What is dream?" parts where handled extremely well. The monsters were creepy, the plotting was excellent, the characters well-done. Moffat was at the top of is episodic game this time out.<\/p>\n

Really, there were only few things I was dissatisfied about.<\/p>\n

1. It was still unclear to me why Santa Claus played such a major role in the Doctor's dream, given that there's no indication that St Nick also operates on Gallifrey.<\/p>\n

Or maybe it's that Santa is Clara (and the other humans' fault), and that just as the Dream Crabs drew the connection between the Doctor and Clara (which raises interesting questions about how they seek out and infect others), Santa was imposed on the Doctor (to the latter's resentment) by the humans. Yeah, that makes sense, esp. since the Doctor ran into Santa only after hooking back up with Clara.<\/p>\n

Okay, I withdraw that one.<\/p>\n

2. Dream Crabs. Creeeeepy. Nicely done. The one element left unmentioned \/ unresolved at the end is that there's at least one Dream Crab left on Earth, the one who successfully ate Turkey Leg Guy. Ah, well.<\/p>\n

Oh, heck — that means Moffat's going to go back to the well on this one, isn't he?<\/p>\n

3. Clara. Clara, Clara, Clara. Actually, I enjoyed Clara this outing. I liked the fact that she let herself be seduced (literally) by the dream. And the creepifying chalkboard scenes with her were nicely done.<\/p>\n

I disliked that we end up with Clara running off with the Doctor. Again. Or that the Doctor is so eager to have that happen. While the character has become slightly less annoying, I still have the feel that Capaldi really can't explore his character fully while still having the Impossible Girl along, turning it into the "Clara & the Doctor Show".<\/p>\n

Plus, we've now had more than enough opportunities for Clara Oswald to return to the masses of humanity (including a perfectly lovely 62-years-later sequence), which will make her eventual departure feel almost anticlimactic. <\/p>\n

I sort of liked Shona the Shop Girl, myself.<\/p>\n

Still, all in all, I liked it a lot. It did all the right "Doctor Who" things, especially for a Christmas special: sentimental without being mawkishly indulgent, fantastic without being hand-wavey, and a good opportunity for the Doctor to be both clever and (some of the time) fooled. Cleverly done, well-executed.<\/p>\n

(h\/t +<\/span>Doyce Testerman<\/a><\/span> for mentioning having just watched it, too, which reminded me to write this up.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n