Funny, sad and bonkers. This year's Doctor Who special had it all.
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| Merry Christmas, River. (Image copyright: BBC) |
If my eyes
weren’t so overloaded Christmas cheer that I was hallucinating, in the title
sequence of this year’s Doctor Who special
there were spinning Christmas tree decorations replacing
the usual planets, as well as a snow-covered TARDIS. It was a lovely touch that
heralded arguably the most Christmassy of all the Doctor Who specials, as well as developing the theme of last year’s
festive outing, that we should make the most of the people we love because they
won’t always be around.
Steven
Moffat always delivers a good Christmas yarn when he mines the vein of melancholy
behind the tinsel in seasonal fiction, the stand-out template for that being A Christmas Carol, which he did the Doctor Who version of in 2010. Not
surprising really, as that and Frank Capra’s movie It’s a Wonderful Life, the other perennial Christmas favourite, are
both time travel stories in disguise. Pleasingly that remained the case here,
with the gradual realisation that here we were seeing the final reel of the
Doctor’s relationship with River Song (the always watchable Alex Kingston).
Before that
all came into focus in the final third, we were treated to the
crash-bang-wallop of a bonkers story that can easily stand side by side with
any of the family-friendly epics by Dreamworks on telly over the holiday. A
giant robot that collects different heads, one of which belongs to King Hydroflax
(lovable Greg Davies, the second actor in Doctor
Who this year to channel his inner Blessed), which has ‘the most valuable diamond
in the universe’ lodged in its cranium. Add in the comedy of River not recognising
the Doctor because he’s only supposed to have 12 regenerations and you’ve got
quite a festive frolic. Amid all the romping around, explosions and shouting, it
was a shame that more wasn’t made of the great, dark idea of a space liner ‘where
[genocidal criminals go] to kick back and relax.’ What a line, though.
This was
probably the funniest Christmas special, with excellent visual and verbal
jokes. My favourite was Hydroflax being a piss take of those old-fashioned Doctor Who villains who made constantly
unfulfilled threats. Removed from his robot Transformer body and stuffed in a
holdall, Hydroflax’s bullying became progressively sillier until the Doctor
burst out laughing because he was ‘being threatened by a bag.’ A memorable
conceit, too, was the way the Doctor kept jumping the TARDIS forward along the
timeline of the restaurant opposite the Singing Towers, from giving a local the
idea to build it to his last night there with River.
Really, though, if ‘The Husbands of
River Song’ was worth watching for anything it was the interplay between the
Doctor/Capaldi and River/Kingston. Which brings us back to that underlying
sadness. The Time Lord’s curse is that he knows nothing lasts and,
impressively, the final scenes were the pay-off of a story stretching back eight
years, a long story arc even for Doctor
Who. In his life like crazy paving, the Doctor also sometimes has the
heart-breaking knowledge of when people’s time is up, and his 24-year night
with River was her last stop before 2008’s ‘Silence in the Library’. Capaldi’s
so good by now that he can do the gravitas just by raising an eyebrow, so it
was good to see him cut loose in the comedy antlers scene, as well as the
classic ‘It’s bigger on the inside!’ sequence where, happily for us, he was
allowed to ham it up outrageously. And Capaldi has got the chops for romance,
too: his reaction to River slowly realising who he was was rather beautiful.
The frenetic mood changes were expertly
handled by director Douglas Mackinnon. He also made ‘The Husbands of River
Song’ look great, from the human colony planet that looked like an idealised
Christmas version of your own high street, via River's red flying saucer to the must-have toy-in-waiting Hydroflax.
Funny, melancholy, intense and totally mad. No
wonder Doctor Who works so well on
Christmas Day.
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