13: Last Christmas

 

Writer: Steven Moffat

Director: Paul Wilmshurst

Originally Broadcast: 25 December 2014

 

Cast

 

The Doctor: Peter Capaldi

Clara: Jenna Coleman

Danny Pink: Samuel Anderson

Santa Claus: Nick Frost

Ian: Dan Starkey

Wolf: Nathan McMullen

Shona: Faye Marsay

Ashley: Natalie Gumede

 

Bellows: Maureen Beattie

Professor Albert: Michael Troughton

 

When writing about 2013’s Christmas special, The Time of the Doctor, I noted the rather strained attempts Steven Moffat made to give that story a “Christmassy” feel, and wondered whether the perceived need to incorporate festive motifs into the annual yuletide episode was becoming too troublesome a tradition to be worth continuing. Last Christmas proves me wrong in spectacular fashion: for Doctor Who’s tenth consecutive Christmas special, Moffat brings Doctor Who and Christmas together in the most direct possible way. Almost as if cheekily daring the audience to revolt and switch off, the long (more than five minutes) pre-titles sequence plays with a completely straight face what seems like an utterly ludicrous situation. Clara, having parted from the Doctor at the end of the previous episode, encounters none other than Santa Claus himself, and a couple of snarky elves (one of them played by Dan Starkey, normally buried under heavy prosthetics as the Sontaran, Strax), when he crashes on her roof – in a sleigh drawn by flying reindeer.

Santa notes that she was a believer until the age of nine, when she stopped because “I grew out of fairy tales.” “Did you really?” he says, as the TARDIS materialises behind her and the Doctor urgently tells her to get in. We had already seen him encountering Santa at the end of Death in Heaven (when he was roused from a snooze in the TARDIS – in retrospect, a subtle clue – by Santa’s entrance), and now his quiet seriousness as he says to Santa, “I know what’s happening, and I know what’s at stake,” is the first hint that something more than twee sentiment is behind these events. He tells Clara there’s an important question she has to ask herself: “Do you really believe in Santa Claus?” Delighted at being back in the TARDIS, she answers that right now, she does – but this misses the point; the Doctor’s question is actually a key to this labyrinthine story, where the question of what is real and what is a dream will become vital.

After the opening titles, we are suddenly in a scientific base at the North Pole which is the subject of one of the show’s most typical plot tropes, the “base under siege” – a small group of people, trapped in an isolated location and under monstrous attack. One of the four scientists here, Shona, nervously enters an infirmary containing four victims of crab-like creatures that wrap themselves around their prey’s face like overgrown face-huggers from Alien (1979). In another deliberately off the wall sequence, Shona sings along and dances to Slade’s Merry Xmas Everybody (a song used several times before in Doctor Who, notably in the first two Christmas specials, The Christmas Invasion and The Runaway Bride) as she makes her way past the sleepers, observed and monitored by her colleagues Bellows, Ashley and Professor Albert. But when the Doctor and Clara’s arrival distracts her, the sleepers get up and shuffle towards them like the gas-masked zombies in Moffat’s The Empty Child back in 2005. With the “dream crabs,” Moffat has come up with another ingenious monster concept; the only way to remain undetected is by not thinking about them (“They can detect their own mental picture in any nearby mind,” says the Doctor) – hence Shona’s use of song and dance to keep her mind occupied. When the other three scientists burst into the infirmary to rescue them, a swarm of the creatures descends from the ceiling upon the whole group.

Suddenly, Santa and his elves arrive to rescue them – he simply orders the sleepers back to bed and they obey him, allowing them all to escape the infirmary. Despite the Doctor’s earlier claim that he knows what’s happening, he can clearly only have had suspicions, since he says he’s only heard of the dream crabs, but never seen them before. While he is telling Clara that the presence of the creatures means she must question everything she sees and hears, Shona is methodically trying to prove that Santa can’t possibly be standing in the room with them. Nick Frost (who, as Moffat happily pointed out in interviews, has the perfect name for someone portraying Santa Claus) starts out seeming merely the jolly stereotype we are all familiar with, thanks to his spot-on costume and makeup. But he soon reveals an altogether more no-nonsense character capable of taking firm control of the situation, baffling Shona with amusingly matter-of-fact statements that only highlight how ridiculous his presence is. There’s the North Pole, for instance – an actual pole, complete with stripes, going through the middle of his workshop. Or how it’s a scientific impossibility for reindeer to fly (“which is why I feed mine magic carrots”). Even when the Doctor himself tries a “killer question,” about how all those presents fit into the sleigh, he is smugly ready with a clever answer – “bigger on the inside.”

The episode strikes a better balance than some earlier Christmas specials have done between telling a satisfying individual story and simultaneously advancing the ongoing series. In Britain, a significant percentage of the audience watches Doctor Who only at Christmas and not at other times, and continuity-heavy stories like The Time of the Doctor run the risk of being quite impenetrable. (Of course, that was a case of force majeure: Moffat might well have preferred a lighter, stand-alone story for Christmas 2013, especially after the Fiftieth Anniversary extravaganza just a month earlier, but Matt Smith’s decision to leave at that point meant there was no other opportunity to tie up all the outstanding plot threads from his era.) Last Christmas works as a funny, clever and creepy story in itself, while also moving the Doctor and Clara on from the mutual lying which caused their separation at the end of Death in Heaven. Earlier, in the infirmary, the Doctor made a crass remark about Danny Pink in order to distract Clara from the attacking sleepers, and was taken aback when she retorted that Danny was dead. Now she reveals that she kept Danny’s death from him – leading to his own confession that he never found his homeworld, Gallifrey. But this quiet interlude soon turns horrific as Clara is attacked by another dream crab – only to suddenly wake up back in her bed on Christmas Day, as Danny enters dressed in a Santa Claus outfit.

Obviously this can only be a dream, and director Paul Wilmshurst makes these scenes look and feel very different, with much warmer lighting and different lenses. As Clara cheerfully banters with Danny about Christmas presents, the Doctor is trying to snap her out of it, inserting mysterious blackboards with chalked messages into her surroundings – a nice use of the motif of him scribbling on blackboards in the TARDIS which ran throughout the last season. Disorienting camera moves and discordant music show the Doctor trying to break through, but Clara finds it understandably hard to resist this beguiling fantasy of her boyfriend returned from the dead, and banishes his efforts from her mind. The Doctor is forced to enter the dream himself by allowing another dream crab to take him. However, even his gruesome description of how the creature attached to her has drilled into her brain and is slowly dissolving it fails to shake Clara, until Danny himself tells her she needs to wake up. Capaldi, Coleman and Anderson work together at this crucial turning-point of the story just as well as they did in the similar moments in Death in Heaven. This Danny may be merely an aspect of Clara’s subconscious, but he provides some moving philosophy about how to accept and move on from the loss of a loved one, telling Clara she can miss him, but only for five minutes a day – “…the rest of the time, every single second, you just get the hell on with it.” And he leaves her with a poignant reflection that shows Moffat’s inspiration for the title of the episode:

 

Danny Pink: “Do you know why people get together at Christmas? Because every time they do, it might be the last time. Every Christmas is last Christmas. And this is ours. This was a bonus. This is extra. But now it’s time to wake up.”

 

The Doctor and Clara wake up back in the base, the dream crabs falling from their faces and disintegrating. The fact that if the crabs’ feeding is interrupted they die instantly and their victims suffer no ill effects at all seems a little too convenient for the writer, meaning that no time needs to be spent on dealing with the traumatic after-effects that such an experience would logically produce. But Moffat puts the time gained to good use; in a plot development immediately reminiscent of Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010), the Doctor realises that they are all lost in a maze of dreams within dreams. He proves it by means of a smart piece of deduction, giving copies of the base’s manual to each of the scientists; they should all be identical, but having them turn to the same randomly chosen page and read the first word on that page results in each of them saying a different word. They have all been dreaming ever since they were attacked in the infirmary and “rescued” by someone who they know can’t exist. Moffat deserves particular praise for incorporating the “real” Santa Claus (i.e. not some robot or alien or some other science-fictional “explanation”) into the story in a way that makes perfect sense. He is a manifestation created by the subconscious of the dream crabs’ victims, trying to alert them to the unreality of what they are experiencing.

Despite the seriousness of the situation, Moffat writes the Doctor with a considerably lighter touch now that he has emerged from the severe examination of this season’s stories. Peter Capaldi takes full advantage of the Doctor’s many funny lines; one of my favourites occurs when Professor Albert mentions the dream crabs’ aforementioned resemblance to Alien’s face-huggers: “There’s a horror movie called Alien? That’s really offensive – no wonder everyone keeps invading you.” The Doctor’s sparring with Santa gives Capaldi and Frost plenty of opportunity to show their comic talents, especially when Santa tries to paint the Doctor as just as fictional as himself, pointing out the ridiculousness of a time-travelling magician living in a phone box. (The Doctor really only has himself to blame, for saying earlier, “You know what the big problem is, in telling reality and fantasy apart? … They’re both ridiculous” – a statement which is certainly true in the Who universe.) The funniest moment comes when Santa starts to explain about the “multi-consciousness gestalt” formed by the dream crabs, to which the Doctor splutters that “No, no, no… Santa Claus does not do the scientific explanation!” – to which the quick-witted Santa responds, “All right. As the Doctor might say, ‘Aw, it’s all a bit dreamy-weamy!’” Now that they all understand what is happening, Santa disappears, and they hold hands (to the Doctor’s hilarious discomfiture) and concentrate to break out of the dream.

The Doctor, Clara, and the four scientists wake up in the infirmary, the dream crabs falling from their faces and disintegrating. After his grumbling at having to hold hands, his brusque manner from earlier in the season amusingly reasserts itself, as he simply says “Bye” and marches off, refusing to get further involved. But Clara stops him with the question which will already have occurred to the alert viewer: “If Santa was only in the dream… why was he on my roof?” What we have been taking for reality – right from the beginning of the episode – is actually another level of dreaming. In a particularly spooky touch, the crew slowly realise they can only respond “It’s a long story” when the Doctor presses them about what they are doing here and what the base’s mission is – and what’s more, Clara can only say the same when the Doctor asks how they came to be here. The four sleepers are actually the four scientists – the whole setting of the polar base does not exist at all, but is simply a shared dream world, and the sleepers represent the part of themselves that has already succumbed to the attack. Moffat introduces moments of nightmarish horror as the sleepers activate and come for them, reaching straight through monitor screens to drag Professor Albert to his death. They run outside, only to be surrounded by an inexplicable horde of sleepers – “the logic of a nightmare,” says the Doctor – including two that look like himself and Clara, emerging from the fake TARDIS.

The Doctor manages to find the only way to escape, with a reference back to one of Santa’s earlier lines: “It’s Christmas, the North Pole… who you gonna call?” The Ghostbusters allusion makes for an appropriately triumphant moment as Santa arrives on his sleigh to rescue them. The Doctor once again asks Clara whether she believes in Santa Claus, and this time she answers: “I’ve always believed in Santa Claus… but he looks a little different to me,” enfolding him in a hug which it seems he has now learned to accept – or, at least, tolerate. As the sleigh careens through the skies of London, Capaldi’s Doctor finally gets the chance to show pure, unconstrained joy as Santa lets him take the reins – reminiscent of the sequence in 2010’s A Christmas Carol when Matt Smith’s Doctor drove a sleigh pulled by a flying shark. After all the darkness and horror, this is a lovely warm-hearted sequence, which comes to a gentle end as the scientists realise their true identities. In fact, they have never worked together or even met before; Ashley is an account manager for perfume, while Shona works in a shop. Faye Marsay has given a lively performance throughout, and it’s a sweet moment as Shona suggests they all swap phone numbers and stay in contact – but to no avail, as one by one they disappear from the sleigh.

Bellows, Ashley, and Shona wake up in their homes, the dream crabs falling from their faces and disintegrating. In a poignant touch, Bellows turns out to be a grandmother confined to a wheelchair, able to walk again in her dream. Shona evidently fell asleep after a Christmas Day DVD-watching marathon; it becomes clear she was responsible for the entire constructed dream world, as her DVD list includes the aforementioned Alien, plus The Thing from Another World (which contributed the idea of the North Pole scientific outpost) and, inevitably, Miracle on 34th Street. She is spending Christmas alone, and at the bottom of her list is the notation, “Forgive Dave??” – presumably her boyfriend. We’ll never know who Dave is or what he did to require forgiveness, but after her experience in the dream world she places a big tick next to his name, rounding off her story with a happy ending. Meanwhile, it’s time for the Doctor and Clara to wake up, too. But while the Doctor disappears from the sleigh, Clara wistfully asks to stay a little longer. Jenna Coleman was coy all through the year in interviews on the subject of whether or not she would be staying with Doctor Who, resulting in a genuine tension as the ending approached about just how the episode would conclude. This sequence, with Clara laying her head on Santa’s shoulder as the music swells and leading to the clichéd but effective shot of the silhouetted sleigh crossing the face of the moon, has an air of finality to it, but Moffat still has some tricks left to play.

The Doctor wakes up, the dream crab falling from his face and disintegrating. He quickly travels to Clara’s bedroom and removes the dream crab from her sleeping face. But she wakes up to reveal the face of an old woman, who hasn’t seen the Doctor for 62 years. Under effective old-age prosthetics (although she doesn’t quite manage to disguise her voice’s youthfulness), Coleman shows a woman at peace with the achievements and regrets of her life. The Doctor’s statement that he can’t see any difference in Clara’s appearance (shown from his point of view with a brief substitution of young Clara for old) is hard to take literally, but is apparently supposed to be – presumably as an explanation for all his remarks about her appearance during the season. In any case, the scene cleverly mirrors the one in The Time of the Doctor where Clara encounters the ancient Eleventh Doctor – right down to her lacking the strength to pull open a Christmas cracker. Noticing this, the Doctor regrets he did not come back earlier… but as Santa reappears, he realises he has still not emerged from the dream.

The Doctor wakes up, the dream crab falling from his face and disintegrating. He quickly travels to Clara’s bedroom and removes the dream crab from her sleeping face. This time, a relieved Clara is back to her normal appearance. Capaldi shows a touching vulnerability in the Doctor as he asks Clara to rejoin him in the TARDIS. His offer of “all of time and all of space” recalls the Doctor’s words to Amy at the end of Matt Smith’s The Eleventh Hour (2010), and Clara’s smiling acceptance and running out to the TARDIS in her nightdress also echoes the joyful ending of that episode. Although the sense of completion is somewhat undermined by a rather unnecessary homage to the ambiguous ending of Inception in the final shot – a tangerine (Santa’s signature gift) is revealed resting on Clara’s window sill while the Doctor muses that he doesn’t know who to thank for his second chance with Clara – Last Christmas ultimately frees both of them from the baggage accumulated over the last year, and looks forward to another series of new adventures.

 

Classic Who DVD Recommendation: 1968’s The Web of Fear, four of whose six episodes were returned to the BBC archives in October 2013 after being missing for decades, is a classic “base under siege” story starring Patrick Troughton (whose son Michael played Professor Albert in this episode), alongside Frazer Hines and Deborah Watling.

 

Reflections: The real answer to the Doctor’s question of who to thank for his second chance is, of course, Jenna Coleman. Coleman’s genuine changing of her mind on whether to leave in Death in Heaven, leave in Last Christmas, or (her eventual decision) stay on for another year, led to Moffat having to produce two possible endings for this episode. In the other one, this would have been one last adventure for the aged Clara, induced by the dream crab to recall her youthful travels with the Doctor and her long-ago time with Danny Pink. The Doctor would rescue her from the creature (as shown in the final version), and she would have the chance to bid him a last goodbye with all the issues between them now reconciled. Given Capaldi and Coleman’s talent and rapport, there’s little doubt the result would have been a heart-breaker, but the ultimate reversal achieves an ending that is just as emotional, and much more in keeping with the Christmas spirit – and it’s created with an admirable economy of means. Moffat simply reveals another, previously unsuspected level of dreaming before we finally come back to reality, like a “false awakening” whereby one wakes up and goes through one’s morning routine – only to wake up again and realise it was just a dream.

Moffat-era Who had played with dream states before, when 2010’s Amy’s Choice had the Doctor and his companions switching between two different scenarios and having to decide which of them was a dream and which was reality (a false choice, as it turned out, since both were dreams). Last Christmas, however, incorporates the idea of multiple, identical-looking levels of dreams, thereby adding greatly to the density of the plotting. For the most part the story hangs together sensibly; however, the additional level of dreaming revealed at the end leaves Shona and the other base crew in limbo, making it possible to imagine that they were simply dream constructs themselves, which was probably not Moffat’s intention. Another anomaly is that, even in the final, real scene, Clara is living in a multi-level house which looks nothing like the flat she had earlier (and will be seen in again next season). The opening shots of the house include a stairlift which was doubtless intended to hint at the revelation of Clara as an old woman (unfortunately, the shot of the stairlift is so dark and fleeting that I never even noticed it until Paul Wilmshurst pointed it out in the DVD commentary), although later, in Doctor Who Magazine (issue #485), Moffat explained (albeit in his usual joking manner, meaning this could be just an after-the-fact rationalisation) that Clara was staying with her Gran for Christmas.

With this episode, we bid a final farewell to Danny Pink, a character who never worked quite as well as he really should have done. Despite being created to be with Clara, he always came most sharply into focus opposite the Doctor, responding to the Doctor’s anti-soldier prejudice with intelligence and vigour, which brought out the best in actor Samuel Anderson. Elsewhere, he was mostly characterised by a lack of conflict. I certainly have no complaints over the avoidance of a “love triangle” cliché (the complete lack of romantic feeling between Clara and the Doctor being one of the most refreshing facets of the season). However, there seemed to be nothing much driving him apart from his relationship with Clara – which, due to the lukewarm chemistry between Coleman and Anderson, only rarely rose above the level of a standard rom-com. Danny’s most traumatic experiences were over and done with before we ever met him, leaving him with a laid-back demeanour that, while it might make him a lovely person for Clara to be with, is not conducive to producing compelling drama. The result was a character who hardly changed over the course of the season, and Anderson himself was unable to make anything remarkable from the rather uninspiring material. Unfortunately, despite Danny supposedly being the great love of Clara’s life, there is not much of a hole left by his loss; if there had been, it might not have been so easy for her to resume travelling with the Doctor for another year.