The Next Doctor
Story 199, Episode 752, Doctor Who 2008 Christmas Special
Doctor: The Tenth Doctor
The Doctor is without a companion, in a fun story that ultimately could’ve been so much more.
The Review
For really the first time, we saw the Doctor ‘behind the scenes’ so to speak, in-between companions, just flying about. He arrives on Christmas Eve in London in 1851, and quickly meets a guy who thinks he’s the Doctor played by David Morrissey. Seeing his interpretations of the Doctor legend are really funny he has a normal screwdriver that makes noise when you tap it, and the TARDIS is a big hot air balloon. He even has a companion, ‘Rosita’, clearly another Rose call-back. It turns out that he’s actually just a human, Jackson Lake, who is suffering a fugue state where he thinks he’s the Doctor. It’s an entertaining story, but instead of diving into what it means to be ‘the Doctor’, Tennant’s true Doctor quickly takes over as the lead hero role. The setting for this story is good fun as modern-day Christmas episodes apart from not feeling all that Christmas had been a bit worn out. It’s a nice change of pace. The point is that the Doctor still is feeling glum from Journey’s End, but here Jackson leads the citizens of London in cheering the Doctor and he agrees to spend Christmas with him. It all feels a bit too little too late, as we know it doesn’t really fix the Doctor.
The flip-side is this Christmas we get more Cybermen in the mix, and they are perfectly adequate but don’t do much. They are aided by the malevolent Mercy Hartigan who is getting revenge on all the rich people in the city not doing enough for the poor…or something? She’s mainly just a megalomaniac, and although Dervla Kirwan gives a very memorable evil performance there is not much reason why she is evil. Still, the visuals of the Cybermen walking through a snowstorm in a graveyard and the giant steampunk Cyber-king rising over Victorian London are plenty fun. There’s some stuff about Hartigan overriding the Cybermen with her exceptionally strong intellect, and the Doctor opening her eyes to the horror of who she’s become causing a big explosion destroying the Cybermen. Still, she is underdeveloped and sadly is not the iconic villain she could’ve been. Despite all this, it’s still a fun episode and has a high rewatch score, especially with there being few things that scream Christmas more than it snowing in Victorian London. It’s a good episode, but could’ve been great.
The Next Doctor is a fun comforting capper to Doctor Who‘s biggest year ever in 2008.
8/10 It’s a fun little story.
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