After a couple weeks off post-60th anniversary specials, we got new Doctor Who again in the form of the Christmas special/the Fifteenth Doctor’s first full adventure, but now it’s over again and we have wait until sometime in the spring to get more. Who giveth and Who taketh away. Luckily, this kooky but fun special gives us plenty of time to get to know the new Doctor and companion.
Lately, Ruby Sunday has been having bad luck, all kinds of bad luck. But the worst of all comes on the back of something lovely: her adopted mother fostering a newborn baby over Christmas, just as she did years ago when Ruby was born. But baby Lulubelle has just been abducted by creatures with a ship in the sky. As Ruby rushes headlong into danger to rescue the little girl, she’s joined by the Doctor, who’s been following her and her string of bad luck to this moment.
Ruby, played by Millie Gibson, seems like she’ll be a fun companion. I like her sweetness and enthusiasm, and like most companions, she brings a certain “[sees] a ladder in the sky and [thinks], ‘Oh yeah, I’ll give that a go’” sensibility to the proceedings. I also just like her spirit. When she tells her friends about her recent bad luck, she laughs about it, and when her grocery bag splits open on the sidewalk, she groans, but then we immediately cut to her blithely carrying everything up the stairs in her arms. There’s a scene where she gets some deeply painful personal news, and even as she fights back tears, she says to the person who told her, “It’s really, really kind of you to let me know.”
Meanwhile, Ncuti Gatwa’s Fifteenth Doctor is simply wonderful. He has all the delight and energy that a Doctor should, brimming with warmth and joy—it’s no wonder that he first catches Ruby’s eye when he’s dancing with abandon in a club. But I also really like his tetchiness at some of the utterly bizarre scrapes he gets into. I love his exasperation as he climbs out of a decorative snowman, and he has the perfect impatient tone with, “I am learning the vocabulary of rope!” when Ruby is distracting him. Both these moments are cracked and weird and Only on This Show, but the Doctor’s annoyance at them makes them feel so grounded and real.
As for the story, there’s a little bit of everything. The goblins are a little generic as baddies, but I like the lore behind them and the brief exploration we get of “the physics of coincidence.” There are daring escapes, time meddling with impactful ripple effects, a full-on musical number, an intriguing mystery in the stinger, and both the Doctor and Ruby dealing with some heavy emotional stuff. There are parts where it’s definitely bonkers and silly, but grading on a Christmas special curve, I think it mostly works.
The biggest takeaway, of course, is the Doctor and Ruby. While I’m still getting a feel for their dynamic together, I love them both as individuals and can’t wait to see what’s next for them. A good Doctor and companion can shine in the goofiest of stories, and these two shone brilliantly.
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