Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Cast: Peter Capaldi, Jenna Coleman, Nick Frost, Samuel Anderson, Dan Starkey, Nathan McMullen, Faye Marsay, Michael Troughton, Maureen Beattie, Natalie Gumede.
Ever since Doctor Who was bought back with a blaze of undeniable glory in 2005, the Christmas special has been a much look-forward to event, on the whole it has delivered, sometimes, thankfully not often, it has been a major let down, like finding out there are no roast potatoes on offer at your in-laws house but they spent all year preparing a room full of stinking and putrid sprouts.
The devil is in the detail and dreams perhaps have the greatest of all detail, a dream after all can leave you feeling more discomfort all day than sitting and groaning in your armchair after several goes at the mountain of food laid out before you. For Steven Moffat, the devil is not just in the detail, it seems to be everything that blurs into view also.
Last Christmas is one of those rare episodes for Doctor Who fans in which the sizable majority will no doubt be happy with the final result and the continuation of the Clara Oswald story but who will also be intrigued to the fate and back story to one of the more interesting young characters to come across in a single episode that Faye Marsay’s lonely Shona.
For Faye Marsay, it is has been an almost meteoric rise. From her excellent role as the cunning but slightly off kilter wife of Richard III in The White Queen and her outstanding presence in one of the British films of the year, the sheer guts and haunting truth in Pride. It is a meteoric rise that arguably demands a role in which she can really shine and in what better programme than Doctor Who in which the national institution status of the long running series can really catapult a young actor on. Not only does she deserve it but her character also, perhaps for only the second time since the series returned nearly 10 years ago, is one that really typifies the lost feel of a companion unused, only the great Sally Sparrow having such a hold over the viewer’s imagination.
With Nick Frost being utterly superb as Santa Claus, it might have been easy for the episode to become lost in a sickly sweet and tiresome hour in much the same way that arguably that Matt Smith’s worst appearance as the man from Gallifrey coincided with The Doctor, The Widow and the Wardrobe. However this was a proper Christmas story, it glimmered with a very good story, the fast pace and unexpected surrealist approach of delving into the psyche and asking the psychological question of what exactly is our role in the universe; the question of who really knows of how substantial our very being is and the question of the power of dreams.
In this the show not only benefitted from an exceptional piece of captured writing between Peter Capaldi and Jenna Coleman as the Doctor faced up to actually seeing one of his companions grow old in the blink of an eye, but also the very touching scenes in which Maureen Beattie, giving perhaps as equally a grand performance as she did in the stage production of Noises Off in 2013, as she realised that her whole persona was hiding beneath the mind of an elderly disabled woman; and that of Faye Marsay who gave loneliness that extra quality of gravitas.
In an episode that could have easily descended into the remnants of left over and stomach ache inducing Christmas Pudding, the afterthought that was on the whole a terrific start to Peter Capaldi’s tenure as The Doctor, it should be seen perhaps as by the best of all the Christmas specials of Doctor Who.
Last Christmas may have attracted adverse criticism from some over-protective parents but this is what Christmas is supposed to be about, not just the incessant greed and the I’ll just get one more present brigade, it’s supposed to be a time in which the ghosts of Christmas past are sent to try us. The modern day ghost story doesn’t need a spectre on the loose and spewing warnings of the dire consequences to come; it just needs to remind us that at all times our very basic humanity is at stake.
Ian D. Hall