Doctor Who: A Christmas Carol

I'm not saying that this is the best Doctor Who Christmas Special, but I am saying it's my favorite one. Cripes, what would we do without cell phones or the Internet or BBC America? Matt Smith as the eleventh Doctor with his first festival episode, and I was all anticipate-y. Steven Moffat crafts a perfect tale inspired by Charles Dickens' classic A CHRISTMAS CAROL. The twists come plenty and frequently.

We first catch up to the Doctor's companions - the newlyweds Amy Pond and Rory Williams - on Christmas Eve as they honeymoon in a luxurious space liner carrying more than four thousand passengers. One of the best things about this episode is that things race along at a heady clip. It's not long at all before the space vessel goes all wonky, gets trapped within the peculiar cloud belt of a human-habitated planet. Amy Pond transmits a distress signal to the Doctor, who arrives and learns that salvation lies solely at the hands of the planet's most powerful man, Kazran Sardick (Michael Gambon, very terrific). Kazran Sardick, bitter and cruel and old, is not only a money lender so tight-fisted he takes his clients' family members as security deposits but he has literally tamed the sky. But he refuses to lift one finger to help even though the ship will crash in an hour's time. The desperate Doctor hits on a brainstorm. As Kazran Sardick himself cynically recounts: "On every world, wherever people are, in the deepest part of the winter, at the exact midpoint, everybody stops and turns and hugs as if to say: 'Well done. Well done, everyone. We're halfway out of the dark. Back on Earth, we call this Christmas... On this world the first settlers called it the Crystal Feast. You know what I call it? I call it expecting something for nothing!'" Bah! So you see where this is going.

I've missed Matt Smith and the boyish exuberance he injects in his role. The constant stream-of-consciousness patter, the dynamic energy, the mad flair, but with that bump of empathy... Smith is just about tied with Tom Baker as pound-for-pound my favorite Doctor. Just add to this Doctor's resume that he makes a brilliant nanny. This special is a wonderfully clever time travel story with bits of brilliant creativity and so elegantly staged. I just love the cause and effect of time travel. This special has got laughs, and yet it resonates on a really strong emotional level. Classical singer Katherine Jenkins, lovely and Welsh, makes her acting debut as Abigail Pettigrew, the frozen girl who breaks your heart. There are two things that bug me some. One is that Karen Gillan doesn't interact more with the Doctor, but given the plot it's understandable why. And it seems far-fetched to me that the Doctor doesn't suss out the ominous meaning of the counting down numbers. But it's a tiny quibble. Never mind. Quibbles don't mean diddly next to a moment as iconic as this episode's "sleigh ride." That sequence is awesomeness.

Can this Doctor redeem a heartless old man? And save his friends? Does a bear shi... I mean, of course, he does. The fun lies in watching how he goes about it. Kazran Sardick, a man grown old and bitter and yet halfway out of the dark, is salvageable. Pass that cup of yuletide cheer. It's got a bittersweet kick. This is Steven Moffat's best Doctor Who story yet.

The DVD also comes with two fantastic featurettes: the behind-the-scenes "Doctor Who Confidential" for this Christmas special (running 00:56:01 minutes long) and "Doctor Who at the Proms 2010," the very awesome Doctor Who concert staged at London's Royal Albert Hall back on July, 2010, featuring composer Murray Gold's musical score, with Ben Foster conducting, and with Karen Gillan, Arthur Darvill, and Matt Smith doing emcee work (00:57:16 minutes long).

I am not someone who cries easily and during the David Tennant's time as the Doctor , I became tired of the emotional manipulation that I was meant to feel , but this epidode,genuinely touched me. I loved Matt Smith's performance as the Doctor. I could not keep from laughing at most of his antics but was equally moved by the bittersweet love story that we saw between Abigail and Kurzan.Of all the modern interpretations of a'Christmas Carol' I have seen , this one had the most heart.

It's a rare occasion that I do a review, but I couldn't pass this one up. This Christmas special was simply brilliant. For me, it's hands down the best Christmas special to date. It's a truly magical Christmas fairytale-ish story, done in somewhat atypical Who-niverse fashion. I just loved it. I had no issues whatsoever with the characters, the casting, the story... it was all just brilliant. Even the "personal timeline" stuff didn't bother me in the slightest - it made for a compelling and somewhat awe inspiring storyline that I really enjoyed (and didn't expect!). And besides... yeah, the cardinal rule of not crossing personal timelines... rubbish, really. True Who fans can probably cite off the top of their heads a half dozen examples of when the Doctor blatantly violated that rule, going all the way back to the 3rd or 4th Doctor even. The way I looked at it was that this was not ordinary Doctor Who anyway... this was the Christmas special... and I thoroughly enjoyed the Who crew taking it a bit further than previous norms. It's the unexpected that makes this show so exciting, and I think Steven Moffat is doing an amazing job taking us there.

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