'It gives you comedy elves, flying reindeer…a time traveling scientist dressed as a magician…You see how none of this makes any sense?' There's a similar moment of self-awareness in Moffat's 'Last Christmas,' when Santa Claus (Nick Frost) is cataloging all the preposterous elements that prove the entire scenario is a dream. I still stand by that, but I can also ask: to what was I really objecting? A fiction, meeting a fiction? A legend meeting a legend? A dream meeting a dream? I hated 'Robot of Sherwood,' and I took major objection to how it played fast and loose with historical fact and presented this cartoonish fiction as an actual person. 'There's no such thing!' But that didn't seem to matter. 'He's made up!' the Doctor (and I) protested. Not the long-lost historical figure that inspired the legend of Robin Hood, but Robin Hood himself, straight out of the legends. In the third episode of the 2014 season, Mark Gatiss's ' Robot of Sherwood,' the Doctor met Robin Hood. You've all seen it, after all, and you don't need me to tell you what happened or whether you liked it. It's not a review, per se, and certainly not a recap. I watched it again last night, and today I woke up knowing more or less exactly what I wanted to write about it.

It's not my favorite of the Moffat-era Christmas specials-2010's 'A Christmas Carol' still holds that title-but it's an impressive and surprisingly deep piece of work. (Am I the only one who thinks that, sometimes, he just likes to screw with us?)īut it was only on second viewing that I realized Moffat had also done something more: yes, 'Last Christmas' was an excellent, entertaining hour of television that worked as a Doctor Who story, but it also resonated outward with wisdom, and maturity, and more than a little melancholy. It's like he knew what we'd all be thinking, and toyed with us and our expectations in delightful ways. By the end of the episode, it was clear that Steven Moffat had threaded the needle with 'Last Christmas,' flirting dangerously with disaster but coming through with a fiendishly clever, reasonably logical explanation for a lot of different elements that seemed, on their faces, preposterous.

Oh god, they're not really doing this, are they?īut, as it turned out, I needn't have worried. (Somehow I'm sitting there the entire time thinking, Please don't screw this up.) And 'Last Christmas,' the 2014 Christmas special, was particularly nerve-wracking: once Santa Claus himself shows up on Doctor Who, after all, the fear that this will turn out to be an all-time stinker is powerful. I never know if I enjoy the Doctor Who Christmas specials on first viewing: for some reason, the 'big event' episodes just make me too nervous to actually enjoy them.

Doctor who last christmas ending