'Joy to the World' (Story Code 14.0X) by Steven Moffat

“The Star-Seed will bloom and the flesh will rise.” - Villengard

“Ham-and-cheese toastie and a pumpkin latte?” - The Doctor

The Doctor attempts to deliver a ham-and-cheese toastie and a pumpkin latte to people at various points in history. Unfortunately, the guests at the Queens Hotel in Manchester in 1940, a passenger on the Orient Express in Italy 1962, nor Edmund Hillary at his Mount Everest base camp in 1953 seem to have ordered them... Meanwhile, in 2024, a young woman named Joy checks in at London’s Sandringham Hotel, ready to spend her Christmas alone. Inspecting her room, Joy is surprised when a locked connecting door suddenly opens, and a business suited Silurian walks in carrying a briefcase. Then the Doctor appears, bearing his snack and beverage…

London, Christmas 4202. The Doctor stops off at the Time Hotel to help himself to free milk for his early-morning coffee, and becomes intrigued by a suited man handcuffed to a mysterious briefcase. After eliciting the help of hotel staff member Trev, the Doctor learns that the luxury establishment enables its patrons to visit notable moments in history as mini-breaks, using portals hidden behind every locked door in every hotel room throughout time. The Doctor goes undercover to investigate the hotel and the briefcase man, posing as room service, armed with a ham-and-cheese toastie and a pumpkin latte he just ordered from the kitchens, which are thirty-minutes in the future. Elsewhere, the suited man passes the briefcase onto the hotel barman; as the case’s control transfers to its new carrier, the suited man comes to his senses, only to be told he will soon die. The barman in turn passes the case to the unwitting Trev, just as the suited man crumbles into glowing dust… Checking out the time portals, the Doctor visits the Queens Hotel in Manchester in 1940, the Orient Express in Italy 1962, and Mount Everest in 1953. Trev passes ownership of the briefcase to the hotel manager, a Silurian named Melnak, before he too turns to dust. Seeing Melnak now carrying the briefcase, the Doctor follows the Silurian through the time portal leading to Joy’s hotel room. As the Doctor confronts Melnak over the case, Joy becomes infuriated at being talked over - she snatches the briefcase, which promptly handcuffs itself to her wrist and takes control of her mind. Joy grabs the Silurian’s keycard, then walks away as Melnak crumbles to dust. Furious at the Silurian’s death, the Doctor grabs the case from Joy and opens it - inside is a glowing sphere: a Star Seed. As the open case’s influence wanes, Joy watches in horror as it begins a countdown to her destruction; Joy slams the lid shut, but the case then demands a four-digit code. The Doctor doesn’t know what the code could be, but he has an idea… which pays off as his future-self steps through the time portal and tells him the combination. After cryptically telling his earlier self that he will take the long way round to where he is now, the future Doctor leaves with Joy. The current Doctor is infuriated, especially when he finds the time portal is now bricked up. With the aid of a leaflet he grabbed from the Time Hotel, for a portal at the Exeter Hotel in New York, 2025, the Doctor devises a plan: he books Joy’s now-vacant room for the next year, then takes a job at the Sandringham Hotel… Over the next twelve months, the Doctor brings his unorthodox style to his work, and becomes firm friends with the hotel receptionist, Anita, enjoying their regular ‘Chair Nights’ together. As December 2025 finally arrives, the Doctor bids a tearful farewell to Anita, then leaves his new bestie to head for New York. At last, on New Year’s Eve, the Doctor’s vigil in a room at the Exeter hotel comes to a rewarding end: its time portal glows, allowing the Doctor to sonic it open, return to the Time Hotel, and give his past self the code in a fine display of bootstrapping. After deactivating the portal to trap his former self, the Doctor watches as the briefcase reasserts control of Joy. As she searches for a room to take her far back in time, the Doctor realises that the Star Seed’s owner intends to activate the star and then jump forward to when it will be ready for use. To break the case’s control, the Doctor tries to make Joy angry by taunting her about her lonely life. Joy furiously storms through a portal leading to a treehouse, then breaks down over her guilt over her mother’s death from the Coronavirus on Christmas Day, the reason why she chooses to be alone during the holiday. With Joy now free of the briefcase’s handcuffs, the Doctor is able to discover the identity of its manufacturer: his old enemy, the unscrupulous weapons manufacturer Villengard Conflicts Solutions. The Doctor realises that Villengard wants to use the Star Seed to create an unlimited energy source; however, activating the customisable star could be catastrophic to everyone at every time on Earth. The Doctor and Joy are interrupted by the arrival of a Tyrannosaurus Rex, which promptly eats the briefcase. Escaping back into the Time Hotel, the Doctor wonders how Villengard will advise Joy, as the case’s last owner, that the star is now ready after sixty-five million years of ‘microwaving’. Just then the Doctor’s sonic screwdriver buzzes with a holographic message from the dead Trev: after his consciousness merged with the briefcase’s user interface, his commitment to the Doctor’s mission overrode its influence. ‘Trev’ sends the Doctor and Joy to the time portal in Room 48, which takes them to an ancient stone temple with a shrine containing the briefcase (after it was vomited/pooped out by the T-Rex!). With just four-and-a-half minutes until the star detonates, and unable to move the heavy stone block concealing the case, the Doctor uses the time portals to steal a rope and grapple from the Everest team; tying the rope to the stone block, the Doctor threads it through the Orient Express, then uses the grapple to temporarily anchor the line to the train tracks, pulling the heavy stone free. However, when the Doctor returns to the temple, he finds the case now empty and no sign of Joy. Climbing up some stone steps, the Doctor emerges onto a desert, where he discovers that Joy has chosen to merge with the Star Seed so that she can control its activation safely. After explaining that the consciousnesses of the case’s other victims now reside in her, Joy tells the Doctor to find happiness with friends; she then flies off into the night sky, where she becomes a bright new star in the heavens… In the present, Ruby Sunday sees the star from the window of her flat, before she takes a call from her mother. In the Sandringham Hotel, Anita receives a visit from a manager representing the Time Hotel, who offers her a job at the Doctor’s recommendation… In London’s Royal Hope Hospital in 2020, Joy’s mother ends a facetime call with her daughter. As she succumbs to the fatal effects of the virus, she sees Joy’s star in the sky; then her soul turns to sparkling energy, which flies up to join her daughter… Back in the desert, the Doctor watches happily as three wise men follow Joy’s star to the nearest town: Bethlehem…


Ncuti Gatwa (The Doctor), Nicola Coughlan (Joy Almondo), Mille Gibson (Ruby Sunday), Peter Benedict (Basil Flockhart), Julia Watson (Hilda Flockhart), Niamh Marie Smith (Sylvia Trench), Phil Baxter (Edmund Hillary), Samual Sherpa-Moore (Tenzing Norgay), Steph de Walley (Anita Benn), Jonathan Aris (Hotel Manager [Melnak]), Ruchi Rai (Receptionist), Joshua Leese (Mr Single), Joel Fry (Trev Simpkins), Ell Potter (Server), Liam Prince-Donnelly (Barman), Fiona Marr (Angela Grace), Fiona Scott (Joy's Mum)

Directed by Alex Pillai

Produced by Chris May
Executive Producers Russell T Davies, Julie Gardner, Jane Tranter, Joel Collins and Phil Collinson
A Bad Wolf / BBC Wales production

TX (BBC 1 & BBC 1 HD):
25th December 2024 @ 5.10 pm


Notes:
*Featuring the Fifteenth Doctor, and introducing Joy

*This episode is sixty minutes long

*It premiered in the UK on the BBC's iPlayer in Ultra-High Definition (UHD) at midnight on 25th December 2024, and simultaneously streamed on Disney+ outside the UK and Ireland

*The first few minutes of this episode were released as a preview teaser at San Diego Comic Con, and then online; a clip was later shown on BBC 1's 'Children in Need' special, on Friday 15th November 2024

*Working titles: 'Christmas, Everywhere All At Once' and 'The Time Hotel'