This article contains mild spoilers for the Doctor Who Christmas special, Joy to the World.

As a fan of Steven Moffat who was disappointed by the writer returned to Doctor Who last season with Boom, cheesy episode with some great moments sprinkled in, this new Christmas special ("Joy to the World") was a treat. It was exactly what I was hoping to get from Moffat last time: a smart story with a lot of heart. And since Moffat is no longer burdened with the responsibility of running the entire show, there's no sense of burnout here. You get the sense that Moffat had a lot of time and energy to rework some beats and smooth out some edges.

Most importantly, Moffat had a chance to try something new here, and he took it. Sure, the weather hotel concept sure seems like a typical Moffat-y plot device, but it paves the way for a surprising tangent for the doctor (Nkuti Gatwa) and the seemingly insignificant innkeeper Anita (Stephanie de Volley). The rest of the episode may be about the Doctor's attempts to stop a briefcase from killing Joy (Nicola Coughlan), but for one wonderful sequence, the episode puts the whole story on pause and gives us something even better.

The only reason the Doctor and Anita's story is happening in the first place is because Moffat couldn't resist another paradox by booting up. In about thirty minutes, the Doctor has to put a 4-digit code into the evil briefcase to stop her from killing Joy, but with only seconds to figure it out and an almost unlimited number of combinations to choose from, today the Doctor has no idea which numbers to press them. Luckily, the Future Doctor knows the answer and enters the room to give it to the Current Doctor. How does Future Doctor know the combination? Well, because the Present Doctor has already heard him say that.

This is one of those plot devices that Muffat always loved; 90% of what the Eleventh Doctor went through was at least partially the result of the Boots Paradox, and of course, Moffat's Most Popular Episode Ever ("Blink" in Season 3) revolves around a time loop that either doesn't make sense or makes too much sense, depending on how you look at it. My personal favorite bootstrap paradox in Doctor Who actually comes from a little-known mini-episode "Space and Time", which handles silliness almost as well as Joy to the World does.

The difference is that while the cycle in "Space and Time" lasts a few minutes at most, here the time loop for the Doctor lasts an entire year. The Future Doctor saves the Present Doctor's life, but takes Joy with him and tells him coldly that he has to take "the long way". The Doctor must spend an entire year living among ordinary Earthlings, experiencing life one human day at a time.

It is not a new situation for the doctor - in fact, given the events of The Giggle, We know there's another version of the Doctor going through a similar situation just a few blocks away - but this is the first time in a while where we get to see it play out. "The Giggle" left us to imagine how the Doctor's time as a civilian went, while "Joy to the World" actually shows us.

When Anita is first introduced, she feels like a joke character. She is kind to Joy as she ushers her into her hotel room, but her main quirk is her oddly understated reaction when the Silurian and the Doctor show up in Joy's room. "I'm so sorry, this has never happened before," she says, before politely putting her things down and walking away. At the time it seemed like this was all we got to see of the character, but in retrospect, it's clear that this was the start of an arc for her; Anita in this scene is closed, withdrawn. She is not interested in engaging with the people around her and simply wants to go about her day in peace.

But when the doctor is forced to spend the year hanging around her hotel, Anita begins to open up. We get some absurd humor when the Doctor fixes things for her by making them more Tardis-like, and Anita takes all of his weirdness. She's not that curious, which would normally be a flaw in a companion, but considering the Doctor can't go anywhere, it works great here. She is not frightened by the doctor's strange behavior, but she does not demand answers from him either.

They settle into a comfortable dynamic, one that increases when the two develop a "Chair Night" ritual in which they hang out in the doctor's room every week to play board games and talk. The subtext of Anita's earlier scenes soon becomes impossible to ignore: this woman is lonely. Desperately lonely, that is, until the moment when the Doctor becomes her friend.

It's one of the more realistic depictions of loneliness we've ever seen on Doctor Who, an emotion usually portrayed in sci-fi extremes. But Anita isn't lonely because she's been marooned on a ship for thirty years, or because she's an immortal Time Lord whose planet is lost; she is lonely in the same quiet, easy-to-miss way that so many ordinary people are all over the world. She is also someone who would never cross paths with the Doctor under any other circumstances; she doesn't seem to have the desire to cross the stars, nor does she have any plans Russell T. Davis (RTD) to bring her back as a companion. If the doctor hadn't been forced to spend a year in her hotel, how long would it have taken for someone to tell her they felt lucky to know her?

Beyond Anita, "Joy to the World" is an episode that explicitly deals with the lingering trauma of the COVID-19 lockdown era. Joy is still grieving over how the restrictions of COVID-19 prevented her from being with her mother when she died in the hospital, and this ends up being a major plot point in her story. Meanwhile, Anita and the doctor's story doesn't mention COVID at all, but it still feels like that's what it's about.

Like many people in early 2020, the Doctor in this episode has to unexpectedly put his plans on pause and just sit around. He's angry about it at first and still struggles with impatience throughout the year, but around spring it's clear he's found the bright side. There has been a hidden benefit of quarantine for many people, in that it has given them an unprecedented opportunity to slow down, reflect and rethink their entire approach to life. It was a time when many people decided to change careers, try new hobbies and realize that they needed to meet new people.

We can see this reflected not only in how the Doctor learns to accept everyday life, but also in how he takes an interest in Anita, a woman who would be an afterthought to him in any other situation. "Joy to the World" finds the Doctor branching out with an entirely different type of "companions" and valuing them as much as the young adrenaline junkies he usually hangs out with.

This little SOVID-typical tangent the episode throws at us feels powerful because Doctor Who has otherwise largely avoided the subject. On Chris Chibnall's final season never got a chance to address it, and then Doctor Who production was in relative disarray for much of the early 2020s. But the show's returning host Russell T. its initial run very explicitly ran from 2005 to 2009, clarifying the dates in a way that the Moffat era rarely struggled with.

It was only a matter of time before the RTD era caught up with how the people of 2024 were still dealing with the chaos of COVID, a pandemic that is still ongoing whether some of us want to admit it or not. The fact that this is an episode written by Moffat and not RTD is a pleasant surprise.

The most magical thing about Anita's story is that it breaks many of the standard screenplay rules. It's not completely redundant, as it somehow ties into the Doctor's general character throughout the episode, but with a few tweaks it could have been completely removed and the audience would never have noticed that something was missing.

Moffat could have easily had the Doctor solve the briefcase code with some explanation with a ripple screwdriver or just make the time loop last a day or two rather than a whole year. Instead, he put the plot on hiatus and gave us the cutest short story in the world. It's not something any screenwriting class would advise a student to do, but the choice nonetheless elevates "Joy to the World" to the status of one of Moffat's best Christmas specials. in his already strong collection.

Reading through some other early reviews of this special, I see that some critics are already pointing out that Anita would make a wonderful companion. As fans watch and discuss the episode, I imagine there will be some disappointment the next companion has already been announced and that's not her. However, I don't really long for Anita to travel with the Doctor, nor do I need her to come back anytime soon. I think her scenes work great as a wonderful one-shot surprise. She's proof of something Doctor Who often argues but rarely shows, that just because someone doesn't "matter" in the grand scheme of things doesn't mean they don't. At the very least, Anita has almost nothing to do with the plot of Doctor Who and probably never will, but we were lucky to meet her just the same.