After dropping off Ruby Sunday to be with her family, the Doctor is alone again. It would be a matter of time when he’d have a passenger again. Who would have expected it would be Lady Whistledown, and what would happen to her?

“Joy to the World” takes a lot of risks. It removes the co-star in favor of another story, makes a comment on how some people didn’t follow COVID rules, and shows how lonely Christmas can be. Still, it ends with hope, and literally Joy.

It starts with three scenes. One is Manchester being bombed in World War II, another is a group hoping to conquer Mount Everest, a third is a girl on a train reading a letter. In all three, the Doctor pops in, with a toasted cheese sandwich and a latte. Is he a waiter?
Then, we head to a lonely hotel in Sandringham. A girl named Joy (Nicola Coughlin) is about to spend Christmas, but why?
Better yet, why is a Silurian (Johnathan Aris) handcuffed to a suitcase, saying “The star will bloom and the flesh will rise”, followed by the Doctor and his food?

Actually, the Doctor landed at a Time Hotel in the 43rd Century, where guests are in rooms that are really time portals. He’s suspicious of a guy with a suitcase handcuffed to him, and gets a guy named Trev (Joel Fry) to follow him. Unfortunately, Suitcase Guy passes it to others, included Trev. They also wind up dying. Clearly, the suitcase is in charge.
That’s why the Silurian shows up (he’s really the Time Hotel manager) and passes the case to Joy. The Doctor opens the case, and finds a Star Seed that someone wants to plant. Joy, though, may get killed if he doesn’t figure out the combination.
Then, a future Doctor tells him what it is, and the present Doctor has to stay in the room for a whole year.
Wait, what about Joy and the other Doctor? They’ll have to wait.

For the next year, he’ll have to be the handyman for Anita, the owner of the hotel (Steph de Whalley). Actually, it’s an enjoyable year, although puzzling for her. She wonders why her car is blue, the mop operates like a Roomba, and he likes police callboxes. 

Then, he catches up with the other Doctor, and the case is deactivated. Joy’s still in trouble, as the case is using her for whatever purpose. He tries to break the connection by asking why she was in a lonely hotel at Christmas in the first place. She angrily recalls how her mom died on Christmas Day, and she couldn’t be there due to COVID rules the Tories preferred to ignore. That’s enough, but it gets worse.

The case is from Villengard, aka Evil Incorporated. It wants to create a star as an infinite power source, and find the right portal in the Time Hotel to do it. That’s why Joy and the Doctor are in the Jurassic Park room, where a dinosaur eats the case. This also means the Earth will be destroyed once the star seed blooms. 

The Doctor thinks the suitcase wound up in another portal several million years later, but where? Thanks to Trev being merged with the star (along with Suitcase Man and the hotel manager) he finds out it’s in a shrine. By using a rope from the Everest portal and the train from another, he releases the case and Joy finds it.
What happens next is a big shock for him.

Joy merges with the star but makes sure it blooms safely away from the Earth. She winds up being the Christmas Star, bringing literally Joy to the World. 
This stunned a lot of fans learning the Doctor accidentally invented a Christmas icon, history more improbable than Mr. Peabody. In any case, Joy tells the Doctor to find a friend while she looks forward to being reunited with her mom among the stars.
What about Anita? She’s about to get a new job…at the Time Hotel thanks to the Doctor

This might remind people of “Voyage of the Damned”, where a waitress named Astrid prevented a spaceship modeled after the Titanic from crashing into Earth. However, it resulted in her death, and later a new form where she could travel the cosmos.  

The episode was mixes tragedy and triumph, and Ncuti Gatwa proves again he was made for the role. The best moments include him arguing with himself (literally). He also shows his manipulate self by how he gets Joy to explain why she was in a lonely hotel in London.
There was also a quick scene with Ruby getting a call from her mom while seeing the star. 
A few are disappointed the episode didn’t really feature Coughlin as people expected. Her role still became more important in the second half.

What about Anita? Will she be an assistant manager? Since she’s now in the future, she’ll be stunned what the next two thousand years would be like…and why her car can only go where she needs to go.

New episodes are expected this spring. The Doctor will have a new friend named Belinda (Varada Sethu)…who just wants to go home. Sounds familiar somehow. 

Meanwhile, BBC America will air the best of David Tennant and Matt Smith on Wednesdays during January. It would be great if they just started with Nine and went from there every weekend. We’ll see if that happens.