First broadcast 25 December 2010.

One of the most striking elements of Russell T. Davies’ relaunch of Doctor Who was that it came accompanied by an annual Christmas special, made as part of a regular season’s schedule but broadcast apart from the other 13 episodes on Christmas Day. These episodes deliberately took a lighter and somewhat sillier approach to the programme than the standard ones. That was often a polite way for critics to argue that these Christmas specials were not particularly good.

In 2010, replacement producer Steven Moffat continued the annual tradition with “A Christmas Carol”, directed by Toby Haynes. It did indeed keep up the lighter tone of “The Christmas Invasion”, “The Runaway Bride”, and so on, but it possessed a richer sense of atmosphere, a much more intricate storyline, and was altogether a much more satisfying viewing experience. Among the various Doctor Who festive specials of 2005 to 2024, this is the episode commonly referred to as ‘the good one’.

A passenger space liner, whose passengers include Amy (Karen Gillan) and Rory (Arthur Darvill), is set to crash onto an isolated human colony. Its only hope is for an artificially generated cloud layer to be deactivated, but the only man that go do it is the miserly Kazran Sardick (Michael Gambon) – and he has no intention of saving anybody. It is up to the Doctor (Matt Smith) to change his mind.

Doctor Who traditionally hasn’t used time travel as anything more than a convenient method to get the Doctor and his companions from one adventure to the next. It is, plot-wise, little different from C.S. Lewis’ wardrobe door to Narnia (more on that in 2011’s Christmas special). When Moffat started writing for the series that general approach started to change. When writing for Davies’ seasons, scripts like “Blink” and “Silence in the Library” were actively built around time travel. When Moffat assumed producing duties himself – as I have recently discussed – his entire first season became wrapped around time travel and paradoxes. This focus on the story potential of time travel continues with “A Christmas Carol”, in which the Doctor actively and repeatedly changes history to save the day.

Let us jump back to 1996. Doctor Who had just made a one-off return to the air with a television film starring Paul McGann. Russell T. Davies was in the middle of co-creating soap opera Springhill for Sky One. Steven Moffat was best known for his teen drama – and all-round masterpiece – Press Gang. Moffat’s first professional writing for Doctor Who was a short story for one of Virgin Publishing’s Short Trips anthologies. “Continuity Errors” saw the Doctor incessantly travel back in time to change the life of a specific librarian, so that eventually that librarian would be a nice enough person to let the Doctor borrow a book and use it to save some distant threatened civilization. The story was told from the point of view of that librarian, their entire life unknowingly changing around them, and it was essentially played for laughs.

“A Christmas Carol” plays out, comedic moments aside, as a heartfelt drama. A spaceship is about to crash. The only man who can save it refuses to do so. The Doctor has a time machine, and therefore sets out to change that man’s past: not just to transform him into someone that will allow the spaceship to land without loss of life, but to actually make that man a better person. To tell that story Moffat adopts the broad structure of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol”. Kazran Sardick is indeed met by three ghosts – of past, present and future – but in a typically Moffat-style twist it is the adult Sardick himself that acts as ghost of the future to his own child self.

As if that wasn’t enough, Moffat throws in a few additional strange elements, like sharks that swim through the sky and a beautiful young woman frozen in a box. The fairy tale elements that infused Season 5 continue to dominate here. It’s one of the most storybook Doctor Who episodes ever devised.

Michael Gambon is a natural choice to play Sardick, Doctor Who‘s science fiction version of Ebenezer Scrooge. Lawrence Belcher gives a wonderful sort of wide-eyed and charming performance as Sardick’s younger self. Casting singer Katherine Jenkins is a stunt, but she still delivers a capable and delightful performance.

That’s the thing about this episode: it’s just a wall-to-wall delight. When the more serious moments hit they’re all the more effective due to how enormously charmed the audience is. Toby Haynes does a great job with a wonderful script. Matt Smith is tremendous, and fully settled in as the 11th Doctor. While Amy and Rory barely get a look-in, you wind up not really minding because what you receive instead is simply so good. In my opinion it’s the absolute best Christmas special the series has generated.