Though it’s not the first time a Physician Who episode hasn’t aired on Christmas Day itself, Christmas 2025 will mark the first time in 20 years that there’s not a particular broadcast at throughout the festive interval—a final lump of coal in the stocking for what has been a very weird year for the Whoniverse. However possibly we must always use the alternative to revisit the episode that began the custom off 20 years in the past as a result of, actually, it stays Physician Who‘s precise finest try at a Christmas story.
Twenty years in the past tomorrow, “The Christmas Invasion”—technically the second Physician Who Christmas broadcast after 1965’s “The Feast of Steven,” a weird story that is each not actually a Christmas particular and is now misplaced to time as certainly one of Who‘s many remaining missing episodes—hit screens as the first full-episode debut of David Tennant’s tenth Physician. Seeing the Physician bedbound in a post-regenerative coma amid an invasion of Earth by the Sycorax, the episode is maybe most fondly remembered now for Tennant’s immediate charm in taking on the Physician, the fashionable period’s first likelihood to overcome the dramatic hurdle of a brand new actor taking on the mantle (and the way simply he did it regardless of spending most of the runtime asleep in mattress), setting the stage for a cultural dominance and interpretation of the Time Lord that neither the mainstream viewers nor the present itself has ever actually moved on from.
However beside that broader significance in the present’s legacy, “The Christmas Invasion” nonetheless charms as a result of it is the first time that Physician Who itself really engaged with the thought of doing a Christmas story—and it went all the means in, in a fashion that the present by no means actually did once more after it established this new custom of the TARDIS displaying up each vacation season. It’s an episode that is unabashedly “a Christmas episode of Physician Who,” mashing collectively the present’s best tropes with festive aptitude. Robots dressed as Santa marching via London streets taking part in carols before revealing their brass devices as explosive weapons evoke the Autons (a becoming parallel, contemplating Physician Who returned to screens with the plastic automatons) and a killer Christmas tree that is ripped proper out of Physician Who‘s playbook of turning the on a regular basis into one thing ludicrous and but nonetheless chilling: this is not Physician Who with a tinselled set dressing, however one which unequivocally and gleefully roots itself in the spirit of the season.
And it’s not simply the visible festivity, both. Thematically, “The Christmas Invasion” is equally a wholehearted embrace of values and concepts we cherish throughout the holidays: the significance of household and group (even when, as was the case with the Physician and Jackie Tyler, you don’t actually have a historical past of getting alongside too properly) and a religion in the hope that we will welcome others with open arms. It’s an episode about large feelings, from the Physician grappling along with his new sense of id to Rose having to shoulder his restoration and the impending menace of the Sycorax—the type of unwariness for the future we frequently discover ourselves reflecting on amid the extra joyous components of Christmas—issues that get to a cathartic climax not actually with the aliens’ defeat, however in the embrace of the new Physician and the Tyler residence’s Christmas dinner.
There are grander Physician Who festive specials. There are tales that are arguably stronger, episodes that are nice Physician Who first and festive specials second. There are tales that go about connecting to the holidays in additional attention-grabbing methods than the admittedly tacky monitor that “Christmas Invasion” takes (however then once more, isn’t slightly cheese a part of each the festive season and Physician Who‘s allure?). However for the previous 20 years, and arguably for extra years to come after the present returns subsequent Christmas, it’s nonetheless the Physician Who seasonal particular to reside up to. It set the gold customary of what Who may do with the trappings and themes of the interval, wholeheartedly embracing them as an alternative of treating them as an afterthought demanded by a broadcast slot.
“The Christmas Invasion” is a narrative that would solely be instructed on Christmas and one that might be lessened if it was transposed to some other time of the 12 months—and in the means of marrying Physician Who with the holidays for entire generations of followers, it created a beautiful custom that has strived to endure all these years later, at the same time as the broader present itself has its personal setbacks.
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