Press Reaction To Last Christmas Is Strongly In Favour

Christian Cawley is a writer at Kasterborous Doctor Who News and Reviews - All the latest Doctor Who news and reviews with our weekly podKast, features and interviews, and a long-running forum.

With 6.34 million tuning into BBC One for Doctor Who‘s 6.15pm broadcast according to overnights – a 27.5% audience share that saw the show defeat the ever-popular Downton Abbey – it would be fair to assume that this figure will increase considerably over the coming days, not least due to delayed views.

After all, a quarter past six in the evening is a little early for Christmas Day (and Doctor Who itself of late, now we think about it), a time when most TV viewers are either drunk, stuffed, or both.

Not so the nation’s press and other journalists, whose ability to review Doctor Who in such timely fashion owes little to their own abilities as chrononauts and everything to the BBC throwing previews at them. This single fact fails to account for how The Guardian was unable to get its act together an offer a coherent review of Last Christmas rather than a ramble about the Christmas evening’s viewing under the banner of a Doctor Who review.  To give them their due, however, they did manage to summarise the story as ” a masterful episode… which managed to be both utterly terrifying, very funny and a rather beautiful tribute to platonic love.”

They continue: “The Inception-esque dream-within-a-dream structure was clever and frightening; the Doctor’s sniping with Santa (Nick Frost, clearly born for the role) was genuinely amusing and the mystery over whether Jenna Coleman would be leaving the show made the ending a treat of a surprise.”

The Nerdist, now a multi-media behemoth rather than the amusing podcast of its inception, offers a more thoughtul review, observing the fact that (robot santas aside) Santa Claus (more commonly known in some parts as Father Christmas, a name that certainly needs some reviving in the face of onslaught from seasonal Hollywood movies) has really been overlooked in ten years’ worth of Christmas specials. Reviewer Kyle Anderson spends some time on the mechanics of the story too, specifically how dream fiction works. “The rules of the dream change throughout, and generally I call that lazy writing or plot conveniences, it’s actually completely fine within the tenets of it being dream logic. It’s the get-out-of-jail-free card of storytelling.” All in all a nice positive review, one that you should check out.

Meanwhile The Telegraph, recently purged of the majority of its editorial staff, give us a review from one Michael Hogan, whose work this writer doesn’t seem particularly familiar with. The review rewards Last Christmas a reasonable 5 stars, but all in all it reads like a rehash of various press releases and Steven Moffat interviews about the episode, with added benefit of viewing. There’s little meaningful here, with only mention of Danny Pink, the closing “cockle-warming cosy glow” and the count of film references “not just Ghostbusters and Alien but also The Matrix, The Shining, The Ring, Inception and Die Hard and Ghost,” showing that Hogan had actually watched anything beyond the BBC’s trailers.

Unleash the Fanboy is a curious blog, clearly aimed at denizens of nerdistan but with oddly pedant-baiting overuse of italic type, seemingly for emphasis in a comic-book style. They really should stop this practice, although awarding 7.5 out of 10 for Last Christmas is at least a sign that they’re moving in the direction of sanity. The conclusion summarises that “Last Christmas proves to be one of the best Doctor Who Christmas Specials in recent years, as though it doesn’t rival the more entertaining episodes of the recent series, it certainly outshines the more disappointing episodes,” and adds: “Highly recommended.”

Obviously, it is talking about a TV show and not a new restaurant or the latest Audi, but the final point in the rating breakdown is interesting: “The focus on festivity once again drains away from the flow.” We’re not certain this is the case; in fact it is arguably the only Doctor Who Christmas special where it is most certainly not, but we’ll perhaps let you decide on that in the comments…

Look out for our own considered review of Last Christmas this weekend…

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