These posts have gotten long-winded, no? What was supposed to be a couple hundred words on why I loved/chose these specials has become a dense tome that could take up your whole lunch hour. But that’s the beauty of Doctor Who—the intricacies, the layered meanings, the jammy dodgers. One must go all the way to the beginning just to come through to the end, which is exactly what our Time Lord has to do in the penultimate special in our countdown.
#2: A Christmas Carol or “Dumbledore’s Ice Capades”
All the Who’s in Doctor Who-ville liked Christmas a lot, but Kazran Sardick, who could buy and sell your mother, did not.
The old bear hated Christmas, the whole holiday season.
But don’t ask him why—he might hang you for treason.
It could be, perhaps, that his Dad was too mean.
Or maybe it’s cuz he had so much green. (Ka-CHING!)
But I think the reason his compassion was dozin’
Was simply because that his girlfriend was frozen.
Old Kazran
Kazran Sardick is a miserable, rich, old fart. He chews people up and spits them out and even freezes them cryogenically as “collateral” in his loansharking enterprise. He’s so mean (how mean is he?), he can ignore his president’s pleas to use the Sardick flashy-lighty weather-machine to open a safe passage in the stormy atmosphere for a crashing spaceship—the vessel on which companions and newlyweds Amy Pond and her Roman Centurion, Rory, are currently honeymooning. Not even entreaties from the Doctor, who has landed down Kazran’s chimney on Christmas Eve, can sway the miserly meanie. Is there no one who can appeal to the reason within this cold-hearted man?
Send in Charles Dickens, the Superman of the British people (doesn’t he, too, wear a cape?), to add a touch of inspiration: Kazran wakes up to see the Doctor—er, Ghost of Christmas Past standing before him. To change the present, the Doctor must travel to a time when a young Kazran lived in fear of his tyrannical father and in wonder of the fish that swam in the fog that misted just above the planet’s surface.
(Okay, I’ve got to stop right here and ask: Between this idea and fish fingers, does Stephen Moffat brainstorm in front of his aquarium?)
After encountering a fearsome and hungry shark (Doctor: “You know what boys say in the face of danger? Mummy!”), the two end up in a vast meat locker in the basement where Sardick Sr. keeps his collateral people, including Abigail Pettigrew, a pretty young woman—played by soprano and Andrew Lloyd Webber muse Katherine Jenkins—whose family traded her in to pay the bills. Okay, so it’s not that heartless. Abigail possesses a secret that may have something to do with the number on the front of her container, which currently reads “00000009.”
The Doctor and young Kazran
Abigail is freed from the chamber just in time to help out the Doctor and young Kazran with a big shark problem, and is invited for a quick trip on the TARDIS before going back into her icy entombment. This soon becomes a tradition every Christmas Eve for the next seven years, which fleet by in the span of seven minutes thanks to the old timey-wimey machine and quick editing, until we see a grown-up Kazran and the well-preserved Abigail fall in love.
Slightly older Kazran and Abigail
Only on their last Christmas Eve outing does Abigail reveal her secret to her boyfriend and the two hold onto each other with all their might. Oh, dear. This is gonna be a heartbreaker, huh? When they return her to the ice palace, the counter on Abigail’s chamber now reads “1,” and Kazran shoos the Doctor away, telling him that it’s time to grow-up and say goodbye to silly TARDIS adventures. This marks the beginning of the miserly old Kazran we first encountered—though he now has new memories from these youthful escapades.
This old Kazran—now being visited by Amy’s hologram as the Ghost of Christmas Present—still refuses to allow safe passage for the ship. “We all die,” he says. All except Abigail, it seems, still locked away in the freezer. Turns out, her secret was that she was terminally ill and sacrificed herself for her families debts, and has been kept on ice to avoid living the last day of her life all these years by a heartbroken Kazran. Only when the Doctor disrupts the space-time continuum and brings a young Kazran to see his old miserable self (this being the Ghost of the Christmas Future-moment), does Kazran have a change of heart to allow safe entry for the spaceship.
One problem (of course!): Having his heart grow three sizes that day has made him unrecognizable to his isotropic machine—in layman’s terms: his weather-controller is broke. The only thing proven to calm the torrent above is . . . (drum roll) . . . Abigail’s beautiful singing voice! Aw man, now Kazran has to let her out of the icebox. But he does. And she sings. And everyone is saved. Huzzah!
You have to hand it to writer and executive producer Stephen Moffat. In his first Who holiday outing, he brought his usual “A” game—adventure, reflection, romance, and the riddles we’ve come to expect. (Was I the only one who wondered if Abigail singing “Silence is all you know” might be foreshadowing Season 6? Just me?) And he treated longtime fans with a brief cameo of the signature striped scarf of the Fourth Doctor, played by Tom Baker.
Initially, I was going to place this episode at #3 in the countdown. Sure, it’s beautifully filmed and has the most recent Doctor Matt Smith and stars Michael Gambon (the “Darren” of Dumbledores), but I thought it may have been more flash over substance. Then the episode had me at “hello:” Early on, when the Doctor asks after the lady on ice (Abigail), old miserly Kazan says that she’s no one important, to which the Doctor utters, “In 900 years of space and time, I’ve never met anybody who wasn’t important.” *Swoon*
We’re almost near the end. By now, you probably know which one I picked for #1. But I’ve a few festive surprises in store that will touch your Who heart.
Make sure to catch up on #5, #4, and #3 before the big reveal.
Camille Dewing lives and writes in New York City. Visit her website at www.WhatsCamilleDewing.wordpress.com.
[...] #2: A Christmas Carol [...]