Miss Clara's Feeling for Snow

Here we are again in that liminal state between Christmas and Hogmanay, my least favourite holiday. About a decade ago, I was in the habit of going to ( whisper it) England to escape those grim days of dogged inebriation followed by  regretful torpor. In Scotland, it's effectively January 3rd before routines begin to return to normal. My country prides itself on its capacity to party and yet I've always found this time of year to be a parsimonious, miserable hiatus in everyday life.

I want to do this next year...

The festive season passes so quickly that it's hard to credit the Doctor Who Christmas Special has now been screened three times on BBC 1 and BBC3. But was The Snowmen a turkey or a cracker?( Ithangyew.)

Certainly, I had low expectations based on last year's tribute to C.S, Lewis, an episode so saccharine that I've never gone back to it. Matt Smith's performance was so eccentric that he veered into Willy Wonka or Wizard of Oz territory, lacking the crucial steeliness that is at the heart of the real Doctor. This year however, the source material  was blatantly  Mary Poppins via Tim Burton with a hint of The Turn of the Screw. 

 Lor' love a duck! A ladder in me tights!

Thankfully, towering mumbler Amy Pond is finally gone, taking her stroppy personality and inappropriate advances with her. She was replaced by secretive barmaid-turned-governess Clara: a bosomy, doe-eyed Victorian doxy. Clara has a mysterious connection to the Dalek with a human personality, Oswin Oswald from Asylum of the Daleks. Like Oswin, Clara spars sassily with the Doctor and is dead by the episode's end.
The eponymous carnivorous snowmen didn't constitute much of a threat since the mystery of the Woman Twice Dead took centre stage. I hope Moffat is teasing us with Clara's epitaph "Run you clever boy and remember": River Song exhorted the Tenth Doctor to "...watch us run" in an episode originally titled " River's Run". I really hope he doesn't go there. One Mary Sue per series is enough. Also the Tardis parked invisibly in the clouds atop a spiral staircase was a step too far into fairytale imagery for me.

The Two Doctors

A Doctor so wounded by loss that he's retired ( and wearing Amy's glasses-) is a trope borrowed from RTD's Tenth Doctor, always about to blub when a fresh-faced wannabe companion showed up. It felt tired and unlikely. Moffat also revived characters from A Good Man Goes to War: the haughty Silurian adventuress Madam Vastra, her life partner Jenny and the buffoonish Sontaran Strax. They were amusing echoes of his other big hit, Sherlock. The character least served by the overstaffed plot was Dr. Simeon, played by Richard E. Grant- the Ninth Doctor at least for a few weeks in 2003. REG had little to do except grit his teeth and snarl.

I felt this year's special was aimed less at the casual Xmas viewer and more at the audience invested in the series. In addition to a menace drawn form 1967's The Abominable Snowmen and an oblique reference to The Web of Fear,  Matt Smith provided the continuity announcement and wore a Troughton-esque hat. The Tardis has a shadowy new interior which looks less like a copper whisky still ( but appears to have little Target Books emblems for roundels!); We also have a new title sequence reintroducing THE FACE and a remixed theme (without the annoying choir or the distracting "dum-tish")

Jemma-Louise Coleman brings a trace of Emma Peel insouciance to the part- ironically in a series that will feature the real Diana Rigg, a submarine story and Neil Gaiman's take on the Cybermen. So, in a festive fug of sprouts and wafer-thin mints, I'll give The Snowmen 4 out of 5 Talmars.

In the department of Gone but Not Forgotten, the Ponds returned in the DWM Xmas strip, Imaginary Enemies. This tale of the Leadworth Nativity also features Mels and the Krampus, allegedly one of the Trickster's Brigade. A charming and warm strip that won me over with the line " Reality rolled up its sleeves and got Scottish". 5 out of 5 Talmars.

The Ponds (and Winston Churchill) also guest-star in IDW's Doctor Who Special but it was published in the late summer. One of the four strips ends on a dark note with a villain becoming one of the children exchanged with the 456 in Torchwood. The lead strip, "In-Fez-station" is scripted by the legendary Len Wein and features those flatulent Slitheen, whom I often think would make excellent enemies for the boyish Eleventh Doctor.
 There's an Easter Egg for David McIntee fans- but the stories are generic and the Doctor's voice proves difficult to capture.  It's a pretty comic but not a patch on the home-grown material. 3 out of 5 Talmars.

Coming soon: Batman: Earth-One; Hickman's Avengers and Dark Eyes.
All images are presumed copyright of their respective owners