Whosday: The Christmas Invasion

While The Dalek's Master Plan and The Unquiet Dead are both set around Christmas, the first official Doctor Who Christmas special was The Christmas Invasion, and while one can argue it might not have been the best one, it is still my personal favorite, not in the least due to a spot-on introduction of the Tenth Doctor as portrayed by David Tennant.

It's one of my favorites, though admittedly not much happens in it, besides aliens called Sycorax invading and the Tenth Doctor coming out of his regenerative bunk to defeat the Sycorax with his newfound energetic whackiness; it's relatively similar to Spearhead from Space and The Seeds of Doom.

One can get confused by a brief and pointless side-plot involving the use of robot Santas not really connected with the main invading force, but otherwise the story is serviceable.  For me, having a discernible plot, and being funny and joyous as all get-out, are enough to be a perfectly enjoyable Doctor Who story, but for many others, it's apparently seldom discussed.  Why is this? I'm actually not sure, but my best guess is that this episode remains relatively unpopular for two reasons:

Firstly, the slow pace; it doesn't have the thickest plot, so it mostly just spends a lot of time focusing on the Sycorax threatening the Earth and the Doctor being in a regenerative bunk, rather than achieving anything productive to resolve the conflict.  It isn't until close to the end when it truly gets interesting: When the Doctor finally wakes up, and David Tennant is at his David Tennant-est.

Secondly, thanks to Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss in particular, Doctor Who became less about telling stories and providing characterizations that would evoke emotional responses as a result of the impact of the story and the development the characters underwent, and more about using stories and characters as devices to set up pre-determined emotional endings.

In other words, Doctor Who went from being a series that happened to be so powerful it could be a tear-jerker most of the time, to being a series that was a tear-jerker for the sake of being a tear-jerker.

Because that's the way it's been for a long time, now some fans actually prefer the idea that Doctor Who should be a tear-jerking series for its own sake, and thus they don't like episodes that aren't tear-jerkers, and this episode isn't a tear-jerker.  It's rather a story that has as much joy as you might feel when you see somebody open a present you picked just for them, and they love it.  Because most fans forget that Doctor Who was, in some ways, a series more about joy than sorrow, I think that's why this episode is the most underrated Christmas special.

Admittedly, The Runaway Bride has a much better, thicker plot than this story, which has a paper-thin plot by comparison, and A Christmas Carol is probably by far more moving, but overall, as Christmas specials go, this is a decent episode.