A Christmas Carol

2010 Christmas special.

Evil for the sake of evil

The episode starts with Amy and her boyfriend in their respective fancy-dress costumes (police stripper and battered Roman) for no apparent reason, on a spaceship. For some reason. I don't know. Anyway, they call the Doctor, because he's not there, and tell him they're crashing. Because of the fog. Presumably something caused the space ship to start crashing into the planet before that, but now they can't land because it;s too foggy and the hip is too broken or something to just fly away. I wasn't really paying attention.

So the doctor goes to the planet to get them to use their weather machine to save the ship. But apparently the entire planet's weather is in the control of one guy, and he's a dickish psychopath. And even though he has no reason at all not to save the ship (the weather machine is right there in the room and he can just go over and use it any time he likes), and could conceivably profit by doing so, he doesn't because he's evil. And evil translates to "Does stupid things just because they're mean, not to further any sort of goal."

Time travel does not work that way!

So the Doctor decides to go back in time to change the dude and make him nicer. Even though he can't do that because it would alter his own time line and this is a rule you have repeatedly established on this show, but fuck it, it works that way this week because the writers are lazy hacks.

Now here comes the worst bit.

The evil dude is watching a film he made when he was a child, and the Doctor goes back to meet him at while he's making the film. The Doctor shows up on the film, demonstrating that the time-line has been changed, but for some reason, present-time evil dude (PTED) doesn't remember the changes. He sits there watching this video that he made and remembers it happening differently.

Wait, did I say that was the worst part? I was wrong, this whole episode is the worst.

Flying fish

Back in time, the Doctor meets not-yet-evil-dude (NYED), who wants to see some fish. These fish, it turns out, can swim in the air because of magic

electricity and are considered extremely dangerous. So the Doctor says "Dangerous flying fish? O curse you should be allowed to see them. In fact, let's lure some right into your bedroom here." because the Doctor is apparently retarded.

So anyway, a shark chases them, and the doctor tries o stop it, but it bits his magic wand in half or something. Anyway, half the wand got stuck in the shark and this hurt it such that i could not get back up into the sky where it lives and is stuck down in the fog and will die unless they can put it in stasis or something.

Stasis or something

Fortunately, NYED's dad has a whole bunch of stasis pods downstairs, and apparently the code for the security door has never once been changed because the Doctor is able to nip back to the present to ask PTED what it is.

But hold on, why do they have all these people in stasis? They're collateral on loans. What sort of fucking stupid business plan is this? If someone can't pay you back, you continue to pay the costs associated with storing people indefinitely?

The obvious stupidity becomes even more pronounced when it turns out later that at least one family has worked out an obvious way to profit by this arrangement. Your family member is dying. You put them up as collateral and they get frozen. You make sure not to pay the loan back until a cure is found. If you invest the money in the meantime you can end up profiting financially as well as saving the person's life.

Oh right, the shark

So they wake some woman up and get her to help them return he shark to the clouds, though I'm still not clear on why they wanted to save it, because it's a fucking shark, but anyway, they all have a good time apparently, and decide to get together every Christmas. Or rather, NYED decides this and the Doctor is too much of a pushover to say no.

So he keeps jumping forward a year at a time, meeting NYED and waking up frozen-woman and taking them around to fun places, and each time the number on the front of her stasis pod decreases ominously, until it gets to 1 and she tells NYED her dark and terrible and blatantly obvious secret and all the fun stops forever and NYED grows up to be evil anyway.

Back to the future present

Meanwhile, Amy phones up PTED and gets the people on the ship to sing Christmas carols, in the hopes that his heart will grow three sizes that day. And Also because singing controls electrical fog somehow. Naturally, PTED is still a dick and says no.

Then the Doctor shows up with NYED and shows him what a dick he'll turn out to be, which changes NYED so he won't turn into such a dick which is the Doctor changing his own time line again which you can't fucking do, but now PTED has never been a dick, so he agrees to help.

None of this makes any sense!

Unfortunately, it turns out that never-was-evil-dude (NWED) was never given control of the weather machine by his father because he was too nice (his father was evil too). And somehow this comes as a surprise to him, because apparently he still remembers his father giving him control of the machine even though that never happened now.

So even though the changes to he past have altered his personality, and he remembers some of the things that changed, he doesn't remember other bits. And everything else is still exactly the same. You'd think if he'd been a nice guy all his life and didn't hate Christmas any more, he wouldn't be sitting alone in his empty house on Christmas eve with a bunch of frozen people held for ransom downstairs, but apparently none of that changed.

The stupid conclusion

Unable to work the machine, the Doctor decides to get the frozen girl out to sing the fog away (because she's the only one who can do it apart from the other people mentioned earlier by NYED who could also do it and aren't dying) and she saves the spaceship (using the magic wand, of course) and then spends Christmas with NWED and then presumably dies on Christmas day, off-screen, so we all get to pretend it was a happy ending.

God, what an irredeemable pile of shit.