First off, I would like to wish a very happy birthday to Pear Mackie. I missed seeing her in person a few months ago, being busy with a show I was doing, but she was absolutely lovely to my wife. Thank you so much, Ms Mackie, I hope you are having a swell day wherever you happen to be.

As for me, yeah, I watched Doctor Who this morning. Like that's a shock. So let's talk Christmas.

A Christmas Carol

(TARDIS Data Core recap)

Matt Smith and Steven Moffat's first Christmas outing is a perfectly pleasant and serviceable holiday special, provided you don't spend much time thinking about it. Moffat set out to make the most "Christmassy Christmas special ever", and did so by loosely adapting the Dickens classic. Except, you know, with flying fish. Amy and Rory are off on their honeymoon (and apparently playing some dress-up bedroom games with Amy in her Kiss-o-gram Cop outfit and Rory in his Roman gladiator attire), when their space liner goes into a crash trajectory around a foggy planet. The Doctor can't land the TARDIS on the ship because of Reasons, the entire planetary atmosphere is controlled by the old miser NotScrooge, and so the Doctor does the only sensible thing: he sets out to alter NotScrooge's past in order to turn him into a nicer person so that he will agree to rescue the crashing ship. The Doctor of course fails miserably.

Basically YoungNotScrooge is a sad boy who receives regular beatings from DaddyNotScrooge. As an added bonus, DaddyNotScrooge has made a large fortune by being a loan shark who requires a family member as collateral for any loan. The collateral is kept on ice in a basement vault, and YoungNotScrooge winds up falling in love with a beautiful young woman who DaddyNotScrooge has had locked up in a freezer in his basement for years. Ho ho ho, Merry Christmas!

So the Doctor visits YoungNotScrooge and PopsicleGirlfriend every Christmas Eve for several years, setting her free for an evening of holiday cheer before locking her up again. Because, sure, that's the kind thing to do. Except, it turns out that there is a countdown on her freezer, and once her counter gets down to "0001" she finally fesses up to TwentySomethingNotScrooge that she is actually dying, and she can only be woken up one more time before she melts. Or whatever. This, in turn, causes TwentySomethingNotScrooge to still become the grumpy NotScrooge from the start of the story, still unwilling to save anyone because his PopsicleGirlfriend will never unthaw. Boo hoo.

In the end, PopsicleGirlfriend is revived one last time so that she can sing a pretty song that gets amplified through a giant flying shark that ate half of the sonic screwdriver (long story), which clears the fog, which resonates with the fog, which clears a path and allows the space liner to land safely. Oh, and it also causes some Christmas snow, and NotScrooge & PopsicleGirlfriend get a lovely Christmas Day together. After which, presumably, she dies. Happy New Year!

Like I say, it's a perfectly enjoyable story on a surface level, and has some very clever subversions of the Dickens classic. But upon any deeper look nothing holds up at all. Like: what kind of illness does PopsicleGirlfriend have in which she appears to be absolutely healthy and able to run around romancing TwentySomethingNotScrooge, singing to the fish, and partying with Frank Sinatra and Marilyn Monroe, and yet so sick that she knows to within 24 hours when she will kick the bucket? That's a weird kind of disease that the Doctor never even once tries to cure. Also: With the Ponds' honeymoon space liner on a crash course with less than one hour to impact, why does he spend days and days of timey-wimey mucking about in NotScrooge's psyche, instead of just using some WhateverTechnology from the TARDIS to do something about the fog? Finally: why would DaddyNotScrooge accept as collateral a terminal patient with only about a week to live? That makes no kind of sense.

So, yeah, it felt like this story could have used a few more rounds of editing where instead it just got an extra few layers of wrapping paper to cover up the gaping plot holes. But that's ok, it's still better than Planet of Giants or Warriors of the Deep. Sometimes you just have to accept the light, fluffy entertainment and then move on.

p>STATS:

Doctor(s): Eleventh
Companion(s): Amy Pond, Rory Williams
Episode(s): A Christmas Carol
Steps Walked: 7,972 today, 3,101,186 total
Distance Walked: 4.20 miles today, 1,618.35 miles total
Push-ups Completed: 100 today, 4,564 total
Sit-ups Completed: 0 today, 929 total
How Many Times has Rory Died?: 2
How Many Times has Amy Died?: 1
Is Anything Cool?: Bow ties are still cool, and so is the sonic screwdriver
Weight: 248.62 lbs (five day moving average), net change -58.68 lbs