The Doctor Meets Santa Claus in "Last Christmas"

harpere

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The Doctor Meets Santa Claus in "Last Christmas"

"Last Christmas" mixes and matches sci-fi horror tropes with Christmas tropes... to surprisingly good results.

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Veldel

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Nick Frost was born to play Santa and holy hell did he nail it.

I want Pegg to be a elf now and have em go on a adventure and let Edgar direct. BEST XMAS MOVIE EVER.


I loved this special and found it funny with the Alien Joke or 12 driving the slay.
 

Soviet Heavy

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I'll just repost what I said in the other thread.

So Clara will return. I'd heard rumors that Jenna Coleman was considering coming back for another season before this episode aired, and it's really obvious that the scene at the end was added later. It really did seem like the episode was supposed to end with eightysomething Clara having one last reunion with the Doctor.

I really really enjoyed this one. As far as I'm concerned, it's probably the best Christmas episode they did since the Christmas Carol with Michael Gambon. Lots of funny movie references, a clever use of Santa Claus that didn't go into the cheese factor like the Robin Hood episode did, and a really satisfying ending.

I for one do not hate Clara as a companion. I think that her interactions with Capaldi were the best she's ever done on the show. The problem wasn't her, it was fucking Danny Pink and his creepy obsessive stalker attitude. They had absolutely no chemistry with each other, even in this episode. But Coleman and Capaldi just click in a way she never did with Matt Smith. So I'm happy she's coming back without all the fucking Danny Pink baggage weighing her down.
 

totheendofsin

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Jul 31, 2009
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I really enjoyed this episode, particularly Nick Frost's Santa, it almost makes me want to see him take over the blue box once Capaldi's ready to leave but I doubt that will happen

I am a bit disappointed Clara is sticking around, I feel one of Moffat's biggest issues is he can't let go of companions, her leaving at the end of Death in Heaven felt like the right spot to end her story, just like the end of season 6 felt like a good spot to leave the Ponds who ended up sticking around til a half-assed final episode for them
 

Tanis

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'Course, thanks to that tangerine at the final shot...

Half of SE9 will be about Clara & The Doctor actually being in a dream the whole time...

With Nick Frost (or maybe The Dream Lord(!)) forcing them both to wake up...

With Clara dying in The Doctor's arms.
 

Deimir

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Tanis said:
'Course, thanks to that tangerine at the final shot...

Half of SE9 will be about Clara & The Doctor actually being in a dream the whole time...
Not only the tangerine, at one point they made a big deal about not having any wound from the dream crabs when they "woke up." I kept watching for it to see when they would really be awake and it never appeared.
 

SerBrittanicus

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Does this mean we have another season of the Clara Oswald show? God damn it I thought she was leaving - if Moffat had to stay I was at least hoping she would go.

Deimir said:
Not only the tangerine, at one point they made a big deal about not having any wound from the dream crabs when they "woke up." I kept watching for it to see when they would really be awake and it never appeared.
Yeah that was what I was waiting for as well, but they had absolutely no marks on their heads, so I kept assuming they were still in a dream.
 

Roxor

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Personally, I think the Old Clara world should have been the real ending. Everything was nicely wrapped up, and the happy ending seems tacked on.

There's a bit of Fridge Horror about the "happy ending", too. Only Clara and the Doctor are awake. Everyone else who was in the base is still asleep and being eaten.

Solvemedia: Very doubtful

How does this thing manage to get such oddly-appropriate phrases for confirmation?
 

Darth Marsden

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Roxor said:
There's a bit of Fridge Horror about the "happy ending", too. Only Clara and the Doctor are awake. Everyone else who was in the base is still asleep and being eaten.
The more you think about the implications of events in Doctor Who beyond what you see on the screen, the darker it gets.

Let's take the previous two-parter. So a bunch of corpses rose from their grave. Was that every single corpse? It's implied. So that means that any of the Doctor's previous companions who have died (this includes Amy and Rory!) rose from their graves as Cybermen.

See? Dark.
 

Roxor

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Darth Marsden said:
Roxor said:
There's a bit of Fridge Horror about the "happy ending", too. Only Clara and the Doctor are awake. Everyone else who was in the base is still asleep and being eaten.
The more you think about the implications of events in Doctor Who beyond what you see on the screen, the darker it gets.

Let's take the previous two-parter. So a bunch of corpses rose from their grave. Was that every single corpse? It's implied. So that means that any of the Doctor's previous companions who have died (this includes Amy and Rory!) rose from their graves as Cybermen.

See? Dark.
Yep, and that's one of the great things about Doctor Who. Spinoffs like Torchwood: Miracle Day are just exploring in detail the sort of stuff which ends up as Fridge Horror in the main show.
 

elvor0

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Soviet Heavy said:
the show. The problem wasn't her, it was fucking Danny Pink and his creepy obsessive stalker attitude. They had absolutely no chemistry with each other, even in this episode. But Coleman and Capaldi just click in a way she never did with Matt Smith. So I'm happy she's coming back without all the fucking Danny Pink baggage weighing her down.
Y'know what's interesting about Pink in this episode? It's pretty clear in Death in Heaven episode, but he flat out admitted this episode he would've let the universe burn if he hadn't had an opportunity to save Clara...yet he gives the Doctor shit for being a selfish "blood soaked general". It's rediculous, all he's done is dig wells and shoot a child in the face, but from his point of view, it's like he's chastising a dectorated war hero who survived paschendale /and/ fought the Nazis.
 

Shiftygiant

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I didn't hate it. I like Santa and Danny, as always, but to be honest I found this special to be as fun as grey paint drying on a wall in the abattoir. At first I enjoyed the dream aspect and the monsters, and I didn't hate Clara as much as I did throughout most the latter half of the Season, but around the moment they were flying over London in Santa's dream sleigh, I took a step back and realized I was bored out my mind by it all. I had more fun trying to guess who was playing the old man scientist than I did with the episode itself (Michael Troughton, who played Piers Morgan-Fletcher in the New Statesman and is son to the Second Doctor, Patrick Troughton).

But yeah, Nick Frost was good, but the elves got annoying after a while.
 

Gizmo1990

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I loved Nick Frost as Santa but everything else was just boring. I had the same problem that I have been having for the last few series. The first 3/4 of the episode felt slow with little happening and then the last 1/4 felt rushed with everything happening at super speed. Still at least Danny 'Captain Boring' Pink was not in it for long. I just jope season 9 can actualy be about the Doctor again.
 

deth2munkies

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They fucking tacked on that ending to bring Clara back and I'm really not happy about it. The 80 year old Clara was the PERFECT send off and I was really looking forward to having a companion that might have some chemistry with the Capaldi doctor. BUT NOPE. We're stuck with this shit for at least another half season.
 
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Just how all of them got into this dream when they're a group of unrelated (save the Doctor and Clara) people who have never met? How did they all wind up in a shared -- and horrifying -- dream about an alien invasion?
I can't keep the pedant in me at bay, and he's got answers for these questions.
They all got into the dream because that seems to be just what the dream crabs do. The Doctor managed to get into Clara's little Christmas-with-Danny dream world without any special use of gizmos or telepathy, creating a shared dream state for their collected victims seems to merely be how the crabs operate.
As for why it was so horrifying, did you catch what was on Allison's (that was the name of The Gobby One with blonde hair, right?) to-do list? A marathon of movies including Alien, the Thing and Miracle on 34th Street. The crabs had apparently drawn from her memories to make the dream world, or at least drawn from her the most heavily
 

VincentX3

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This is probably one of the better episodes yet.

I found it extremely funny and amusing to watch because before I started I was playing Alien Isolation (On Nightmare no less!) and... Yea.. After I died a whole bunch of times and started the episode, what do I see?

Dreamcra... Facehuggers.

They even made a reference to it so I was grinning all the way.

At first I felt the whole Santa Claus thing was tacked on just for the sake of having him here to make the Christmas special, but it was actually really well done and the whole dreamception really worked well.

So yep, this one episode, for it to be just a Christmas special is probably one of the better in this season.
 

Rebel_Raven

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I finally got around to watching it.

Grand ep. It wan't a gushy Christmas ep, though. Not quite the tear jerker I expected. I still liked it though.

One thing bothers me, though. ... ... They didn't have a budget for more than 3 reindeer, or something? Sleigh seemed under powered. :p
 

Pescetarian

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If this ended forty-five seconds earlier, it would have been one of my favorite episodes of New Who ever. It's amazing how much a bad ending can bring down an otherwise great story - felt this way for TDKR too.
 

DaedricDuke

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wow another episode where the writer is too lazy and incompetent to deal with change. Please let Doctor Who die, his screams of agony aren't funny anymore.
 

ForumSafari

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Roxor said:
Yep, and that's one of the great things about Doctor Who. Spinoffs like Torchwood: Miracle Day are just exploring in detail the sort of stuff which ends up as Fridge Horror in the main show.
One thing sticks in my mind from Torchwood, there's a scene where they're talking about everyone on Earth and mention a number, the number in question being considerably lower than the actual population. Looks like the repeated invasions have made quite the dent.

On another note I really liked the facehugger joke in this episode. I like that Doctor Who cribs from other sci-fi and I love that they admit to it every so often. I also liked the jab about the insensitive name.