The episode starts with Clara being awoken by noise on the rooftop. It is Santa, two elves, a sled and flying reindeer. It is immediately comical. An elf makes a reference to Santa growing a beard as a disguise, but peope have picked up on it. They pole fun at Clara’s suggestion that her parents just suddenly decided to give her presents one day a year – it is a nice story, but it is time to live in the real world. The mention of growing out of fairy stories is nicely timed to coincide with the Doctor’s arrival.
The episode begins comically, and does not entirely lose that element. But it becomes the stuff of horror later on.
The Doctor finally learns that Danny Pink is dead, when he tries to distract Clara with a mention of him. They have arrived in a place where humans are trying to get through an infermary where telepathic species are sleeping. There are dream crabs on Earth. They generate a telepathic field, altering perception, making it impossible to tell what is real. The Doctor says that the big problem telling fantasy and reality apart is that “they’re both ridiculous.”
There is a deliberate echo of the Gift of the Magi, as the Doctor and Clara both admit that they each lied in order to try to help the other. Each hid their own sorrow and loss in order to try to protect the other’s happiness.
The Doctor says to interrogate everything, in case it is a lie.
Someone compares the dream crabs to face huggers. The Doctor says, “There’s a horror movie called Alien? That’s offensive. No wonder they keep invading you.”
The dream crabs use the perception of others to see. They induce a dream state while they devour the brains of their victims.
One of them gets Clara. The Doctor tries to get through to her by allowing one of the creatures onto his face, to join her dream. Dream Danny works to save her, and they manage to wake up.
Then they realize that in fact, they are all still dreaming, they all continue to have the same pain in the side of their head. The Doctor does a dream test, gets them all to read the base manual, since they will not have a common memory of it and so will not see the same thing on the same page number. It’s a clever plot device.
Shona talks about Santa as a dream that is trying to save them. He says she just defined him.
The Doctor says, “No one knows they’re not dreaming.”
Towards the end of the episode, the Doctor finds Clara 62 years later, in a touching scene. And then, Santa wakes him, for real. A rare second chance for the Doctor.
The question of whom the Doctor has to thank, and the shot of the tangerine on the windowsill, poses the same “Is this reality or just another layer of dream?” question that one also found in The Matrix series, Existenz, Total Recall, and most of all Inception. And it is a subject that Doctor Who touched on previously, in the episode “Amy’s Choice.”
I was a bit nervous when it was revealed that the episode would feature Santa Claus, elves, and flying reindeer. And so I was very pleased with what was actually done. What did you think of the episode?
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