Doctor Who Review: Last Christmas

It’s the annual tradition, and this year was no exception: the Doctor Who Christmas special. This year, we got a tangerine-loving hero Santa, Alien and Inception plot knock-offs, and a touching reunion. How? It’s a long story, but let’s get into it… We thought it was the end of Clara and the Doctor, but with the horribly sad way season eight ended, I was hoping it wasn’t true. No, I don’t need Clara and the twelfth Doctor to be together forever, but at least give me some closure. So we start off with Clara encountering jolly old Saint Nick himself with his reindeer and two comic relief elves. The Doctor shows up, whisks Clara away in his Tardis, then all of a sudden they’re in the North Pole as a group of scientists are in the middle of some vague, unknown mission (again, “it’s a long story”). There are a bunch of Alien-esque telepathic facehugging aliens who suck your brains out and induce an euphoric, dreamlike state on the host. Oh, and Santa pops up to argue with the Doctor occasionally and save the day whenever they need help. So this episode’s all about illusion versus reality and we’ve got the whole dream-within-a-dream multiple twist set-up that feels a lot like Inception … because it’s pretty damn close to Inception. So much so that I could call several twists in the episode—I’ve seen Inception enough times to know how dream stacking works—but this special still kept me guessing at times, especially toward the ending. In the spirit of the holiday season, here are m…