The Christmas Invasion had a lot to achieve as the first ever Doctor Who Christmas special. How did it help to create an annual tradition?
(Image credit: Doctor Who/BBC.
Image obtained from: official Doctor Who website.)
With no new Christmas special to look forward to this year, we look back at the first, The Christmas Invasion, and why it was so important to Doctor Who.
It’s a strange time for a Doctor Who fan this time of year. While we do have a New Year’s Day special, it’s strange to know that we won’t be getting the traditional Christmas Day one.
But even stranger is remembering a time when it had never been a tradition. When it was originally announced that, along with a second series for the show after the success of the first episode, we would be getting a Christmas special as well, the idea was met with skepticism.
While Christmas specials were and still are very common for a huge number of British programmes, there had never been any Christmas specials at all in Doctor Who before. In fact, only one episode of the entire original run was broadcast on Christmas Day, and that happened only because of coincidence.
Also, The Feast of Steven is a rather peculiar episode, as it’s a very light-hearted and silly story in the middle of the epic and gritty The Daleks’ Master Plan. So Christmas episodes didn’t exactly have the best reputation at this point.
A surprisingly successful story
So when The Christmas Invasion came along, we weren’t sure what to expect. We knew what it needed to be, though: good. Really good. In fact, it had to be strong enough to show that the Christmas special could be something that we could look forward to, rather than dread.
Still, I don’t think any of us were expecting The Christmas Invasion to be quite that good. With it being Christmas, perhaps we were expecting something lighter, and indeed, we’ve certainly had a few light-hearted Christmas specials since then. (The Return of Doctor Mysterio definitely springs to mind.)
But what we had was a very solid alien invasion story. Fellow writer Luke described it as “surprisingly dark” in his selection for the five best Christmas specials, and that’s definitely an apt description for it.
Instead of the series becoming sillier in tone or increasing the comedy, what we instead got was a story where one third of the world’s population were possessed and in danger of killing themselves. The image of so many people around the world standing on rooftops is still a haunting one.
Even the things that could have been silly – such as the evil killer Santas or Christmas trees – had a genuinely sinister edge to them. Overall, Russell T Davies treated the episode at least as seriously – if not more so – as any regular Doctor Who episode.
A new Doctor
Of course, The Christmas Invasion has one other major aspect to it: it was David Tennant’s first full episode in the role. After seeing him at the end of The Parting of the Ways and a brief scene for charity telethon Children in Need, we were eager to see more of his Doctor.
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So showing him in bed and unconscious for almost two thirds of the episode was certainly a risky decision. But one that almost certainly paid off. The moment the Tenth Doctor opened the TARDIS doors and said, with a great big smile on his face, “Did you miss me?”, practically everyone accepted him as the Doctor. No easy task, especially after how popular Christopher Eccleston had been.
And the love the audience had for Ten only grew once David Tennant finally got to show off what he could really do. With his performance and Davies’s strong script, we got a Doctor who was heroic, daring, fun, eccentric and easily lovable. With such a strong opening episode, it’s no wonder that the audience took to him so quickly.
Overall, The Christmas Invasion was a very successful Doctor Who story, and therefore, a very successful Christmas special. It proved that even a Doctor Who episode made specifically for Christmas didn’t have to suffer in quality as a result.
As a result, it ensured that the format would last for almost a decade and a half, turning what had been an idea initially met with skepticism into a much-loved annual tradition of the series.
Do you agree on the importance of The Christmas Invasion? Is it one of your favorite Christmas specials? What was your reaction to it when you first watched it? Let us know in the comments below.