There’s already a recap of this year’s Doctor Who Christmas special here at Tor, so I won’t go too much into what I thought about the episode as a whole. What I will say is that I loved it even more than last year’s “A Christmas Carol.” I loved that “The Doctor, the Widow, and the Wardrobe” captured what’s awesome about Doctor Who, particularly Matt Smith’s Doctor. The fact that he talks to children as if they are smarter than adults. To quote Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, “Parents are always more knowledgeable than their children, but children are always smarter than their parents.” I think this idea is central to who The Doctor is, and this special captured that in the two wonderful children at its heart, and in the way The Doctor built them a Christmas getaway that so readily appealed to them.
However, I also loved that this was the Girl Power (or rather, Woman Power) episode of Doctor Who. Now, there’s been a lot of debate about that on the internet, so allow me to lay out my case for why this episode was not the affront by Steven Moffat to women everywhere that I’ve seen it depicted as on Twitter. I’d also like to lay out how his Madge Arwell trumps his more problematic Christmastime female character, Abigail, of “A Christmas Carol.”
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