In other words, the production period of Graham Williams, which was the period of the show directly after Hinchcliffe. It's usually Tom Baker, with a jelly baby in his pocket, a huge smile on his face, eyes like Marty Feldman, and a quip to defeat any monster.

The interesting twist here is how they describe the Doctor. This is identifiably the period where the show was produced by Philip Hinchcliffe. But it's more than that, it has moved on during 2014, and in 'Last Christmas' we not only had a love letter to the show's gothic period, but Moffat has moved the nature of the show forward from the simplistic 'scary' answer to something more complicated.Īsk anyone to describe classic Doctor Who and they will invariably describe a dark show, with brooding horror, shadows, monsters, and generally sounding a bit gothic with a dash of Hammer Horror. Is Doctor Who about scaring the audience? Yes, it is, and that's how most people will describe the show. The real conflict in the episode is a metaphor over the real conflict of Doctor Who in popular culture. Doctor Who, more than any other BBC program (excepting 'Miranda') can contribute to nightmares and scary dreams in the younger members of the audience. I suspect a lot of parents are going to have a difficult time tonight when a scary dream wakes a child and they ask 'if they are really awake'.

We're also revisiting some of the oldest production rules of writing Doctor Who with this Christmas episode, including the power of television to give life to imagination, distracting companions with mathematics, and the classic 'Yeti In The Loo' principle of making ordinary hum-drum objects in life scary. (And in case you missed the references, a few of them were called out in Shona's check-list at the end of the episode). Opening with a mix of 'The Thing', and 'Alien' - which is now canon in the Doctor Who Universe alongside 'My Little Pony' (Slade's 'Merry Xmas Everyone' popped up in 2005) - the episode proceeded to merrily lift from 'Miracle on 34th Street', ' Santa Clause: The Movie', 'Inception', and even a tiny call out to the greatest Christmas movie of them all, 'Die Hard'. I'm specifically looking at the first half of Tom Baker's time as The Doctor - a period the production team has been calling back to throughout Series 8 - and with Christmas a time of reflection on the past, 'Last Christmas' was no exception. 'Doctor Who' has always openly taken popular stories and reworked them into the fabric of the show.

Doctor who last christmas ending