Although it’s not the first time a Doctor Who episode hasn’t aired on Christmas Day itself, Christmas 2025 will mark the first time in two decades that there’s not a special broadcast at all over the festive period—a final lump of coal in the stocking for what has been a very weird year for the Whoniverse. But maybe we should use the opportunity to revisit the episode that started the tradition off two decades ago because, really, it remains Doctor Who‘s actual best attempt at a Christmas story.
Twenty years ago tomorrow, “The Christmas Invasion”—technically the second Doctor Who Christmas broadcast after 1965’s “The Feast of Steven,” a bizarre story that is both not really a Christmas special and is now lost to time as one of Who‘s many remaining missing episodes—hit screens as the first full-episode debut of David Tennant’s 10th Doctor. Seeing the Doctor bedbound in a post-regenerative coma amid an invasion of Earth by the Sycorax, the episode is perhaps most fondly remembered now for Tennant’s immediate charm in taking on the Doctor, the modern era’s first chance to overcome the dramatic hurdle of a new actor taking on the mantle (and how easily he did it despite spending most of the runtime asleep in bed), setting the stage for a cultural dominance and interpretation of the Time Lord that neither the mainstream audience nor the show itself has ever really moved on from.
But beside that broader importance in the show’s legacy, “The Christmas Invasion” still charms because it is the first time that Doctor Who itself actually engaged with the idea of doing a Christmas story—and it went all the way in, in a manner that the show never really did again after it established this new tradition of the TARDIS showing up every holiday season. It’s an episode that is unabashedly “a Christmas episode of Doctor Who,” mashing together the show’s finest tropes with festive flair. Robots dressed as Santa marching through London streets playing carols before revealing their brass instruments as explosive weapons evoke the Autons (a fitting parallel, considering Doctor Who returned to screens with the plastic automatons) and a killer Christmas tree that is ripped right out of Doctor Who‘s playbook of turning the everyday into something ludicrous and yet still chilling: this is not Doctor Who with a tinselled set dressing, but one that unequivocally and gleefully roots itself in the spirit of the season.
And it’s not just the visual festivity, either. Thematically, “The Christmas Invasion” is similarly a wholehearted embrace of values and ideas we cherish during the holidays: the importance of family and community (even if, as was the case with the Doctor and Jackie Tyler, you don’t really have a history of getting along too well) and a faith in the hope that we can welcome others with open arms. It’s an episode about big emotions, from the Doctor grappling with his new sense of identity to Rose having to shoulder his recovery and the impending threat of the Sycorax—the kind of unwariness for the future we often find ourselves reflecting on amid the more joyous elements of Christmas—things that get to a cathartic climax not really with the aliens’ defeat, but in the embrace of the new Doctor and the Tyler residence’s Christmas dinner.
There are grander Doctor Who festive specials. There are stories that are arguably stronger, episodes that are great Doctor Who first and festive specials second. There are stories that go about connecting to the holidays in more interesting ways than the admittedly cheesy track that “Christmas Invasion” takes (but then again, isn’t a little cheese part of both the festive season and Doctor Who‘s charm?). But for the past 20 years, and arguably for more years to come after the show returns next Christmas, it’s still the Doctor Who seasonal special to live up to. It set the gold standard of what Who could do with the trappings and themes of the period, wholeheartedly embracing them instead of treating them as an afterthought demanded by a broadcast slot.
“The Christmas Invasion” is a story that could only be told on Christmas and one that would be lessened if it was transposed to any other time of the year—and in the process of marrying Doctor Who with the holidays for whole generations of fans, it created a wonderful tradition that has strived to endure all these years later, even as the broader show itself has its own setbacks.
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