Doctor Who Episode Christmas Special

It's never explained who delivered the lethal Christmas Tree. The Sycorax aren't on Earth yet and don't know about the Doctor. If it's the "pilot fishes," Jackie makes no comment about how they looked like Santas. And if it were the pilot fishes, why would they drop off a tree and leave, instead of going inside and capturing the Doctor with minimal resistance? Plus... the tree is a killing machine. It's established that the pilot fishes want the Doctor alive as a power source. However, the tree is trying to kill him.

The Doctor: Cos' quite by chance, I'm still within the first 15 hours of my regeneration cycle. Which means I've got just enough residual cellular energy to do this. [holds out arm and hand regrows].


Though the "15 hours" revelation was a new piece of the Doctor Who legend, this is not the first time we have seen evidence that a Time Lord body does not "Set" immediately after a regeneration. In the original series "Destiny of the Daleks" Romana is seen regenerating, changing her looks several times before settling on the appearance of Princess Astra.

As mentioned by Rose, the TARDIS telepathically translates alien languages into English for her and the other humans present, but how did it manage to make the mouth movements of the Sycorax leader fit the English translation as well?

The answer could be that it is to aid lip-readers. Not all communication is verbal. Shrugs, nods, shakes of the head - surely all these are not a universal standard - so it makes sense that the translation would include them.

A deleted scene for this episode shows the Doctor congratulating Harriet Jones for her victory in the election, attempting to say "Fantastic", a word commonly said by the 9th Doctor, from whom he had just regenerated, but failing, apparently due to the shape of his new teeth, as stated at the end of "The Parting of the Ways". However, since this scene was deleted, he ends up saying it at the end of this episode, and in "The Girl in the Fireplace", both times as a reference to the 9th Doctor.

The opening cut in the wall of Jackie's apartment by the tree appears to be far too smooth, and looks more like it was made by a cookie cutter mould than by a rough edged Christmas tree.

In the opening teaser the TARDIS appears, slams into and damages two buildings, then hits the front of a moving red van before skidding into some trash cans and stopping. Oddly, after this has happened, people are seen in the background calmly standing around and nobody gets out of the van nor does anyone attempt to see if the person in the van is alright.

An explanation for this COULD be linked to something the Doctor has maintained on several occasions - that the human race delude themselves when it comes to what they view as impossible. The Doctor, after all, selects only the more aware people as companions. It may be the people in the street were trying their best to ignore this unlikely even, each assuming that they were the only one to see it...

There is an interesting confluence of "fact" and "fiction" in this episode. The Doctor makes a reference to himself in a dressing gown as very much like Arthur Dent, the lead character of Douglas Adams's The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. Adams served as a writer and script editor on the original Doctor Who series where he inserted a side joke into the script for the first episode of Destiny Of The Daleks involving Oolon Caluphid, a character from the Guide. The Doctor is reading Caluphid's Origins Of The Universe.

This Christmas episode was filmed in July and 500 supporting artists were hired to play the British public.

When the Doctor is trying to figure out what to wear, he holds up against himself David Tennant's costume from Casanova.

At the end of this episode it is implied that Harriet Jones is finished as Prime Minister. This is despite the fact that the Ninth Doctor told Rose in World War Three that Harriet served three consecutive terms as Prime Minister. That would mean she would have been in office for up to fifteen years. Yet in this episode it is apparent that not a lot of time have passed since Jackie and Mickey last saw Rose in Parting of the Ways. Has the Doctor altered history?

Another thing is that Harriet told the Doctor that she won in a landslide yet she seems in danger of losing a no confidence vote mentioned in the news bulletin. If Harriet has such a big majority in Parliament this would mean for her to lose the vote, a mass defection from her own ranks would have to vote against her. In reality a mass defection of Government MPs bringing down their own government is very unlikely.

The commentary for the episode on the BBC website, however, gives the impression that her career does not survive.

This is the first episode of the new series of Doctor Who to show any part of the TARDIS other than the central control chamber.

The wardrobe room where the Doctor chooses his outfit includes every previous Doctor's' outfit in it, according to the commentary track on the BBC website.

Several scenes were filmed in Cardiff city centre during summer 2005. These include scenes of people standing on the rooftops under the Sycorax control and the scene where Mickey and Rose are attacked by the robotic Santas.

When Rose addresses the Sycorax and tells them to leave, she mentions several adversaries that she and the Ninth Doctor faced: the Slitheen (seen in Aliens Of London, World War Three and Boom Town), the Gelth (in The Unquiet Dead), the Jagrafess (in The Long Game) and the Daleks (in Dalek, Bad Wolf and The Parting Of The Ways).

A teaser trailer aired on the BBC website from December 2nd 2005.