“The Return of Doctor Mysterio” is the 2016 Christmas Special for the new Doctor Who.
The Christmas Special opens with a comic strip, and goes to New York where a man is in bed. There seems to be something swinging past his window, but it seems he’s actually having a dream. Then a young boy, Grant (aged 8), wakes to see a man swinging past his window.
The man is the Doctor, and he’s dangling by a rope tied around his foot. The rope is also attached to the roof, and he’s dangling 60 stories up. The Doctor had been setting a trap on the roof, and had accidentally activated it. The Doctor wants to come in, but Grant has to ask his mother for permission first. Strangely, it’s granted – but it’s Christmas and Grant told his mother that is an old man outside the window. So guess who the Doctor has been mistaken for.
After a brief discussion of Superman and Spider-Man (Grant is very much into comic books, and says that in them the Doctor would be called Doctor Mysterio), the Doctor leads him to where he has been building a contraption on the roof, in order to resolve the temporal turmoil that New York has been experiencing, apparently the fault of the Doctor (possibly a reference to what happened to Amy and Rory in “The Angels Take Manhattan”). He has a special gem which grants what the possessor wishes; unfortunately, Grant swallowed it thinking it was medicine. Which gives him various superpowers.
In present day New York, Grant is now working as a nanny. At a research organisation called Harmony Shoal (which has a rotating globe on its roof rather like the Daily Planet does in Superman), Lucy Fletcher, a reporter for the Daily Chronicle is rather suspicious of the man running it, Mr. Brock. The Doctor is also investigating the organisation, along with Nardole, seen in the 2015 Christmas special, “The Husbands of River Song”, who the Doctor has removed from Hydroflax and reassembled.
Mr. Brock isn’t the bad guy here; instead it’s a bunch of alien brains with eyes that actually set the organisation up. They want to take over the planet (not a new concept admittedly), by removing the brains from viable lifeforms and replacing them with their own. The Doctor, Nardole and Lucy are helped by the Ghost, a real life superhero with actual superpowers. No guesses as to where this superhero got his powers from.
Another alien invasion at Christmas (as the Doctor says, at Christmas he gets either colds or alien invasions), but in many ways a rather more light-hearted one, despite the slightly gruesome coring of people’s brains and heads splitting open. Lucy’s interrogation of the Doctor by terrorising a squeaky toy, Mr. Huffle, is one point of amusement, and Nardole and the Doctor have a rather different relationship. Nardole has an odd combination of occasional competent and easily distracted (‘an elephant’). There’s also the whole superhero thing, with the hidden identity, as Grant knows Lucy in both of his identities. More than a few Superman references here.
An alien invasion, superhero film and a romantic comedy all in the same episode. A different combination of things.
There is a connection (and a not entirely obvious one) between this year’s Christmas Special and last year’s – “The Shoal of Winter Harmony”. Perhaps something that’s going to recur.
There was, again, an occasional problem with the speaking being drowned out by the effects or music.