Almost Doctor Who:
Boots Christmas Advert 2021.

 

TV As it says in the title, find above the new Boots Christmas Advert 2021, in which Jenna Coleman, the actress who played a companion for nearly three seasons in the popular British science fiction programme Doctor Who, bounces in as a completely different character who is gifted a handbag for Christmas by her Nan, which is bigger on the inside.

Hopefully Andrew Pixley will rock up at some point with the making of this thing because the behind-the-scenes on this could be a riot, either because they're all Doctor Who fans having a laugh or everyone including Jenna were completely oblivious to the implications which would somehow make it all the more hilarious.  I'm not sure either way.

For one thing, they make it absolutely clear throughout that Jenna is playing a character called Joy presumably because it ties in with the hashtag #bagsofjoy which appears in the YouTube title and other socials.  Which is either a way of distancing themselves from Doctor Who, or again just makes it look as though their distancing themselves from Doctor Who which again is even funny.

Just to be silly, how would this fit within Doctor Who?  Since the character is named Joy and has a completely different family, we have to assume this isn't sadly, Clara Oswald herself at some time after she's travelled with me, sorry Me.  In which case we have to assume Joy's one of the splinters of Clara, created when she stepped into the Doctor's timeline in The Name of the Doctor.

How did she end up with this magical bag?  The advert opens with Joy in her bedroom approaching the bag and the message from her Nan as though she hasn't seen either before, much less picked up the bag and investigated its secrets.  Mores to the point at the end of the episode, her Nan seems just as bewildered by this dimensionally transcendental gifting machine as anyone.

How did it get in there?  The party at the end of the film seems to happening in a much larger house than the one in the establishing shot at the start, the bay windows being the real give away, so we know that Nan doesn't live with Joy.  She could be a different Nan, the mother of another of the parents, in which case the bookended messages would make no sense.

The most obvious explanation is the bag's a gift from the Doctor.  We know that such bags do exist.  For years the Doctor's sometimes accessorised with a Gladstone bag which had the ability to gift him just the random object that might be needed to get out of a given problem (originally designed by the TV Comic writers so they could get out of a corner they'd written themselves into).

Perhaps after this Clara splinter stepped into to save the Doctor, unaware even of the help she was giving, the adoptive Time Lord decided to leave the gift.  But not wanting to disrupt her existence too much by revealing Joy's true origin, decided to attribute the present to her Nan, hoping that the old dear would be so full of Christmas cheer that she'd forget that she didn't gift the bag in the first place.

But why does the bag have the Boots logo on the side?  Because unlike the TARDIS it has a working chameleon circuit which transforms it to fit its setting and this seemed the least conspicuous.  Perhaps the Doctor's own bag turned into a Gladstone during an adventure in the mid-19th century or when he visited the Titanic (where they were used by the pursers) and got stuck that way.  

Either way, this has made me feel immensely Christmassy even though it's only the 4th November, which is precisely what they're meant to do.  Before you ask, I haven't quite managed to work out how the John Lewis advert is a secret episode of The Sarah Jane Adventures, unless Luke's sister was hiding some things about her anatomy.  And a vowel.

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