Blue Diamond Web Services

Returning Doctor Who showrunner Russell T. Davies might have pioneered modern Doctor Who holiday specials—Christmassy monsters, high spectacle, an occasional amount of Kylie Minogue—but it’s arguable that it was his successor, Steven Moffat, that really nailed the balancing act of what a good Doctor Who Christmas story should be. The answer, paradoxically, is not really a great sci-fi story all that much—or at least, that’s not as important as a swath of earnest, almost cloying sentimentality about the romance of the season. This year’s offering, Moffat’s first Christmas script since 2017’s Twelfth Doctor send off “Twice Upon a Time,” mostly succeeds in that balancing act with an interestingly time-twisting Doctor Who adventure festooned with festive charm—one that really leans on the latter to help make up for a few missteps in the former.

“Joy to the World,” airing next week on Christmas Day, has a few parallels to Ncuti Gatwa’s full-fledged debut as the 15th Doctor in last year’s holiday episode, “The Church on Ruby Road,” in so much that it relies on an array of charming performances to try and mask when its story doesn’t quite cohesively come together. It trades the fantastical bent of creepy baby-snatching goblins for more traditional sci-fi aesthetics as the Doctor shacks up in a futuristic “Time Hotel” for the holidays, offering temporal gateways to Christmases across human history. It also leans heavy on that seasonal aesthetic too, with plenty of snow, tinsel, and trees, feeling much more of the season rather than simply being any old episode that happens to air near the end of December.

Intrigued by the mystery of a strange suitcase that seems to be fatally swapping between hosts at the hotel, it is in this festively timey-wimey scenario—and via the Time Hotel’s aforementioned gateways—that the Doctor crosses paths with the lonely Joy (Nicola Coughlan), as she checks into a run-down hotel in London during Christmas 2024. The mystery of why Joy becomes so important to the Doctor’s latest adventure is actually put aside for a good chunk of “Joy to the World” as it takes a sideways step into exploring the ramifications of the Time Hotels’ gateways, and the temporal paradoxes that come with them. It’s all perfectly Moffat-y, a blend of laughs, time-twisting story telling, and the almost mandatory melancholy that comes with his best outings as a writer, as the Doctor finds himself thrust into the life of another lonely woman along the way (Steph de Whalley’s Anita, perhaps secretly the breakout star of “Joy to the World”). It’s a killer Doctor Who story idea, one that also deftly touches on the Doctor’s own loneliness after parting ways with Ruby. It just so happens to be appropriately seasonally stuffed inside another Doctor Who episode that is… well, not quite given the time to breathe into something as interesting.

“Joy to the World” makes up for those structural shortcomings with Joy’s storyline by really allowing that element of the episode to be where it goes all out on the sentimentality of the festive season, with a climactic narrative high on heart-tugging emotional drama to make up for the fact that it’s playing a bit fast and loose with the logistical underpinnings, especially contrasted with the plot-within-a-plot the first half of the episode of is devoted to. For the most part it works, thanks to stellar performances from Gatwa and Coughlan, and will particularly strike a bittersweet chord for people going through Christmas without loved ones. But if you find yourself particularly immune to Doctor Who‘s sentimental charm offensives at this time of year, you might find the culmination of it all a little wanting—and wondering just how the episode might have been if it stayed with that initial plot-within-a-plot as its main idea.

But even if you don’t find yourself resonating with the emotion of it all, there’s still at the very least a good chunk of great Doctor Who to be found in “Joy to the World,” even if it’s not the ultimate focus of the episode. There’s enough here to satisfy either anyone looking for a great Doctor Who idea, or someone who just wants something big and Christmassy to swell their heart with seasonal spirit as they sit down with over the festive period—and at this point in Doctor Who‘s long history of holiday specials, that we can still get stories that manage to balance both is a welcome little gift under our collective trees.

Doctor Who returns to Disney+ around the world and on the BBC in the UK and Ireland on Christmas Day, December 25.

One Piece‘s Creator Tells Netflix’s Luffy Why the Hero Is So Special

It’s not every day that an actor in a successful live action anime project gets to sit down and interview its creator in their native tongue, but Netflix’s One Piece star Iñaki Godoy did just that ahead of the show’s second season.

In a recent video from Netflix’s Still Watching YouTube Channel, Monkey D. Luffy actor Godoy sat down with Eiichiro Oda on the set of One Piece’s Cape Town location in South Africa to discuss what lies ahead on the Grand Line in season two, and how Luffy became a beloved character.

“I got to see some actual filming, and especially the props, massive sets, special effects, the making of the wigs and costumes, the stunts,” Oda said. ” I saw so many things and was truly touched by everyone’s dedication.”

[embedded content]

When Godoy giddily asked Oda if he thought the acting was good, Oda responded in kind saying, “It was.” Naturally, Godoy exploded in infectious giggles, making Oda chuckle in return. Godoy’s subsequent question, posed in remarkably fluent Japanese despite only beginning to learn the language in January, inquired of Oda why he made the events in season two so challenging to adapt, given that the Straw Hat’s first season was already an immense undertaking. Another question, mind you, that made Oda chuckle when Godoy remarked on how “huge and crazy” their adventure was before making it to the Grand Line.

“In that universe, the Grand Line is the harshest of the seas. We need to shock audiences. That’s why there are giants, and, of course, lots of bounty hunters,” Oda replied, teasing the adventures that lie in wait in the upcoming season. “This needs to be a season full of new, surprising elements. That’s why it’s more challenging.”

Godoy’s final question asked Oda how he came up with Luffy and made him such a depth-filled and endearing character, despite seeming like a simple fellow upon first blush.

“Luffy is an ideal child for me. When you become an adult and join a company, you can’t always do what you want. Entering society often means losing freedom. Luffy has a child’s heart, so he does whatever he wants,” Oda said. “That aspect is probably, for adults already toiling in society, and to children about to enter society, what makes Luffy so appealing.”

Oda wasn’t remiss in throwing a compliment Godoy’s way congratulating him on bringing Luffy to life and energizing audiences worldwide. The two then share a loving embrace. It’s very sweet.

Alongside Godoy, returning cast members on the voyage of Netflix’s One Piece live-action series include Mackenyu as Zoro, Emily Rudd as Nami, Jacob Romero as Usopp, Taz Skylar as Sanji, Ilia Isorelys Paulino as Alvida, Jeff Ward as Buggy, and Michael Dorman as Gold Roger.

One Piece‘s second season will also see a crop of new faces from the anime make the jump to live action. Key among the new faces along the journey (and the actors who will be bringing them to life) are:

Maintaining their usual secrecy, Netflix and Tomorrow Studios have not yet disclosed the actor who will bring the Straw Hat pirates’ doctor, Tony Tony Chopper, to live. All we’ve seen of the hard working reindeer is a shot of him from behind, confirming—to some fans’ dismay—that he won’t be a muppet but a little CGI dude. Hopefully the next One Piece sit-down (or teaser trailer) will show off Chopper in all of his cute glory.

In io9’s review of season one, we lauded the Netflix show for not requiring viewers to have invested in the anime to appreciate it, writing, “The show was clean. It was slick. Everything fit together, and at the end of the season, despite Luffy yelling again, I wanted a second season.”

In tandem with a second live-action season, Netflix also has plans in motion for a remake of the anime, titled The One Piece, animated by WIT Studio. In short, now’s as good a time as any to get into One Piece—be it through the manga, live action show, the ongoing anime, or its upcoming remake.

Holiday Offer: Secure Your Data with the Best Cloud Storage – Up to 60% Off

pCloud is famous for its all-aroundness. It’s fast and secure but also easy to use and privacy-focused. This Holiday season, pCloud has dropped its prices massively, letting you save up to 60%. To be frank, this is the cheapest pCloud offer we’ve seen in years!

If you’re seeking highly secure storage that won’t compromise on transfer speed at an “approachable” price, pay attention to these pCloud limited-time deals.

Up to 55% Off on pCloud Lifetime Storage

pCloud is all about securing your files for a lifetime, so you won’t have to pay each month or year. Instead, the Holiday sale focuses on these two plans:

Both plans are titled “Family” because they’re suited to FIVE users. Moreover, both plans allow you to allocate a specific amount of storage to each family member for added convenience.

To claim pCloud’s 55% off deal, simply use one of the buttons in this article, sign up, and set up pCloud on your devices. We strongly recommend the 10 TB option because of its MASSIVE price drop.

Outside this time-limited deal, pCloud’s 10 TB plan is much closer to $2,000. Now, it’s only about $1,050, making it the most affordable cloud storage for a lifetime.

60% Off on pCloud Lifetime 3-in-1 Family Bundle

Essentially, you’re getting 5 TB of storage with zero-knowledge encryption and a password manager. Like before, pCloud allows the plan to be enjoyed by 5 users.

Beware that this bundle isn’t pCloud’s “standard” plan, so it won’t be there forever. The end of the Holiday season will mark the termination of both offers and return to “normal.”

pCloud Is Risk-Free: Try It Out Now

With the three discounted plans, pCloud has positioned itself highly on the totem pole.

Compared to its rivals, this company went out of its way to honor us with Lifetime deals that don’t cost a fortune. Best of all, pCloud is risk-free and offers a 14-day refund policy.

You can test its premium version, see how you like it, and be refunded if need be.

Alternatively, pCloud offers the best free cloud storage with up to 10 GB of space. Being fast, reliable, and still impressively secure, this one won’t disappoint you either.

Still here? Don’t be too hesitant; the clock is ticking. Board the hype train.

The Creator of Shudder’s New Christmas Anthology on Spooky Holiday Traditions

If you’ve been creeping around Shudder looking for something to add a little fright to your seasonal viewing, you might have noticed The Haunted Season—a brand new anthology series from showrunner Kier-La Janisse, a genre expert whose many works include standout film-theory book House of Psychotic Women and recent folk-horror documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched.

The first entry, To Fire You Come at Last, is written and directed by Sean Hogan; it’s about a group of men carrying a coffin to be buried who’re haunted (literally) by past misdeeds while making the journey. To learn more about The Haunted Season, which will bring one new entry to Shudder over the next several years, we talked with Janisse over video chat.

Cheryl Eddy, io9: I have read your book Yuletide Terror: Christmas Horror on Film and Television, which gives a wonderful history of the genre and the traditions behind it. But for people who might not have read it, I’ll borrow one of the chapter titles and ask: “Why the ghost story at Christmas”?

Kier-La Janisse: It’s interesting because Derek Johnston, who wrote that chapter, years ago wrote a book called Haunted Seasons, which my title is completely ripped from [laughs]. When I was doing the Yuletide Terror book, there’s hundreds of films in it, but most of them are very obviously connected to Christmas in some way. They’re either about Christmas or they take place at Christmas, or there’s visible Christmas decorations so that you could justify it as a Christmas movie.

But a lot of the BBC’s A Ghost Story for Christmas [episodes] of the 1970s had nothing to do with Christmas. And so when I was including them in the book, I thought, North American audiences are not going to understand why these films are here because they’re like, “What do they have to do with Christmas?” I asked Derek if he would write a chapter talking about where this tradition comes from, of telling ghost stories of Christmas and the idea of Christmas programming—not necessarily the programming itself, but the fact that it’s chosen to be programmed at that time.

It goes back centuries—it comes from the older tradition of telling winter’s tales. [When] people gathered around the hearth or around the fire, and they would come up with entertainment to pass the time while they were trying to keep warm. Winter’s tales were what they were called because they’d be these spooky tales that they would tell [when] the days are so short and [the season is] turning over into a new year. There’s this idea of liminal boundaries between one state of being and another. They would tell these ghost stories and then over time, once we started having written literature, you would start to see references to them in [places like the works of] Shakespeare and Marlowe.

Then of course in the Victorian era, you have Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, which was massively important, not only for the idea of the Christmas ghost story, but just for Christmas in general. It was part of Queen Victoria’s mandate to repopularize Christmas. Charles Dickens writing that story when he did was a big part of not only cementing this idea that Christmas is the time when we tell ghost stories, but that this is the time of year we have Christmas—because before Queen Victoria, it had kind of fallen out as a popular holiday. A Christmas Carol became important for creating a lot of these ideas and mythologies we have around Christmas—Christmas tree decorations and all these accouterments that we associate with Christmas that came from that period.

The ghost story for Christmas came to be associated very strongly with that period—an also, there were so many ghost story writers in the Victorian era … there’s just tons and tons of them. And so when radio came in, they started doing radio adaptations of A Christmas Carol and other types of ghost stories around the holiday. Then, that transformed into television.

So the BBC was kind of always active and doing ghost stories for Christmas in some form or another. In the 1970s, Lawrence Gordon Clark, who was a director, proposed this idea of—he didn’t foresee it being a series. He proposed one film doing an adaptation of M.R. James’ story The Stalls of Barchester. He used a previous adaptation of an M.R. James story as proof that this could be popular; Jonathan Miller had made an adaptation called Whistle and I’ll Come to You in the late ‘60s, which is fantastic. And it was not made for Christmas. It was made for a different time of year, a different program.

But Lawrence Gordon Clark took that to them and said, “Look how good this is, and imagine if we could do something like this for Christmas.” So he made The Stalls of Barchester. It was a big hit, so then he got permission every year to keep making another one. And so it became a series; all through the ‘70s, there would be a different episode.

And so that is what my series The Haunted Season is based on—this idea of an annual ghost story film that premieres every year. And I know for North American audiences, using the word “series” to describe something that only has one episode for a year is weird, but it is based on that tradition. It’s basically a Christmas special that’s ongoing, where there’s a new installment every year. That tradition still exists in the UK. So this series is just part of that bigger tradition.

io9: How did you decide on To Fire You Come at Last as the first entry? How did writer-director Sean Hogan get involved?

Janisse: Sean Hogan is a filmmaker, a writer of books, a playwright—he does all kinds of all kinds of things. He’s incredibly talented, really great with period dialogue. And so I proposed to him—and he can do a lot with a little, which is important because we have very low budgets for these things—if he would make a short film originally for Severin Films’ folk horror box set. We were doing our new box set, All the Haunts Be Ours Volume Two. The first box set had my documentary [Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched] on it—it had a new film on it. And we were like, “We don’t have an equivalent of that for the second box set.” So we asked Sean if he would make a film for that.

I gave him a couple of prompts for it. The idea of it being set on a corpse road was something that came from one of the prompts that I gave him.

But before he even finished the film, I sort of flashed back to this idea that Sam Zimmerman from Shudder and I had over a decade ago when we used to work together for Fangoria magazine. Back then we were trying to get Fangoria to do a ghost story for Christmas that we could premiere on the website, and the publisher wouldn’t go for it. But we had wanted Sean Hogan to make that film.

So when Sean was making this film for me, before he was even done, I said to [Severin Films’] David Gregory, “What if we can pitch this to Shudder about being part of an ongoing series of ghost stories for Christmas?” And David was like, “Sure, go for it.”

And so Sam and I had a conversation, and it was amazing because it was this idea that we had that was not approved years and years ago. We were so excited about it, like, “Let’s do it now!” And so that was really how it happened. It was in some ways a very long-gestating project, but then it just was like everything clicked, where it was like, all of this could actually work, you know? I’m just super glad that Sean Hogan made the first one because he was the filmmaker we were talking about doing the Fangoria one all those years ago.

I love the film. It turned out so well. He made it with a small team in the UK and—you can’t tell from watching the film, but it was freezing and raining while they were making it. They were in very adverse conditions, but I think it turned out really well.

io9: To Fire You Come at Last is very traditional, very much in the style of the older films. Is that something we’ll be seeing as the series continues?

Janisse: I don’t know that they’ll be in black and white, but they will all be period. They won’t necessarily be that same period, but they are supposed to engage with the past in some way. The guidelines that I’ve given the filmmakers is that definitely nothing after, like, 1960. You can go back to the Middle Ages if you want, or you can go up to the ‘50s, you know, but it has to feel [like a period piece]. That was what the tradition always was.

It’s interesting, when A Ghost Story for Christmas first played in the ‘70s, the last two episodes, they made modern stories—they did not adapt like older Victorian ghost stories. They made new stories, modern stories set in modern settings. And the audience at the time revolted—a lot of them got bad reviews. Now people love those episodes because now they’re vintage, now they’re period pieces. But at the time when they were new, people were like, “You’re ruining the tradition!” So I decided that I was going to keep the parameters. It’s [a pretty broad time frame], but they will still be period pieces of some sort.

Janisse: The only thing I can tease is that I’m doing one of them [as my first narrative film]. I have asked other people, they’re writing their scripts now—I’ll tease [more] when the time gets closer.

io9: I am a big fan of Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched, your folk horror documentary. Are these Christmas ghost stories part of the folk horror tradition?

Janisse: It definitely crosses over because of that oral tradition aspect of it. Like a lot of the BBC ghost stories for Christmas, you probably call them more like gothic horror than folklore, but it depends. Something like A Warning to the Curious and Whistle and I’ll Come to You you could call folklore because they’re definitely digging up an artifact from the past that is carrying all this baggage with it. There’s definitely folk horror elements to some of them, but some of them are definitely more in the gothic realm. But I think that Christmas ghost stories, just because of the fact that they’re tied to this oral tradition, that makes it a bit more connected to folklore.

io9: And you’ve mentioned a couple of titles, but for people who watch the first episode of The Haunted Season and want to see more in that vein, what do you recommend they seek out?

Janisse: Well, Shudder has licensed Jonathan Miller’s Whistle and I’ll Come to You. Absolutely start with that. And they’ve licensed Lawrence Gordon Clark’s A Ghost Story for Christmas from the 1970s. Those are the ones that my series is referencing, so I would recommend taking in all of those—there’s like nine different choices of what they can watch. I don’t know if they have The Stone Tape on Shudder [editor’s note: they do!] but The Stone Tape was broadcast for Christmas. It doesn’t have anything to do with Christmas, but it was broadcast as part of the Christmas programing, as a Christmas ghost story. And that’s a great one, too.

Watch To Fire You Come at Last, the first episode of The Haunted Season, on Shudder now.

Instagram Will Soon Let You Transform Your Stories With Text-to-Video AI Slop

A teaser showed Instagram head Adam Mosseri completely transform his appearance using simple text prompts.