Ncuti Gatwa and Nicola Coughlan in the sneak peek

Joy to the world! Bridgerton Star Nicola Coughlan will star alongside Ncuti Gatwa in Doctor Who2024 Christmas special, and thanks to a preview released at San Diego Comic-Con, we see the two cross paths.

“I'm so excited for you to meet my character Joy, a determined woman whose life changes forever when she meets the Doctor,” Coughlan says in the video, which you can watch above. (She was not present at the show's panel.) “I had the best, best time filming this episode with Ncuti and the whole crew.” The special will be released on Disney+ in the US on Christmas Day

The preview takes us from Manchester in 1940 (and the Queens Hotel) to Italy in 1962 (and the Orient Express) to Everest in 1953 (and Base Camp) and finally to London in 2024 (and the Sandringham Hotel). The Doctor travels between all these times and places with a tray full of food. “Wrong room, whatever,” he says in Italy when the passenger asks who he is.

We meet Joy in London in 2024, checking into a hotel. “Can you see it?” she asks when the woman at the front desk identifies the room as a “single room?” “It's quite… pink,” Joy says when she sees it. She notices a locked door. (It's not the first one in this clip.) “There's always a door like that in a hotel room,” she notes.

When she is alone, things get strange. First an alien (wearing a manager name tag) comes through the locked door and then the Doctor. He smiles when he sees Joy.

The special was written by Steven Moffat, a former showrunner of Doctor Who. “I couldn't say no because I love doing the Christmas songs. I absolutely love Doctor Who on Christmas Day, and I thought, 'Well, I've done 'Boom', I don't need to do another one,' he told TV Insider. “Then Russell [T Davies] sent me an email and asked, 'Do you want to celebrate Christmas?' And I said, 'Oh, fine. I have to do that.'”

Doctor WhoChristmas Special 2024, December 25, Disney+