Specials, Episode 3 | 1 part | First broadcast: 25 December 2016 | Writer: Steven Moffat | Director: Ed Bazalgette
Cast
- Peter Capaldi as the Twelfth Doctor
- Matt Lucas as Nardole
- Justin Chatwin as Grant Gordon / The Ghost
- Charity Wakefield as Lucy Fletcher
- Aleksandar Jovanovic as Dr Sim
- Tomiwa Edun as Mr Brock
- Logan Hoffman as young Grant
Summary
Years after accidentally swallowing one of the Doctor’s alien “ghost energy” crystals as a boy, mild-mannered New Yorker Grant Gordon has grown up with genuine superhero powers, secretly moonlighting as the flying, super-strong vigilante known as the Ghost while working as nanny to the daughter of investigative journalist Lucy Fletcher, on whom he has harbored an unspoken crush since childhood. When the Doctor and his new assistant Nardole arrive in New York investigating a sinister corporation called Harmony Shoal, they uncover a plot by brain-swapping alien parasites to hijack the bodies of the city’s elite in order to seize a captured alien spacecraft hidden beneath a Manhattan tower. As Lucy closes in on the same conspiracy for a story and Grant is torn between his secret identity and his feelings for her, the Doctor and Grant’s paths collide, forcing the reluctant superhero to embrace both the Ghost persona and his real one in order to save the city, all while the Doctor wryly needles Grant about the impracticality and cliché of the whole “secret identity” business.
Interesting Facts
- This special was explicitly conceived by Steven Moffat as a loving pastiche of Superman and classic American comic-book mythology, deliberately leaning into superhero genre tropes the show had rarely used before.
- It marked Matt Lucas’s first full appearance as a regular companion figure following his brief cameo as Nardole in the previous year’s “The Husbands of River Song.”
- The episode’s title and premise directly reference a fictional in-universe comic book, “The Ghost,” which the Doctor is shown reading and enjoying decades earlier, tying the hero’s later existence back to the Doctor’s own influence.
- It was one of the show’s first extensive American location-set stories to lean fully into a New York City skyscraper setting as a central visual and plot element, akin to a superhero blockbuster.
- Airing as the sole Doctor Who offering of 2016 aside from a brief prequel, this special served as the sole bridge between Series 9 and Series 10, alongside introducing Nardole in his expanded, ongoing role for the following series.
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