There are plenty of theories why the John Lewis Christmas ad no longer hits as hard as it once did. You could look at the fortunes of John Lewis itself, which has spent the last couple of years locked in a nightmare of plunging revenues and store closures. You could look at how aggressively every other retailer has attempted to rip off the tear-jerky John Lewis Christmas ad formula, to the extent that sitting through an ITV commercial break in November or December is now exactly the same as suffering through the first 10 minutes of Up on a neverending loop in an abandoned corn silo full of crying children.
But judging by this year’s offering, you might also suggest that John Lewis has run out of ideas. Because this year’s ad is such a straight-down-the-line John Lewis Christmas advert that you can only imagine it was assembled by tombola.
Sweet children? Check. Bittersweet ending? Check. Maudlin cover version of a song you once liked? Check, in this case a version of Together in Electric Dreams that sounds like it was performed by someone who has tumbled down a well and just realised nobody is coming to rescue her. Such a total lack of John Lewis products that, if you showed the advert to someone who didn’t know what John Lewis was, they would be forced to assume it was some sort of spaceship repair company? Check. It is, plain and simple, a Christmas ad by numbers.
The story it tells, however, is a dark warning about the fragility of life itself. It begins with a boy watching a spaceship burst through the clouds as it plummets to Earth. Now, anyone with half a brain would know exactly what this is. It’s Peter Parker seeing the Titan craft at the start of Avengers: Infinity War. It’s the opening scene of A Quiet Place 2. What the boy is watching is nothing less than a clear and present threat to the future of humanity. This is an invasion.
Now, if you or I saw a spaceship plummeting to Earth, we would ultimately have two choices. We would either retreat to a basement and hope the authorities have the right level of firepower to neutralise the alien threat, or we would grab a shotgun, race to the crash site and blow a giant hole in the invader’s head before it could colonise the planet for its own foul means. This is just logic. Don’t question it.
Not this boy, though. This boy, this gawpy threat to global safety, actually decides to visit the alien so he can teach her about Christmas. He shows her a light-up jumper. He feeds her mince pies. He teaches her how to hurl projectiles at unwitting strangers, which seems especially shortsighted.
After a few days of this, the alien decides it’s time to return to her home planet. She kisses the boy on the cheek. Then she flies away, back to her laboratory so that she can weaponise the human DNA she extracted from him into a synthetic alien virus expressly designed to wage war on humanity as we know it. That’s right, the John Lewis Christmas ad is a Coronavirus origin story. Don’t argue with me. It is. It makes perfect sense.
Oh, sure, you might read the advert differently. You might think it’s a reminder to help strangers wherever you find them, or a message about the importance of sharing tradition. You might, if you’re feeling especially brokenhearted, see the alien’s departure as a reminder that happiness is only fleeting and everything is destined to end.
But that’s not what it’s about. No, the John Lewis Christmas advert this year is definitely about an alien crashing in the woods in December 2019 and lulling a boy into a false sense of security so she can extract his DNA, turn it into Covid then spread it around the world upon her return the following month. The moral of the story is that you should definitely kill all aliens with guns as soon as you see them. Merry Christmas everyone.
