T he John Lewis Christmas advert no longer lands with the same thud as old. Once it prompted full media saturation and performative crying contests on social media. Now, more often than not, it’s the thing you skip before watching cat videos on YouTube. Nevertheless, its release is still an event, and so here we are again.
This year, either by fluke or by design, John Lewis has managed to remember that it is a shop, and not simply a vessel for feelings of unfathomable sadness. Rather than being a vignette about lonely penguins or Moon Hitlers or Elton John’s growing fears about his own mortality, the John Lewis Christmas advert is literally about a woman going shopping. Admittedly there are caveats, but we’ll get to those. For the most part, this is less ‘Christmas can be emotionally brutal’ and more ‘Hey guys, remember shops?’ That has to be a good thing.
But, oh boy, those caveats. We open on Kristin Scott Thomas, a grandmother who lives alone in an absolutely enormous house. Her daughter comes to visit, along with her partner and her two children. Scott Thomas bends down to hug her grandchildren, but her grandchildren need the toilet so sprint past her. This fills her with wave after wave of burning fury. Those children are immediately dead to her.
The kids make a mess, because they are kids. Scott Thomas stares coldly at them. She decides that what the kids really need is to play with an ancient dog on wheels that she has dug out of an attic, named Pickles. They are rightly unimpressed by this, and Scott Thomas – nauseous with anger that the problems of normal children in 2026 can’t be solved by a block of wood – slips some money in an envelope for each of them. That’s right, she’s giving them the worst gift of all time, £30 in cash.
But then something magical happens. Pickles comes to life and tells Scott Thomas off for being unimaginative. It takes her on a whirlwind tour of lesser shops – seasonal pop-ups, fast fashion outlets and a sterile Scandi designhaus – before they end up in good old reliable John Lewis. As they return, Scott Thomas shows her grandchildren what their real present is, and it’s an entire room of her house decorated with ribbon. The end.
The big mystery at the heart of the advert, of course, is Pickles the dog. Surely the most sensible thing Scott Thomas could have done is told the children that it was a magically sentient wooden dog, because that would be far more interesting than the boring lump of wood she presented them with. If nothing else, it would have saved her an evening traipsing around the shops.
But maybe Pickles is only sentient to her. Maybe there’s an actual human soul trapped in the body of Pickles; a real life person who Scott Thomas killed so she could implant their being into the body of a toy. Racked with guilt, and plagued with their screams of anguish that only she could hear, she locked it in the attic for years and years. She’s clearly a wrongun. Maybe that’s it.
Except it isn’t, because this year’s John Lewis Christmas advert is clearly a nightmarish allegory for the age of AI. On her own, Scott Thomas is awkward and unimaginative, and she needs the wooden canine equivalent of ChatGPT to tell her what to buy for her own grandchildren for Christmas. She has outsourced her own cognition to the secondhand suggestions of a chatbot, and this is why she has lost the ability to be a recognisable person in her own house.
It gets darker still. The chatbot warns Scott Thomas not to give the children money, because money represents freedom of choice. No, better to rob them of their agency and trap them in a locked room. Sure, it’s a room they might get to jump around in, but a comfortable prison is still a prison.
Also, let’s not forget that on Slow Horses Scott Thomas plays the head of an intelligence agency, and as such it is hard to see her as anything but an avatar for the surveillance state. This year’s John Lewis Christmas advert wants to remind you that you are always being watched, always and forever, as powers beyond your control guide you into a miserable post-human existence where you will remain, shivering and cold, until the robots deign to stamp you out for good. Merry Christmas!
