There were many trains to take the name Orient Express, but only one in space.
Completely faithful recreation of the original Orient Express. Except slightly bigger. And in space. Oh, and the rails are actually hyperspace ribbons. But in every other respect, identical. Painstaking attention to detail.
A mini-break for two…
There’s a body and there’s a mummy. I mean, can you not just get on a train? Did a wizard put a curse on you about mini-breaks?
An exotic mini-break for two on a train in space? Mummified soldiers, passengers on a train dying one by one, malfunctioning alien tech – laughs and scares, a bit of glamour and a break from relationship issues. Sign me up.
The story so far
The series so far had been weighed down a little by a number of ongoing arcs – the story of Clara and Danny, the fallout arising from the Doctor’s regeneration into an older, much spikier, often callous man – him questioning ‘Am I a good man?’. And the collapse of the relationship between the Doctor and Clara as a consequence of these changes. This may have been somewhat disorientating and off-putting for an audience who had grown up with or gravitated towards a show based largely on two younger Doctors and relatively straightforward relationships – principally the Tenth and Rose and Eleventh and Amy- with lots of popular variations on that– Martha, Donna, Clara etc. There is a lot of angst and conflict in series 8 and a startlingly different Doctor, who often wasn’t all that easy to like, even for someone familiar with the classic era of the show. Less obviously across the series, another arc was also being seeded, one that would come to a head in ‘Death in Heaven’ – that of the new Doctor’s attitude to the military, which this story does contribute towards, albeit in a rather light touch way.
Personally, I think what series 8 really needed by this point (the eighth story in) is a couple of really good 8 or 9/10 ‘Doctor Who’ stories to anchor it. Scary, funny, entertaining and largely angst and arc-free. And then Jamie Mathieson turns up. The clouds part and ‘Doctor Who’ comes out to play again. Jamie I could kiss you, Well, I can’t, we are in the middle of the pandemic – but if ever a writer deserved a gold medal for good timing it is Jamie Mathieson here. Fifteen minutes to go, the substitutes warming up, we haven’t heard anything about this new kid, on the field, two cracking goals and the season is saved.
‘Mummy on the Orient Express’ isn’t a traditional, classic-era ‘Doctor Who’ story in structure or mostly in terms of content and yet it manages to feel like it is. It feels part of a tradition of ‘tea time horror stories for kids’. What is clever that despite feeling traditional – using the Mummy as a starting point (just as ‘Pyramids of Mars’ had), the cast dying one by one (as per say ‘Robots of Death’ or ‘Horror of Fang Rock’), it is executed in a way that feels more cut from the same cloth as a Steven Moffat story than Robert Holmes. The Foretold – a ‘monster’ that only the victim can see, the time limit, ‘stop the clock‘ and the resolution all feel very much inspired by the showrunner. What it feels like rather is ‘Doctor Who’ 1976/77 (death a plenty, scary cadaverous monster inspired by horror films, time running out) run via a 2014 filter, buffed up and presented afresh – a tad more glamorous than it would have been in the 1970’s – the beauty of the train and costume (Clara and the Doctor both look great in this – she is beautiful, he is very dapper, almost sophisticated, but very Doctor-ish), even music – the Queen song sung by Foxes and all. It isn’t hugely heavy on concept, at least by series 8 standards, but within that it manages to be very clever and have a through line that it feels almost by accident fits one of the themes of the series – the soldier still fighting the war in his head. It is so good and well, has a beguiling simplicity and clarity, that I genuinely wonder what I will find to write about it.
Can we talk about planets now?
Oh yes please, can we? Thankfully, the on-going damaged relationship business between the Doctor and Clara still hanging over from ‘Kill the Moon’ is out of the way early on and with minimal fuss. The Doctor tries to ignore it in exactly the same way that I’ve been trying to all season:
DOCTOR: Oh, I remember when this was all planets as far as the eye could see. All gone now. Gobbled up by that beast. And there’s that smile again. I don’t even know how you do that.
CLARA: I really thought I hated you, you know?
DOCTOR: Well, thank God you kept that to yourself. There was this planet, Obsidian. The planet of perpetual darkness.
CLARA: I did. I did hate you. In fact, I hated you for weeks.
DOCTOR: Good, fine. Well, I’m glad that we cleared that up. There was also a planet that was made completely of shrubs.
CLARA: I went to a concert once. Can’t remember who it was. But do you know what the singer said?
DOCTOR: Frankly, that would be an absolutely astonishing guess if I did know.
CLARA: She said, “hatred is too strong an emotion to waste on someone that you don’t like.”
DOCTOR: Were people really confused? Cos I’m confused. Did everybody leave?
CLARA: Shush. Shut up. Look, what I’m trying to say is, I don’t hate you. I could never hate you. But I can’t do this any more. Not the way you do it.
DOCTOR: Can I talk about the planets now?
The ‘Am I a good man’ theme which is potentially very interesting, but is generally presented across the series in a way that really isn’t, is similarly dispensed with here. We have a bit of narrative sleight of hand that initially suggests otherwise, but ultimately of course he is, he’s a bloody hero. He’s just one that doesn’t have the time or patience (or ‘bed side manner’) to always appear that way. Good, that’s done with. You can be the Doctor now. The relief of it. It’s like someone has opened the windows and let the bad smell out. Can we talk about planets now?
Clara and Maisie
Clara, who by the way, looks lovely here in her flapper dress and 20’s hairstyle, is once again enjoyable to spend time with. What really helps, is that once we have the heart to heart with the Doctor out of the way, she is then mostly paired with Maisie, who is in shock and feeling guilty after losing her Grandmother (the redoubtable Janet Henfrey) in the opening sequence. This works rather well after being stuck with either the Doctor or Danny for the series so far. It also serves to make her appear a much more sympathetic figure than she does for a lot of the series as she takes the rather damaged Maisie under her wing. Reminding us in the process, what a likeable, capable actor she is. It is maybe an approach they should have taken more often.
The Mystery Shopper, the Captain and the Chief Engineer
You know, Doctor, I can’t tell if you’re a genius or just incredibly arrogant.
Can we get a new expert?
Whilst Clara is paired with Maisie, the Doctor spends most of his time with Perkins, the Chief Engineer – who works very well as a foil for Capaldi’s Doctor. Working class, down to earth, technical and clever – you can tell the Doctor is impressed – he doesn’t even insult him that much. It isn’t always the most technically assured performance by Frank Skinner – but that actually doesn’t matter much, he’s charming, he plays it with a twinkle in his eye (old school reference there), is great fun to spend time with, looks like he’s genuinely enjoying himself and brings out the best in the new Doctor. It all starts to feel a bit like a Robert Holmes double-act, except with the Doctor – more like say the Doctor and Spandrell in ‘Deadly Assassin’. It is a shame we don’t see more of Perkins in subsequent stories, he feels very much to be set up as a regular and it feels like there is much more mileage in the character.
Elsewhere, the Doctor initially at least, has a less cordial relationship with the Captain, Quell (played by the excellent David Bamber). In classic ‘Who’, this would typically be the bureaucratic authority figure, refusing the act and locking the Doctor up for a couple of episodes. There to slow down the action to stretch to 4-6 episodes. However here we don’t that have that runtime to fill and so cleverly, even Quell is made a sympathetic figure. He is revealed to be suffering from PTSD after surviving a combat mission, where all his comrades died – another entry in the list of military references this season. He is allowed redemption before he dies at the hands of the Foretold, even thanking the Doctor for ‘waking me up’.
QUELL: When you said I’d lost the stomach for a fight, I wasn’t wounded in battle as such, but. My unit was bombed. I was the sole survivor. Not a scratch on me. But post-traumatic stress. Nightmares. Still can’t sleep without pills.
DOCTOR: Which means that you are probably next. Which is good to know.
QUELL: Well, not for me.
DOCTOR: Well, of course not for you, because you’re going to die. But I mean for us, from a research point of view.
QUELL: You know, for a doctor, your bedside manner leaves (something to be desired).
He has a point here. Other Doctors have been cold (Tom in a number of stories – ‘Seeds of Doom’, ‘Pyramids of Mars’, ‘Horror of Fang Rock’ or McCoy in a number of others) or manipulative of those around him (McCoy again, Troughton in ‘Evil of the Daleks’), but this Doctor takes it too extremes. He just about gets away with it here – as it is made clear that he is doing it for a reason and we get to see him take on the burden that Maisie carries, putting himself in harm’s way to confront The Foretold.
The rest of the cast are also excellent – Christopher Villiers in a lesser role – Professor Moorehouse, Janet Henfrey – killed in the opening sequence and John Sessions, who brings a kind of season 17 ripeness to the role of GUS that could otherwise have been quite dry. It is a pretty decent ensemble and could have benefited from a longer runtime.
The Foretold
Ladies and gentlemen, could I have a moment of your time, please? There’s a monster on this train that can only be seen by those about to die. If you do see it, you will have exactly sixty six seconds left in which to live
A mummy that only the victim can see. I was being rhetorical. I know exactly what this sounds like.
The star of this story though is the mummy itself – the Foretold. He is a brilliant creation. It is a fantastic piece of design work – the teeth, the rotting bandages and flesh, bones poking through. Even the walk. That walk – it is brilliant, the foot dragging half bent over as it stalks you. Even then you can’t run away as it can teleport as well. Possibly the creepiest moment is when it walks straight through the Doctor:
I can half imagine a season 13 or 14 John Friedlander version. It places the story firmly in that tradition. However rather than joining the list of Robert Holmes rotting, cadaverous, black-hearted villains – the Master or Greel for example, what elevates the Foretold, is that in the end it is a rather sympathetic figure. Really it is the Japanese soldier on a Pacific island, still fighting the Second World War in the 1950’s – because nobody has told him that the war is over. It is a terrific idea. It feels like a mixture between the moral complexity of someone like Mawdryn begging for release, combined with the malfunctioning tech of ‘The Empty Child’. The backstory and legend again feels like it is from the Robert Holmes playbook and contributes to the more traditional feel of aspects of the story, whilst giving the otherwise lightly sketched menace as weight and history.
The myth of the Foretold first appeared over five thousand years ago. In some stories, there is a riddle or secret word that is supposed to make it stop. Some characters try to bargain with it, offer riches, confess sins. All to no avail.
A tattered piece of cloth attached to a length of wood that you will kill for. That doesn’t sound like a scroll. That sounds like a flag! And if that sounds like a flag, if this is a flag, that means that you are a soldier, wounded in a forgotten war thousands of years ago. But they’ve worked on you, haven’t they, son? They’ve filled you full of kit. State of the art phase camouflage, personal teleporter. And all that tech inside you, it just won’t let you die, will it? It won’t let the war end. It just won’t let you stop until the war is over. We surrender.
The ending, the Doctor taking Maisie’s place and seeing the Foretold, making the intuitive leap that the symbol is a flag, is a satisfying ending to this story strand. The mummy/soldier standing to attention and saluting after the Doctor ‘surrenders’ is a mirroring of the series climax in ‘Death of Heaven’ with the Brigadier. It felt forced in that story, but natural here, I wonder which was conceived first? In a series with a running theme ostensibly about the military, this is the most truthful passage to my mind, the most meaningful compassionate and affecting.
The clock has stopped. You’re relieved, soldier.
If there is weakness to the story it is that there are still unresolved plot elements – who was GUS and what does he want? It feels like it was designed for a follow up episode that never appeared. GUS was originally intended to appear in Jamie Mathieson’s series 10 story ‘Oxygen’ but was dropped, so we still don’t really know who he was or what that was about. Also, just who was Perkins? Are we supposed to ask that question even? He is pitched as if he was intended to be a bit of an enigma – like he is maybe more than the chief engineer on the train. In that regard the story seems to end rather abruptly, cutting to the beach after the explosion and with only a farewell scene with Perkins, lovely though that is. Poor-old lifelong fan Frank Skinner – offered a place in the TARDIS and having to turn it down. He would have added a nice balance to the mix of regulars, much as Nardole did in series 10. Unfortunately, it wasn’t to be.
This is a lovely story and announced a genuinely new talent to the world of Who writing.
Indeed, at times this story, ‘Flatline’ and ‘Oxygen’ almost feel like pilots for a Jamie Mathieson series, mirroring the Steven Moffat stories during Russell T Davies’ time as showrunner. There are the building blocks of his own world here. Unfortunately, we are still waiting to see it.
A Journal of Impossible Things 