Mummy on the Orient Express

Chapter The 150th, in which various people are gone in 66 seconds.

Plot:

Clara has got the hump with the Doctor after he's acted callous one too many times, and is going to stop travelling with him. As a last hurrah, he takes her to the Orient Express in Space. Enjoyably - for him - it turns out that this is no pleasure trip. Most of the crew and passengers are holograms, and onboard computer Gus has brought most of the rest - all experts in their fields - together deliberately to investigate the Foretold, an ancient creature of fearful repute, who has the appearance of a bandaged Mummy straight out of a Universal horror movie. The Foretold can only be seen by his next victim, and once seen will kill that person exactly 66 seconds later. Gus provides one carriage fitted out as a lab to allow the creature to be studied, and will kill the other passengers and crew if they stop work. It wants the assembled to capture the creature so that its technology can be reverse-engineered; Clara and one of the passengers, Maisie, discover a hi-tech containment unit - which looks like a sarcophagus - in one carriage, for this purpose.

Using the data gleaned from victims as they are picked off, and helped by chief engineer Perkins, the Doctor discovers that the Foretold is attacking not at random but going for the most vulnerable, physically and mentally, first. He works out that the next victim will be Maisie, because of mental trauma, and gets Clara to lie to her to get her to the lab. He uses some tech to fool the Foretold into thinking he has Maisie's symptoms and in 66 seconds works out that the Foretold is actually the remains of a cyber-enhanced soldier, who can't stop killing until his long forgotten war officially ends, so the Doctor says "We surrender", and that stops the creature, who collapses into a pile of rags. Gus doesn't want any survivors, so tries to kill everyone, but the Doctor gets them away in the TARDIS before the space train explodes. Clara decides to continue travelling with the Doctor, understanding that he sometimes has to lie and be callous for the greater good.

Context:

Another one with all the family (Better Half and three children - boys of 13 and 10, girl of 7); we watched this, from the Blu-ray series boxset, on the first Sunday evening without a new broadcast Jodie Whittaker episode, to plug that gap. Everyone enjoyed it (the boys maybe enjoyed it more - or more visibly, at least - than Jodie's recent offerings). The youngest of the children was a little scared in places, but stayed with it. 

First time round:

We'd fallen into a pattern by the time of Doctor Who's regular broadcasts in 2014, where the Better Half and I would watch the latest episode time-shifted on the Saturday evening of broadcast and gauge it for suitability for the children. If it was not too scary, I'd watch it again with them the following day. That particular year was pretty intense, with a high proportion of stories felt to be too much, particularly for the younger ones. The very next story, Flatline, by the same author Jamie Mathieson, was one which only the eldest child was allowed to see at the time. Why we thought Mummy on the Orient Express was more acceptable is hard to quantify; it essentially comes down to an instinct. Immediately that the show starts, the threat is made plain to be something a long distance from anything they would encounter in real life, and genre is a kind of hard protective carapace for the young minds watching, I think. Compare this to Flatline where the danger is real and close-to-home: graffiti and the patterns you get in a suburban living room wall. As I remember, everyone enjoyed the Mummy story at the time; the younger two have still not seen Flatline, though. 

Reaction:

Speed is the key word for this story. Whether it emerged from the story-lining process, or writer or showrunner came up with the title first, the setting of the Orient Express, even a space-bound version, inevitably turns this from a pure horror tale to a genre splice with a disaster movie in miniature. There are consistent aspects of a standard disaster movie scenario: a group of different passengers expecting a luxurious pleasure jaunt instead are thrown into chaos that they must survive. A mismatched group battles through, but not all of them will make it, and the audience is left guessing as to which ones will die. The key thing, normally, though, is that disaster movies take time to play out: the suspense is ratcheted up by having a long period where everything seems fine, with hints about the oncoming tragedy but tension about exactly when it will strike. Then, the period of survivors battling through needs to be fairly gruelling, and there needs to be mystery about who will and won't make it through. The only other time that Doctor Who had previously tackled a disaster movie in a serious way was the Christmas special with added Kylie, Voyaged of the Damned, and that was more than 70 minutes long. Mummy of the Orient Express has to wrap things up in 45 minutes. 

Mummy hits every trope, but in a super condensed timeframe. The 66 second duration for the Foretold to kill each victim is a genius stroke therefore; as well as keeping everything moving at a fair lick, it's also a great gimmick - turning on its head the usual tradition that Mummies are slow and lumbering: this one is guaranteed to get you in just over a minute. The onscreen clock ticking is a nice touch to bring this home, and it allows for periodic bursts of frenetic excitement interspersed with the rest of the action. In the end, the implicit - and latterly explicit - promise of the script is realised as the Doctor is the one to face the antagonist, and manages in a minute to do his usual cleverness at top speed, working out and diffusing the threat, and throwing in a joke and a cheeky continuity reference ("Are you my mummy?" - they presumably couldn't resist) for good measure. Capaldi is excellent in that sequence, as he is throughout the episode, playing the early grumpy version of his Doctor. He's supported admirably by Jenna Coleman and Samuel Anderson, who are really nailing the relationships in their regular roles. 

The guest characters are impeccably cast; again, this is required because of the brevity. It's obviously going to be broadbrush, but this is still pretty much in keeping with the disaster movie genre; if you want a frighteningly severe old lady, who better than Janet Henfrey (she played one many times in Dennis Potter's works, and once before in Doctor Who too); Daisy Beaumont is every bit the anxious put-upon younger female carer, Christopher Villiers is impeccably suave and intellectual; John Sessions' vocal work is perfect for the bumptious Gus. David Bamber, who is always great in everything, manages to deliver shade and contradiction in only a handful of lines. When he answers an earlier rhetorical question of the Doctor's of how many people would need to die before he finds his backbone, saying "It turns out it's three", it's a lovely line, and nicely delivered. Again, the heightened final 66 seconds of the characters as each faces the Foretold gives extra opportunity for everyone to shine. Frank Skinner's performance is an interesting one. It's very... I can't find the words for it. It lacks nuance, but is still enjoyable. Sometimes, one can look and see a performer who's just very happy to be there, which jars a bit (one never ever loses sight of Frank Skinner in the character of Perkins). But Perkins is a character who seems to be having enormous fun working with the Doctor (as Skinner is working with Capaldi) so it works.

Every aspect of the production is perfect, which raises this up to be something special: sets, graphics, effects work. The costumes and decor are exquisite, and getting a pop star (Foxes) in to play a chanteuse and sing a lounge version of a Queen song adds to the opulence. They really pushed the boat out. The Foretold is one of the most amazing looking monsters the show has ever produced, too, for my money, and just as impressive as the similarly excellent designs for Mummies when they appeared against Tom Baker. The score is one of the best of this period, with the bombastic bit of Murray Gold's Capaldi Doctor theme kicking in as the Doctor confronts the Foretold (the first time I really became aware of it, as it had been more subtle in the mix in stories before this, at least to my ears) and the twinkly bit accompanying the aftermath. Even cramming all of that in, the story still finds room to keep the ongoing series arc going, with Clara finding new perspective on the Doctor's methods, lying to Danny and continuing her adventuring with the Doctor in secret. Combining a clever feat of writing and a richly staged production, this is one of the very best of this era, and well up there for the whole of Doctor Who too.

Connectivity: 

Mummy on the Orient Express is another story, like The Moonbase, which features an ensemble cast of characters stuck in a place without means of escape; in both stories these people are being attacked by cybernetic killers. The Doctor clashes with an authority figure, before eventually winning them round, and an antagonist opens up the secure base to the vacuum of space at one point in each story.

Deeper Thoughts:

Finale and Finality. I hope enough time has passed now to discuss the ramifications of the latest series of Doctor Who's final episode, The Timeless Children. If you haven't seen it yet, proceed no further as there will be spoilers. Mummy on the Orient Express was a story that, lest we forget, covered the aftermath of revelations that the moon was a big space-dragon egg in the sky, so Doctor Who has most definitely done audacity before, but perhaps not ever on the scale witnessed in The Timeless Children. So, to summarise then, partly to make sure I've got it straight in my head, we now have a filled-in backstory of how the Time Lords became able to regenerate, which also changes everything we knew, and the character herself knew, about the Doctor's origins. It centres on a figure from ancient Gallifrey, Tecteun (who we've never ever heard about before, but she is a woman so it's plausible that the patriarchal Time Lord society would have only remembered Omega and Rassilon, the men; I can buy that). Tecteun is a pioneer of space travel, and landing on a world where there is a portal allowing entry from other parts of the universe, she discovers a lone, abandoned child, assumed to have come through the portal from a time and a place unknown. This is the person that eventually we will know as the Doctor, and an accident reveals her ability to regenerate, which Tecteun studies until she can transplant the required genetic material into the elite of Gallifrey, who later become known as Time Lords. The Time Lord regeneration limit of twelve times is imposed on everyone by Tecteun, and doesn't apply to the Doctor.

The grown-up Doctor is recruited into a secret force, the Division, who are permitted to bend the rules about Time Lords' non-interference in other worlds. Nothing on screen states that this isn't a division of the CIA (the Celestial Intervention Agency) which was a similar entity mentioned in the classic series, so I'm going to assume they are one and the same. At some point, things turn sour and the Doctor breaks off with the Division, hiding out as a human after using a chameleon arch. The matrix from this point on is redacted, except for some encrypted scenes put there by Tecteun, potentially for the Doctor to one day find, that show events happening in Ireland (nice little in joke - several times in the classic and new series Gallifrey is assumed to be in Ireland somewhere). From these, it seems that the Division caught up with the Doctor, wiped his/her memory, forced a regeneration that made the Doctor a young (baby?) boy, and he then started life again as just another Time Lord, joined the academy at age eight, met the friend who would one day become the Master, looked into the Untempered Schism, grew up to be William Hartnell, stole a TARDIS, left Gallifrey, etc. etc.

It's rather neat, creates a new mystery about the Doctor, means that she is both normal and special without that being contradictory, and fits in very snugly with existing lore without too many loose ends. The Shobogans, for example, mentioned in passing in The Deadly Assassin, are revealed to be the indigenous Gallfreyan people. The Doctor as a child - seen in Listen - is part of the character's second lifetime, post the mind wipe. During a sequence in The Brain of Morbius, many faces appear that - from the dialogue - appear to be earlier incarnations of the Doctor, but prior to that - and since - it has been unequivocally stated that the William Hartnell incarnation is the first. That little crease has finally been ironed out. The many hints that were dropped in the Sylvester McCoy era that the Doctor was more than just a Time Lord make sense now, but only if we assume that he had some of those pre-Hartnell memories - but there's no reason to suggest that he couldn't have had a partial mental restoration just during that one life. The arch manipulator style of the seventh Doctor isn't much like any of the others, so presumably from Paul McGann onwards it has all gone from his mind again. The character of the 'Other', a third Time Lord pioneer alongside Omega and Rassilon, could be Tecteun, or the Doctor himself, but either way he could have - for that incarnation only - had memories of that time (this also handily explains away why it wasn't picked up on in the show before or since). 

What doesn't work? Biggest issue is that River Song can regenerate, even though she has no genetic material from the Doctor or any other Time Lord to allow this. But, we also have the often mentioned concept of regeneration energy, so it seems that over the years of time travel (which came to the Time Lords after regenerative ability), the time vortex has altered the genetic transfer in such a way that it can be passed on as pure energy, and this was what altered River at the time she was conceived in the TARDIS. It's still just on the right side of plausible. There's the issue that the Ruth Doctor seen in Fugitive of the Judoon has a TARDIS disguised as a police box, when we saw (in The Name of the Doctor) that the Doctor's TARDIS was stolen only when he was in his William Hartnell incarnation, and got stuck as a police box only in the first ever story An Unearthly Child. I like to think that it must be the same TARDIS and - as we know the TARDIS has a telepathic link to the Doctor - the ship made sure that he picked the same one he'd used in his previous life. It's a very old model compared to other Time Lords', which would fit - it might have been top of the range years before when the Doctor was first working for the Division. As to why it was previously shaped like a police box, perhaps it was an appropriate disguise when Ruth and her companion first landed on Earth (we don't know exactly how long they've been there), or perhaps the chameleon circuit was already on the blink. It was halfway through repairs when the Doctor (re-)took it, so worked for Hartnell for a while before falling into an old pattern stored in memory. 

Talking of The Name of The Doctor, that story also features Clara entering the Doctor's timestream,  splintering into lots of different space-time events, but she never encounters any Doctor prior to Hartnell. This is also explainable, though, as she never meets the War Doctor either, as the Doctor somehow blocks it (as he doesn't consider the John Hurt version to be worthy of the title Doctor). It seems sensible that a similar block on his memory of pre-Hartnell incarnations would prevent Clara from interacting with them. Why hasn't the Doctor ever bumped into any of those incarnations before the Ruth Doctor? Well, perhaps she has and not realised it. Or perhaps the Time Lords have set up some kind of time lock (similar to that which prevents anyone travelling back to the Time War) that prevents our Doctor from ever travelling anywhere where she may bump into them. This would fit, as once the Master has destroyed the Time Lords, that time lock is presumably gone, and the Doctor runs into Ruth pretty much immediately. It's also not very clear how much the Time Lords know about the Doctor's history. For the conspiracy to work, it would make sense for only a few people to know, and they may be long gone now. So, when his people bring him back for The Three and The Five Doctors, they aren't aware that there's previous Doctors before Hartnell, and when they gift him another regeneration cycle in The Time of The Doctor, they presumably believe he needs it or else he'll die.

The only other thing that I can think of (though five or six more points may occur to me in the next few days) is how to explain away how the Doctor appears to be half human just for one night in San Francisco in 1999. I doubt that one will ever be rationalised to anyone's satisfaction, so I'll just keep ignoring it like I have been the last 20 odd years! 

In Summary:

Your Mummy should know: this is one of the very best!