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!

The Rings of Akhaten

Chapter The 33rd, Akhaters gonna Akhate.

Plot: 
The Doctor continues trying to impress his new companion Clara with flash dates; a jet flight and a coffee in London last week, and this week a musical. The venue for which is the Cantina Band scene from Star Wars being played on a continuous loop. Clara meets the star of the show, a little girl called Merry, and gives her a pep talk to get her up on stage. What's the worst that can happen? Well, turns out the worst that can happen is Merry will get eaten by a Sun god (as in a Sun that's a god) for hitting a bum note. Audiences are getting tougher and tougher these days. The Doctor tries to talk the Sun to death, but Clara saves Merry, and the day, by showing the Sun a leaf. (I'm not making this shit up, that's actually the plot.) Everyone has a lovely old sing-song. The End.

Context: 

A school night. The Better Half is out, the kids are abed, and I fancy watching a Who on my own. The random number generator I use to pick, though, might fall upon a real crowd-pleaser that everyone will want to watch with me, and it would be selfish to keep to myself, what then? ... But no, it's chosen The Rings of Akhaten. No one's in any hurry to watch that one again! But I'll try to keep an open mind - perhaps it's not as bad as I remember.

I watched the episode on Netflix as my daughter is midway through her zillionth rewatch of Frozen and I don't want to eject her disc. I noticed in doing so that the whole of 21st Century Doctor Who is available on Netflix except for The Day of the Doctor and The Time of the Doctor. That must make it tricky for anyone for whom this is the sole source of episodes to follow the ongoing narrative, as some quite significant stuff happens in those two. It didn't bode well for The Rings of Akhaten that I was quite so distractible even before I started. But, I did try to keep an open mind.

First-time round:

I watched it, time-shifted to the evening, on the day of its original BBC1 broadcast in 2013. At this point, my every Saturday was like a football fan's whose team is languishing at the bottom of their division in a losing streak. I'd start off full of hope that there would be a win, but end up disappointed yet again. I hadn't minded the season opener the previous week, and my hopes were low for this one anyway because of its name (more on that later), but it still underwhelmed. As did every other episode, alas, in the 50th anniversary year except the big one in November.

Reaction:

Positives first: the music is good. The Long Song, Murray Gold's folk lullaby, sung by successive generations to the greedy god, is perfect. When presented at the Proms as a stand-alone piece, it really shone. And it's not even the best song in it (Ghost Town by The Specials is heard in the 1981 pre-credits sequence). The creature effects can't be sneezed at either. So: good tunes, good masks. That's the end of the positives.

It may be that the intention was to tell a story more about exploration and wonder at an alien world than about a big exciting adventure; if so, the script chickens out halfway through, and tries to start up and resolve an adventure story in far too little time. Or it might be that the aim always was to do the adventure story, but because this is the new companion's first trip to an alien environment, they felt they needed to dwell more on her reaction and background; but, if so, why did they dwell for over half the running time? There's almost as much material about haggling for a vehicle rental as there is about defeating the big bad guy. Though it would certainly have been a refreshing change of pace to have a story where the most dramatic thing is a child getting over her stage fright, I doubt seasoned TV professionals like writer Neil Cross or The Moff would have entertained that beyond an initial brainstorm. So, likely it was always intended to be somewhere between those two poles - they were trying to have their Akhaten and eat it too - and the result is unsatisfactory by either measure.

They were on to a hiding to nothing, anyway. The 'exploration and wonder' approach works with Rose - when she gets a sudden panic attack on Platform One because she's surrounded by aliens, or when she puts her footprint in the snow of 1869 - because she's a real person and is written and played as such. Despite having possibly the best companion actress since Billie Piper playing Clara, she is set up as an unplayable sci-fi enigma, and - just as he did with Amy - Matt Smith's Doctor has an ulterior motive in asking her aboard the TARDIS, which damages our trust in him, and makes the relationship seem a bit creepy. He is seen literally stalking her family through time in the early sequences of this story. I am keeping everything crossed that soon-to-arrive new Capaldi companion Bill is just an ordinary person with guts and a sense of adventure, because that's all you need.

One would think that the plot of Rings, once it gets underway at around the 20 minute mark, doesn't have time to drag thereafter. But one would think wrong. There's some kinetic movement hopping or mopedding from place to place, but dramatically, emotionally, everything is static. The Doctor stands up to a scary nasty, delivering a big speech while it just stays still, not looking very threatening. Then, he realises the Mummy thing isn't the big nasty, and so stands up to another scary nasty, delivering a big speech while it just stays still, not looking very threatening. To have this happen twice over is unforgivable and should have been picked up in rewrites. But perhaps Rings didn't get any of those - it was a rapid commission after Cross's first script for the series, Hide (shown later but filmed first), went down so well with the production team, and it shows every sign of being rushed half-formed to the screen.

Connectivity: 

Ooh, quite a lot: both stories have more musical numbers than is usual for a Doctor Who story, both involve intergalactic tourists, both feature an alien girl, and both include a trip in a slightly unusual space vehicle (space-bus in Delta and The Bannermen, space-moped in The Rings of Ahkaten). Plus, they both have stupid titles (more on that soon).

Deeper Thoughts: 
'Rose' by any other name... 'The Rings of Akhaten' is just the kind of 'King Thrash-wobbler of the Biddly Bong' name that repels a certain section of the audience, and prevents a mass appreciation of a fantasy product even if deserved, consigning it to the cult ghetto. Now, you might think - and if the mood's right, I might agree with you - screw 'em. If those people are going to switch off just because they can't cope with an odd sounding name here and there, they're not worth keeping. That would be fine for any other show, but not Doctor Who. It shouldn't ever be a cult; it should always aim to appeal to the widest possible family audience - that's what it was made for, from the very beginning.

Avoiding outlandish language that might be off-putting is therefore wise, especially when part of the title. Since its return to screens in 2005, Doctor Who has taken care for the most part to use the episode titles as Big Tent marketing opportunities. It's dropped the ball a couple of times, yes: I still think 'The Father of the Daleks' would have brought in more punters than 'The Magician's Apprentice'; but, generally, it's done okay. The Rings of Akhaten was broadcast during the era of what Steven Moffat dubbed slutty titles, which started with Let's Kill Hitler - big Cinemascope ideas for each story encapsulated in a snappy and obvious title which would invariably appear weekly on a movie poster style image.

In the old days, Doctor Who stories had some pulpy titles, for sure, and many included made-up proper nouns; but, they usually had a sense of excitement about them. 'The Power of Kroll', to take a representative example, is more dramatic a title than perhaps deserved by the somewhat soggy story to which it is attached, and it too would qualify for the centrepiece of a passable movie hoarding. There were also some gnomic beauties too, like the spate of single word titles in the early 1980s, e.g. 'Meglos' (a story that was crying out instead for an 'Attack of the Cactus Man' moniker).

From 2005 onwards, though, all that is banished. Doctor Who didn't blaze back onto TV screens with 'The Return of the Autons'; its opener was instead, very deliberately, called 'Rose'. Something sounding innocuous, maybe even a little dull, because it was the story of someone with an ordinary life to whom extraordinary things then start to happen. Every title in that 2005 batch uses only normal English words ('Dalek' is in the OED). With the exception of occasional uses of the names of established Doctor Who baddies that haven't yet got into the dictionary - Sontarans, Ood, Zygons - that's how it has stayed. (There's only one real exception before Rings, 'The Pandorica Opens'; yes, there's no word Pandorica in the English language, but it's only two extra letters different from its famous mythological inspiration, and it was also mentioned previously in the series before it's titular usage.)

'The Rings of Akhaten' could never be described as a slutty title, not even in the rarefied environs of one's local comic store or Games workshop. The movie poster image seemed to suggest some kind of King Solomon's Mines adventure pastiche, but the story and the title didn't relate to that. Ultimately if it did any good it was to expedite the end of the slutty era - it was limiting to concentrate on only large high-concept ideas, week in week out. And it does seem to have been a one-off; since Rings, it's been back to reasonable titles not written in any alien language. Some might see all this as a lack of confidence, but I disagree for the reasons given above: Doctor Who should never be excluding or elitist in its approach. And it should certainly never again put made-up words in an episode title that sound like someone clearing their throat. Ahem.

In Summary:

The Long Wrong.

Pyramids of Mars

Chapter The 28th, one where Tom's really putting the effort in, now.

Plot: 
In Von Daniken style-ee, the ancient gods of Egypt turn out to be very powerful aliens; during a big war, the main nice one Horus defeated the main nasty one Sutekh, but had moral qualms about actually killing him. So, he imprisoned Sutekh instead in a pyramid in Egypt, somehow kept immobile and controlled by a power source on Mars, the Eye of Horus. Not literally his eye, of course, that would be hideous.

In 1911, archaeologist Marcus Scarman stumbles into Sutekh's hiding place and becomes controlled by him. Somehow, an ancient society of Sutekh worshippers exists in Cairo and somehow they have lots of useful equipment like robot mummies and bomb parts. Somehow all this equipment is transported to Scarman's estate in England, including a sarcophagus that's really a disguised portal into a time-space tunnel. Scarman arrives from Egypt through this portal, puts a forcefield around the house, and then kills every person in the grounds bar two: the Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith, who have been dragged there off course on route to UNIT HQ. Somehow.

The Doctor winds up being taken over by Sutekh too, and takes Scarman, Sarah and a couple of mummies to Mars. Somehow Sutekh neglects to kill either of the time travellers once there, so they are witness to the destruction of the Eye of Horus. They race back to Scarman's house to monkey about with the time tunnel and this kills Sutekh. They are in a great hurry as they only have the time it takes for the signal to reach from Mars to Earth to implement their plan. Although they do have a time machine, so, they could have taken it more leisurely. Also, it was lucky Sutekh, once freed, travelled by the time tunnel rather than start his reign of destruction in Cairo. He should have thought of that really, the silly god.

Context: 

Watched the DVD, an episode every so often over the course of about a week. It was just me and the Better Half as the kids were not interested, though middle child (boy of 6) wandered in at one dramatic point and said "dun-dun-dahhhnn!!!!" without any hint of sarcasm.

First-time round:

This was an exciting one; it was late Summer 1987, not yet six years on from when I'd first discovered Doctor Who; the show was still on TV, with a new Doctor, Slyvester McCoy, to debut soon. As the incumbent at the dawn of the affordable Doctor Who video age, Slyv was the first who had to contend with such direct competition from older Doctors for fan's affections. Videos of early stories had begun to be available to buy from 1983, but they were very expensive. By late 1986, they started to re-release those early titles at £9.99. The family had got a VCR for Christmas 1985 (I taped Minder on the Orient Express and watched Only Fools and Horses' To Hull and Back live, in case you were interested). Everything was aligned for my addiction to collecting Who - an addiction still alive today - to be enabled.

In those early days, though, it was not a case of rushing somewhere to snap it up on the day of release. Distribution, just as with Doctor Who Magazine, was hit and miss. My school friend and fellow fan Dominic had a source. He'd bought Revenge of the Cybermen, the first ever title, for himself from a shop near where he lived, and had then sold it to me second-hand a little while after, deciding he'd watched it enough. Before that, I'd found The Seeds of Death in a WHSmiths when I was staying at my Dad's. Unlike Dominic, I did not find (still have not found) the point where I have "watched enough". I must have viewed and reviewed those two tapes so many times in those first few months of owning them. One day in the Summer holidays, Dominic contacted me breathless with news: there was a new video in the shop near him: Pyramids of Mars. Did I want him to buy it for me? I did, I did, I did.

The videos in those days were edited together to remove all the beginning and end credits of the middle episodes, plus scenes that might offend like the Doctor measuring things with his scarf and doing some mental calculations. There were indeed some odd cuts in that original edited version, but I watched it so much, and so happily, it became for me the default. The unedited version was released on tape in 1994. A long time ago, but even now seeing a section that wasn't part of that original experience, it still leaps out at me.

Reaction:
Pyramids of Mars is one of those stories that have been held in very high esteem by fandom for longer than I've been a fan, so it's very hard to watch without prejudice - especially when memories of those heady enthusiastic days I first got to own and replay this story clearly still colour my enjoyment to this day. This time, I tried to watch with a critical eye.

The plot, as a cursory examination of the synopsis above will show you, is illogical and convoluted. Does it matter? The writing has to jump through lots of hoops to justify why the action is happening in a priory house in Edwardian England, rather than in Cairo. Yes, it's fun, and in keeping with some films of the 'Mummy's curse' genre, to have the horrors following the archaeological adventurers into the incongruous world of stately homes and poachers. Plus, the Beeb is better at doing fusty English drawing rooms than it would be doing pyramids and Egyptian bazaars in TC3. Unfortunately, the resolution of the drama is inextricably linked to the mechanism of travelling between the two locales, which makes it more difficult to forgive.

Many Doctor Who stories - hell, many of any kind of stories - have been built on shakier ground than this, though, and for the first three episodes the story just whizzes by with one visually impressive scene after another. I doubt anyone at the time would have been wondering about why, when and where any of these events are occurring; instead they'd have been too busy being impressed by the design of the Mummies, who - with their sunken eyes and bulbous chest units - are striking and memorable. Watching the scenes as they stalk various characters through the woodland grounds is very exciting. Add to that, explosions that go backwards, and cobwebbed rooms with sarcophagi shuddering as they open behind unsuspecting servants, and you get a great dramatic experience.

It's not deep enough, perhaps. The producer Philip Hinchcliffe and script-editor Robert Holmes now responsible for the show had started to make their mark; inheriting a few scripts from their predecessors' reign, the first year they produced for Tom Baker still has vestiges of the socially and politically conscious themes that were common in Jon Pertwee's time. But by Pyramids they've dispensed with such themes in favour of all-out horror-inflected adventures.

There is some depth provided at a character level, though. Pyramids is very like a modern story, not just in terms of the pace in getting our heroes involved, but also in its focus on the character of the Doctor.  Repeatedly, we are dramatically reminded that the Doctor is not human, to the point where – inadvertently or not – it becomes a theme of the story.  Michael Sheard’s wonderful performance as Laurence Scarman is a polar counterpoint to the other scientist adventurer in the cast: he’s meek, optimistic, open, smiling, worried about his brother, in contrast to the Doctor’s brooding, doomy and brusque characterisation and his concentration on the wider issues beyond the personal.

Arguably, Sutekh is just like the Doctor, but pushed to the extreme end of the spectrum: he’s the extreme example of the dark alien whose overriding aim is more important to him than human life. All this thematic stuff comes to a head with Laurence’s death and the Doctor and Sarah's discovery of his body, the best scene in the story and one of the best scenes in Doctor Who: "Sometimes you don't seem -" "Human?". The problem is that Laurence dies before the end of episode 3. This leaves the final episode to fall flat, just a traipse through some booby-traps - fun, and in keeping with the genre, sure, but nothing like as good as the rest. A shame, because otherwise this would be a perfect story to begin Baker's peak period.

Connectivity: 

Both stories include a break-in to a burial chamber and funereal accoutrements that may be more than they seem.

Deeper Thoughts:  

Would the Doctor be ‘no-platformed’ in a UK university right now? Recent events across the globe are highlighting that identity politics are an ever stronger motivator of people’s decisions. Alongside this, increased care has become required in any discussions that touch on an individual’s identity, whether that be their nationality, culture, gender, or whatever. There’s greater and greater consciousness that one’s group identity should be protected in some way from those outside of that grouping. Discussions can get quite heated, particularly on the internet, and sensitivity shouldn’t be ever seen as a bad thing; but, where should the line be drawn? And should artistic endeavours be exempt from any such scrutiny?

If it’s taboo to wear a plastic sombrero when you’ve been to a Mexican restaurant, then it’s obviously unforgivable to make up a Caucasian actor to play a Chinese magician (as happens in 1976’s The Talons of Weng Chiang)? Or is it? Offensive as ‘blacking’ or ‘yellowing up’ may be, some actors have recently defended this, based on the freedom that no thespian should be prevented from playing any part, regardless of any aspect of that role; because that’s what acting is. Whether one agrees with this or not, it is fairly easy to see that hurt could be caused to some members of an audience to see their identity reduced to a funny accent and a particular hue of slap.

Less clear cut though, is the identity (and therefore the possibility of protected status) of the works themselves. Artists and dramatists don’t come along fully-formed, and have always developed through imitation of existing art, at least at first; so, where does the process of artistic inspiration by assimilation end, and cultural appropriation begin?  Can any particular identity group claim ownership of a story or a genre? That ship may have already sailed; if rock n’ roll came along as a new phenomenon now, white men would probably not be allowed to sing the blues, or at least they wouldn’t be able to play the university circuit if they did. But my enquiry is searching for a relevant morality for now, so dismissing this as something you could get away with in times past does not help.

Pyramids of Mars comes from a period of Doctor Who where the producer and script-editor were (very successfully, and inspiring great popularity in the resultant product) sampling. It wasn’t the first or last time this would happen on Doctor Who, but it may have been the most full-blooded attempt. Should they have thought twice, and considered the morality of borrowing so heavily from Universal monster movies, amongst other sources?

And where did the tropes from those movies come from? Tracing it back, a lot of them come from fairy stories and folk tales that grew through retelling amongst communities. Those stories are known to us now because individuals from outside those communities collated them, tweaked them, published them and made some money off the back of it. If we had always carried the protectionism of cultural identity too far, we would never have had the monster stories evolving from that root, only the purist original. In other words, there would be no Doctor Who. So, dare I say it: wear your plastic sombrero with pride – identity is important, of course; but we can only learn and grow if aspects of our identities are shared.

In Summary:

3 parts Mummy, 1 part musty.