Thursday 13 August 2015

Revisiting the Twelfth Doctor: Mummy on the Orient Express

Mummy on the Orient Express

If any episode wanted a sneaky trick to win points from the off, Mummy on the Orient express managed it by having a swing reworking of Queen's Don't Stop Me Now. Good work! And it's an episode full of references - I doubt I spotted them all. Before we get into it, here's what I remembered from my first viewing of this episode:
Tricky one, this. Could be exceptional, but for The Doctor's callous attitude to other people's death. Need to reconsider that on a second viewing. But otherwise this was a great bit of period-charm silliness, a scary monster and a chilling tale. Seem to remember this story leaving unresolved issues.
There's a habit with Doctor Who recently of taking a great idea and then throwing it into space to make it "zany". Let's put this alongside Dinosaurs on a Spaceship and Voyage of the Damned. I imagine there's a meeting somewhere along the line and there's this one really excitable person who's like  1980's space guy from The Lego Movie.
RTD: I'd really like to do a Doctor Who story on the Titantic.
80SpaceGuy: Yeah, like in a spaceship!
Moffatt: We should definitely do a story with dinosaurs.
80SpaceGuy: In spaaaace!
Moffatt: How about a bunch of 1920's stock characters are being killed by the curse of the mummy?
80SpaceGuy: Spaceship? SPACESHIP!
But then, we use so much of our technology and effort to recreate bygone times for the sake of nostalgia, that it's not a huge stretch to imagine that spaceships will feature remakes of classic vehicles. Plus the space setting gives this a stranded/danger of suffocation tension, needed by the plot, plus all the future tech required to examine the "mummy". I would have liked to have seen how this episode would have played out in a real 1920's setting, especially since once the Doctor figured out that the creature was using technology, I really can't see how the Tardis' lab isn't capable of tracking it. But then the Tardis is always a win-all toy, so maybe it wouldn't have worked.

 Aside from that, this is a great episode of Doctor Who. Yes the 12th Doctor's callousness is hard to swallow, but in his response to the kitchen staff being spaced and in taking the place of the final victim, it is clear that he cares deeply about the lives he is able to save. Perhaps this Doctor finds it too painful to dwell on the ones he can't save. And, following on from Kill The Moon where the Doctor forces Clara to take responsibility for the decisions of the human race, here we see the Doctor making Clara take on his role: promising someone that they will get out alive, when there is a good chance they won't.


It's an understandable character development. The mark of true loneliness is a desperation for others to empathise with our situations. The Doctor is making Clara walk a mile in his shoes. The episode after this is Flatline, in which Clara takes on a whole adventuring party by herself - but the groundwork for that experience is here and Kill the Moon.

It's a great episode, let down only slightly by what felt like a rushed ending. Hard to believe that the Doctor isn't more angry at the individual who keeps kidnapping all these innocent people for death - he makes no reference to tracking the stranger down. And even when the Doctor comes up with a plan to save everybody - we simply cut away and show the Doctor explaining to Clara what he did. It's like the old days when they couldn't afford to show the action, so the cast describe it in painful detail. Ah well, maybe these unresolved issues will feature in a story again some time...

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