Writer: Jamie Mathieson.
Director: Paul Wilmshurst.
Starring: Peter Capaldi, Jenna Coleman, Frank Skinner.
The title of this tale alone serves as something of an introduction to what we’re in for, I think. What do you get when you cross the Orient Express in space (with tones similar to the Tenth Doctor Christmas Special ‘Voyage of the Damned’ albeit with a train and not a boat) with a roaring 1920’s aesthetic and an ancient Egyptian-inspired deadly and terrifying creature? If there’s a proper answer to that riddle, I haven’t heard it, so let’s settle by affirming that the answer is, in fact, this episode!
A high-concept title indeed. Does the episode match it? Read on to find out! This is ‘Mummy on the Orient Express’.
STANDARD WARNING: POSSIBLE MILD SPOILERS AHEAD, PERHAPS.
The episode opens with a remarkably grim pre-credits sequence (continuing Series 8’s trend of drawing us into the action immediately), where we see several passengers aboard the luxurious space-borne train that is the (presumably newest) incarnation of the famous Orient Express. Everyone’s having a grand old time…except for one particular woman, who is understandably perturbed by the horrifying mummy that is dragging itself towards her, hands outstretched. Even more bizarre is that nobody else can see the creature, even when it reaches her and, in the blink of an eye, removes her from the mortal coil. Shouts of “Help!” and “Fetch a doctor!” go up around the room, and of course one very particular Doctor is not far off. He’s brought Clara to the Orient Express as a final trip, so to speak, following their tense confrontation at the conclusion of last week’s episode…but there’s more to this trip than fond farewells. Numerous layers of intrigue, terror, and poignant moments await, as the deadly Foretold stalks the passengers of the train…
It’s an extremely engaging opener to an episode, and ‘Mummy on the Orient Express’ is essentially summed up by that one word: engaging. Everything about this episode keeps the viewer on the edge of their seat, sometimes on account of the scary monster, but just as often due to the rapid-fire plot. It’s a narrative that moves forward at considerable speed, introducing new dilemmas just as quickly as old dilemmas are solved, and it never lets up. It has the definite feel of the Classic era about it, in particular the run of Tom Baker, which clearly had quite a notable influence on this story (Baker’s Fourth Doctor, of course, being no stranger to Egyptian-themed villainy, what with Sutekh and one particular version of Scaroth). Indeed, there are throwbacks aplenty to episodes gone by, but Baker’s Doctor certainly gets the lion’s share of them. ‘Mummy on the Orient Express’ is a real mix of tropes from all sorts of settings and genres, taking sci-fi, horror, mystery and thriller and throwing them all into a big 1920s-shaped blender. It works magnificently (reminiscent of ‘The Pyramids of Mars’ to an extent in that regard) and personally speaking I adore this kind of episode. It’s very uniquely Doctor Who.
Aesthetically, this tale is impeccable. It takes its time as much as it can early on to fully establish exactly what sort of setting we’re in, and the story is all the richer for it. The Orient Express is fantastically realised, looking exactly like a perfectly-vintage train that just so happens to have set out amongst the stars. It’s a wonderful anachronistic element that lends the story that little spark of indefinable magic. Even the fashion in the episode adds to things so beautifully well, a mix of classic 1920s attires with just a few space-age touches to lend things that nice sci-fi flair. Particular attention, of course, goes to the Doctor and Clara’s choices of clothing in this tale, the Doctor in sharp clothes that have more than a few pertinent similarities to those he typically wore long ago in his very first incarnation, and Clara in yet another gorgeous period-appropriate costume that, I must cheerfully admit, I found slightly distracting from the actual events of the episode (in the best way possible, of course). The music, too, is highly-befitting of the tale’s events, particularly the jazz-styled cover of Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now” as performed by musical guest Foxes, which really sets the scene beautifully.
The cast for ‘Mummy on the Orient Express’ is a notably large one, with plenty of supporting characters each given their own brief moments in the limelight. Chief on the list is long-time Doctor Who fan Frank Skinner as Perkins, an engineer aboard the train itself, and one of my favourite one-off characters of recent years. He’s an excellent match for the Doctor, the two debating points as if it were the typical Doctor-companion relationship. Indeed, the Doctor himself seems to practically consider him one right away, and there’s a great deal of amusing banter between the two. Meanwhile, Clara is having her own dilemma with Maisie (Daisy Beaumont), a traveller aboard the Express whose grandmother was the above-mentioned first victim of the monster that stalks them. There are quite a few important conversation pieces between the two that have quite notable repercussions as the episode goes on, but of course I’ll leave that to all of you to see. Rounding out the supporting cast are ex-military man Captain Quell (David Bamber) and alien expert Professor Moorhouse (Christopher Villers), both of whom find themselves drafted into the Doctor’s ad-hoc team to deal with the menacing Foretold.
Speaking of the Foretold, that’s a creature that needs addressing. The so-called mummy has been built up for quite some time as a villain so scary they couldn’t show it in the earlier time-slot of the series, so scary that it wasn’t even allowed to appear in the trailer, despite fervent attempts to make it so. Having watched the episode now, part of me must admit, I can certainly see where these rumours were coming from. The Foretold is a fairly gruesome monster, unnerving even, and clearly the design department pulled no punches whatsoever when creating this enemy. Everything, from its slow, purposeful movement and decaying features, to the powerful sense of inevitability that occurs when a clock appears on-screen counting down to its next victim’s demise (a narrative device that runs throughout the entire story), all combines to make a truly-implacable Doctor Who monster, a terrifying creature that cannot be stopped conventionally. As ever, there’s a lot more to this particular mummy than meets the eye, and the twists and turns that come along with it only contribute to the episode’s already-great narrative.
With all of that lot out of the way, we should of course finally get to our main duo. The relationship between the Doctor and Clara remains strained in this episode, as of course it would after the last one, and there’s a dynamic between them that we haven’t really seen play out between Doctor and companion before; that of an oncoming end to their travels. Things are rather awkward, but of course the threat of danger livens things up considerably, and it’s not long before things are back in gear, albeit a less-comfortable gear.
Capaldi’s Doctor is at his absolute best in this episode, mixing his usual calculating and detached mannerisms with a great deal of enthusiasm and more than a little suaveness, playing up his own Doctor with some elements of the Third, Fourth and Seventh Doctors mixed in. Ambiguity remains the name of the day for the Twelfth, a man who makes impossible choices as he puts it, and that ambiguous, perhaps initially even more careless attitude is thrown into further light in this tale. Coleman plays a rather more subdued Clara in this episode, who is having a great deal of difficulty coming to terms with her own decision to leave the TARDIS, a decision which is all the more muddled by the events of the episode. The script underscores this new division quite beautifully by keeping the two apart for the vast majority of the episode, allowing both to get their full screentime without the other. It’s interesting to watch indeed.
Well, as I’m sure you’ve all guessed by now, ‘Mummy on the Orient Express’ stood out to me as an utterly fantastic episode. It feels like quintessential Doctor Who, fun, scary, poignant, and hard to pin down to any one genre. I wasn’t expecting this one to get everything as right as it did, I’ll be completely honest, but I’m delighted to have been proven wrong. The throwbacks and classic feel of the episode are only the icing on an already-beautiful cake.
Gorgeous, well-paced, thrilling, exciting. 10/10
Do join us next week, for what appears to be a very two-dimensional episode (but not the way you’d think) in ‘Flatline’…
