Doctor Who Recap

Mummy on the Orient Express

By Edwin Davies

October 20, 2014

Amusingly, the Doctor may be older than the mummy.

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Continuing a (probably) unintentional theme running throughout this series of Doctor Who, "Mummy on the Orient Express" starts out with a number of marks against it. The title is the obvious one, since it's built on a half-serviciable pun that is not quite as egregious as the one in "Robot of Sherwood", but only just, but more damning is the way that starts out like any old episode.

The cold open shows an elderly woman riding on a plush and fancy train getting killed by a horrifying mummy that only she can see, after which the camera pulls back to reveal that the train, despite its Gatsby-esque mid-'20s glamour, is actually traveling through space. Once the credits have played, The Doctor and Clara arrive on that same train, dressed up in their finest suit and elegant evening dress respectively, and reveal that the train is actually The Orient Express (or at least an Orient Express), and it becomes clear that they are going to get drawn into solving the mystery of what the mummy is and why it is killing people.

Now, that's all a perfectly fine set-up for an episode of Doctor Who, but I was trepidatious about it because the business as usual approach seemed like a betrayal of the ending of "Kill the Moon", which ended with the creation of a seemingly irreparable split in the Doctor/Clara dynamic.

Starting the next episode by throwing them straight into another adventure seemed like the show falling back into the bad habit of treating major character moments as things to be forgotten. (Remember that time Amy and Rory witnessed their baby being kidnapped then went right back to having unrelated adventures with The Doctor?) But then The Doctor mentioned how Clara's smile was actually sad and melancholy, and it became apparent that the show wasn't going to forget about what happened in "Kill the Moon". This wasn't just another adventure; this was meant to be their final adventure together. A last hurrah for The Doctor and Clara, and a sad admission that he had done something that she may never fully forgive him for.




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Obviously that was not the case; their adventure on the Orient Express led Clara to change her mind, and the pair will continue to travel among the stars for at least a little while longer. But in not only acknowledging that Clara had gone through an experience that caused her relationship with The Doctor to shift drastically, but also weaving that into the fabric of the episode, it further underlined what I've been saying about this series as a whole. Unlike the last couple of years, which tended to get bogged down in telling an overarching narrative at the expense of individual stories, the writers are now writing standalone stories that are linked together by the emotional journey of Clara and her changing dynamic with The Doctor.

That aspect of the episode only really comes into focus at the very end, though, even if it is bubbling under the surface throughout. For the most part, "Mummy on the Orient Express" is a fun, spooky episode that gets a lot of mileage out of a simple premise (the aforementioned invisible, unstoppable and deadly mummy) which it gradually complicates in subtly interesting ways.

The Doctor, working with an expert in mythology (Christopher Villiers) and the train's Engineer, Perkins (Frank Skinner, who brings a cheerful sarcasm to the role) conclude that the creature is what's known as a Foretold, a being which kills its victims exactly 66 seconds after first appearing to them, and only them. They try to figure out how to stop a supernatural creature, even after the Professor reveals that it cannot be killed (to which Perkins replies, "Can we get a new expert?"), at the same time that Clara finds herself locked in a compartment with Maisie (Daisy Beaumont), the guilt-ridden granddaughter of the woman who died, and an empty sarcophagus.


Continued:       1       2       3

     


 
 

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