12.8: Mummy on the Orient Express

In which Clara forgives the Doctor by becoming more like him.

Broadcast: October 2014

Watched: March 2022

“Are you my mummy?”

Very few quotable lines – I think maybe you can see Moffat hasn’t done a page one rewrite with Mathieson’s stuff? – but probably my favourite of the season. It’s funny and scary and with a load of ideas (the real time countdown, the Foretold, the juxtaposition of a load of golden age style with a train in space). And like many of my favourite episodes it’s unbelievably Doctor Who while not being especially like any other episode. Plus, it’s so stylishly made and the performances are all brilliant (the professor’s death scene, David Bamber’s “It turns out it’s three”). Also, an actual pop star singing, because why not.

Some random things that I like:

• The entire scene of the Doctor talking to himself like he’s two people

• The Doctor’s cigarette tin of jelly babies.

• “No! Stumpy!”

• The bit where the countdown starts, but it’s another 40 seconds before we cut to the victim so we can’t work out if it’s real or it’s just a joke because we’ve found a sarcophagus with bubble wrap and fairy lights on it.

• John Sessions. 

• “I’m your worst nightmare.” “A mystery shopper, oh great.”

• The moment where it turns out half the people on board are hardlight holograms and vanish. (“That was my best guard!”)

• The professor bargaining for his life.

• Frank Skinner, giving one of those performances that’s objectively terrible (he’s *so* OTT when running out of air, he looks like he’s in a different show to everyone else on screen) but very charming. Lol that he’s the chief engineer so basically Geordi Laforge.

A smaller number of things I don’t like:

• Clara and Maisie locked into the baggage car. It’s contrived, it’s also not made clear when or why they become trapped, beyond “Clara light episode.”

• Danny is insanely chill about the entire “one last ride” thing, especially considering he has to use the phrase “You can’t dump him, he’s not your boyfriend”.

• There are so many extras on the train that once the Captain and Professor are dead, it’s only Capaldi and Skinner talking and everyone else just reacts silently. It’s weird.

• It also feels maybe a tiny bit unfinished? It scratches around a broken survivors of war theme (the captain, the identity of the mummy) but it’s so underdeveloped I’m not sure it’s deliberate at all.

All tiny issues, though, especially since this was Mathieson’s second script for the season. God I wish he was still on the show.

Other thoughts:

• It’s the second story running which ends with the Doctor pontificating on a beach. That must be deliberate surely.

• Perkins’ final scene feels like it’s partly there to let Skinner see the TARDIS, partly to show that the Doctor actually did save everyone, he’s not just saying that to shut Clara up (c.f. Deep Breath). Although it’s also because none of the other people he saved has lines, is it?

• Love the fact Moffat decided that the throwaway line from The Big Bang was too good to waste. (Also, the way we mix the Orient Express and Egyptology up in a whole barrel of interwar stuff means it’s not as big a juxtaposition as it feels, until you throw space in.) I wonder why it’s a mummy, not an Egyptian goddess, though?

• Clara lying to Maisie to get her to the Doctor so he can learn something by watching her die feels like a key moment in the “Clara becoming more like the Doctor” arc; the Doctor saving her anyway is a key one in the “12th Doctor not actually just a space prick” one. Which is good. So maybe I just hate the way the break up, “this is going to ruin us” narrative warps her story?

Shout out to the guy who cornered me in a pub on Saturday to demand to know why I disliked Clara, btw.