Doctor Who has always been a serialized show. When the series began in 1963, stories were told in multiple-episode arcs, meaning an entire story could be told over multiple weeks. But when the series was rebooted in 2005, that shifted to a hybrid format: while there were season-long plotlines that would get set up in the premiere and not get resolved until the finale, episodes were more or less standalone adventures that could be watched on their own.
That creates an interesting tension — how do you balance the immediate threat at hand to whatever has been haunting the Doctor all season? That tightrope act can often be the deciding factor between a “meh” episode and an all-time great one. In 2014, this balance was struck perfectly by an often-overlooked episode that proved just how Doctor Who’s storytelling can be terrifying, heartbreaking, and wholesome all at once.
Season 8’s “Mummy on the Orient Express” finds The Doctor and his companion, Clara, at a crossroads. Clara has been traveling with the Doctor for a while, but after he forces her to make a crucial world-shaking decision in the previous episode, she decides she no longer wants to join him on his travels. After all, when they started, The Doctor, then played by Matt Smith, looked completely different. Now, he’s played by Peter Capaldi and is older, Scottish, and gruff. She barely knows this version of the Doctor.
They decide to take a trip for one “last hurrah” to the Orient Express... in space! (Side note, this conceit was previously used in “Voyage of the Damned,” which was set on a Titanic In Space, but the trope worked then and it certainly works now.) Everyone is dressed in their Gatsby-esque finest, but the entire train is haunted by a terrifying mummy only visible to its victims, and once it’s seen, there are only 66 seconds left until it strikes. Every murder is shown in real-time, with an on-screen timer counting down the seconds.
While Clara follows a victim’s granddaughter into a locked car, the Doctor sets off on a fact-finding mission that almost echoes an Agatha Christie novel: interviewing witnesses, looking for clues, and revealing secrets. Eventually, he pieces together the true intention of the Orient Express’ journey: to solve the mystery of the mummy itself.
“Mummy on the Orient Express” is a multitool of storytelling. It’s an homage to Christie’s work (and a far better one than the Season 4 dud “The Unicorn and the Wasp”), a classic monster story complete with a foreboding gimmick, and a science-fiction fable.
On top of that, it’s also an isolated place where Clara can stew on the very purpose of The Doctor’s new personality. Is he really that heartless? Is it all an act? Why does he lie so often, and why does he force her to lie along with him? As the events of this episode prove, this Doctor’s moral structure is always about doing what’s best of the possibilities, even if it means lying in order to achieve the best result. “Sometimes the only choices you have are bad ones,” he says. “But you still have to choose.”
Sometimes, companions are depicted as awestruck humans just grateful to be traveling with a millennia-old Time Lord, but this episode proves how Clara is the exception, or at the very least, a progression of a sometimes unaddressed Who trope. Often, because the Doctor’s companions are young women, there’s an automatic age-gap situation, simply because the Doctor is older than everyone else by default. Visually, Matt Smith’s 11th Doctor and Jenna Coleman’s Clara looked like a couple, an idea which that era of the show played up. When Capaldi became the 12th Doctor he told Clara “I’m not your boyfriend.” The entire vibe of “Mummy on the Orient Express” solidified this new era of their relationship — The Doctor and Clara were partners, and basically, equals.
Here, we see that she’s not afraid to get upset with the Doctor, and this entire one-off adventure, even the deadly parts, are all the Doctor’s attempt to win her back. It works, but only just. But, by the end of Season 8 and into Season 9, Clara’s future is even sadder and more heartfelt. This episode was just the beginning.
