In which the Doctor is dapper, Clara is dressed as the quintessential flapper, and it's all aboard The Orient Express - in space! - to investigate a possible suspicious death and the legend of The Foretold.
This is a gem of an episode. A Doctor-Who-dunnit. Gorgeous sets and costumes, fantastic action, phenomenal pacing, use of lighting, music, special effects and acting. Oh the acting!
That the episode is influenced by Agatha Christie's classic Murder on the Orient Express almost goes without saying. But just as interesting is the nod to her other best selling murder mystery And then there were none, in which ten people are enticed into coming to an island under different pretexts. All have been complicit in the death of another human being. All have escaped justice to date. One by one they are picked off as the novel unfolds. Plus there's the oblique nod to the Partner's in Crime, Christie series with Tommy and Tuppence Beresford as the main detecting characters.
It's a nod which makes for interesting subtext given that (and I quote from Wikipedia): "In this first book The Secret Adversary…][… they meet up after the war and come to realise that, although they have been friends for most of their lives, they have now fallen in love with each other."
Do I think there's a romantic undercurrent between the Doctor and Clara?
There is love. But romantic love? I'd say it's unrequited. A brilliant line delivery (from Jenna Coleman) confirms it, when she tells Danny (to whom she's talking on the phone) that she loves him, while looking down at the Doctor. The Doctor? He looks down at the TARDIS console with an uncomfortable expression on his face, one matched by the faux, over-enthusiastic, grin he gives Clara when she tells him she's had a wobble and is ready to carry on seeing the universe on his terms, just as long as he gets her home bang on time after every adventure, without a scratch on her.
It is pertinent to mention, or to remind viewers, that Moffat et al haven't been showing us all the adventures Clara and the Dctor have had since his regeneration. But, I do think we're watching their journey in linear story-telling time. When Clara and the Doctor stepped out of the TARDIS into the baggage car, I have to admit, I momentarily I failed to recognise Jenna Coleman. She looked stunning. So much the quintessential flapper (with her Louise Brooks bob) that, coupled with her banishment of the Doctor in last week's episode, I actually thought he'd taken another brunette out for a jaunt in space. It's the Doctor and Clara's last hurrah: "A good one to end on." An episode which re-affirms to us, and apparently to Clara, who the Doctor really is.
The teaser "Start the Clock" and the 66 seconds count down on screen is a terrific hook and invitation into the action. I am unsure as to where in the narrative the Doctor narrates from (at the top of this episode) but there's a flash-forward built into the opening moments. Very timey-wimey. Then we're in an opulent dinning car, looking into a world of luxury, right before the illusion is shattered by the approach of a nightmarish mummy. Special-effects-wise the mummy is part Hollywood cgi, part Scooby Doo cartoon which has to be perfect for children's telly - albeit that this broadcast later than usual and so cannot be said to be tea-time fare.
Actually little here is child-friendly, for all that this is Doctor Who. The invitation to step onto the train is one of opulence and seduction. Cocktails and intriguing tales of a past Clara may have failed to see, in her trip through the Doctor's time-line/life. Our two travelling companions pointedly have adjacent sleeping berths. Clara steps out of her cocktail dress, into pyjamas, then back into that same evening dress. The Doctor doesn't sleep. They both almost knock on the other's door. For all that the Doctor's invitation is one of adventure, not assignation, there's more than a whiff of a period weekend house-party - or game of Cluedo here. And what of the fellow guests on this journey?
To refer back to And Then There Were None for a moment, it's easy to posit that the victims aren't being picked off here because they're ill (and thus weak) in this terrifying game of survival of the fittest. The captain on this train was a soldier, so would have killed. The chef, gripping a carving knife threateningly? It's not impossible. But Maisie? She does admit to having violent fantasies. To wishing her grandmother dead. But thought crime isn't in the same vein, for all that it's an interesting, oblique, allusion.
Maisie (whose pony-killer of a grandmother is the mummy's first victim) played by Daisy Beaumont, is more catalyst than main supporting character. That role belongs to Frank Skinner's as Perkins, who is superb. Perkins here is Hastings, or Watson, to the Doctor's Poirot or Sherlock. He also stands as mirror to Clara, as companion, unlike her both seeing and understanding the price paid by those who step aboard the TARDIS. Perkins also seems to be able to match the Doctor for wits and investigative skills. From the moment he steps out of the shadows in the baggage car, to confront the Doctor, to the later fantastic moment where he appears with armfuls of papers and schematics, he's brilliant. I do rather wish Perkins had decided to travel with the Doctor even a short time, while working on changing out those drive stacks.
Maisie, in contrast, stands here primarily as confidant as well as possible victim. Resourceful, she over-powers a computerised baggage door-lock (linked to a mysterious centralised computer or AI?) with a well-aimed high-heel shoe. And given her girly-chat with Clara, by the time Maisie's in imminent danger we feel a greater sense of tension than if another red-shirt (or should that be white-shirt, seeing as the greater number of those sacrificed were part of the kitchen staff?) were offered up. Trapping both characters in the baggage car overnight, Mathieson creates the opportunity to have Clara talk to someone about the Doctor. About what he is and is not to her. Obviously, seeing as this is set in space, in a planetary system far, far, away, Maisie doesn't make the same cultural assumptions as Clara about their relationship. From Maisie's perspective the Doctor's physical appearance, the fact that he looks to be what he is i.e. a learned, distinguished, far older man, is not a barrier to his being in a relationship with Clara.
Their chat may fail the Bechdel test but it works in light of the wider series plot-arc, quite simply because we haven't seen or heard of any of Clara's friends. There's Danny, possible other teachers at Coal Hill School, apart from Alistair - and no one else we know of. On Earth, going about her ordinary life, it would be impossibe to explain the Doctor and their friendship to someone who hadn't experienced him. So, I can believe she has no one other than Danny, or the Doctor, with whom she can discuss the Doctor. Until she is trapped, overnight, in a baggage car.
Every companion who travels with the Doctor is changed viscerally by him, and by their experiences. They each change to become more like him (Sarah Jane Smith and Captain Jack Harkness being the best examples of this.) Here too Clara, prompted by the Doctor talking to her on the phone, is placed in the appalling position of having to lie to Maisie. Lie and pretend that the Doctor has everything under control, that he knows Maisie will be fine - that he is a good man - thus should be believed, and believed in.
The Doctor lies.
Maisie realised that upon first meeting him, but his lies are often matter of perspective. The Magellan black hole has been one for centuries, hence Maisie being convinced he couldn't have visited or picniced on the planet. But the Doctor isn't lying. He enticed Clara away for a weekend, but in so doing also wanted to investigate who or what had been trying to get him aboard that train for decades, if not centuries.
The Doctor pretends to misunderstand human emotional response, to have a child-like understanding of emotions, while at the end of the episode revealing he understands and can read human emotions and interactions perfectly. He just chooses to act as if he cannot. Hence the point about Clara's sad smile, his telling her that she's malfunctioning. The Doctor lies. Amusingly, he also stands as interpreter of the scary, adult, world of complex emotion. Small children do probably find the gamut of adult emotion confusing. Frightening even. For them friendship is a straight-forward thing. They wear their hearts on their sleeves, and a liar is a bad person. End of. In contrast, the murky world of adulthood is full of white lies and omissions. At the tail end of the adventure, when Clara wakes from a nightmare into a chilly day by an alien seashore, she is being watched over by a man who looks his age. A man who looks wizardish (that gnarled stick being used as a cane) yet, a man playing in the sand. The Doctor embraced his inner child (please excuse the expression) long ago, and tries to hold on to that sense of wonder and mystery while exploring the universe. But he is a proper grown-up, an elder figure. And to prove it Mathieson gives us that gift of a speech on the beach to explain that - when you're a grown up - choices may be unpalatable, and people's actions may look, or be, other than heroic. The mystery of the cursed mummy is solved. Ancient alien tech, and an ancient alien, saved the day and the remaining passengers - possibly. For there are two readings: one that he is telling Clara the truth; and the other that no-one else lived and that only he and Clara washed up on a distant shore.
I loved the scene where he extrapolates on difficult choices and bad decisions.
I loved the line delivery.
It was almost as perfect as the moment the Doctor introduces himself to the mummy he can finally see, and the later moment when he deduces the mummy was a soldier from a forgotten alien war. Here we have the second overt nod to the Doctor as commanding officer - the mummy saluting the Doctor before he is relieved of duty, turning to dust. It's a salute which mirrors Danny's angry one. And, I really, really, hope this symbolism of the Doctor as an officer, or commander, is being written with some clear plot-arc in someone Moffat's mind.
While the A plot is the mummy and it's next victim, the B plot or emotional arc is Clara coming to realise she can't change the Doctor and so either has to accept his travelling ways or walk out of, and away from, the TARDIS - as Martha Jones once did. Clara imagines they'll keep in touch. She asks him to drop round for dinner, but we - the viewers - know better. As lighting dims in the trains corridor and Peter Capaldi looms, sorrow oozing from an almost poker-faced expression, we know the unspoken answer to Clara's question. We remember the Ponds, who were left with an empty place setting at their Christmas table. We know the Doctor runs and rarely looks back, even now.
In episodes where Peter Capaldi shares scenes with older actors he excels, bringing phenomenal nuance to his performance. Here, we're also also given the gift of his monologue, which is fantastic performance-wise. Mathieson has woven in nods to earlier episodes, to earlier character traits and likes the Doctor had, and I applaud him for it. That perfect moment when the Doctor opens a silver cigarette case, with a tap, to reveal a row of jelly babies. The scene in which the Doctor lies awake, fingers pressed against his eyelids, talking to himself. Both moments calls to mind Four.
At the end of the episode what remains a mystery is GUS or G.U.S. Thanks to the Radio Times I was reminded that we first learnt of the Orient Express in space back in series 5 in Victory of the Daleks. Given that we met Professor Edwin Bracewell in that same episode, he being our 'first' clockwork man, I can't help wondering if he lost his Dorabella, and his post-office. Is Bracewell somehow linked to the Promised Land and Missy? GUS, being a computer system with a three character name, calls to mind CAL and the Library database. Simply coincidence? I fear so.
GUS was, of course, controlling the Orient Express and the tests being run aboard her. All this series we've seen or tests on soldiers have been alluded to. Rusty the Dalek was tortured, the subject of human testing. Was Danny? Obviously he was tested, pushed too far and resigned his commission. The mummy/soldier from a forgotten alien war had tests performed upon him, tests GUS and his accomplices were hoping to re-create. That makes me think GUS has some link to the military - to UNIT?
What Mathieson has done brilliantly is to create the sense of a new arc, one born from a seed tossed aside series ago. Who or what is GUS? Who was the woman in the shop who suggested Clara call the TARDIS, for technical support? There do seem to be plot-hooks drawing us onward.
Clara? She wants to have her cake and eat it and, for the first time, is showing signs of being the same kind of young woman Amy Pond once was, when she climbed out of her bedroom window and ran off to see the universe - leaving her wedding dress hanging on her wardrobe door. Peter Capaldi's brilliant smile that is more of a grimace (before he takes Clara off for another spin in the TARDIS) foreshadows how badly this is going to end.
On that, I am positive.
I absolutely loved this episode for pacing, character, dialogue, sets and costumes. Oh the costumes! Obviously all costumes in the episode came from Angels Personally, I covet Maisie's pyjamas more than Clara's backless, beaded, wonder.
And it's Saturday again... Where did my week go?