Mummy On The Orient Express: Ranking - 190

  Mummy On The Orient Express

(Series 8, Dr 12 with Clara, 11/10/2014, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Jamie Mathieson, director: Paul Wilmshurst) 

'Are you my mummy?...'

'No. Are you the next victim? 66...65...64'

'No.  Are you sure you're not my mummy?'

'I'm everybody's mummy, dummy. 50...49...48'

'Help me Mummy'

'I don't help people, kid. I kill them.40...39...38'

'Why are you counting mummy'

'There's a war on.30...29...28'

'Is it my war mummy?'

'Which war is that, son?20...19...18'

'World War Two...'

'No. One...Darn it, you made me lose count. What do you want anyway?'

'Are you my mummy?'

Ranking: 190

 

 

A lot of modern Who stories like combining unlikely elements that shouldn’t go together almost at random, like the Whuzzles on acid: Agatha Christie and killer alien wasps, farting green aliens in Downing Street, dinosaurs on a spaceship, fish fingers and custard. Sometimes it’s silly and feels a little as if a toddler has been at your Dr Who models and spilled the contents randomly onto your floor with bits of things from other franchises randomly stuck on top but sometimes, just sometimes, these ‘shopping lists’ of contrasting clashing ideas can work. For instance I’m struggling to think of any series that would give you a plot line about a cosmic-bound version of ‘The Orient Express’ from the future or a mummy from space (‘The Foretold’) who ‘kills’ people with a 66-second countdown to their doom that only they can see. Both those plotlines sound intriguing shows worth watching. I can’t think of any other series in a quadzillion years that would put these two plot strands together. That goes double for telling that story within 45 minutes: I mean, there’s enough mileage there for a whole series. It’s working out how they fit that’s the fun bit, with the sleuthing element of an Agatha Christie novel used not just as decoration but for the feel of a story that’s trying to work out just why the Egyptology action bit is there. Usually Dr Who is about the ordinary of our world hitting the extraordinary one of The Doctor but this one is slightly different: it’s more about two extraordinary human inventions that don’t usually mix hitting each other head on and working out how an Egyptian mummy ended up on The Orient Express in space (especially as that costume of badges mean he doesn’t have any pockets for his ticket).

Not that you have much time to ponder anything much in this story as it’s all a bit of a breathless rush, which is both this story’s biggest strength and its greatest weakness. Series eight is, I think its fair to say, the talkiest series of Dr Who. I mean you could make a stiff case for some of the 1960s with its longer scenes and smaller number of cutaways but by and large its this series where everybody talks through their problems at length, over and over, separated by one or two big set pieces sprinkled across the story. Whether conscious or subconscious Steven Moffat seems to have taken the decision to take his hand off the accelerator, giving his older 12^th Doctor less running around and more explaining. What at first seemed like a breath of fresh of air (what’s this? A plot I can actually follow?!) has begun to get old by episode eight, with the stories starting to flow into one another in template form. Long preamble, lengthy setup, elongated investigation, clash with monster, The Doctor does something incredibly clever and explains it at length. Suddenly having this story, which is all madly running down corridors (and what corridors!) already felt like unearthing some long lost tomb of how things used to be. Coming after two slow burns (flickers?_ of ‘The Caretaker’ and ‘Kill The Moon’, two of the talkiest Dr Who stories there is, this one feels fun again, a reminder that Dr Who isn’t just a scifi space opera where people do one thing and then get to talk about their feelings but a genre about how people cope with yet another big event being thrown at them when they hadn’t properly finished processing the last one yet. Of course the downside to that is that, come to this story on its own away from the rest of the series, it falls flat. People talk about feelings but don’t have any time to process them and once you know the big trick at the end this story has less to offer you. It’s like an archaeological dig where everyone was so busy enraptured by the mummy they forgot to notice how few precious jewels there were inside the tomb. Plus, when you sit down and think about it, the resolution doesn’t make much sense anyway. I mean it’s all very well sticking two disparate things together and hoping they click but…why is the mummy here/ Why isn’t it haunting, say, Egypt? And why is there a replica of the Orient Express in space half-full of holograms and half-full of real people at all? Is this how they do cos-play in the future? We learn frustratingly little about this world and how it works because everybody’s too busy running round screaming, scared for their lives.

For the life of me I can’t decide if this story is an inspired masterpiece or a bit of tired filler. You see, ‘Mummy’ does all the sorts of things Dr Who stories tend to do at both ends of the spectrum. On the one the setting is a pure gimmick: we’ve had space planes (‘Timeflight’), boats (‘Enlightenment’) and automobiles (Bessie, The Whomobile) plus endless stories about busses, so I can’t tell if its inspired and original or tired and secondhand to do something similar in this story with a train. Steven Moffat suggested the Orient Express setting, figuring that it would be the perfect place for The Doctor to impress Cara, given its mixture of the future and the past and the sophisticated and gentile yet ridiculously exciting that sum her character up well. In theory there are a lot more reasons why aliens from the future would re-create this part of Human culture than, say, naming a spaceship after the Titanic and the re-creation is done with all the usual love and details of a BBC costume drama from the past.

At the same time, though, the train doesn’t have the same ‘wow’ factor of Edwardian sailing ships in space or the sheer wrongness of a bendy London bus on an alien planet. As for the ‘sleuthing’ script that’s a pale retread of earlier ideas too, without the twists and turns or, indeed, the logic of ‘The Robots Of Death’ or even its lesser cousin ‘Terror Of The Vervoids’ not to mention the Christie homage ‘The Unicorn and The Wasp’ (which had its own, albeit completely bonkers, internal logic). In Christie terms, though, the plot is a cheat, with a solution that comes from outside anything we’ve been told and with a motivation that’s ill defined, an about turn that makes sense in scifi but is tantamount to treason in crime fiction. On those terms it’s the most defective of the loose ‘detective’ Who quartet. And yet in other ways it’s the cleverest: having the Orient Express, of all things, in space is very in keeping with the original novel. Before it became a byword for excess, posh kids on gap years and Great Aunts being taken out for tea, the Orient Express was all about exploration, of passing into the unknown and its journey from Paris to Istanbul was, at the time, the single longest uninterrupted journey that could be taken by train in Europe. It’s the ultimate in Edwardian tastes, a planned trip on rails into the great unknown (this was, after all, the great exploration age). Recreating that on Who makes sense as does having it become the target of a very different space-age time in the future. Throwing in a space age mummy from his favourite Christie book, ‘Death On The Nile’, is another example of something that’s both confusingly odd and aesthetically brilliant.  Mathieson’s clearly been thinking about what Moffat’s sent his way and even though some of this story feels like disparate things being thrown together willy-nilly there is a sense of structure that (just about) holds it all together. Ish.

 ‘Mummy’ suffers from a lot Dr Who ish problems, yet has some impressive little ways to rectify them. For instance, the speed of their demise means we don’t really get to know the passengers on board this train or care for them. They’re just victims, there to make up the numbers for the most part and we never do find out why they’re on this particular holiday. Most of them are perfunctory even for this era of this series, caricatures who don’t say much and mostly stand around waiting to get ‘mummified’. Even Perkins, the much ballyhooed and highly publicised guest part, with longterm fan and comedian Frank Skinner finally getting a chance to guest in one of his favourite series though it turns out to be a fairly nondescript performance in what’s a pretty bland role that only has a few lines (not at all what you were expecting from the build-up publicity that milked to death The Doctor’s consideration to having him onboard The Tardis at adventure’s end). Frank is so much of fan he was watching ‘The Sensorites’ episode three in his trailer on the set of another series when his agent rang him offering him the job (I mean, he could just be saying that but if he was then he’d choose something a bit cooler than ‘The Sensorites’, a story only as true fan would watch more than once. He also told Dr Who Magazine he celebrated the night he learned he passed the audition by watching ‘Colony In Space’ which is even less cool!) As a fan Skinner probably recognised his function: someone on hand to tell The Doctor what’s going and there to try to stop him by misunderstanding his actions, something straight out of the ‘Making Of Dr Who’ textbook. He might also have recognised that he’s basically a 21^st century update of the whizzkid from ‘The Greatest Show In The Galaxy’, a fan and (quite literal) trainspotter who knows all sorts of facts that The Doctor will call on in short measure to short-circuit the plot and keep momentum. And yet unlike some other lesser stories ‘Mummy’ turns this one around. Hopefully Skinner would also have noticed that writer Jamie Mathieson covered the basics with more aplomb than we’ve been having lately: Perkins doesn’t do much at all and yet he still feels like a living breathing person with a soul (and it’s not from the acting: Skinner tries hard with something the comedian has never done before and is more than passable but it’s clearly not his forte). More interesting is Christopher Villers as Professor Moorhouse, returning to the series for the first time since 1983 when he was the son of Ranulf Fitzwilliam during the jousts of ‘King’s Demons’ in 1983 (or 1215 depending how you look at it. Either way he’s aged well) and John Sessions as Gus, the impenetrable baddy whose seemingly in charge of the train (a one time auditionee for the 8^th Doctor in 1996 - but then again wasn’t everybody?! - the impressionist doesn’t get much space to show off his gifts but still sticks in a great performance) All three only come into their own at the end though when the story is nearly over.  You see, it’s a really clever thought to have the mummy end up attacking the passengers that are the most ‘vulnerable’, as we retrospectively find out about the ones with heart conditions and dicky tummies and PTSD, Mathieson taking the postmodernist idea that any bunch of characters in Dr Who needing to be saved are in a sort of Doctor’s waiting room as he tries to treat them in order of need. Suddenly, at the last minute, we’re reminded of these people’s back stories and the lives they lived before the cameras started rolling. The fact that mummy is picking these people off faster than he can save them is every Doctor’s worst nightmare: which patients do you save next? How can you tell whose sick is everybody’s illness is invisible? How do you heal and put a bandage on an alien made out of bandages? It’s a more straightforward battle between than usual this week, for all the mystery: can this Doctor work out a cure before all his patients die?    

No wonder, then, that a stressed Doctor’s bedside manner is so bad this week, enough for the people around him to comment on it. By now the 12^th Doctor being acerbic and rude has become a bit repetitive: it’s a bit of a one-joke idea anyway having an acerbic antihero Doctor and there are increasingly less ways to make it interesting (as they found out in Colin Baker’s run). Somehow, though, Mathieson finds new ways to do this by putting The Doctor under so much intense sharp pressure that he doesn’t have time to think  about his actions and just has him re-act in the moment as his ‘true’ self. The ‘series arc’ has been about whether the 12^th Doctor is a ‘good man’ or not and by now Capaldi is at the peak of his irascibility to the point where its actively getting in the way of his attempts to put things right and save everybody. The scenes of The Doctor arguing with a dying man to pull himself together and give him details of the attack that only he can see, while he’s actively begging for his life, and ticking him off are the sort of scenes Capaldi was born for and he’s much more comfortable with the comedy of this episode than anything he’s been given thus far. Unlike some other 12^th Doctor stories (though like a few of the 6^th Doctor ones it has to be said) there’s a sense of insecurity behind the outbursts and rudeness though. This Doctor is still cooking and hasn’t proved himself yet and every time he tries to do the right thing it seems to go wrong spectacularly. Even in ‘Kill The Moon’, when he left the big decisions up to Clara, that came within seconds of being the wrong thing to do and damaged the trust of the only person who till now has had any faith in him. Nobody on this train trusts him the way they used to because he doesn’t seem to even trust himself and as cross as The Doctor gets with everyone around him the person he gets crossest with is himself. We’re back where we started in ‘An Unearthly Child’ in so many ways, a Doctor who yearns to save everyone around him but who doesn’t know how and whose meddling at first just makes things worse. On the face of it this is just the 12^th Doctor being a caricature of himself, grumpy and gloomy, but underneath it there’s something much cleverer and smarter going on that’s so subtle its at risk of getting lost underneath all the running around.

Usually that’s where Clara would step in and smooth things over, as a go-between that stops The Doctor being quite so alien. But she’s fed up with him too. I’m so glad they carried on her frustration with The Doctor from the previous story: it’s what they tried and then bottled with Steven and Tegan before her but Clara carries on being cross, agreeing to this trip as a way of saying goodbye and shocked to find out that, all this time, it was a ruse to remind her of how exciting these adventures can be and make her rejoin The Tardis fulltime. It’s a neat throwback, too, to the line at the end of ‘The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang’ and its comedy ‘oh no, here we go again!’ moment when, just as the universe is saved, someone from the Orient Express calls The 11^th Doctor for help. Moffat only meant that to be a joke, a sweet tribute to the part of Russell T Davies’ writing he really liked and especially Catherine Tate crashing in at the point of The Doctor’s mourning in ‘The Runaway Bride’.  But here its something that The Doctor’s been putting off, a message that effectively went to his spam box and he’s been too busy to check out. The Doctor knows that it’s the perfect place to take Clara though to remind her of what she’ll be missing if she steps away from The Tardis for good. It’s such a very Clara place to be full of all the contradictions in her character: somewhere a bit posh but very real, where the future and past clash together head on. Clara’s been better catered for than usual lately and you can feel her annoyance with The Doctor softening gradually over time, frustrated at everyone he shouts at but aware that he’s trying to do his best. The Doctor’s conversation with her at the end is a telling moment for her character: she agrees to stay not because The Doctor saves people but because he finally tells the truth about trying to make the best of a bad situation, admitting that ‘sometimes there’s no right option’ and that he didn’t know for sure if he could save her friend Maisie’s life, just that he hoped he could. Clara being Clara she’s impressed that someone tells her the truth at last because she knows how hard that is for her to do – and its perfectly in keeping that she then immediately lies to Danny about having cut off her friendship with The Doctor (there’s a neat cut scene, at the beginning and end, where Danny urges her not to cut him off violently or cruelly but do what he did to his friend when they pulled apart: meet once a year and talk about nothing until they gradually fade. Clara agrees and lies that this is exactly what she’s done). 

Unusually for Dr Who it’s the running down corridors that works best - not least because we’re on a train and these corridors all look so good (for all the aliens and mentions of space this could easily be the real Orient Express, so good is the attention to detail).  There’s a real energy and excitement to this story that’s long overdue, a sense of drama as passengers keep dying and we don’t know why. It’s rare to see The Doctor quite this desperate and the use of a timer to count down the 66 seconds spoken of in the ‘mummy’s curse’ is clever, as is the way each scene with it really does take 66 seconds from the first appearance of the mummy for the victims to die (that’s a tough thing to write and keep intact for all the re-writes I can tell you. As is finding new ways to have basically the same scene over and over again, with all of these characters coming into their own in their dying moments as their either accept it gracefully, fight against it, beg and plead or go to pieces). For a story that’s so often about death there’s very little in Dr Who that properly looks at how we die – it’s as if Who is so full of the joys of being alive that it looks the other way when it comes to the importance of dying a good death. Being confronted with death means something different for each of these people, makes them reflect on how they would have lived their lives differently, or how much being alive means to them. That’s a brave thing to stick in a supposedly children’s show on at teatime (actually this story’s first broadcast was the latest of the entire run at 8.30pm, reportedly because of how ‘scary’ it was – and it is, thanks to some creepy CGI effects, but no more than, say, Weeping Angels or Dalek attacks).  It’s one up on Agatha, too, who almost never considers the deaths of her characters except in plot terms. 

The story works even better as a ‘mummy’s curse’ story, the feeling of some ancient power exacting revenge for something you did by accident that you don’t understand, calling up ancient powers that make the modern day look sadly primitive. There have been surprisingly few of those down the years - even ‘Pyramids Of Mars’ didn’t really go down that route despite having all the other trappings of a ‘tomb opening gone wrong’ scenario, while the only tombs ever seen were when The meddling Monk hid in one in ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’ – even though it’s one of the most obviously Dr Whoy things you can do, with something from one timezone having a huge ripple effect centuries later. There was a longstanding rumour that the people who opened up Tutankhamen’s tomb all saw a ghost of the pharaoh before they died and their last moments were spent pleading to an invisible entity and pleading for their lives.  Sadly/mercifully it was all complete fiction, sensationalist copy to explain the fact that Lord Carnarvon (who funded the expedition) died so soon afterwards when a mosquito bit him in Egypt bit him and he cut the bite while shaving, with it becoming infected. In truth at most there was ancient bacteria in the tombs that modern man wasn’t immune to and caused a bit of a cold. It’s a good story though and one that made many people wonder. After all, Ancient Egypt was and is still so unknown to us and a time filled with impossible Gods who could do anything because…super powers. It’s a small and very Dr Who hop from there to Egyptians being aliens who can do anything because…science.  It’s very in keeping, too, with the Moffat era of Dr Who that we have a monster who doesn’t much more than loom (at one with statues that only move when you don’t blink and The Silence who you forget the minute your back is turned). Throw in the time angle (a curse coming true centuries on) and you have perhaps the single most Moffat story Moffat didn’t actually write.

At the same time, though, it feels a bit…odd. Especially the sleuthing element. You see, we at home get to see the mummies and those 66 seconds when The Doctor doesn’t, which brings up whole questions of who narrates this story and to whom. Why should we at home get to see what these characters don’t? Are we outside time? Is this all being beamed to us? Having us at home be privy to things a detective doesn’t is absolute anathema to an Agatha Christie novel and considered ‘cheating’; by rights this should be a ‘Columbo’ story ather than a ‘Marple’ or a ‘Poirot’ where the joy is in watching the detective work it all out. There are also way too many tricks and turns that Christie would never have allowed too: not mere red herrings but bits that break through the story with Dr Who logic that don’t work to this story’s established ‘rulebook’. The mummy turns out to be (spoilers) a soldier, still fighting a distant war, taking out people one by one because it doesn’t realise the war is over. Eh? How does that work then? We’re told almost nothing about The Foretold and instead have to work it all out for ourselves. First of all an Egyptian war seems to contradict a lot of other Who stories (notably ‘Pyramids Of Mars’). Is it at war with Humans? If so why haven’t we all been wiped out long ago given its greater weaponry and technology? Why isn’t it in flipping Egypt?! What made it latch on to a train in outer space that has no actual links to Egypt? For the original train of course Egypt was one of its most famous stop off points, but this train is a replica. Plus if this train really has been running since the 11^th Doctor’s day presumably this isn’t the first one. Did it kill all the passengers on those as well? In which case why hasn’t it had an investigation (or at any rate a o star review on intergalactic tripadvisor: ‘Lovely scenery. Nice food. Shame about the Egyptian trying to kill us all and murder us in our beds. Lovely service’). Why does The Tardis translator circuits not interact with the Egyptian? Why is it dressed in bandages? (Hardly a practical army uniform). How come it doesn’t notice that these people aren’t soldiers and haven’t attacked it? Really there should be more clues than just carrying a tiny flag, which is totally cheating: where it its medals, its insignia, its banner for its kind? Even in the real story that probably inspired it, about the soldier in Vietnam who refused to believe that the war was over and kept trying to shoot everyone who came near to tell him to go home, he wasn’t quite that thick: it’s obvious this war is over, that these people aren’t at war and the lack of people fighting for, what? Nearly 2000 years should have been a clue. Unless of course this is an automated hologram. But how can one of those kill you? How come it takes 66 seconds every time? (seemingly a big clue that’s then just ignored). Surely a soldier wants to kill without the chance of being killed. Is that how long it takes for a psychic weapoj to work? If so how come someone as used to psychic devices as The Doctor doesn’t notice or at least wave his sonic screwdriver around and find any residue from one? And how does it kill anyway? The mummy just seems to loom until you drop dead (fright? Is it aiming for passengers with a weak constitution and heart? That would work physically but how come it works mentally as well? You don’t literally die of a broken heart you know). Did all the other passengers getting on pay half price for coming on board with their ‘mummy’?!?

I have so many unanswered questions about this story which, after showing his skill in so many other ways, the writer just ducks at the last minute. It wouldn’t be that hard, either, to have a scene tying everything up, of having The Doctor mumble something about ‘gosh, its hoogawhatzit sprocket must have been damaged in the war, it’s like an answering machine that could never be switched off, that’s frozen in time when the last update from the war with the Agroglaihardifunks from the mirror planet Mras came through. It was never at war with Humans until a spray quadizoola bullet struck it and turned its defence capabilities into overdrive. I always meant to go back in time and study that war. The Ice warriors won you know. All the mummies should be dead. It’s being kept alive due to anger, nationalism and bandages – quite literally given they’ve been embedded with interstellar zoowalleia juice from the planet Gagadoobedoobawahey that melted through its other clothes. Blimey. Who’d have thought it?’ There are red herrings that are never explained too: why does the soldier kill the weakest first? It looks at one stage as if we’re getting a riff on how not all illnesses are visible before we end up in a war. Why does The Mummy use the countdown number of 66, one number away from ‘The Beast’ leading us to think The Devil from ‘The Impossible Planet’ is coming back? What role does Gus, the apparent bad guy, play in any of this? Why was The Doctor given an invite when the mummy doesn’t seem at all interested in him? Why are there so many holograms on a space-train that could surely have filled its quota out several times over? Why is everyone on board Human? (Surely there should  be some aliens here?) And where are we even going, what is the destination? Or are we simply going in orbit round the nearest planet? IT all feels a bit of a cheat, not just like a crime novel that you would never have been able to solve but also a crossword puzzle with a word that makes no sense or a wordsearch with a word that isn’t printed; it feels a little like you’ve been wasting your time getting invested in something that makes no sense. This was, reportedly, a last minute substitute for a more detailed ending Mathieson suggested but which Moffat said would take too long to explain; to be fair I’ve read what it was in a few guidebooks now and I don’t get it either so the showrunner might have had a point.

Overall, then, it’s a draw: the bits that work are cancelled out by the bits that don’t work and the parts that are original, imaginative and inventive are cancelled out by the usual Dr Who clichés of people escaping and being captured or locked out and supporting characters who don’t act the way normal people (even aliens, even hologram aliens) would. For all that this episode falls apart like bandages when they get wet if you think about it too hard, though, it’s very enjoyable when it’s on which is all you can really ask from a Dr Who story, with arguably more happening in this one story in terms of action than the rest of series eight combined. Mathieson throws in some really clever lines that are so obvious in retrospect that its amazing it took 51 years for a writer to come up with them: the joke about how this Doctor has a really poor ‘bedside manner’. The idea of The Doctor performing ‘triage’ and working on his patients from multiple angles at once (inspired, surely, by Mathieson’s work on the impossible task of adapting our old friend Douglas Adams’ freewheeling ‘Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency’ novels on TV, stories where two very different plots strands always come together by the end. Sort of). The opening call of ‘is there a Doctor onboard?’ after the first body, when The Tardis arrives right on cue. The ‘are you my mummy?’ injoke (from ‘The Empty Child’) when The Doctor is trying to work out if he’s the victim or not. The Doctor’s period cigarette case full of…jelly babies (reportedly Capaldi’s suggestion). His going undercover as ‘your worst nightmare’ then reacting when Gus calls him a mystery shopper with the line ‘I need a new pillow and I’m very disappointed with your buffet bar. Plus all the people who keep dying…’. The line about how people ‘with a gun to their heads don’t have time for mourning’, a pure 4^th Doctor bit of wisdom that makes even more sense said by the 12^th who has even less time for comfort and support. Overall it feels like proper traditional Dr Who this story, even when its doing the series has never done before – and occasionally tripping over the things traditional Dr Who usually gets right (the explanations). Even if the end of the story turns out to have bandaged over the plotholes and the destination turns out to be suspect (more like travelling on the real ‘Orient Express’ than many would care to admit I suspect) this wouldn’t be the first Who story where the journey was more fun than the destination. Despite the age-old mummified presence this story is a breath of fresh air just when series eight badly needed it and on that score alone is a pretty decent success.   

POSITIVES + The costumes are excellent, as you’d expect from the BBC doing period drama. Peter Capaldi always looks good in a tuxedo as we’ve often seen. Clara though, is a revelation in 1920s dress and a bob haircut that suits her so well she should have kept it for the rest of the series (she’s an actress who, forwhatever reason, always looks best when dressed in clothes from the past: her stint as ‘Voctoria’, for instance, is uncanny and Jenna is more natural at playing her than an early twenty-something from the 2010s). The mummy too looks better on a BBC budget than anything Hollywood can do too with attention to detail over the bits ‘missing’ rather than just looking like a man in a suit, a real triumph for the Mill who are usually pretty bad at standalone monsters that need to move but who really nail this one, especially its transluscentness.

NEGATIVES - Alas, the CGI model of the Orient Express is pretty awful and decidedly not up to a Hollywood budget, or even ‘Enlightenment’ from over thirty years earlier. It looks like the weird half-real, half-fairytale models used in ‘The Polar Express’ as it drifts through space, instantly undoing the believability of the rest of the story. Though mercifully Tom Hanks isn’t playing every other role in this episode. Also why is the singer Foxes there singing a song pointlessly in the opening few minutes? (and if you don’t know who she is she’s one of those singers who are big for five minutes, win lots of newcomers awards, then disappear as people make way for the next one). Well, no, I’ll tell you why she’s there: Moffat met her at a BBC Worldwide showcase event in Liverpool where having done his bit, he was getting drunk at the bar. Foxes was on the bill too and found herself sitting next to him, plucking up the courage to say that she’d love a cameo in Who one day. Normally Moffat would have been sober enough to politely turn down such a request and wriggle out of it but, drunk, he said ‘sure why not?’ and then had to work out which story to slot her into. He’s lucky the cameo didn’t go out of the way of what happens the last time a drunken producer randomly said yes (the barbershop quartet of ‘Shada’, the story that was never finished) although given how random this five minutes of plot-slowing in an otherwise super fast paced adventure goes, some of us wish it had. Although then again the time before that when a musical act had a cameo it was The Beatles in ‘The Chase’ who went on to worldwide fame and adoration, so it’s a lottery in other words.

BEST QUOTE:  ‘Sometimes the only choices you have are bad ones. But you still have to choose’.

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