Flatline: Ranking - 188

 Flatline

(Series 8, Dr 12 with Clara, 18/10/2014, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Jamie Mathieson, directed by; Douglas MacKinnon) 

'You know how 30^th anniversary special 'Dimensions In Time’ and 50^th anniversary special ‘Day Of The Doctor’ were both in 3D? Well for this year’s 51^st anniversary there have been some cut backs. Yes that’s right, this year our monsters are going to be two dimensional!'

Ranking: 188

One of the things the 2000-era Dr Who stories have in common with the 1960s and not the years in between is that most years the lead actor gets to take a holiday and is written out the series. The show has come up with some really good variations on this over the years (The Doctor sulking in his Tardis for an episode during the exploits of Marco Polo; Is Steven trapped on the Massacre of St Bartholomew’s Eve because the Doctor really is dead?, ‘Blink’ having the Doctor be the centre of events despite only having three scenes the entire story; ‘Turn Left’ being an entire story about what would happen to the universe if the Doctor wasn’t around to save it) and some really bad ones (‘Doctor, you’re back!’ says Ian at a cliffhanger in ‘The Space Museum’ without actually seeing him; The Celestial Toymaker making him mute and invisible on a whim). ‘Flatline’ though makes possibly the best use going of the fact that Peter Capaldi needs a break and Clara has to carry most of the story, setting up the arc of her turning into the Doctor and taking on all of his own responsibility without the get out of jail free card of regeneration that he’s got. For now Clara is successful but close sequel ‘Face The Raven’ is proof of why the Doctor should be so worried about her. Where’s the Doctor? Well, they’ve tucked him away in a box this week. Only that box happens to be a malfunctioning Tardis. It turns out that the dimensionally transcendental circuits have picked up a virus created by the local invading monster that causes it to become unstable, so for a lot of the story the Doctor is reduced to a waving arm or a leg or sticking his head out of a tiny Tardis model that Clara has to carry around. It is, if you will, a pun on the idea (in a phrase that seems to have originated with Christopher Eccleston talking about ‘Father’s Day’, an episode in which he didn’t appear much either) that these sorts of stories are always ‘Doctor-Lite’ – because for one episode he is. To date this is the last time Dr Who has tried this idea: the schedule is slowed down to give the actors room to breathe and the production team enough time to catch up. That seems to be especially true now that Russell T Davies has taken over again: at the time of writing the production team is over a year ahead of transmission dates and at eight episodes a year down from thirteen there’s less rush all round. That’s a shame in many ways: the I can’t-believe-there’s-no-Doctor frill-free episodes are some of the most inventive as the writers are pushed to think outside the box, not least because this story got it right more than most, thinking outside the box by, erm, putting the Doctor inside a box and leaving him there for most of the story. Oh and if you’re wondering why Jenna Coleman can’t have a day off writer Jamie Mathieson wrote ‘Mummy On The Orient Express’ first as a companion piece, a Clara-lite episode that sees her separated in a railway carriage for a good proportion of the story. 

 That in itself is quite something: the last time a writer wrote back-to-back stories who wasn’t the showrunner or a script editor it was Chris Boucher writing for Tom Baker back in 1977. Steven Moffat really enjoyed working with Jamie, a writer who’d been steeped on the fringes of the Whoniverse for years without actually writing any Who before this pair of stories: he’d written for the TV adaptation of one-time script editor Douglas Adams prematurely cancelled oddball series ‘Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency’ (which did for crime fiction what ‘Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To the Galaxy’ had once done for sci-fi, making it weirder and funnier) and wrote most of the series that Who-writer didn’t for ‘Being Human’, a series made by many of the same production personnel who’d once worked on Who. Like Douglas he has a gift for writing in impossible situations that turn the usual conventions of the series on its head and like Toby manages to make the most unlikely and unlikeable people seem real and sympathetic. What he doesn’t have necessarily is a love for Dr Who and an encyclopaedic knowledge the way a lot of the other writers for the modern era do. That might be why this story skirts so close to ‘Fear Her’, being about creatures from another world that only exists in two dimensions and based around drawings coming alive, which given the fan reaction to that story seemed inevitably the one story we would never ever get a sequel to. ‘Flatline’ is a less clumsy version of that story in many ways, with the drawings much more unsettling and creepy which might be why this later one tends to get a much better reaction from fans. It’s certainly a story that’s easier to watch without blushing or having to make compensations for low acting or weird effects, but at the same time I’ve never been sure why the fanbase does the one and not the other. After all, ‘Fear Her’ is by far the braver of the two scripts with its themes of child abuse and neglect and loneliness: ‘Flatline’ is one of those rare stories that doesn’t really have that much of a message, being more of a story that’s about watching the Doctor try to solve a problem he doesn’t understand. 

 That said there’s nothing childish about ‘Flatline’: these aren’t children’s drawings coming to life but people being sucked inside out and being turned into drawings, with the only evidence that they’d ever existed a shape on a wall that’s assumed by the people who walk past them to be a mural. Which leads to the one message of ‘Flatline’: the need of all sentient beings to leave a mark on the world they live in, no differently to a dog. Humans particularly lead short and transient lives which means we tend to be forgotten not long after we’re dead and even when we’re still alive in some cases: Rigsy sees Clara staring at what they both take to be a mural and explains how she died alone, unloved and un-mourned. His graffiti, for which him and half of Bristol seem to be doing community service after being caught, is another aspect of this need to make a mark: Rigsy leaves his handle behind because, in a dilapidated poverty-stricken city like this one, it’s his only way of ever being noticed by anyone or leave any mark that he was really there at all (‘Face The Raven’, will sort-of carry on this obsession with markings, when Rigsy ends up with an alien tattoo). The Boneless are this story’s monster with the unique twist that they’re the first the Doctor’s ever met who only exist in two dimensions, coming into our world to learn more about how three-dimensional people think. But all they’re really doing is speeding up the human process anyway, reducing the people they take to being mere outlines, a shadow of their real selves. 

 All modern writers for the show have their own favourite era of the show; to date all three showrunners have said they love the Phillip Hinchcliffe 4th Doctor era the best even if they pick up on very different aspects of it as inspiration for their work (Davies goes for the importance of Sarah Jane and Leela to the plots and the big emotional drama, Moffat the horror and the occasional non-linear structure and Chibnall the big moral messaging). Mathieson is unusual in that he did watch the Tom Baker era but, by his own admission stopped watching by the end of his run and was always more interested in ‘Sapphire and Steel’ anyway. Which is interesting for a couple of reasons. One is that, more by coincidence than inspiration, he hones in on the short era when Christopher H Bidmead was script editor, writing a story where the Tardis malfunctions and gets smaller (like ‘Logopolis’), with aliens working out of a completely different dimension (like ‘Warrior’s Gate’) and where the baddy kills people by sucking through the ground (just like ‘Frontios’). All this story needed was a mathematical genius working in block computation and we’d have had the set (Rigsy is very much under-rated by the Doctor, who calls him all sorts of names in this story, but a genius is a stretch too far I think). This story also resembles ‘The Man Who Never Was’, the nicknamed fans have given to what was officially named ‘Assignment Four’ in Sapphire and Steel, about a crossover between dimensions that means a being can escape from photographs and put people from our world inside them, burning them to get rid of the evidence. ‘Flatline’ does resemble Sapphire and Steel far more so than Who at times: the idea of other dimensions and objects coming to life isn’t something Who has ever really done before and while other stories have gone up to the line of having something ‘out there’ that even the Doctor doesn’t understand ‘Flatline’ is the first story that really crosses that line, as it were. Again, more by coincidence than design, ‘Flatline’ has another connection with Sapphire and Steel, with Christopher Fairbanks (appearing here as gruff overseer Fenton) started his acting career in the last deeply bonkers episode of that series and is to date surprisingly the only actor to have appeared in both scifi series.

 Mathieson had three other influences for this story too: one is the children’s story ‘Flat Stanley’ by Jeff Brown about a boy squashed flat in an accident with a bulletin board who can be squidged into different shapes: one of the community workers killed by the Boneless is named ‘Stan’ as a homage. Another is the famous painting by Hans Holbein the Younger named ‘The Ambassadors’ but which most Whovians can’t help but re-name ‘The Ambassadors…Of Death’, given that it has a whacking great skull in it that can only be seen from a certain angle. An early play with perspectives, it very much taps into this story’s feelings of people wanting to make their mark, as from the front it’s a typical 16th century drawing of two aristocrats with more money than sense (they look as if they’ve just walked out of the Bullingdon Club with David Cameron and Boris Johnson’s ancestors) – however death and extinction is waiting for them just like everybody else from another view, with history not recording who the pair are or much caring. The third influence is the 1884 novella ‘Flatland: A Romance In Many Dimensions’ by Edwin Abbott Abbott (you might have noticed that this story is set around the fictional ‘Abbott Estate’). In this metaphorical tale about prejudice and wanting more from life a square from Flatland dreams of visiting Lineland but finds the reason no one from his part of the world ever seems to go there is because he comes in two dimensions and they live in one. When he does visit no one can see him because they can’t comprehend another dimension. He in turn has ghostly hallucinations where he’s visited by a being known as Sphere who doesn’t have any dimensions at all. 

 Put all those disparate sources together and you have ‘Flatline’, a story that’s not like any other Who episode at all (barring ‘Fear Her’). It is, however, exactly the sort of thing the series should have been making. You see, I think there’s a great political message buried within ‘Flatline’ that’s so, well, flat that few fans even notice it. The only part of Bristol we see in this story is a group of community workers who are in trouble for various petty crimes and a railway line that looks near-abandoned (even though trains apparently run from it). These people are so working class they make the likes of Ace and Rose look posh: at least they had jobs to go to (even if they were both menial jobs that wasted their respective talents): the people in this story don’t even have that. They’re certainly very different to the comparatively affluent children seen at Coal Hill School, our ‘home’ location in this era of the series. No wonder they’re sat around graffiting buildings: what else do they have to do? There’s nothing to aspire to, no great plan, no sniff of a career: they’ve given up already and been left behind. After four years of austerity from The Coalition they weren’t the only ones: there were whole great pockets of society like this. How did society respond? By kicking them further. No prime minister in our history has ever been as clever at manipulating the media as David Cameron and he fed the papers all sorts of stories about the ‘have-nots’ that made the ‘haves’ treat them as if they were aliens from a different planet. If you were here in those years then you might remember his ridiculous claims of ‘hugging hoodies’ to make them ‘feel better’ as if their probems could all be solved so easily and on the other hand his petty policies to come down hard on petty crimes (like graffiti) by having law-abiding (i.e. rich) citizens complaining and getting Asbos (Anti-Social Behavioural Orders) handed out like they were sweets. They weren’t serious enough to go to court but they did stay on your record and meant you were even less likely to mix with people who had money and the vast majority of people given them were young: the generation hit the worst by austerity because employers were more likely to hang on to workers with experience than school-leavers. As a result Britain had never been more divided: the much-mocked 2011 London Riots, dismissed in the media as an indulged youth getting things they hadn’t earned, which was really a cry about the unfairness of a system rigged against them. This was an era when the people at the bottom of the food chain might as well have been living in another dimension for all the understanding and empathy they got from the other half. The Boneless, then, are really the Spineless: the rich who could have helped end this suffering but chose instead to eat these people up and spit them back out, dissecting them in the papers while trying to ‘work out’ how they got by. Fenton is a ‘Boneless’ in Human form, scowling at the people under his charge without recognising their desperation or frustration, treating them as criminals from the position of an older self-made man who got a job so why can’t they? The Doctor points out that only people like him that can’t ‘see’ the psychic paper have no imagination whatsoever and it’s true; more to the point he has no empathy either because he can’t imagine what another person’s life might be like and why it might not be like his. It’s the train that’s the key. The Boneless have no reason to go to a railway station particularly – in the script it’s just the place they go next – but it’s the only means of escape for the people who live here. The train represents going up in the world, of changing stations in life of escaping the place you were meant to remain. And the Boneless just eat that up too to prevent anyone from this broken down end of society escaping too. After such a gap it’s great to have Dr Who the ‘family’ show actually offering different perspectives for the audience at home again, just like the 1960s (when the ‘younger’ generation watching then are the ‘older’ generation watching now and harrumphing about kids not being like in their day all over again). 

 A quick word about the in-jokes on the train. You might have spotted two sings on the front of them as they run through the tunnel. One reads ‘A113’ , a longstanding joke in animation studios that turns up in loads of Pixar films in particular. Back in the 1990s, when computer animation was new and nobody wanted to spend money on it, every employed digital artists worked out of a tiny room in Disney’s empire which had the number A113 on the door. Though nobody at Disney knew it at the time the only reason their company would stay afloat in the 21st century is thanks to the money the Pixar animators made for them in a run of box office successes starting with ‘Toy Story’. The reference is a joke to computer animators that once their profession was considered very very small but has since become very very big, to the point where they have more floors at Disney tan the traditional 2D animators. Given the theme of what Flatline is all about this reference might just be the most apt out of all the hundreds of films its been in! The other, ‘2M65’, is a lot more obscure and might simply be a coincidence (although as the other train number clearly isn’t it made me keep searching long past the point where normally I’d have given up with something like this).2M65 is the name given by scientsists to the tiny block of DNA that accounts for ‘human restriction’ – it’s the thing in ‘Lazaurs Experiment’ basically that helps us keep our human shape rather than morphing into, say, a pat or a squirrel. It’s as if something in our past decided that the human form was the best need for our uses so ‘locked’ it in place in ‘our’ dimension, as a three-dimensional property in a three-dimensional world. Most species have a version of it: probably all of them do but I confess I rather nodded off trying to understand the scientific journals that mentioned it. Is this the thing that the Boneless are lacking that everything in ‘our’ dimension has? Although of course it could just be a reference to the Manchester to Leeds train, which is indeed ‘2M65’ (though if it is goodness only knows what it’s doing in Bristol! And no they didn’t film it in Bristol. They didn’t film it in Manchester either though: this is Barry Train Station and Wenvoe Tunnel, both in North Wales). Rigsy Moorhouse, by the way, is named for Jamie’s best friend who turned him onto Dr Who and urged him to send in a script to Steven Moffat. For a time another friend, Bill, was the name of the train driver who told Jamie everything he needed to know about trains for his script (but whose lines got cut: he’ll end up the Frank Skinner part in ‘Mummy From The Orient Express’ instead). 

 Of course to most people this is just a jokey script about the Tardis going wrong and it works on that dimension too. We’d had the Tardis shrunk before, in not just ‘Logopolis’ but ‘Planet Of Giants’ and ‘Carnival Of Monsters’ but it’s new for the ‘comeback’ era and none of those earlier stories had quite played around with dimensions like this, with the scene of the Doctor sticking his limbs out of the tiny doors and walking across the floor with his hand, ‘Addams Family’ style. The 12th Doctor is often painted as a grump but this story gives him more reasons to be than most and his exasperations at being trapped and having to leave all the Doctoring up to Clara results in one of Capaldi’s best performances, despite being missing for half the story (he’s a lot more comfortable with comedy than drama despite drama being his background). This is a great little story for Jenna Coleman too, who becomes what all companions dream of being – the Doctor for an episode, right down to adding ‘Doctor’ to her pseudonym. So far the bulk of series eight has been about the Doctor’s newly regenerated doubts as to what sort of man he is and whether he’s a good one after all those people he’s killed and who have died because of his actions. At least though he an comfort himself that he shoulders all that responsibility alone so no one else has to. Suddenly his best friend is running around in danger trying to find a way to set him free and he’s effectively paralysed. Clara shows how much attention she’s been paying to the Doctor in this story, lying to everyone up to and including the Doctor, pretending to Danny that she’s given up her travels in the Tardis and pretending to her boyfriend that she’s in no danger even when she’s hanging from a lightshade surrounded by alien monsters from another dimension. For Clara this story is a lot of fun: yes she’s in danger but she’s been in danger lots of times and she’s always survived. The Doctor knows from past harsh experience though that pride often comes before a fall (especially from on top of radio telescopes: seriously Mathieson must have seen ‘Logopolis’ at least). The big moment in this story comes, unusually, at the end when everything has been solced and Clara beams to the Doctor about what a great version of him she was today. The Doctor looks horrified and she thinks he’s jealous, but really he’s afraid that she’s turning into him and that one day her luck will run out (as it does in ‘Face The Raven’). 

 Which is all pretty deep for what’s otherwise a silly story about an alien who lives in scribbled lines. It’s that aspect that lets the story down: on the page, in the layers behind the words, ‘Flatline’ is as great a story as any in the modern Who era, particularly the uneven Capaldi years; on the screen? Meh, not so much. The Boneless is one of those Who monsters that can’t talk so we never learn much about it and once its one big scare is let out of the box there’s nothing else for it to do: there’s only so many times the same special effect can look creepy. Similarly once the Doctor has stuck his arms out of the Tardis and been a big ol’ face peering out the Tardis eyebrows behind stern eyebrows that plot element has worn out its welcome too. A lot of what is really quite a thoughtful story ends up being a one-dimensional runaround with that lengthy sequence in the train station that feels padded to the extreme. They play around with the idea of the Tardis being destroyed, wiped out by an incoming train and the lingering silence over the radio where the Doctor should be, but the Doctor’s already explained how low the power is and his escape and then silence fools absolutely no one (though the fact that the powerless Tardis ends up looking just like one of the timelord ‘message’ cubes from ‘The War Games’ is a neat trick and quite possibly the inspiration for Moffat’s future series finale Hell Bent/Heaven Sent). A lot of the comedy misses this week by a lot: the slapstick scenes of Clara trying to juggle her work-life-Doctor balance is too broad and slapstick and there are only so many jokes about the Tardis being tiny you can make before the jokes start seeming smaller too. Danny is becoming a bit of a pest this series, slowing the action down every time it gets moving and here more than most. For the life of me I don’t know why Clara doesn’t just say she’ll call him back because she’s ‘a bit busy’ (well I do: the script wants a comedy scene but it s a very false one). I do have to praise Rigsy’s comment that the model Tardis is ‘bigger on the inside’ and the Doctor’s response that ‘the phrase has never been more apt; though, which is a clever bit of writing. 

 Worse the local community dropouts, the key to this story’s ‘real’ message are treated one-dimensionally themselves just when the story needs them to be heroes (or at any rate real and complex people just like the people at home who can actually afford a TV license). Fenton is a real waste of Fairbanks’ talents, with no comedy to get his teeth into and juyst being written as a gruff and bitter man (it makes a change: in years gone by Christopher would have been cast as Rigsy, which is more or less the part he plays in ‘Auf Wiedersehn, Pet’). No mention is ever made, by the way, of how such a broad Scouser ended up in Bristol (another sign, perhaps, of how unfamiliar with this down and out world the people making this story were). Even Rigsy, the character we spend most time with, is weakly drawn: we have no idea of his aspirations, his goals, his dreams, his wishes. We don’t even hear firsthand why he adds his graffiti tag to so many soulless buildings: we’re meant to infer that he’s the person here with a heart of gold but all we really see him do is talk to Clara next to a mural and from how its written and played by actor Joivan Wade it feels more like an awkward attempt to chat her up. This story needs Rigsy to be an artful dodger type, cheekily trying to push the law to see what he can get away with; wade plays it more with a nonchalant shrug, as if this a fun thing to brighten up his lunch hour rather than the single weirdest thing that’s likely to happen to him this lifetime. His colleagues are worse, being rude and arrogant and everything David Cameron told us to fear. It all smacks a bit desperately of getting on down wi da kids yeah innit? Without understanding that kids change with every generation: adults are meant to be left behind and confused, that’s the point. Rather than get the feeling that Dr Who is going back to basics amongst the dirt and the grime of the cities after dark the way it should this episode feels like the series at its most middle-class, not understanding the characters they live in or the world they live in at all, a classical music lover writing about punk. What a lost opportunity: had we explored this underworld and shown it to be as three-dimensions as all the posh worlds seen in Dr Who and other series this story could have defeated a few Bonelesses of its own. In the end, despite the great concept and the neat metaphors, we’re left with a story that barely features the Doctor, that has Clara deliberately acting against type and a supporting cast who don’t do much supporting. That leaves us with some jokes with a tiny Tardis, some dodgy CGI effects and not a lot else to be honest. For much of the time it’s on ‘Flatline’ falls a bit, well, flat. 

 For all that, though, the concepts are still good enough to give this story a cautious thumbs up. I love Dr Who stories that are brave and try something a bit different and this one certainly has that ambition, even if the way its put over on screen sadly recalls the days of the 20th century when those great ideas often fall apart in execution. There are lots of little scenes from this story that live on long in the memory even if the linking bits are so unmemorable: the first time we see the Doctor stuck in the shrunken Tardis, the chilling moment the Boneless leave the policewoman’s nervous system hanging on the wall like a pattern and the second train in a row putting the Doctor in danger (Mathieson also seems to have a thing about railways). Even if they have nowhere to go with it our first sight of a Boneless is genuinely creepy and unsettling, the sort of monster you can’t even hide from behind the sofa because chances are the sofa is next to a wall and even the walls aren’t safe! They were even more gruesome before they were diluted though: in Mathieson’s script they were called the Boneless because they didn’t understand the concept of human bones and snapped them, with a great cracking sound effect that got taken out in post-production out of fears it was too grim and scary. Which to be fair it probably was. While it made more plot-sense in the original the point when the Tardis grows and shrinks are this generation’s ‘Logopolis’, the chilling moment when everything that once seemed safe and cosy about our travelling home turning in on itself and it looks great on screen, exactly the sort of life from the old series they should have been trying with a whole new generation of fans. The fact that these scenes manage to be so funny too despite the horror going on in the rest of the story is one of the deftest bits of writing in modern Who and the cast sell it superbly. The story only turns flat when it becomes, well, three-dimensional ironically, and moves away from the Doctor and Clara to an outside world that doesn’t feel real at all. Still, a great central concept, some strong lines and some excellent acting makes it more than worth 45 of your Earth minutes. 

 POSITIVES + The effects on Peter Capaldi’s big ol’ face appearing at the door of a model ‘2Dis’ that Clara can pick up and carry around in her pocket are really well done, as are the ones of the Tardis scurrying about on Capaldi’s hands like a hermit crab or the hand from Addams Family. That’s a very pat analogy actually: of all the Doctors so far the 12th is the crabbiest in many ways as well as the one who often looks at an issue ‘sideways’, waiting for other character to fix it before he gets fully invested or involved (one of the reasons Clara ends up filling in the vacuum where a fully heads-on Doctor would go). It’s also neat because the script goes out of its way to refer to the Tardis as the Doctor’s home’ (rather than his ‘car’, the metaphor most modern writers of the series tend to use): it’s very crab-like to carry your home on your back with you everywhere you go. You really believe that the Tardis has shrunk, even though we all know full well that the full-size Tardis proper has been replaced by the sort of models you can buy in the BBC shop. There are a lot of effects in this story though, more than usual, and it’s one of The Mill’s best because not one of them is shabby or obviously fake: that really does look like the Doctor’s hand, face and leg sticking out the Tardis model. It makes me want a sequel to ‘Planet Of the Giants’, with modern effects making insects huge and the everyday threatening, more than ever because this era of Dr Who could do it really really well. 

 NEGATIVES - By contrast, the effects used for The Boneless that make them shiver and shake like drawings never quite come off. In their ‘main’ phrase they’re bits of orange sparkly pixie pixel light, which is odd because everything in the comeback era is made out of orange sparkly light, including the Doctor’s regenerations. Except for a brief moment when they become the ‘other’ most popular Who alien colour, green. Surely there’s another colour in the special effects paintbox? They feel as childish and basic as the scribbles in ‘Fear Her’, even though everyone re-acts to them as if they’re the most horrible thing they’ve ever seen. No wonder they like hiding in the dark and undergrounds so much – it’s to hide their embarrassment from the host of other aliens who’ve tried to invade Earth over the years. 

 BEST QUOTE: Clara: ‘Go on, admit - I was a good Doctor wasn’t I?’ Dr: ‘You were an exceptional Doctor Clara – goodness had nothing to do with it’ 

 PREQUELS/SEQUELS: Rigsy unexpectedly turns up again in ‘Face The Raven’. 

 ‘The Eye Of Torment’, a comic strip that ran in Dr Who magazine issues 477-480, isn’t a sequel in the strictest sense of the word but there are many parallels. Issue 477 came out the same week that ‘Flatline’ was on the TV and also features Clara in the fore of a story set in a more working environment than normal also in the present day in a plot about a largely invisible monster that makes the Doctor wonder about who she’s turning into. This story couldn’t be more different though: this one is very dark, with an alien influence that causes great depression in its host and causes people to commit suicide. The Doctor and Clara are stowaways on a rather beaten up old ‘sunship’, The Pollyanna, and saves the Doctor by getting the aliens and humans to start talking with each other. This is one of those comic strips that, like a lot of the Moffat era it has to be said, starts off very promising but kind of fizzles out by the time you reach the end. 

 Previous ‘Mummy On The Orient Express’ next ‘In The Forest Of The Night’

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’.

  Previous ‘Kill The Moon’ next ‘Flatline’

The Caretaker: Ranking - 239

   The Caretaker

(Series 8, Dr 12 with Clara, 27/9/2014, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writers: Gareth Roberts and Steven Moffat, director: Paul Murphy) 

Rank: 239

In an emoji: 🧹

'So, Doctor, I'm just going through your paperwork on your first week with us. You say you've checked the cupboards for Voord, exterminated an infestation of p'tings and made interstellar contact with a mop and bucket that suddenly turned sentient after being beamed from the Spectrox galaxy. Well, that all seems to be in order and you're still more reliable than the last guy we had, he looked like Richard Briers but spoke in a really funny accent and was followed everywhere by a giant cleaning robot. Well, here's your pay. You want it in what currency? Jammie Dodgers and fish custard?!?...'

‘Dr Who’ is, as we’ve seen many a time, an elastic format that can take in most other genres: drama, comedy, horror, even Westerns, documentaries, reality TV, quiz shows, sport and farce. One genre I assumed it would never do is that of the soap opera, the format that’s so diametrically opposed to it in many ways. As a (very) general rule soap viewers watch because they find comfort in the receptiveness of the storylines, the reliability of the unchanging characters and a fleeting feeling of glee that there are actually some people in the universe with lives as ugly and messy as yours. ‘Dr Who’ of course is different to that – it goes somewhere different every week, hops about in time and space at random while the characters within it change and grow, learning more about themselves with every passing adventure, while there’s the secret feeling of glee as characters who feel like ‘us’ end up saving planets, and defeating monsters making us feel ‘gee, maybe I could do that if the Tardis ever comes a calling’. Soap operas tend to make me very depressed about humanity and where we’re headed and work on a sort of collective frustration; Dr Who makes me feel joy and hope for the future. They shouldn’t fit together at all and quite often they don’t, but that hasn’t stopped certain people running the show from trying. ‘An Unearthly Child’ is a little bit soap operay, a ‘Byker Grove’ style plot about a troubled but brilliant kid at school with a strange home life being investigated by her teachers (even though what they find is far from domestic realism). One time production assistant turned producer John Nathan-Turner loved his soap operas and the Peter Davison era of the show especially became about the effects that travelling around in time and space had on the companions – even if the effects were caused by rubber pink snakes and the death of a close friend in a spaceshuttle during a Cybermen attack rather than, say, a bit of cheating or a car crash. JNT was such a fan he even stuck Dr Who against its polar opposite ‘Eastenders’ in the 1993 charity special ‘Dimensions Of Time’, the ultimate in the extraordinary world of Doctor Who colliding with an ordinary one. Russell T Davies brought that element back a little, giving companions lives beyond the Tardis doors and showing that ordinary life continued while they were away having adventures in time and space. Mostly, though, companions managed to keep their home and adventuring life separate (Tegan’s journey is the most complex, with a stop off in earth in between her two eras in the Tardis, but basically people lead one life then another, not the two in parallel). When Steven Moffat took over the show one of his big changes was in taking away that family element – Amy, Clara and Bill are all lonely orphans who don’t leave a family behind who’ll miss them in quite the same way. He does still give his characters lives outside the Tardis but they tend to be through their jobs or love lives – and ‘The Caretaker’ is about both, The Doctor going undercover at Coal Hill School (the very place his grand-daughter was enrolled back in the very first episode) and Clara’s struggles to keep her boyfriend and her time-travelling companion apart. 

 It’s an unusual story, to say the least, Dr Who at its least scifi and most soapy as for once this isn't a story about saving the universe but Clara struggling to find a work-life-time travel balance. It's an odd and often uneasy mixture, lurching from melodrama (Clara and Danny going one step forward to two steps back in their love life), action (on the run from killer robot-like aliens!) and pure farce (the Doctor's insistence that the bloke Clara loves isn't Danny at all but the guy who dresses a lot like the 11th Doctor. Well he is a teacher - bow ties and tweed are de rigour amongst teachers, never mind cool). How you feel about all this really depends how much you invest in the story of Clara and Danny’s love life and how much you accept the fact that the Doctor has an irrational jealousy of what Clara gets up to when she’s not there – something he’s never really shown to any of his companions before (bar the odd twinge when Captain Jack was first sniffing around Rose). I personally like Danny, he’s a sweet character, a reformed soldier turned maths teacher whose been to hell and back and just wants a quiet life where his biggest problem is a 5th former failing their GCSEs rather than a battalion of friends being killed. He’s the sort of dependable, quiet chap you want on your side in a crisis but oddly emotional for a soldier, struck by pangs of guilt and remorse most soldiers have trained out of their system. Danny’s an interesting take on the sort of teachers who were everywhere in the immediate post World War Two years, when many teachers had been conscripted to fight and turned into soldiers, the vacuum filled by returning wounded soldiers who couldn’t find any other work besides teaching and who took their post-traumatic stress out on the children in their care, the very people they’d ‘fought’ to save. There was a whole pandemic of this – Pink Floyd’s concept album ‘The Wall’ (a short snatch of which you hear the Doctor whistling in this story at one point) is all based around this same theme, of the most unsuitable rigid tortured souls shaping impressionable young minds and expecting them to somehow function in peace time when they grow up to become adults. This was still very much happening in 1963 when Susan was at Coal Hill School, which is why Ian and Barbara stand out for being young and kind, two things that not many teachers had in common with real life back then. Danny, thankfully, is nice, a reformed soldier who regrets fighting and comes to teaching not so he can take his anger out on the next generation and destroy their hope so much as let some of that hope wash over him and make him belief in humanity again. I’m willing to bet that writer Gareth Roberts, born in 1968, had at least one of these teachers still rattling around in his school somewhere: his analysis of Danny is just too good. 

 I’m fond of Clara too, much more than most of the fanbase seems to be. She’s torn, particularly across series 8, wanting a ‘normal’ stable sort of a life and the sort of adventure that only being with the Doctor can bring. She’s managed to somehow straddle her two lives till now, making the most of the fact the Tardis is a time machine so she can effectively lead a double life without anyone noticing (although Danny is observant enough to pick up on her sudden tans, the way she looks as if she’s been running already when he invites her out on a jog and the Doctor mentions the fact she once had to eat two meals in a row). You feel for her as she just longs for a normal boyfriend whose more reliable than the Doctor, who can tether her to Earth the way she needs – though equally she can’t quite bring herself to give up on her adventures just yet. A lot of modern Who is about the tension between the extraordinary life you enter and the ordinary life you have to give up as a consequence and few stories do that as deftly as ‘The Caretaker’, where it’s the A-plot for a change, not relegated to a B-plot. However, there’s a problem at the heart of this love story which means we can never quite bring ourselves to invest in it the same way as the Doctor and Rose, or Amy and Rory: these two just aren’t right for each other. Danny’s someone sweet whose learnt the hard way to be tough and wants to unlearn it all, who needs someone patient and caring and solid to help him overcome his trauma he still carries around with him. His desperate pleas to Clara in this story to always tell him the truth are a direct result of what he’s been through: he’s seen how short and precious life is, he doesn’t have time to waste. Clara, for her side, is naturally brash and sassy, while her adventures have taught her the importance of being kind and deep down she doesn’t really need someone solid and dependable at all. She’s an adventurer, an explorer, she needs someone who can give her what the Doctor gives her, just in a more rooted, Earthbound type of a way. What she really needs is the Doctor in human form. She’s not right for Danny and he’s not right for her. You can already feel before this story, the sixth of the year, the tension between them and the way their different outlooks on life have caused all sorts of arguments and even if you can’t put your finger on why you just know this partnership would be doomed even if (spoilers) Danny hadn’t been converted into a Cybermen and killed in the final episode of the year. You know from the opening seconds that the Doctor and Rose ‘belong’ together even though something bad is always likely to tear them apart because theirs is a doomed kind of romance tat’s ominous from the start. You ‘know’ Amy and Rory belong together too by their shared chemistry and the way they bend their characters to be who the other needs them to be without sacrificing their core selves. In the same way you know that Danny and Clara are heading to the divorce courts within a year if they ever finally get together because their basic needs are so different that, in order to compromise, they would have to become two entirely different people to be with each other. Also, truth be told, while Jenna Coleman and Samuel Anderson are great individually, they have very little chemistry together (there's a much greater spark between Jenna and Peter Capaldi, which complicates matters about whether this is a ‘love triangle’ or not, though honestly its a relief the scripts don't go there with yet another Doctor-companion love tryst like other years). Never once do you feel Clara and Danny even like each other much, never mind love each other and without that the script rather falls apart. Which means the big emotional impact of this story and this series arc as a whole falls kind of flat. 

 Maybe the Doctor knows this, which is why he’s acting so out of character this story, sniping away and acting far more harshly to Danny than anyone in this series who hasn’t actually pointed a gun (or a crossbow) directly at him. You could argue that the Doctor is being an over-protective father not wanting to see his favourite daughter hurt on dates, but that seems oddly ‘human’ for the 12th regeneration in particular. Instead (and along with his similar reaction in ‘Robots of Sherwood’) he comes over as a hurt ex, which isn’t him at all (the 11th Doctor never had that kind of relationship with Clara, a few truly bizarre lines about her short skirts in private aside – it would make sense of this story if he had, given his assumption that she’d dating Adrian, the bow-tied tweed jacketed teacher in this story who very much resembles Matt Smith’s Doctor, tinged with the sadness that the 12th Doctor knows he is much older and less suitable for her in ‘Human’ terms, except that this Doctor doesn’t understand human aging at all and calls himself younger looking than Clara at one point in this story). That jealousy just doesn’t fit this character or his relationship with Clara, which is more like brother and sister than jealous passionate lovers – I think the writers were going for a ‘Green Death’ style ending here, where the 3rd Doctor leaves Jo’s engagement party looking forlorn, but that was more the Doctor’s sadness at losing his best friend – here it shouldn’t matter to the Doctor at all if she’s with Danny or not as long as she still steals away to fly with him in between lessons and dates. Even if you take it as just a personality clash, that seems a bit out too. The Doctor’s never attacked anyone for being a ‘soldier’ before. Sure he might not use guns himself except as a last resort, but he’s spent enough years around people who have to know that there are many many reason to become a soldier including some honourable (if misguided) ones. He’s also smart enough to pick up that Danny is not a natural soldier, that he’s embarrassed by all that he was asked to do and is trying to turn his life around: most Doctors would have identified with that and supported it. The only part in all of this complicated love triangle that rings true is that Danny recognises the Doctor as a ‘commander’, in the story’s best line stating that ‘I’m the one who carries you out the fire – but he’s the one who lights it’. He sees the Doctor as his opposite, a soldier whose pretending to be a caretaker (rather than a teacher who once pretended to be a soldier) and sees already that the Doctor is pushing Clara so far so fast that she’s doing what he used to do, obeying orders without question, and that one day she’ll end up like him, burnt out and guilty. The two men in Cara’s life might be at different sgaes in their adventuring, the Doctor having come through the worst of his survivor’s guilt and out to the other side, but basically they’re the same. And not ‘so similar their small differences rub each other up the wrong way’ like a regeneration story – they both want the same things, they both want Clara to be safe, they’ve both seen the darker side of life and want to flee it. The only difference is that one’s had enough of fighting now and the other still can’t stop their curiosity getting them into trouble. Honestly though I expected the end of the season to have them as best friends finding out they were the same and Danny travelling in the Tardis. Instead they never get past this mutual spikiness and the Doctor’s childish put-downs make him as unlikeable as this character’s ever been (well, since Sylvester McCoy pushing Ace to her limits in stories either side of the time they were at Coal Hill School and William Hartnell in the first story set there funnily enough; it must be something about this place that brings out the worst in people). 

 Even when he knows what’s really going Danny doesn’t react in quite the way you’d expect: companions like Ian, Seven and Sarah Jane took several stories before they quite believed they really were travelling in time and space, but Danny’s response is more on the lines of ‘aha – I knew you were keeping a secret form me!’ and never ‘wait – what?!’ Despite their extra screen time this week Clara and Danny both feel a little bit like cardboard cut-outs compared to their other appearances and while their stop-start relationship is clearly changed by the big revelation of what Clara’s been up to, it still feels as if it doesn’t fundamentally change much about their relationship from hereon in: Danny always knew Clara had a secret; from now on after he knows what it is he just changes it to suspect she’s broken her word and gone back to her travels instead (hint: she has). You can get away with that in a long running soap opera that needs to tell a lot of stories a week and can afford to study each character in turn, so it can hit a big reset button, but in a series that’s only on for thirteen weeks a year plus a Christmas special ending up in more or less the same place we began feels like a cheat, a filler episode before we get back to exploring people as they explore space again, rather than merely exploring people like lesser series. It feels this whole year as if we focus on Danny and Clara’s relationship woes way too long when there are so many other (admittedly more budget-draining) things to explore.

 Those major fundamental flaws aside, I still quite liked this story, which makes a lot of clever points about a life of time travel that few other Who stories have managed before. Gareth Roberts is the modern series’ most consistently funny writer, filling the hole of Robert Holmes and Douglas Adams from the ‘old’ series and while the Doctor let loose on a school isn’t quite as funny as the Doctor being let loose in a flat or a shop (as per Gareth’s other scripts ‘The Lodger’ and ‘Closing Time’) there are still lots of clever moments here. We haven’t had a school setting outside ‘School Reunion’ (and the Sarah Jane series of course) so the idea of this extraordinary world of the Doctors hitting the very mundane and repetitive world of schoolwork is a format that’s itching to be explored for the younger end of the family audience watching at home. While the Doctor will make a good and typically eccentric university lecturer later on, it makes sense he’s a caretaker here too: an outsider in a staffroom full of teachers who teach things out of books they don’t know firsthand while he gets his hands dirty and makes things work in the present (it’s the old Romana relationship all over again) while maintaining the safe running of an environment where people only ever notice when his job goes wrong is pretty much what he does anyway. I like the fan-pleasing fact that the Doctor finally takes the post up after talking about it in ‘Remembrance Of The Daleks’ too. Clara being helpless to prevent her two very different worlds colliding is also a clever theme: everyone has a ‘professional’ persona they use when at work or at school compared to being out with their friends. Anyone whose ever bumped into someone who knows you in one context in another, such as a friend at the school gates or at a works drinks party with plus ones or starting working in the same building with someone you went to school with, will recognise Clara’s angst here: will this person I love still like the ‘other’ me, or will they see it as a lie, a betrayal of who I am when I’m with them? This is made worse by the fact that truth is such a big thing with Danny whose gone to great lengths to admit his past to Clara including the parts he’s ashamed of and the fact the Doctor, while he changes faces and persona every few years, tends to be the same in every situation he’s in so doesn’t understand her predicament. One thing I wish this story had done though (and which was there in the draft script) is Clara’s frustration with the pair of them for trying to shape her into the person they want her to be, ending the original story cross and telling both of them that she doesn’t need their permission to be herself. Had they turned that aspect up front and centre and dropped the Doctor’s jealous comments and made him more of a concerned friend than a bitchy ex then this could have been a great episode rather than a merely good one. 

 There are a few other niggles this week too. Alas we don’t get to see much of Coal Hill itself, beyond a playground, a corridor and Clara’s classroom and after so many years of waiting it’s sad we don’t get at least a few flashbacks to how it used to be (‘Remembrance’ handled that nostalgia element much better). It does seem odd that a marauding alien would just happen to choose this of all schools to run around in (that sort of thing seems to happen an awful lot to this school - I'd love to see the Ofsted report. Oh and you'd think someone walking down the corridor would say 'I wonder if these strange events we keep hearing about is in any way related to what my mum told me about the two schoolteachers and the fifteen-year-old that just disappeared one day when she was at school - only for the teachers to turn up two years later with some daft story about this weird schoolgirl being left behind on an alien planet. No wonder my mum failed her O levels that year’. You'd think it would make the school newspaper at the very least. And yes I bet they have one: Clara’s exactly the sort of English teacher to push her pupils into making one). The only pupil we get to meet properly is Courtney and she’s a mighty strange character all round, as is the Doctor’s reaction to her. She introduces herself to him, not knowing he’s a time travelling alien with the fact she’s always called ‘disruptive influence’ at school. That should make her top of the Doctor’s ally list, but instead he shoos her away, only later changing his mind and revealing who he is and taking her for a spin in space because he has a ‘vacancy’, to which she’s promptly sick on the Tardis floor. It wasn’t so very long ago the Doctor kept the secret of who he was to himself at all times but here he’s actively breaking cover and interrupting Clara’s lessons to debate the accuracy of Jane Austen’s life from personal experience even though he knows it could undermine his job undercover at the school, never mind his friendship with Clara (and as much as he’s oblivious to her feelings most of the time as it is, he’s still practically begging her to travel with him in this story and doesn’t want her to quit for good). The fact that we’re in the setting of the first Dr Who story, when the 1st Doctor took off with Ian and Barbara aboard and risked their lives just in case they dared breath a word about what they saw to anybody, only rubs the point in more: when did the Doctor become such a blabbermouth? He doesn’t even warn Courtney about the consequences if she tells anyone. The schoolgirl’s response to time travel, meanwhile, is nonchalance even after seeing the Tardis interior. You’d expect it to be all over her facebook page at the very least (and yes absolutely she’s the sort of person to have one, at least in 2014 before everybody’s parent joined in and Nick Clegg took over and it stopped being the cool thing to do). Normally I’d dismiss this as a writer not quite getting children (a lot of adults don’t) but Gareth Roberts is one of the best child-friendly writers the series ever had: he’s particularly strong at the teenage fear of the ‘crossover’ into being adults, of responsibilities to others when you’re still learning to look after yourself and wanting to do your best to different and often conflicting people you feel loyalty to in his Sarah Jane stories, where the characters never seemed more real than when speaking his words. Courtney, though, doesn’t seem real at all (Susan wouldn’t stand out at all this lot are all so strange and un-childreny) and the school in general feels more like a dysfunctional half-memory of Grange Hill rather than an actual proper place (disappointing spin-off series ‘Class’, which it was hoped would cash in on this kind of setup, was nearly unwatchable because that feels even less like a ‘real’ school), although it’s nice to see Coal Hill as an actual establishment this time rather than just a place where Clara chats up teachers. 

 The scifi element very much takes a back seat this week too, the ordinary: extraordinary quota more balanced in favour of the former than arguably at any other time in the show’s history. The Skovox Blitzer, a cross between a gremlin a mountain bike and Robocop, feels like an afterthought put together out of all the spare bits in the Dr Who costume box they hadn’t used for a while. It doesn’t get much of a back story or a sense of motivation and it feels more as if it turned out the way it did because it looked as if it would make a good Dr Who toy as much as anything else (there was indeed a 4” model of it. Then again pretty much everything in the series up to 2014 had been a model, including the Abzorbaloff and a bust Cassandra. Even in the 1980s you could collect no less than two slightly differently dressed Bonnie Langfords!) Ironically for such an otherwise child-friendly story there’s very little of the sort of thing that would traditionally keep them watching, the monsters and the explosions (there’s only one of each, both interrupted by Danny suddenly walking in on the action and getting in the way without realising as Clara’s two worlds she’s kept separate for so long finally collide); by contrast wondering whether two teachers will get it on or not is hardly a priority of the under-12s market. Perhaps that’s just as well: this story marked the start of a move to a transmission time of 8.30pm following the start of that year’s ‘Strictly Come Dancing’ in the slot before it (a most bonkers series which always reminds me of the celestial Toymaker’s cursed ballerina toys who can’t stop dancing or stop smiling even though they’re clearly in pain), the latest Dr Who has ever been transmitted to date. 

 If all that sounds as of ‘The Caretaker’ is an unwatchable mess, it really isn’t. This is a particularly sharp and funny script with some great one-liners sprinkled throughout. It’s long overdue that Clara’s double life should catch up with her sometime and the scene of her, having run a mile from marauding aliens and looking for a quiet time at work only to be invited out for a jog by Danny and collapsing, exhausted on her sofa, is one of the show’s funniest. Peter Capaldi, despite coming to fame in shouty angry roles like ‘The Thick Of it’, is a lot more comfortable with comedy than he is with angst and gives one of his best performances. Jenna Coleman continues to be one of the unsung heroes of this era, pushing Clara into new areas as her traditionally unruffled up-for-anything persona a gets a real whallop this week. The scenes of the Doctor causing casual mayhem in a school setting and oblivious to the damage he’s causing are great fun. It’s the perfect setting for a different kind of a story though, one where the invading monsters are the focal point the way they were in Roberts’ all-round similar but superior ‘School Reunion’ and all the emotional stuff is a colour in the background, not an illuminated light in the foreground. You could argue that this is the sort of experiment Dr Who like all long running series needed to do as a change, but you're also glad we didn't get week in week out as, to be honest, one story feels more than enough – which makes it mildly disappointing Dr Who and a rotten soap opera (whose whole point is to make you care enough to reel you in for more episodes regularly). Besides, everything in this story becomes null and void in a few episodes’ time when (spoilers) Danny snuffs it anyway – and it’s a sign of how little this story managed to do its main job of making Danny a fully living breathing character that you don’t really feel you know him enough to care all that much at series’ end. Had this story appeared as a comic strip or a Big Finish audio or a Viewmaster collection of holo-photos then I’d be all over it as a nice bit of extra detail to add to what we already knew. But as a whole story in its own right it’s a bit empty and ‘The Caretaker’ is a story that feels a bit hurried, ironically enough as if more care needed to be taken over it. B- Could do better. See me after class. 

 POSITIVES + The Dr Who community has pretty much agreed to have collective amnesia regarding writer Gareth Roberts these days after some J K Rowling style commentary on the Trans community, a group who've traditionally had more of a safe space with Whovians than in most places in this troubled angry world (and even more so since this review’s first draft thanks to ‘The Star Beast’). You can see why this was his last role with the series given the outrage his comments caused and rightly so. There was a time though, in the days before Russell T got fully involved with DW, when Gareth was the single best writer we had with a number of excellent books in the 'New' and 'Missing' adventures series, so much so that I’d really hoped that he’d take over from Russell as showrunner over Steven Moffat. In his TV episodes too for me nobody had a better grasp of dialogue and comedy except Russell himself. This is the last and in many ways the least of Gareth’s five DW scripts but it still sparkles with witty dialogue, nuance and character with just enough action to keep things moving. Steven Moffat gets a co-credit too, presumably for all the re-writing needing to fit this into the Clara-Danny story arc. 

 NEGATIVES - The whole invisibility thing is annoying because it comes out of nowhere, merely to solve a plot point that isn’t strictly necessary. The Doctor uses it to go undercover – then runs around like a mad thing after the alien anyway in his usual style (and besides, he never stops to find out what it’s eye spectrum is: for all we know Blitzer can see the Doctor better when the light refracts off him using his fancy technology). Clara then uses invisibility because she wants Danny to hear that she’s ‘no different’ when she’s with the Doctor, only for this potentially interesting moment to be cut short by the Doctor realising Danny’s there and being snarky all over again, while Danny is smart enough to guess that the Doctor knows, a conversation they could have had much easier somewhere else. The only time the invisibility is really useful is when Danny rushes in to help Clara at the end, worrying that she was in danger, and frankly he could have done that by hiding behind a pillar. The Doctor’s never shown this ability to turn himself invisible before and never will again – it’s all a bit too ‘Harry Potter’ for a show sort-of vaguely based round science like Dr Who and we never do get a sensible comment on the science behind it all. Just think too how many other Dr Who plots would be solved episodes early and the millions of lives that would be better off if the Doctor really could make himself or his companions invisible at will.

 BEST QUOTE: ‘You’re a space woman. You said you were from Blackpool!’