Doctor Who: Mummy on the Orient Express (spoilers)

[mme_hardy]

 I had much more fun than last week.

The good:

• 1920s-30s costumes?  The Orient express?  A mummy? in SPAAAACE?  I'm there.
• See above.
• Scary.  The mummy's hand passing through the Doctor's face?  Brrrrr.
• Most of the non-Doctor people are intelligent, too.
• Clara does confront the Doctor, and about the important stuff.

The semi-good or at least better:

• The Doctor has been toned down from nasty to just ruthless.   This week's Doctor does what he believes has to be done to save the situation, and doesn't care how many people he hurts in the process.   That sure beats being a jerk for the sake of it.  He also genuinely doesn't get emotions: this is hamhandedly told by his not understanding how Clara can be happy and sad at once.
• The Doctor's persuading/forcing the various dying people to give him evidence so he can save the rest of them.
• The reveal that the Doctor isn't sending Mamie (was it?) to her death, he's getting her to send him to his I'm-too-smart-to-die.
• Twelve is more self-aware in some ways than Eleven; in particular, he knows that part of the reason he saves the world is for the rush.
• Nice dramatic moment when Clara asks the Doctor a question, and he responds grimly, "Would it make you like me better if I told you 'yes'?"
• Nice dramatic moment -- although I have issues with the through-line, see below -- when the Doctor's eyelids flicker on hearing Clara say 'I love you' to Danny.    This fits nicely with his comment in ep 1 about "I'm not your boyfriend, Clara. ... I never said it was your mistake."

The bad:

• Telescoped ending, in which we cut from EVERYBODY'S DYING NOW to Clara waking up safe and the Doctor telling her everybody else is safe.  ?!?!?  I'm guessing they ran out of time.  They should have cut more of the Doctor-reconciles-with-Clara B plot IMHO.
•  Also, I spent half of the telescoped ending thinking 'He is totally lying about everybody else surviving'.  Apparently I was supposed to believe him.
• Although the 66-second timer worked as a dramatic device, it's feeling recycled.   We have SEEN the Moffat horror plot.
• The reunion felt cheap and superficial when compared to Clara's deep rage of the previous episode.  At the beginning I was yelling "I thought she'd dumped him?!??!"  It made no sense that somebody as angry as Clara was in the last episode would go on "one last hurrah" and be nice with the Doctor.  The emotional through-line, and the Doctor's characterization, are wobbling all over the place from episode to episode.
• "You can't hate somebody unless you like them."  Huh?  In any case, I was expecting the next one to be "And I don't like him any more."

The really bad:

• Clara lying to the Doctor about her having Danny's permission to keep travelling.  I'm screaming WHY THE HELL DOES SHE NEED HIS PERMISSION?  This whole "father-figure fights with boyfriend for control of a woman" plot gives me the creeps.
• The  "cowardly Captain is redeemed by the Doctor's tough love" thing.  Ugh.
• There should have been some explanation of why the 100-year-old woman was on the spaceship; shouldn't we have been told she was a distinguished scientist?  Was she just there as bait?
• The reveal that the Doctor had lied to Clara to get her on the ship, and her accepting it after the briefest of protests.

I had fun, because I am a cheap date (see above) and because the A plot was well executed and very enjoyable.  I continue to be unhappy with the season as a whole.

Comments

[legionseagle]

FWIW, I don't recall the line as quite "You can't hate somebody unless you like them" but more along the lines of "You can't hate someone unless you care about them" (I know the word used was "like" - or possibly "liked" but the inflection was odd). Which did make perfect sense, to me - I agree the next line was "and I don't like you" but I don't think it needed to be said to be heard.

Because what I think the season about is about relationship burnout; Clara no longer actually cares about the Doctor. It's like someone who's in a relationship with someone where there's been a big change - like a major illness or sudden disability or depression - happening to one partner, and the other one is in part afraid to leave (and angry with themselves for wanting to leave) because that's superficial and shallow and says something bad about them but on the other hand the other person isn't what they signed up to and they really can't cope and it's all such hard work.

And the Doctor of course knows what's going on (it's happened often enough before; traditionally Companions do not transfer happily to being with a new Doctor, they hang on for a season and are then written out and a new one comes in) and is on the one hand trying to stop it, on the other hand knowing it's impossible to stop, and alternately trying to remind her of the good times ("in the past") and lashing out at alternative possible futures in which he has no part.

I'm not saying it's always pleasant story-telling or it's always particularly well done (I very much disliked "The Caretaker" for all the reasons you mentioned, and "Kill the Moon" was just inept on multiple levels)but I can see what's going on, I think. And I think it's got the potential to be interesting and has occasional flashes of getting there.

[mme_hardy]

I think that's a good insight. God knows if I'd fallen in love (romantically or not; I prefer to ignore Clara's infatuation) with the overflowingly joyous (with patches of despair) Eleven, I couldn't cope with the reserved, angry Twelve. And, as a viewer, that's part of my problem. I greatly admire Capaldi's performance, and his microexpressions, but Twelve is not fun; he's hard work.

is on the one hand trying to stop it, on the other hand knowing it's impossible to stop, and alternately trying to remind her of the good times ("in the past") and lashing out at alternative possible futures in which he has no part.

Absolutely. And is competing against Clara's boyfriend in a way we haven't seen since The Green Death. I suspect -- we've seen that this Doctor has preternaturally good hearing -- that he knew Clara was lying about having Danny's permission. "I do believe her, though I know she lies." and all the rest of that sonnet. He's been clinging to Clara's affection all season, even though he's known from the beginning that she loved Eleven, not him.

[ellen_fremedon]

Agree agree agree with all these points.

More of the bad: The whole bit with comparing the rush of travel/saving the day/etc to an addiction and, specifically, the Doctor saying he's never tried to give it up. Dude. Trenzalore was LAST SEASON. He did give it up, for the rest of that body's natural life, and Clara watched him do it.

More of the meh: I can almost forgive the telescoped ending, since my biggest complaint about the whole new series is that 45 minutes is not long enough for a proper Doctor Who story. But couldn't we have cut some of the endless bit where Clara was locked in a cupboard with Maisie making unfunny meta jokes about their Bechdel fail?

More of the good: Jazz Age chanteuse cover of "Don't Stop Me Now." Hands down my favorite thing in the episode.

[mme_hardy]

I hadn't heard of her either, but that's the British indie singer Foxes doing a cover of Queen's "Don't Stop Me Now".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-OTYT02W7E

e: Good catch on Trenzalore!

[davesmusictank.livejournal.com]

Rather a mixed bag of a season so far.

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

*Very*. Indeed, a curate's egg of a season.

Because there's been such enormous wank about Moffat-hate I've been reluctant to say it, but Moffat has served his time and needs to go. The episodes endlessly recycle his tropes, the overall season arcs have never worked well, and the characterization last season (who the heck was Clara? Why did the Doctor care?) and this have been all over the map.