What is fun to be a traveler in time is that you can often procrastinate on important tasks as long as you want. It was part of the call for Amy (Karen Gillan) at the start of season 5 of “Doctor Who”; She thought of marrying Rory the next day, so the promise of the doctor that she could travel in space and time as long as she wished beforehand seemed to be a lot.

The rest of the season finally treated Amy’s doubts about Rory, but it ended again with the procrastinating characters. This time, it was the doctor who took his soft time to go to an important task: in the final, he receives a telephone call (apparently from the future queen or the King of England) concerning an emergency situation. In the future, there is apparently a train that runs in space called the East Express, and there is a sensitive mummy flowing around it, killing passengers one by one.

Seems to be an urgent business, right? Well, the doctor does not take care of it before season 8. At this point, the doctor has a whole new face And a brand new companion, but as regards the person on the phone, he arrived immediately.

The episode of season 8 was a fun case of the show paying a disposable line long after the occasional fans remembered it. When “Mummy on the Orient Express” was broadcast in 2014, the only people who could appreciate the joke were the hardcore fans who remembered these months on the forums of the fans after “The Big Bang” of season 5. During speculation on the subject of the special annual Christmas episode, many fans assumed that it would be a game inspired by Agatha Christie went in a different direction. (Of course, the game inspired by Dickens that we have in place was so good that it was difficult for fans to complain.)

Another factor which made it possible to easily forgive the stalling of the program on the scenario of East Express is that at the time of the final of season 5, it had not even been as long as the show had not succeeded in an episode of tribute Agatha Christie. The story of season 4, “The Unicorn and the Wasp”, was a mystery of murder in the 1920s which involved Christie herself (played here by Fenella Woolgar).

The episode was based on “Croooked House”, a novel that is not as known as “Murder on the East Express“But who nevertheless succeeded in obtaining his own cinematographic adaptation in 1982, entitled” Evil Under the Sun. “The main writer of the episode, Gareth Edwards, spoke of the way he deliberately chose a comic tone and that he and the showrunner T. Davies tried to press as many references to Christie’s books as they could.

It is a perfect episode to sit and relax, and in season 4, it serves as a last light story before things become dark. The following three episodes (“Silence in the Library”, “Forest of the Dead”, “Midnight”) were all terrifyingThen the show had gone to a very dramatic season of season in three parts with high issues. “The unicorn and the wasp” were to be the last point in which the doctor gave and the life felt simple and carefree, and that succeeds definitively in this regard.

When “Doctor Who” made their episode of Christie in season 8, with the 12th doctor who finally followed this season 5, it was in a much darker period in the life of the characters. “Mummy on the Orient Express” was the first episode after “Kill the Moon”, the episode where Clara and the doctor have a big grave. The episode is part of a period when Clara is very close to leaving the doctor for good, and the doctor struggles more than ever with the question of whether he is a good or not man. (This is undoubtedly the great thematic question of season 8.)

The result is that this episode is interesting, but barely a riot of laughter. Clara and the doctor enter serious arguments, and when the punctual characters die in this episode, he really stings. Here, the writer Jamie Mathieson used the general premise of Christie as an opportunity to explore the heavy and life or death questions that the doctor and Clara were confronted with the whole season; The duo can end the story on a positive note, but they make a difficult trip to reach this point.

Overall, the seasons 4 and 8 were faced with two very different arcs for its main duets. Season 4 was the last season of the tenth doctor, everything to let the public enjoy it before leaving. Meanwhile, season 8 was all about Capaldi to prove to the public, convincing us (and Clara) to let him stay. The result is an episode of season 8 Christie Tribute which was much more frightening and more intense than the one who before. The scenario may have been introduced in season 5 as part of a disposable joke, but the real episode was a surprisingly dark affair.