Youtube recommended me a youtube video entitled 'Mummy on the Orient Express is a Perfect Opener' (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aa4El7NcfUQ) I was intrigued and immediately thought 'actually maybe it would work as a season opener!' So naturally I then watched the video to see if I was right and found it was about something completely different (why you should show Mummy on the Orient Express to your friends who haven't watched a Capaldi episode before. Also a good argument.) But once the idea was there, it got me thinking...
Picture the scene, it's a Saturday/Sunday night, you've just sat down to watch the new season of Doctor Who. The TARDIS lands somewhere exciting and new and the Doctor and companion step out ready for their adventure. Everything seems normal but you can tell something is off between them. As the adventure goes on, hints and teases are dropped: Clara admitting that she doesn't hate him, reference to this being their 'last hurrah', etc. Finally, it's revealed Clara is leaving because the Doctor's new personality is a heartless manipulative liar. It's clear her heart isn't in it though, as she struggles to let go, and at the end refuses to give up the 'addiction' having gained a new understanding of the Doctor and some appreciation for why he does it. Now isn't that an absolutely fascinating place to start a Doctor and Companion relationship for a season - rebuilding broken trust. And best of all no reference is ever made to Kill the Moon explicitly so we don't need that episode.
As for the Doctor himself, there's an obligation for a season opener to introduce the Doctor to us and give us an insight into his character. Whether this is the new Doctor's first season and we've fast forwarded past the regeneration trauma and the first few adventures or the start of his second season, Mummy is a brilliant introduction to Twelve for new viewers (just like that youtube video claimed.) It gives a far better insight into his character than any other episode in Series 8, showing us the season's vision of a darker, colder Doctor, who's manipulative and deceitful, but also gives us a charismatic performance from Capaldi, undeniably Doctor-y moments and aspects of the performance, and that beautiful speech at the end ("sometimes the only choices you have are hard ones but you still have to choose") that finally explains Twelve so that his character makes sense and we can still see him as the Doctor and understand him. It's an episode that seen as your first Twelfth Doctor episode plays with your expectations, particularly for the Doctor, in a brilliant way but never feels untrue to the show or the character.
What about the actual plot of the episode? There's a creepy new monster that's very effective and will catch people's attention in The Foretold. There's an exceptionally well formed collection of guest characters. There's a scary, exciting and engaging Doctor Who story that shows exactly what an episode of Doctor Who should be like. There's an impressive visual look to the episode. There's that Foxes version of Don't Stop Me Now. Particularly with the extra runtime a season opener can afford, there's everything we need to amaze.
The main job of a season opener though is to set up a new season and leave enough dangling questions to get viewers hooked. There's the emotional side of will the Doctor and Clara's relationship repair fully or fall apart? There's the character arc of Clara seeing the TARDIS as an addiction she can't give up, and lying to Danny about her adventures so having to maintain a normal life too (for presumably more than the one episode S8 has before Danny finds out about them again). On a side note there, Danny has been introduced as Clara's boyfriend who seems to support whatever decision she wants to make on the Doctor front and comes across far more likeable and less controlling than the first half of Series 8 (looking at you: The Caretaker) allows him to. But what about the mystery for the season? The plot arc?
Gus. The evil computer who sets up the whole thing and causes countless deaths. By the end of the episode, he gets away and his identity is never revealed (although it was at one point intended to be revisited in Series 10). As a middle-of-the-season one-off, this mystery is left alone. As a season opener, this mystery could drive the season, with the villainy behind Gus being revealed as the season goes on leading to a dramatic end of season confrontation. They could go with Mathieson's S10 idea of GUS as the computer for an evil corporation (behind the events of Oxygen - Oxygen could then be included later in this season to further that plot and reveal Gus' identity/masters) or they could go with something completely different.Whatever they did, I'm sure they could amaze us.
So there it is, my argument that Mummy on the Orient Express could be the season opener. I'm not saying it SHOULD be necessarily, it works very well where it is. But it COULD be and it would work very well too. It gives a better indication of the new Doctor's character, and a more original plotline than the actual season opener Deep Breath manages, and the Doctor's post-regeneration moments could be revisited later in flashback or as a later episode to cover those events or left untold as they were for Nine for so long with little complaint as it allowed him to make a dramatic fully formed entrance in 2005.
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