Orphan 55

Chapter The 245th, in which someone called Benni finds himself at something of a crossroads.

Plot:

The Doctor, Graham, Ryan and Yaz go on holiday in an unspecified future year to Tranquility Spa. This is a resort within a protective forcefield on an 'orphan' planet, i.e. one that wars and ecological disasters have rendered uninhabitable. This one is Orphan 55, but who knows what planet it could possibly have been in the past before wars and ecological disasters? It's literally impossible to guess. The resort's head of security Kane abandoned her daughter years ago to earn money through this enterprise. The daughter, Bella, now grown up and posing as a holidaymaker, sabotages the resort with a computer virus to get back at Kane. This lets in a Dreg creature from the wastelands outside. The Dregs are the survivors of the race that used to inhabit Orphan 55, who've evolved to breathe in carbon dioxide and therefore survive the inhospitable climate. Most of the holidaymakers and staff are killed before the Doctor can protect them. A few remain alive including Kane and Bella, and an elderly couple, Benni and Vilma. Benni is kidnapped by the Dregs, and the others go off to save him. Their vehicle crashes and they have to escape on foot trying to reach a tunnel that will take them back to safety. Many are killed before they can reach there, including Benni, and many are killed in the tunnel including Vilma. The Doctor and friends find Cyrillic script on the tunnel walls indicating that they are in Siberia. Orphan 55 is Earth - what a surprising development! Back at the resort, the Doctor rigs up an escape teleport and gets the fam and a couple of other people to safety. Kane and Bella go down fighting, side by side. Back in the TARDIS, the Doctor lectures everybody on ecological sustainability.

Context:

I'm still not attempting to interest my family in watching Doctor Who stories for the blog. So, I sat down to watch this on my own one day, with the Blu-ray (from the series 12 box set) in the player. Just before I pressed play, I thought I'd check the news on my phone. Long-term readers of the blog will know that I always do the - possibly annoying, sorry I can't help it - running gag of adding 'Hi Mum!' in brackets every time I refer to long-term readers of the blog; also, long-term readers of the blog (Hi Mum!) will know that I am a UK parliamentary politics junkie. The day I'd chosen to watch Orphan 55 was the 19th October 2022, and there was more UK parliamentary politics on that day than occurs in months when the country's governance is more stable. I was hooked on the news until late - refreshing the page on twitter, then a news site, then back to twitter - to see the latest updates on the chaos. I finally watched the Doctor Who story the following evening - not that the 20th October 2022 was exactly uneventful either as it saw the resignation of the UK's Prime Minister Liz Truss (see Deeper Thoughts below for more details). 

First Time Round:

Watched this story live with the whole fam when it first went out in the UK on BBC1, Sunday 12th January 2020. The buzz of the big festive special / two-part series opener Spyfall, with its many twists and revelations, was only just subsiding. The next - quieter, regular, one-part - story was always going to be a bit of a come down. I didn't mind it on first watch, though, and the younger two of the kids (aged 7 and 10 at the time) were scared by the Dreg creatures. It must have been doing some things right. I saw a bit of a hostile internet reaction when I checked immediately after broadcast, but there's always some of that no matter what Doctor or era one's watching. You can't please all the people online all the time, and it would be foolish to try. It was later and gradually that I became more aware, over the years between then and now, of the poor reputation the story had (more on that immediately below).

Reaction:

Orphan 55 is regarded unfavourably by fandom as a whole. It's hard to say for sure where it would sit in a series-wide, 1963-to-date Doctor Who Magazine fan poll, as there hasn't been one since the story was broadcast (maybe they'll do one for the 60th anniversary next year, perhaps), but it's a good bet that it would be nearer the bottom than the top. Aside from a lot of internet digs as mentioned above, there's some hard data out there to indicate this too. It came bottom of the magazine's series 12 poll in 2020. More interestingly, there's the audience appreciation index recorded after it went out: it scored 77, the second lowest for any episode shown since 2005 to that point (2006's Love and Monsters being the lowest scorer at 76). Some stories that aren't popular with fans got perfectly respectable appreciation index stories, meaning that the general audience probably didn't notice any significant difference to whatever was shown the previous week. An example would be Fear Her, a story hated by a significant section of fandom, but which scored 83, same as - amongst others - Tooth and Claw, a much more fan-respected story from the same season. Orphan 55, though, seems unappreciated by everyone, fan or not. When you watch it, though, it rattles along. Stuff happens without any moments that drag. It's perhaps not the most original stuff, comprising a lot of things that other Doctor Who stories and genre works do (base under siege, small rag tag group being picked off one by one, underlying message). Being fairly generic is far from unique for a Doctor Who story though. So, what exactly needs fixing in Orphan 55. And, is it the same things for fans as it is for a general audience?

Let's start with what works, and there's a hell of a lot of it. These things are subjective, of course, but I think anyone would have to accept that the Dregs are an effective monster design. Creating new memorable monster races didn't seem to be a priority for the Jodie Whittaker era, with returning creatures from Who's back catalogue more often featuring, as well as single alien or human foes, and everyday creatures turned monstrous (spiders, birds, and on one unforgettable occasion, a frog). The only other new foe from this era that was as effective to my mind was the P'ting, and that's more cute than monstrous. The Dregs might not be as durable as post-2005 creations like the Ood or the Weeping Angels, but they were new, well-designed and scary, and the scenes with them in the story are effective. The location work too is exemplary. The Auditorio De Tenerife, location for the Tranquility Spa exteriors, is a wonderful building and well used, but the scenes in the desolate grey landscape outside the forcefield are just as visually striking. The old Russian metro tunnels, and the spa interiors are perfect too. It's hard to know what's location or studio, such are the grand spaces being created. The music is good, the effects are good, and I'd say the script is good too. Writer Ed Hime is, as mentioned above, doing something a lot more traditional than his work for the previous season, It Takes You Away, but it's full of incident and the dialogue is good. Maybe there's some minor pacing improvements that could be made, a tiny bit of material could be chopped out of the climactic section to make it move faster, but that's it (and a lot of stories, including those in the same season that were better appreciated, have worse pacing). There's one other script change that could be made, but we'll get on to that later.

The characters we're presented with are all fine on paper, and again they are perfectly in keeping with the genre. This era with its too many regulars does warp horror / disaster narratives - every rag-tag band of survivors being picked off one by one has to include four people the audience knows will be safe. Orphan 55, though, features a decent number of distinct guest characters, and kills a good few of them off to ramp up the tension. This is possible because of a plot hole where, for no offered nor obvious explanation, all the surviving characters go off on the quest to find Benni. There's no need for all of them to be there, except to provide Dreg fodder, but it's forgivable as it makes for a more dramatic middle section. Besides, if they'd split up it would be just as much playing up to the genre formula. No, the problem is that in some places the characters are not realised well (the green wigs of James Buckley's maintenance man and his son, holiday rep Hyph3n's look that is a bit too similar to Barf from Spaceballs) or not performed strongly enough (Julia Foster as Vilma, who struggles to make her despair and loss credible, and whose every cry of "Benni!" elicits humour rather than pathos). This is enough to make the piece as a whole seem embarrassing, and that is the kiss of death for a fan's enjoyment of a Doctor Who story. We fans, you see, set a lot of emotional store by a programme that many other people find silly. As such, it's much easier to cope with a story being credible and well made but boring, rather than contain anything that might make us cringe in embarrassment. It's drilled in to us by many memories of watching episodes with less invested family members who might laugh at the bits they're supposed to find impressive or scary. Change a couple of costuming choices, and recast one actor, and it would be fine. Many of the performances (particularly the always reliable Jodie Whittaker, and Laura Fraser as Kane) are strong.

Did some of those low audience appreciation scores come from young fans whose Dads or Mums were guffawing at the sight of the bloke from the Inbetweeners in a silly wig? Maybe. I'd say, though, that it was a different reason that made a more general audience take against the show, and that is the preachiness of the ending. This is the required script change I mentioned earlier: cut out most of the Doctor's ending speech, and let the story itself convey the message. This might be helped by seeding in earlier on that we're witnessing only a potential future for Earth. Maybe have something wibbly happen when the Doctor and friends first teleport to the resort that can later explain why they have moved into just one possible time branch, and it's therefore not too late change Earth's fate. With those tweaks, I think that the story would be better thought of by fans. As for whether it would have got a better appreciation score from the more general audience, it's not easy to say. A few subsequent stories in the 2020 run got scores almost as low as Orphan 55, and everything has been in the 70s from Revolution of the Daleks to date (though note The Power of the Doctor's score hasn't been published at the time of writing). Most episodes of Flux performed the same as or worse than Orphan 55 (the third chapter 'Once, Upon Time' achieved a new low for post 2005 Who of 75). Perhaps the general audience is tired of Doctor Who in its present form. Perhaps these numbers don't matter, particularly when the future of the show is assured. Many Patrick Troughton episodes that are now looked upon as classics were rated poorly at the time and could have meant cancellation back then, but the series carried on and achieved increasing popularity. If the audience wants a change, there's definitely a change coming - see the Deeper Thoughts section below for more details (but beware spoilers).

Connectivity: 

There aren't any obvious connections I can see between Orphan 55 and Extremis. Maybe this is pushing it, but both contain the Doctor and friends with others trapped in a 'fake' environment, beyond which lies death.

Deeper Thoughts:

Two Yorkshire women with blonde bobs leave their jobs in the same week. It's all random, but with luck another Jodie Whittaker story will come up to be blogged in the few weeks before 2022's end. I'll use that to reflect on Whittaker's (and showrunner Chris Chibnall's) era as a whole, and its culmination in The Power of the Doctor. For now, it's too soon for that; I'm still processing the events of that final feature length episode (which has just been shown at time of writing). My immediate reaction to The Power of the Doctor in and of itself? Like The Day Today's Crisis Correspondent Spartacus Mills, I can't summarise it in a word, and if I had to summarise it in a sound it would be "Wuuaaaaaaah!!!!". (If you haven't seen the story yet, then you might find the rest of this section too spoilerific, definitely the second paragraph - be warned!) I've now seen it twice. On first watch, the surprises were all the things that were included (Like him! And her! And them! And all them too!). On second watch, the most striking things were those that were missing. It defied my expectations, for example, in not picking up the Timeless child / Division arc at all. The Doctor's decision at the end of Flux didn't seem final at the time, but looking back it's a good ending to that plotline: the Doctor decides that the memories stolen from her aren't necessary for her to be the Doctor she currently is, so she locks them away. If Chibnall wasn't going to pick up that plotline in subsequent episodes, he may as well have made it more final and have her throw the pocket watch into the heart of a sun or something, rather than hide it in the TARDIS (future writers motivated to revisit the Division, if there ever there were to be any, would still have been able to write their way out of it). The other thing that was missing was any direct reference to Yaz's romantic feelings for the Doctor. To me it played as an emotional farewell of a long-term friend, but not someone with a - possibly reciprocated - crush. When this had been such a focus of scenes in the last story Legend of the Sea Devils, it stood out as an omission.

[****SPOILER WARNING; seriously, don't read this paragraph if you haven't seen The Power of the Doctor; if you were happy with the level of reveals in the first one, the next para should be fine if you want to skip to that.****] Some online commentators said the parting of Yaz and the Doctor was too abrupt, but it seemed okay to me. It would have been better if Yaz had been allowed a bit more say in the decision to part (she knows the person she loves is going to change into someone completely different, which is a reasonable motivation). The Doctor just says, "I think I need to do this next bit alone" and that's that. As any long-term fan knows, this is not always true. Yaz is now in touch with previous companions; it'll be a bit embarrassing if Tegan lets on to her that she was allowed to watch the Doctor change when she'd only known him for five minutes. That quibble aside, though, the regeneration scene itself was a triumph. Good last words, a beautiful location, nice effects work, and a final surprise. Interestingly for yours truly, a Doctor Who fan and politics nerd as mentioned above, the changeover in the show mirrored what was going on with the changeover of Prime Ministers of the UK government. Just like in Doctor Who, a woman was leaving the role, and there was a question in everyone's mind about whether we'd see a younger man of colour take over, or whether the guy who had done the job before would instead be back again. Superficially, the Conservative party took the more progressive choice; but, it wasn't much of a choice, really. At almost the exact same moment as David Tennant reappeared as the Doctor, former Prime Minister Alexander Johnson MP published a statement bowing out, unable to get sufficient support to unite his party and provide stable leadership for the country. Tennant, needless to say, has a lot more support from fandom. It's a great thing that someone without white skin can finally be Prime Minister of the UK, and another finally play Doctor Who. We just have to wait a little longer for Ncuti Gatwa, that's all. According to the press release, that wait is until the 'festive season' of next year, with Tennant appearing in three episodes before that in November 2023 for the 60th anniversary.

The day after The Power of the Doctor was shown, Rishi Sunak became leader of the Conservative party, and the following day he became Prime Minister. This means that, although she had stepped down as leader of her party for a brief leadership contest, Liz Truss was still Prime Minister when The Power of the Doctor went out. That didn't stop a large number of people online posting the un-fact that she was the first PM since the series started not to have an episode of Doctor Who broadcast during her time in charge of the country. It was thrown out there by all manner of different people, and thrown back corrected by just as many detail-conscious nerds. The truth never gets in the way of a good meme, of course; what's more interesting is that it hadn't yet happened before Truss, even though there were long periods when the show was off the air. From Douglas-Home in 1963 to Thatcher in 1989, and from Blair in 2005 to Cameron in 2016, the show was on for a number of weeks a year, and the PM didn't change too frequently. In between those two periods, John Major was in power when the Paul McGann TV movie was shown in 1996. From 2016, PM's periods in charge have got shorter just as more and longer gaps between Doctor Who showings have become normal. If those trends continue, it's bound to happen sooner or later, but it didn't for Truss. This was a miraculous stroke of luck, as Truss was only in power for 50 days, and Power of the Doctor just snuck in under the wire, two days before she was out of office. Rishi Sunak needs to still be in post in November 2023 to avoid being the first Prime Minister to suffer this trivial but nonetheless ignominious fate. Given the difficulties facing the country, and the engulfing chaos of the Conservative Party that's perhaps only been shoved a small distance below the surface temporarily, I wouldn't bet against it. The good news is that when it said goodbye to its recent blonde woman in the lead role, Doctor Who was in a much better state. Though time will tell whether this is true for the UK's ruling party, it's also already clear that Doctor Who's future is in safe hands...

In Summary:

It's maybe time for this poor unloved Orphan to be adopted by fandom, as it isn't nearly as bad as its reputation; in fact, it's only a couple of tweaks away from greatness. 

Extremis

Chapter The 244th, features the Pope and some Monks inside a life-size Grand Theft Auto.

Plot:

After his final (ish) parting with River Song on the planet Darillium, the Doctor is called to a planet of executioners. The people of the planet take their responsibility seriously and have protocols for every race of the condemned. A Time Lord must be executed by a fellow Time Lord, so they want the Doctor to execute the captive Missy. Nardole arrives, sent by River to remind the Doctor to be kind or something. Taking an oath to watch over Missy for a thousand years, insisted upon by the executioners in case of later regeneration, the Doctor pulls the big kill lever... but he's sabotaged things so Missy survives. (This is told in flashbacks intercut with the main Extremis story.) Many years later, the Doctor now works as a lecturer at a Bristol university, with Nardole as his assistant and Missy locked in an underground vault. The Doctor is still blinded after an unprotected space walk in a previous adventure, but hiding this with his special techno-sunglasses. He receives an email from an unlikely source...

The pope and entourage visit to ask for help with the 'Veritas', an ancient text fabled as one that whenever it is read in translation, the reader commits suicide. They want the Doctor to read it. He agrees, and with Bill and Nardole is taken to a secret Vatican library of forbidden works. Bill and Nardole are separated from the Doctor and find a portal that can lead them to many different locations including the Pentagon and CERN, where the scientists have all read the Veritas emailed to them by one of the Vatican translators. They are about to commit a mass suicide by blowing up the building, and Bill and Nardole only just escape in time. Investigating, Nardole sees that the different locations are being projected, and when he steps out of the projection field, he disappears. The Doctor is attacked by Monk-like creatures and flees. Bill catches up with him in a projection of the Oval office. The Doctor has worked out that they only think they are real, but are in fact characters in a computer simulation that the Monks are using to trial different scenarios in advance of an invasion. The Veritas revealed the nature of the fake world, and the suicides were just people exiting the game. A monk kills Bill, but before he is killed too, the Doctor subroutine manages to email out the details to the real world Doctor.

Context:

Watched from the Blu-ray on my own one evening with a glass of wine. Perhaps I am the only member of the household (which comprises as well as me the Better Half and three children, boys of 16 and 13, girl of 10) who hasn't grown out of Doctor Who yet. None of them have watched any stories with me for some time. I think the children will come back for Jodie Whittaker's swan song The Power of the Doctor (a few days away at time of writing), but not sure about the BH, who hasn't watched any new Who since before Flux. Time will tell, it usually does, &c. 

First Time Round:

Watched this story live with the whole fam when it first went out in the UK on BBC1, Saturday 20th May 2017. It's only just over five years ago, but I can't remember any detail. It was in the middle of a general election campaign, but the UK in those times and since always seems to be having an election campaign, or referendum, or the threat of one or the other, happening, so that doesn't narrow things down. I remember being generally happy with this latest series - the dynamic between the three regular characters was good, and I'd enjoyed the first five stories of the year before Extremis. Looking back at posts on this blog from the period, I see that I was struggling to get through The Time Monster around the time of the broadcast of Extremis, and I would publish my thoughts on it in another week's time. The Time Monster and the empty, repetitive sloganeering of Theresa May; no wonder I don't want to remember! 

Reaction:

In the UK at the time of writing, Extremis writer and exec producer Steven Moffat's latest drama Inside Man just completed its first series. I started watching with much enthusiasm as the pre-publicity had indicated an intriguing premise and it had a strong cast. I did not get much past the halfway point before I bailed on it. The plot could only develop because of a series of coincidences and increasingly silly decisions by characters, to the point where it became a bit wearing to watch. The character being put under most pressure, played by David Tennant, was a vicar, and so I wonder whether this was somehow intended to be an updated version of the story of Job. A common theme with people I saw online discussing the show was that, though most were quick to say that it was far fetched and silly, they felt that it was nonetheless compulsive: they had to keep watching to see what lurid and ridiculous scenario would occur next, and what indignities Tennant's character would bring upon himself or others. Moffat is clearly someone who can plot a piece of drama tightly if he so desires, without relying on coincidence or insane character decisions. I'm convinced therefore that he deliberately structured his drama this way, for better or worse. Those online comments reminded me of something else, but it wasn't until I watched Extremis with it's big borrowings from the novel Angels & Demons (secret clues in old writings and buildings, the Pope, Cardinals, the Vatican, CERN) that I realised what it was. Operatically - even, stratospherically - silly plotting, but compulsive for the viewer / reader's curiosity at a base level. With Inside Man, Moffat was just possibly trying to write like Dan Brown.

I wouldn't even say Moffat's latest effort was trying to write like Brown again, as beside the superficial trappings Extremis isn't much like a Dan Brown potboiler. It's definitely very watchable, with the central mystery of the Veritas text keeping up interest, but the underlying explanation is sensible (at least compared to secret societies collecting anti-matter to blow up the world, or whatever the plot of A&D was exactly - it's a long time since I read it and I ideally want to put it behind me!). The central conceit that the Doctor and friends we're seeing are self-aware cyberspace versions of themselves allows for some impactful scenes such as the whole of the CERN staff with Bill and Nardole thinking of and chanting the same number over and over again. It is pretty easy to program multiple calls to a random number function that produce different results, but the monks had a lot of coding to do simulating the entire world, so I'll forgive them for cutting corners. More distracting was my wondering throughout why reading the text produces an instant 'suicide' in everyone. Towards the end, Moffat throws in something of an explanation for why the Monks put the Veritas in their simulation - it's to see who's clever enough to work out they're not real. As such, the Monks would presumably want such people to stay alive for study, and therefore it can't be the programming forcing these deaths on people. So, why is it so comprehensive? Perhaps it's just me, but if I found out that I was living in a computer game, I'd want to stay alive as long as possible and have some fun. Though it is effective, the simulation plot is quite slight. Only one real thing happens, the simulated Doctor sends himself an email. It's a nice moment: even a copy of the Doctor can outsmart the bad guys and get a warning out to his real life counterpart. But it does mean that the main story is essentially just treading water, and the fight against the Monks doesn't start properly until the following week's episode.

In order to bulk up Extremis, flashbacks to the origin story of the Missy vault are intercut. It's the right time in the series as a whole for there to be some answers about this, with hints having been dropped in the previous five stories. The trouble is that it has no link at all to the simulation / Veritas plot. It's just for exposition because, in the course of the Monk saga (not even in the next episode, though, but the one after that), Missy will be brought into play, and this gets out of the way the necessary explanation of how she came to be in the vault. Moffat makes an effort to thematically link the memories of Missy's failed execution in to the main plot at the end, but it's a sticking plaster. This is a criticism that would only come up on second watch, though, first time out it gets away with it. Helping things along is good direction and production design throughout. The Monks are an effective new creation, with the sequence of them chasing the partially-sighted Doctor (after he's tried to fix his eyes with a gizmo) being particularly good. The scene where Bill's date with Penny is interrupted by the Pope is one of the funniest of this period, so good they did a callback to it in the next episode. The only other minor issues I have are in the Missy execution sequences, and they're both bad habits of the writer. The first scene is worded ambiguously so the audience might think momentarily that it's the Doctor that's going to be executed; Moffat does this sort of thing a lot (another example would be when Matt Smith's Doctor says "It's mine" in A Good Man Goes to War, and could be talking about the crib or Amy's baby) and I don't know why. It adds nothing except confusion. The other flaw is another recurring one, the Doctor grandstanding in a face off with someone based on his universal reputation. He gets the executioners to back down and leaves with Missy by intimidating them with all the places in their records he's listed as "cause of death". Given that the script has just been making a big deal of his mercy and compassion, it's a bit of a bum note.

Connectivity: 

Both Extremis and Meglos are stories with one word titles that feature a religious order, and both have a character appear throughout the action who looks like the Doctor, but isn't really him.

Deeper Thoughts:

The great uncast. Long-term readers of the blog (Hi Mum!) will know that I always use an obliquely linked photograph for the banner image at the top of each post. For Extremis, it was obvious to me that this should be Dan Brown related, maybe using a movie poster for the Angels & Demons celluloid adaptation. Then, I heard the news about Robbie Coltrane's death at age 72, and went with the image of him you can see above from film The Pope Must Die(t), as a small tribute. Sometimes celebrity deaths impact me more than I would have anticipated, and Coltrane's was such a surprising reaction. I was a huge fan of his comedy work in the 1980s and his dramatic work in the 1990s. The most surprising thing is that he had nothing at all to do with Doctor Who. I'm usually able to separate the work from the person and not get any unwarranted emotions mixed in, but finding out about the passing of - just to take two examples - Jon Pertwee and Terrance Dicks hit me hard despite this. My affection for Doctor Who lowers my barriers somewhat, but Coltrane had somehow got past them despite never appearing in my favourite show. My next thought was probably obvious: why hadn't Robbie Coltrane ever appeared in Doctor Who? Two guest cast members of Extremis, Jennifer Hennessey and Joseph Long, had appeared in different prominent roles only a few years previously - they were already doubling up, but there wasn't a chance to find a role for Robbie? He might have made a good comic cameo as the Pope in Extremis, though was likely too big a star in the new series era, or maybe just not interested. The nearest he came to appearing was being considered for a role in Revelation of the Daleks in the mid-1980s, probably either as Takis or the DJ (the latter was eventually played by fellow Comic Strip and Young Ones alumni Alexei Sayle).

Who else is surprisingly missing from the cast lists of Doctor Who, new and old? Catching a bit of Strictly Come Dancing in the UK recently, I saw Will Mellor on screen and wondered which was the Doctor Who story he was in. I checked online and was surprised to find that he's never appeared in the show, nor any spin off or tie-in. I think at the back of my mind I had him appearing in maybe 42 (but that was William Ash). That seems odd to me, as he is exactly the sort of person that could have been cast anytime in the last ten years. Just because he was mentioned in a recent Doctor Who Magazine interview, I also thought about Rob Brydon. He too seemed like an obvious guest star for recent years. Just like new Who, he was made in Wales, and seemed happy to act in other BBC productions. Perhaps both Mellor and Brydon have been too busy, or not interested, or both. Of the alternative comedy generation Robbie Coltrane was part of in the early 1980s, a few people have been notable by their absence. Only two of the five main actors in The Young Ones have featured in Doctor Who proper (aside from the previously mentioned Sayle, Christopher Ryan has appeared a few times over the years), plus Nigel Planer was the lead in a touring Doctor Who live production in theatres in 2010. It was a terrible shame Rik Mayall never managed to appear before his tragic early death - he was being considered (also by director Graeme Harper, who had cast Sayle in Revelation of the Daleks) as the villain in The Dark Dimension, a special planned for the 30th anniversary of Doctor Who in 1993 that then fell through. Adrian Edmondson could easily have a guest role still; he's worked as a straight actor on lots of BBC productions, including in recurring roles in long-running series Holby City and Eastenders.

The showrunners of Doctor Who since its return in 2005 do each have something of a repertory of actors that reappear in many of their works. Both Russell T Davies and Chris Chibnall started their period on the show by casting an actor they had worked with in their last production (The Second Coming and Broadchurch respectively) as the Doctor. Davies repeated it the following year by giving David Tennant the main role in Doctor Who after they had worked together on Casanova. A lot of Chibnall's Broadchurch regulars have appeared in Doctor Who, although many - Tennant, Olivia Colman, Arthur Darvill - appeared in Doctor Who first. Still, regulars of the third series of his investigative drama Lenny Henry and Julie Hesmondhalgh were cast in Doctor Who when Chibnall was in charge. Andrew Buchan and Carolyn Pickles, who had large parts throughout Broadchurch, stick out as possible guest stars in Doctor Who in future. Steven Moffat wasn't so much of a drama writer before Who, and worked with mostly different casts through his sitcom writing years, but still managed to cast the lead of his first ever show Julia Sawalha in a Doctor Who skit for comic relief in 1999. I'm surprised he never found a role for Gina Bellman,with whom he'd worked on a couple of show, when he ran the show proper. Russell T Davies seems to have been the most comprehensive at recasting from his previous shows. There are many examples between 2005 and 2009 - Jo Joyner, Mark Benton, Debbie Chazen, Jo-Stone Fewings, Peter O'Brien, Lesley Sharp, Jessica Hynes, and others. For his second showrunner period, there are a lot of people he's worked with since that could easily slot into Who roles, such as Olly Alexander and Lydia West (with whom Moffat has also worked recently). I could probably go on like this for hours. The only way that Doctor Who can cast everyone who'd be a good fit is for it to keep going for ever! Here's hoping... 

In Summary:

It's watchable; not quite extremely good, but extreme-ish.

Meglos

Chapter The 243rd, all together now: cactus, cactus man, I've got to be a cactus man...

Plot:

An arrogant but technically skilled cactus called Meglos engages (somehow, despite his being a cactus) a group of intergalactic bandits called Gaztaks to kidnap a random bloke from Earth and bring him to the barren planet of Zolfa-Thura where Meglos lives. Sometime before, his fellow Zolfa-Thurans all but destroyed the planet to thwart Meglos's plans for universal destruction, and ejected the power source of his doomsday weapon into space. This is the dodecahedron, which landed on nearby planet Tigella; since then, the Tigellans have worshipped the dodecahedron as a holy object, and used it to power their civilisation, though its idiosyncratic fluctuations cause them ongoing issues. The Tigellan people have formed two distinct and squabbling castes because of this, the scientific Savants and the religious Deons, with their aged and wise leader Zastor in the middle trying to keep the peace. The Doctor visited Tigella and met the younger Zastor years before, and when the Tigellan learns the Time Lord is back in the area, he invites him to come to the planet to advise. Meglos eavesdrops on this, merges with the earthling and transforms himself into an exact copy of the Doctor. He traps the TARDIS in a time loop to prevent the Doctor, Romana and K9 from reaching Tigella before he arrives there with the Gaztaks. He impersonates the Doctor and steals the dodecahedron. The TARDIS team work out how to throw the time loop out of phase, and arrive on Tigella too. Meanwhile, the earthling fights against Meglos's control, causing the Zolfa-Thuran's disguise to get a bit prickly occasionally. The real Doctor is captured and nearly sacrificed to the Deon's god, but luckily the Gaztaks and the green, spiky Doctor-Meglos are discovered. The villains escape to Zolfa-Thura after a zap gun battle, but the Doctor follows, impersonates Meglos and manages to get them to blow each other up. He offers to take the earthling back home a few minutes before he was abducted.

Context:

After musing in the Deeper Thoughts section of the last blog post on Deep Breath about my brain's over-saturation in Doctor Who, and how this might be robbing me of surprise when encountering old memories about my favourite show, I considered having a bit of time off from watching it. Perhaps this might help me recapture some more of the magic. Obviously, I wasn't 100% serious, but the resolve lasted much less time than I might have forecast. About forty minutes after finishing that blog post, on the 27th September 2022, I saw someone on twitter doing one of those "on this day in Doctor Who history" style tweets that told me it was exactly 42 years on from the first broadcast of Meglos episode one (on the 27th September 1980, obviously). As Meglos had already been selected by the random number generator assisted process I use to choose the order of stories to cover for the blog, it seemed unavoidable that I should start the story that very evening. I did so from the disc in the season 18 Blu-ray box set, and then proceeded to watch an episode every couple of nights. At one point during the first episode, the Better Half came in to the living room and watched for a while. She asked one very good question of me: "What kind of planet is this where everyone has to have the same haircut?". I couldn't answer this of course, but it made me wonder whether it is indeed a haircut or whether it's a wig. I mean, I know it's a wig on each of the actors, but are the Savants in the fictional world of Meglos wearing wigs, or is that supposed to be their real hair. Zastor seems to have normal hair, so it's not every Tigellan that has an artificially white sculptured do. Why would the scientific caste of the planet all adopt the same hairstyle or wig, though?!

First Time Round:

Meglos is one of a handful of stories I watched for the first time courtesy of UK Gold. After three years of university, where my burgeoning Doctor Who VHS collection often entertained (and sometimes infuriated) my friend group in many communal viewings, I went back home and lived in my Mum's place in Worthing for a while. This was the mid-1990s. I temped to earn some money to pay off my student loans (they were much smaller in those days). By the time Paul McGann was taking on the keys to the TARDIS, I had moved with the Better Half to a tiny studio flat, and had got a full-time job. When I'd finally paid off the loans, just over a year later (by which time I was on my own in the flat in term-time as the BH was off studying herself), I thought I'd treat myself by getting cable connected, and would get one of the relatively inexpensive channels packages. I was never interested in paying more for the sport or movie channels, I just wanted UK Gold to watch old Doctor Whos that hadn't come out on video yet. For more than a decade, UK Gold had the surviving archive, or parts of it, in constant rotation. By the time I was connected, stories were being shown as omnibus editions on Sunday mornings, with intermediate credits sequences removed, but advert breaks between episodes (and a slightly more intrusive advert break in the middle of the final episode). The only issue was that at that point the only stories being shown that I hadn't already seen were not exactly the cream of the crop. For a few months, I was able to watch and record onto my own tapes The Invasion of Time, The Creature from the Pit, Nightmare of Eden, The Horns of Nimon, and Meglos. There don't seem to be any historical listings for UK Gold online so this isn't definitely exact, but I think I would have watched Meglos on Sunday 19th October 1997. I must have discontinued my cable subscription very quickly afterwards, though, as I didn't watch State of Decay (two stories after Meglos) on the channel but instead saw it for the first time when it came out on VHS (which wasn't long after in November 1997). My cutting the cable wasn't 100% down to the poor run of Doctor Who stories that were on offer, but it didn't help.

Reaction:

There's a famous old joke (it's told, for example, at the beginning of the film Annie Hall) where two old ladies are in a restaurant and one says to the other "The food in here is terrible", and the other replies "Yes, and such small portions". Alvy, the main character of Annie Hall, sees this as a metaphor for life. I see it as a metaphor for Meglos. For Meglos contains much that is rubbish, and I will go into more detail on that very soon have no fear, but it is also very short. The episodes barely scrape above the 20 minute mark each (classic Doctor Who episodes are usually four to five minutes longer), and many contain very long episode recaps (the final episode, by my timing, contained about three minutes of recycled material upfront). This, I believe, is indicative of script difficulties, which might be understandable to a certain extent. The writers John Flanagan and Andrew McCulloch were doing their first ever TV screenplay, and script editor Christopher H. Bidmead was early on in his tenure, still making his mark. Though the production team taking over this year were keen to break with what had gone before, both in terms of the look of the show and the seriousness of the subject matter, this was still a transition period. The first couple of scripts brought to screen by incoming producer John Nathan-Turner and Bidmead, when you dig deeper than the superficial, bear a lot of similarities with those of the previous regime of producer Graham Williams and script editor Douglas Adams. It was apt that I started watching this story on its 42nd anniversary, because it is clearly inspired by Adams's work. This isn't surprising, as the recent episodes of Doctor Who screening when Flanagan and McCulloch were writing were ones written or rewritten by Adams. Plus, in 1979 and 1980, UK science fiction was generally in thrall to everything Adams anyway, as The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy had by then become a big hit in both its radio and book forms.

An ordinary earth person thrust into time and space against his will trying to understand the weird things going on around him (like Arthur Dent), a cactus villain (similar to a sentient bowl of petunias), comical pulp sci-fi archetype characters like the Gaztaks, cosmic misunderstandings as a satirical commentary on religious zealotry, conceptual jokes like the time loop the characters find themselves in (quite like the time-slips the same characters experience in City of Death the year before Meglos), Tom Baker larking about: these are all found in Adams's work, either for Doctor Who or elsewhere. The script could easily have been made in the 1979/1980 house style. Unfortunately, that style was one that the people making Doctor Who a year later wanted to distance themselves from, so instead of leaning in to the ridiculousness as might have worked better, the script and production fights against it. Additionally, nobody involved has the flair for dialogue that Douglas Adams had, which would keep a lesser story afloat. Instead, particularly in the first episode, everything is leaden and expository. The Savants, Deons and Zastor are all one-note ciphers; nothing they do surprises us or the other characters, and they often tell each other things that they already know. The script is also so clearly on the side of science rather than religion that there's no dynamism in the scenes between the two castes. In fact, if you remove the Deons altogether, you wouldn't lose very much. It's too simplistic a depiction for the satire to be effective, and the narrative would barely change. Meglos could still hoodwink a wholly scientific society, and the same society could then mistrust, and potentially even threaten with a death penalty, the real Doctor turning up after the disastrous actions of his double. Lead Deon Lexa sacrifices herself to save Romana near the end, but it's abruptly written and badly shot such that you can almost miss it, so that would be no great loss either.

Playing Lexa is Jacqueline Hill, one of Doctor Who's original cast members when the show started in 1963 (playing schoolteacher Barbara). She does sterling work, but isn't well served in the script and it's odd to any long-term fan watching to see her playing someone different. Nathan-Turner (I think rightly) decided after this that previous regular or recurring Who character actors would never again come back in new roles, but would only return to play their original characters. None of the other actors really stands out, though they are all working hard with what they are given. Bill Fraser and Frederick Treves are having fun playing the two main Gaztaks (Fraser reportedly insisted on kicking the K9 prop to show how evil his character was), and Tom Baker is enjoying getting to play the villain, and then in the final episode having some larks in the confrontation scenes playing against himself. The script for the story before Meglos, The Leisure Hive, was also not that different from the silly stories the production team didn't like from the year before (it was after all written by the most prolific author of the Graham Williams producer period, David Fisher) but innovative direction decisions disguised that, and made the story seem more sophisticated than it was on paper. Meglos director Terence Dudley does solid work, but the result is something that's sometimes risible, but mostly just generic: the good guys are good and they beat the bad guys who are bad, and everything is put to rights. Somehow, one expects a bit more than that of a story where the titular character is a cactus, even if it's just high camp or parody.

There are flashes of visual distinction here and there; the effects wizardry allowing the interaction of various characters with the models representing parts of Zolfa-Thura was ground-breaking for the time, and still holds up today. Also, the whole folly is worthwhile for that one great, indelible image of Tom Baker's Doctor but bright green and covered in spikes: this was so memorable that Baker became the first (and only?) person to be represented at Madame Tussauds waxworks in London by two facsimiles in one tableau. (Around the time of the first BBC1 broadcast of Meglos, there was a Doctor Who themed exhibit at this famous tourist attraction that included life-size models of both the Doctor and the green, spiky Meglos Doctor.) As well as this, the music is good, and there's the odd good line, e.g. the Doctor being described thus: "He sees the threads that join the universe together, and mends them when they break". Ultimately, though, it's odd to me that a story with a talking cactus playing the Doctor can end up so underwhelming and run of the mill.

Connectivity: 

In both Meglos and Deep Breath, the main villain uses the body of at least one human to transform themselves (Meglos doesn't kill and dissect the poor sap he's using, though). In both stories, there is a trade between two characters to obtain a coat (a running gag in Meglos has Gaztak second in command Brotadac repeatedly admiring and finally obtaining Meglos's copy of the Doctor's coat, while Capaldi's Doctor swaps his watch for a Victorian homeless man's overcoat).

Deeper Thoughts:

On anniversaries and endings. Just after I finished viewing Meglos, the Better Half and I got round to watching the final ever episode of Neighbours, which I'd recorded when it was shown on Channel 5 in the UK toward the end of July this year, and we'd been meaning to find time for ever since. For the uninitiated, Neighbours was an Australian daytime soap opera that started to be shown on UK television in the mid-1980s. It was relatively cheaply made, and often cheesy, but had engaging characters who were played with enthusiasm by the cast. It soon captured the imagination of a UK audience, particularly children and young adults. This was probably because it had a number of good looking (or at least better looking than anyone in the main homegrown soaps such as Eastenders and Coronation Street) teenage characters, most famously (though neither were in it from the beginning) Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan as Charlene and Scott. Such was the youth engagement with the series, it rapidly got a late afternoon repeat in the 1980s BBC1 schedule. Before that, it was only shown at lunchtimes and kids were bunking off school to catch it. The daily repeat was added at 5.30pm after the children's programme zone. I happened to see the very first episode as I was at home from school unwell. I was a bit feverish, though, tucked up in bed watching the portable TV in the corner of my room. I only vaguely remember early character Des meeting Daphne who was the stripper hired for his stag party (he'd subsequently call off the wedding, eventually get married to Daphne, and would later still hold her hand on her death bed as she passed away after a car crash - it's a soap, after all, whaddaya gonna do?!)

The actor who played Des returned for the final episode. I don't think that the actor who played Daphne did, though, but I might not have recognised her (her character's death within the history of the show would not have been a blocker - several dear but departed characters appeared in a brief cameo as ghosts, I kid you not). As will be obvious from that supernatural narrative decision, every conceivable (and some barely conceivable) efforts were made to get as much of the full history of the programme as possible represented in this finale. Long running character Toadie was having the latest one of his many wedding ceremonies, which acted as a spur for many characters that had left the area to return. Those that did manage to come back were sometimes quite surprising, Donovan and Minogue had a couple of scenes in the main Ramsey Street location just waving and saying hello, but Guy Pearce, who since Neighbours launched his career has become a Hollywood star, appeared throughout in lengthy sequences with an actual plot arc, as he got back together with old flame Jane. Pearce hadn't been around on the same day as Donovan and Minogue, so the moment where the three of them ran in to each other and hugged was a masterful bit of editing. There was also a clunky but fun scene of the characters played by Natalie Imbruglia and Holly Valance, another two of the Neighbours cast that have gone on to stellar recording careers; their characters didn't meet on the show, so were seen coincidentally bumping into each other way away from Ramsey Street and reminiscing. The remainder of the cameos were shoehorned in as a long Zoom call style section where numerous characters recorded their well-wishes to the happy couple. This meant that Margot Robbie, who was briefly on the show a few years back before mega-stardom, was able to appear also. Watching it, I got an increasing sense of deja vu. Doesn't this remind you of something, Doctor Who fans? It's like the Neighbours version of The Five Doctors.

In Doctor Who, we're two weeks away at the time of writing from an ending: Jodie Whittaker's final feature-length story is now being trailed, and we already know it's going to feature some returns of characters from multiple eras of the show (I won't specify which in case anyone reading this is still miraculously unspoilt). In big stories for anniversaries or regenerations in the past we've seen cameos accommodating actors that couldn't spare much time out of their schedules; plus, what was the series of clips, voiceovers and impersonations as all the Doctors come together to save Gallifrey in The Day of the Doctor except a sci-fi version of the Zoom call approach of Neighbours. Maybe more surprise guests are planned for Whittaker's last hurrah. After that jamboree, though, Doctor Who goes into its 60th anniversary celebrations, with a rumour now that we may even be getting the first such special during the upcoming festive period (I'll believe it when I see it!). More old characters are coming back for that (again, I won't spoil it, if you've missed the press releases and snaps of location filming). Will it create a nostalgia overload, or will those involved find new ways to celebrate the old? Watching the Neighbours episode, I got to experience being a casual viewer in a way I couldn't ever for Doctor Who, and it was fine. I watched a lot of the early years of Neighbours but I can't have seen an episode for something like 25 years; nonetheless, I could mentally reverse engineer the plot arcs sufficiently that I knew what was going on. During the flurry of characters appearing, I was quite relaxed about not recognising most (then enjoyed the odd moment where I was able to say something like "Ooh, that's Joe Mangel!"). This would be what it was like to someone who likes Doctor Who but not obsessively wondering who Mike Yates or Liz Shaw are when they pop up, or seeing Tom Baker as the Curator and marvelling at how old he's got. I think it'll probably work out okay for the show and for the audience. On top of that, unlike poor Neighbours, any wake at which we celebrate is also a christening of sorts. Doctor Who will be reborn again, then again will revel in its long history, and finally it'll carry on to new and exciting things in 2023 and beyond!

In Summary:

It's somehow not fun or silly enough, despite the eyebrow-raising nature of the villain, but it's over relatively quickly at least.