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).
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.
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.
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