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.