|
BBC Orphan 55 |
|
| Story No. | 316 | 
|
| Production Code | Series 12, Episode 3 | |
| Dates | January 15, 2020 |
|
With Jodie Whittaker, Bradley Walsh, Tosin Cole, Mandip Gill
Written by Ed Grime Directed by Lee Haven-Jones Executive Producers: Chris Chibnall, Matt Strevens |
| Synopsis: The TARDIS fam win an all-inclusive stay at a luxury spa. But something isn't right... |
"Catastrophe Is Coming" by Jason A. Miller 5/4/20
The Series 12 two-part premiere was a master class in slow, luxuriant, storytelling, with Chris Chibnall getting two full hours to tell us about Spyfall (Parts One and Two). The next episode, Orphan 55, however, is a master class only in strident lecturing.
We were a bit spoiled, perhaps, that both parts of Spyfall were an hour long. Orphan 55, however, is a mere 46 minutes and is a beast-of-the-week story rather than a richly layered bit of story arc. There's a brief reaction shot in the first scene of the Doctor looking gloomy, presumably to remind us of the closing minutes of the previous episode, and then things hits the ground running rapidly, with no reference to the ongoing Timeless Child business. The initial plot conceit (the TARDIS crew wins a vacation to a tropical holiday resort spa) is exploded within literal seconds, as several exotically dressed extras are eaten by slavering beasts, who appear to be a cross between Giger's Aliens (slavering teeth within elongated jaws), the Haemovores from The Curse of Fenric (their origin story) and the Marshmen from Full Circle (rubber-costume-looking men slow-walking in formation out of the mist towards the camera; and they can be defeated by oxygen).
The Gigeresque look is no coincidence. The first half hour of the story, before the surprise reveal, is a mini-staging of Aliens. The resort has been intentionally placed on a dead planet, with an eye towards terraforming, much as LV-486 in Aliens was being terraformed before all those pesky Xenomorphs got in the way. The Dregs here - this story's Aliens stand-ins - are apex predators, and soon the Doctor and the few guest cast members who survived the first 15 minutes are in an armored truck heading straight into deadly territory. In a nifty bit of effective location filming, the production here takes a page out of the Planet of Fire playbook and uses one of the Canary Islands (Tenerife instead of Lanzarote) for both the spa-resort setting and the barren rocky planet surface.
The pace is frenetic almost from the get go; once we're out of the dome, a supporting character dies every two or three minutes, like a condensed version of the last third of The Poseidon Adventure. The script is witty, with tons of quips, and there's two frustrated romances (Benni's often-interrupted marriage proposals to Velma, and Ryan's often-blocked attempts to flirt with Bella). And you know that things will turn out all right for at least some of the guest cast, because the principal guest star is Laura Fraser - I'm glad to see she survived being poisoned by Walter White during the Breaking Bad series finale, next to which Orphan 55 is a positive opera bouffe - and another cast member is a plucky 12-year-old boy, this episode's version of Newt. But while the monsters are redolent of the vampires from The Curse of Fenric and the costumes from Full Circle, the script is not quite so poetic as either of those earlier two stories.
The big twist, without naming the direct spoiler, is one familiar to viewers of The Mysterious Planet, as well as a particular Rod Serling-scripted late 1960s parable about humans being enslaved by a lesser bipedal species. It serves to flip the story from an Aliens-esque thriller, to a story about the environmental crisis and the Sixth Extinction. Which, as I write this on a 64-degree-Fahrenheit day in the middle of January in New York, hits uncomfortably close to home. The discussions of how the planet Orphan 55 was given that new name are a bit ripped-from-the-headlines, and doubtless will cause J. Rightwing Fanboy to go into more spasms of rage about Doctor Who "getting political". On the subtlety scale, Ed Hime's script falls somewhere between eight (The Green Death) and eleven (The Doctor's Daughter) on the message-with-a-sledgehammer scale. What, you expected something else from the author of It Takes You Away?
The Doctor's closing speeches to the camera are among the least subtle writing ever seen on Doctor Who and veer more on the side of PSA rather than dramatic screenplay. But, again, it's 64 degrees outside on January 12th, so who am I to criticize the estimable Mr. Hime? I mean, there's much to criticize, and just because he happens to be correct, doesn't give him a free pass for the over-the-top messaging.
The supporting cast is good, the locations are evocative, and much of the dialogue is witty, so things don't really fall apart until the last 15 minutes. But apart from the relentless messaging, Orphan 55 is also not the Doctor's finest hour, in terms of scripting. Jodie Whittaker is a delight to watch, as usual, but the story requires her to jeopardize everybody by bringing everyone out of the dome (including the plucky green-haired boy), to jeopardize them once again by talking too much and thereby consuming all the oxygen and then to allow a couple/three characters to die by heroic suicide (either by failing to take any action to avert their course, or in one case by wandering off directly into peril, thus necessitating a rescue from someone who can't escape). Wandering off and talking too much... not the most Doctorish of attributes.
The story lost me by the closing monologue, nearly delivered straight to the camera. While the Doctor is correct, of course, it's all a bit heavy-handed, and I usually come to this show for an escape from the news headlines. Orphan 55 is akin to twelve catastrophic news articles all being pushed to my phone at once. I don't think history will judge this story too kindly. If any of us actually live long enough through the climate crisis to be able to judge it.