Doctor Whosday – S12E3 “Orphan 55”

The Doctor and the Fam take a relaxing vacation that of course goes off the rails because it’d be boring otherwise.

SUMMARY

Graham (Bradley Walsh) assembles six coupons he’s collected into a transport cube to an all-inclusive stay at Tranquility Spa. Graham, Ryan (Tosin Cole), and Yaz (Mandip Gill) all hope that this will lighten the Doctor’s (Jodie Whittaker) mood after the destruction of Gallifrey in “Spyfall.” Ryan quickly gets infected by a “Hopper” virus that the Doctor cures just as the Spa declares an emergency. The Doctor goes to investigate why people are carrying guns, leaving Ryan behind to meet another guest named Bella (Gia Ré) who goes with him to investigate on their own. Graham meets with the Spa’s mechanic Nevi (James Buckley) and his son Sylas (Lewin Lloyd) while Yaz joins them with elderly couple Vilma and Benni (Julia Foster and Col Farrel). 

The Doctor bluffs her way into a security room and finds out that there are a number of creatures invading the compound. Kane (Laura Fraser), the security chief, tries to kick the Doctor out, but the Doctor manages to build an “ionic membrane” which kicks the creatures out. They’re revealed to be Xenomorph-esque creatures called “Dregs.” It turns out that the Spa was built on a desolate planet, Orphan 55, which is populated by the monsters who view the Spa guests as intruders. The area outside of the spa is uninhabitable to most life. It turns out that Benni has been abducted, so most of the characters we’ve named so far all go out after him (despite the fact that many of them are civilians, because narrative gotta play out). The Dregs set a trap for the group, disabling their vehicle. It turns out that the monsters’ strength is their adaptability, allowing them to survive Nuclear Winter, lack of oxygen, and even gunfire. It’s revealed that the Dregs are using Benni as a hostage. The Dregs attack, killing Hyph3n and Kane kills Benni to spare him an agonizing death. 

The group makes it to a maintenance tunnel where Bella steals a gun and reveals that she’s Kane’s daughter. Kane, it turns out, owns the Spa and is planning to terraform Orphan 55 so that she can own the planet. Bella, who was essentially abandoned by her mother, wants to destroy everything her mother owns as revenge. The Dregs attack and Ryan teleports with Bella back to the Spa, leaving the rest behind to run. The Doctor finds a sign in Russian, confirming that Orphan 55 is just Earth in the future. The Dregs are the people who got left behind when the elites abandoned the planet due to climate change, horribly mutated by the subsequent nuclear war. Vilma sacrifices herself to save the group, who make it back to the Spa. The Dregs surround the facility, but the Doctor captures the lead Dreg and appeals it to change. It buys the group enough time to fix the teleport and all of the survivors return to safety except for Kane and Bella, who remain on Orphan 55. The Fam is depressed by the fact that Earth is doomed, but the Doctor reminds them that all of them have the power to help change the world.

END SUMMARY

Last week, I said that I thought “Spyfall” allowed the show to finally find the balance between getting the message across and telling a complete story. This week that fell to sh*t. This story felt more rushed than almost any Doctor Who story I’ve seen in a long time and that should have been completely avoidable. Part of it is that they attempted to introduce a large number of characters so that there could be a larger bodycount in the episode. Unfortunately, that’s not how you properly raise stakes in this kind of series. We need strong emotional connections to the people that we’re losing if their deaths are to mean anything, and adding more characters inherently dilutes those connections. Now, you can pull off a large number of quick emotional connections to characters using strong visual storytelling or some very, very skilled dialogue combined with the proper framing, but that’s not this episode. 

Instead, the bulk of the work seemed to go into figuring out what cliche the characters were going to indulge in. We have the vengeful daughter, the greedy developer, the loving old couple, the repressive father and the brilliant son, and a bunch of other characters who were more likely to have weird names than any actual character traits. There are a ton of Doctor Who episodes that have pulled off similar structures better, but they always used the right balance of archetypal and more original characters to make sure that the deaths had more impact. “Voyage of the Damned” comes to mind, but even that episode had difficulties making all of the deaths feel meaningful. Here, many of them just feel empty.

The message that “Climate change is bad” is undercut a bit by the fact that it’s represented by the monsters from Feast blended with Pumpkinhead. We aren’t seeing the suffering, we’re just seeing the sci-fi remains. It so far removes the effect from the cause that it really doesn’t give us any kind of actual connection. Even though I believe the point of the episode is right, it’s still just a bad story to use for it.

The companions were pretty much scattered throughout the episode, much like everyone else. The dialogue wasn’t particularly notable. The monster designs were pretty good, but the CGI was shoddy in places. The performances were fine, but they didn’t have much to work with.

Overall, this feels less like Doctor Who and more like someone who doesn’t understand the nature of effective storytelling using the character. 

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