#81 - Doctor Who - Orphan 55

It’s 2021 and time once again for a New Year’s Look at Doctor Who

Series 12 of the show introduced some brave new ideas, some of which are major retcons to the show’s ever-changing history. They introduced the latest incarnation of the Master, did some interesting bits with the Cybermen and there are a couple of interesting historical ones.

But whilst many s12 episodes divided opinion, one that definitely didn’t was Orphan 55, everyone seems to agree this episode is bad. The writer Ed Hime has only the bare minimum of writing experience, but does have It Takes Your Away on his IMDb which was a pretty good episode of series 11, so why did this one really not work? Well, let’s take a closer look.

We open with the Doctor, Yaz and Ryan having dealt with some sort of tentacle hentai, hey whatever floats your boat, I won’t judge. It’s left them a bit tired and cranky but some potentially good news, or at least convenient is on the horizon. Graham has earned coupons with coffee? And with his 6 coupons he’s got a free holiday. The only problem is the 6 coupons join together to form a cube which teleports them straight there. I can’t think of a single reason why any Hotel would do this.

The Hotel is called Tranquillity, because this episode is not subtle. They’re greeted by Hyph3n, or Hyphen with a 3, and apparently their vacation is 2 weeks all-inclusive. How is this hotel making money? Ryan heads off to explore, Graham to relax and Yaz goes to check out the pool, leaving the Doctor to do… the exact same thing Ryan is doing.

We meet Benni and Vilma, a couple who have been together for years but haven’t gotten married, but Benni, who importantly has an oxygen tank, is about to propose when Yaz interrupts. Ryan finds himself drawn to a vending machine for a free snack, but something shocks him as he grabs something from it. He’s apparently been infected with the Hopper Virus, a virus that can infect humans, infect machines and cause elemental transmutation, you know, the usual stuff. The Doctor arrives quickly and manages to save Ryan from the virus, but goes to investigate how the virus got into the hotel, leaving Ryan to get to know another guest named Bella. Their interactions are adorably awkward but I will get back to Bella later.

The Doctor finds a ‘Linen Cupboard’ and convinces Hyph3n that she’s a hotel inspector to allow her access, it’s a war room with the worst lighting known to man. Most of the hotel is surprisingly dark. There she meets Kane, the store manager/owner/head guard, who’s armed to the teeth. They discover that thanks to another Hopper virus in their systems, the ionic membrane around the facility has just failed.

Making matters worse, the teleport systems were also affected by the virus so they can’t evacuate the facility, as the ionic membrane was there to protect guests from the ‘Dregs’ outside. ‘Dreg’ is a terrible name for a monster. I guess it’s more foreshadowing but only if you know what Dreg means. The Dreg is slaughtering the guests as the Doctor calls everyone to the linen cupboard, including the maintenance man Nevi and his son Silas, Bella and Ryan are stuck in the steam room, just barely avoiding the Dregs.

Because the Doctor is well, the Doctor, she’s able to fix the membrane and kick the Dregs out. This is one of the first major missteps of the episode in my opinion, but I can’t really explain why until later. During the evacuation, Vilma dropped her hat, Benni stopped to pick it up but fell behind as the Dregs approached.

The gang soon realise that the hotel has a saboteur. It also transpires that the hotel and pool are real but the background is faked, they are on a planet known as Orphan-55, a planet deemed uninhabitable. However, it seems that with the money from the hotel, Navi planned to terraform Orphan-55 and well basically own it. (What money? You're giving away 2 week all-inclusive stays with a coffee coupon)

Benni is alive but outside the dome surrounding the hotel. He’s only alive because of his oxygen tank. The Doctor orders a rescue party and for some reason everyone tags along. Why would an engineer, a child and someone who is a guest at the hotel want to come along for this? They’re each given bands and nose-pieces, the bands glow green if the oxygen supply is ok, orange if it’s running and red if you’re out, they refill themselves in any O2 rich environment. But just to annoy everyone watching, there’s some computer system warns them repeatedly when they’re low on oxygen.

During the trip Benny changes direction

“Why would he do that?”

I don’t know, why would anyone who has no idea where they’re going change direction suddenly? I’m not saying that’s right but it’s an obvious and logical answer. It turns out he’s moving fast, meaning he’s a captive of the Dregs, who have taken him prisoner because of reasons. Leaving the Hotel is another major misstep, but I’ll get back to this later. Navi is about to abort but Vilma gives her a valuable heirloom to convince her to keep going. The Doctor says this

“Never mind the money, there’s a man’s life at stake”

This Doctor is an amoral prick sometimes. Yes, a man’s life is at stake, but there are 10 of you in that vehicle and the Dregs are clearly capable killers, you don’t walk into a situation like that without a plan, else you’d all be dead. The Doctor notices that Navi’s gun has is able to randomly modulate its energy blasts, meaning that whatever’s out there could adapt to her attacks. This feels like a fundamental misunderstanding of how evolution works but it’s not worth the effort.

The vehicle crashes having fallen into a Dreg trap. The vehicle is completely knackered, and when the sun comes out, they’ll all suffer from solar blistering. There’s a service tunnel where they might survive if they make it there, but Vilma decides to act like a moron with no perspective and start calling for Benni, leading the Dregs right to them.

And may I say, my god are these the most generic looking monsters I’ve ever seen. They head back to the truck to wait it out. They begin to use Benni to get to Vilma. He first makes his proposal, then asks for one of them to kill him. Dude, what was the point in proposing if that was going to be your next line? Usually the proposal would come and the death would be unexpected, hence the tragedy.

The next battle claims another 3 lives, including Hyph3n and Benni (also the security guard who’s name I hadn’t mentioned) Vana is injured but concedes to help the others through the tunnels and get back to the hotel. There’s a maintenance teleport that could get one of them back to the Hotel but before any of them can use it, Bella pulls a gun on them.

Yup, turns out she was the saboteur and the reason… Her mother didn’t pay her attention, even when she had to care for her father. OK, there’s no doubt Vana is amoral, but what Bella has done, which has resulted in the deaths of now at least a dozen people, it’s sociopathic. But weirdly, this episode frames her as in the right, or at least that being money-grubbing and abandoning the family is the worse of the two actions.

Ryan tries to stop her but ends up teleported to the hotel with her, where she’s begun setting charges to blow up the hotel. She says she was hoping to do it when the hotel was abandoned but unless it goes out of business offering free all-inclusive stays to people who drink too much coffee, it never would be, and since the hotel is the only means of getting anyone off the planet, she’s essentially condemning everyone to death anyway.

There is another way back to the Hotel for the group, unfortunately it’s through a nest of Dregs. Vilma sacrifices herself to buy the others some time, and frankly she’d long since become a liability anyway, I can’t say that I’ll miss her. As they approach the Dreg nest, they come across a name for something written in Russian, that for some reason isn’t being psychically translated by the TARDIS. And yeah, Russian, Orphan 55 is a future version of Earth.

Gotta say I called this as soon as carbon levels in the atmosphere was mentioned. By the way, there are still trees in this CO2-rich environment and as we’ll find out in a bit, Dregs breathe in Carbon Dioxide and Breathe out Oxygen, and ethylenyl too, I’d imagine. Anyway, with all species living here giving oxygen, I imagine this problem will fix itself given time. (Thousands of years, maybe but still...)

Anyway, Yaz and Graham are soon clued in and have a lot of questions but because we have one chatty Doctor, her oxygen has gone orange. Of course, being a Time Lord (or whatever she actually is now), she can survive a bit of time without oxygen, a fact that’s by and large forgotten about in this episode. They quietly sneak through the Dreg’s nest but the Doctor begins taking a closer look at the Dregs for answers, finding that when one breathes out, her oxygen tank refills. 1 breath does not an oxygen rich environment make.

The Dregs begin to wake up, as Vana holds them off so the Doctor can escape. They meet with the others back at the hotel, but the Hotel is surrounded by Dregs and once again the ionic membrane is down. Their only hope is to rework the teleporter to get everyone home, but the need for power is still a problem. They can extract Cerillium3 from the Hotel’s systems but it would need to be transmuted into Cerillium4 by the Hopper Virus in order to provide enough power.

There’s a minor subplot going on in the background with Nevi and Silas. Nevi may be the maintenance guy but his son is somehow better than him. And here he has to accept that as only together are they able to get the power they need. The Dregs are swarming the place… seriously, showing that many in CG is just setup for disappointment, the Dregs are rarely on screen with the humans at all.

The Doctor tricks a Dreg leader and makes a point to speechify about the problems with Earth, whilst using their respective carbon balance to keep them both alive. There are a few tense moments but long story short, they make it out as the hotel explodes, including Mava who’s still alive.

To cap off the episode, we’re reminded this is only a possible future and then the Doctor starts addressing the audience directly. Here’s the problem with abject messaging, there’s no-one who doesn’t know about these problems, either they know and are doing nothing as a matter of choice, in denial in which case this won’t work or they’re actively trying to do things to change course. When you make people think about their actions through subtext you could alter their perspective on a situation, that can’t happen if you hand-hold. If you assume your audience are idiots, you can’t also expect them to change a situation that is far more complex than this episode gives it credit for. We already had the speech in the cell, this entire bit is unnecessary.

This episode has components that could make for a bona fide classic episode but wastes them on forcing in an unnecessary moral and trying to up the action. This setup was built for a base under-siege type story as the cast picked off one-by-one by monsters in the Hotel whilst the Doctor races to understand why. All whilst there’s potentially a saboteur among the group.

Bella is confusing to me; her actions are not mirrored by her personality. She is a sociopath with plans that far outweigh the wrong done to her. Forgive me if I’m not elated at the prospect that she actually might make up with her mother.

The idea of Orphan-55 being Earth isn’t necessary a bad idea, but it needed more world-building and context not just in the Doctor speechifying. And again, it’s not that the moral is bad it’s just presented in a way that presumes everyone watching is an idiot. Then again, more than 20,000 people rang Ofcom to complain about a dance routine on a talent show, maybe they’re more justified than I think.