Orphan 55: Rank - 310

      Orphan 55

(Season 12, Dr 13, Graham Ryan and Yaz, 12/1/2020, producer/showrunner: Chris Chibnall, writer: Ed Hime, director: Lee Haven Jones)

Rank: 310

‘Things that might be found in a Dr Who vending machine: Sonic Screwdrivers, Jelly Babies, celery for detecting harmful gasses in the praxis spectrum, ice Lollies for Ice Warriors, Alpha Sigma Liquorice All-Sorts, Aztec Cocoa-Bars, Capri-Alpha Centauri drinks, Stovepipe Hats, a fez and a scarf’ 

 

There are so many layers to making a television programme that, generally speaking, someone will be on their game somewhere even if everything else is letting it down – there are plenty of examples, for instance, of the most hackneyed script actually looking quite good on screen (‘Tooth and Claw’ comes to mind), while the silliest looking stories can actually be quite deep and probing when you study them properly (or better still read the novelisation: ’Horns of Nimon’ is a case in point). Sometimes its behind the scenes obstacles like budget restraints, miscasting or production crises that cause a story to fail despite how hard everybody tries to make it good, up to and including throwing random kung-fu kicks into the action (‘Warriors Of The Deep’ had all three). And sometimes, if a story is really unlucky, it’s a mess because everyone drops the ball in turn. ‘Orphan 55’ is one of those stories. It’s a not that promising script that got messed around with and re-written until it ended up more like a parody of a proper Dr Who story, delivered by a production team who are pushed for time and money, by a cast who are woefully poor and uninterested in it, that ends up with nothing to say that can’t help preaching anyway. Forty-five minutes of poorly dressed people in green wigs and clown-like makeup being picked off one by one by monsters you want to speed up, without any senses of drama or tension in a ludicrous setting, ‘Orphan 55’ is what people who have never seen Dr Who and can’t imagine how it would look assume it must be like every week: plain daft. There are so many moments in this story that make you have your head in your hands it’s difficult to know what to single out first: the tired old ‘base under siege’ setting that takes place in a holiday spa of all things. The location that’s meant to look exotic and alien but just looks like any old spa on Earth, just with a few badly dressed aliens in the background. The virus that, usefully for the budget, hides in a vending machine. The makeup and costume design that looks as if it was created by a near-sighted toddler. The wretched dialogue that even the un-embarrassable Bradley Walsh has problems speaking. The hackneyed attempts at a love interest with the un-sexiest lines ever seen in the series (‘is that the worst chat up line ever?’ asks Bella after Ryan asks her what she knows about alien viruses and I can’t say I can think of many worse). The awful jokes that miss their target by a quadzillion miles (where Graham wears his speedos is not something we ought to be dwelling on). The mother-daughter spat that’s apparently more important than survival of an entire species. The doctor spouting even more scientific gobbledegook than normal without stopping to explain it to us at home. The gibberish about alien metals that are named but never explained. Ryan sucking his thumb in an attempt to suck out alien poison, that’s meant to be cute but just looks stupid. A rotten final twist that will be obvious to anyone whose ever seen ‘Planet Of The Apes’ (I won’t spoil it for you because, well, it’s the only reason anyone had to actually watch the episode but believe me, its not worth sitting through the half  episode you need – even that’s clumsily revealed midway through with a whopping great hint rather than at the end). A preachy final speech at the end that comes out of nowhere and takes a story like this which is so blunt it’s already not much of an allegory and hits us over the head with it.

But no: the part that’s gone into folklore due to a combination of horrific plotting dialogue and casting coming together, is Gia Re’s Vilma, who reacts to the sudden horrific death of Benny, her husband of forty-eight years, with all the passion of someone collecting bus numbers and later attacks the monster by shouting at it with all the passion of an OAP on a day outing. Other Dr Who stories have individual crimes worse than all of these. But this is a story where so little goes right that the large majority of things that go wrong have nowhere to hide. This story has bigger problems than a failed iombic membrane: the whole guts needed to be ripped out and started again, but in the need to get another episode out as part of a regularly running series everyone involved in this series had to patch things up, with re-writes that made things worse, acting that either over or underplayed to compensate for the flaws and direction that exaggerated all the worst features. Far from being an orphan there are too many people trying to take charge of this story to make it work and none of this helicopter parenting is helping what was always going to be a flimsy minor B-movie kind of a story.

Could this tale ever have worked? Well maybe, actually. This story is closest in feel and setting to 4^th Dr story ‘The Leisure Hive’, another spa setting that had aliens playing odd-looking sports in funny coloured clothes and a sinister menace lurking under the surface. The original script apparently had much more of this going on, sinister things lurking in the darkness just out of sight while humans were walking about assuming its like paradise. There’s a neat ‘Robots Of Death’ style starting point that the (mostly rich) people who were expecting luxury and pampering from subjugated people end up running for their lives in fear instead, because animal life doesn’t care about where you think you are in the food chain. We should have had more of this set-up instead of just having the alien menace arrive so early and so clumsily. We’ve had other stories, generally strong ones, where we get to know a planet of people and care for them, only to watch the tension rise as they’re picked off one by one. The real trouble there is that none of these characters seem ‘real’, so there’s no jeopardy. It’s all very cute giving aliens silly names like ‘Hyph3n’ which, for all we know, is exactly what the parents of the whatever-century-this-is (we never find out) are naming their children, but in the 21^st century that’s just shorthand for ‘wacky alien that’s made up’. The same goes for the green hair: that’s what children use when play-acting Dr Who, not when adults are making it with a proper big budget. It takes more than just giving someone a green wig and a silly name to make them ‘alien’ – there’s no sense of where anyone in this story comes from or how they ended up on this planet.

The trouble is writer Ed Hime, with Chris Chibnall breathing down his neck waiting for a re-write, has run out of time for detail with so much plot and running down corridors and there’s no time for subtlety so he tries to paint relationships in with big broad strokes in a few scenes and that’s a tough job to pull off (Russell T Davies can do it in his sleep but few other writers can). We have a lot of characters in this story and they can’t all have long slow character-driven scenes leading to a big climax, so what should be big horrific life-scarring moments end up being a couple of lines of dialogue and nothing else. Vilma and Benny have a horrific time of it in this story, they’ve been married all that time and they thought they were having a celebratory holiday after a lifetime of toil and trouble, the karmic reward after a lifetime of struggle. The moment they’re separated and you hear him over the intercom pleading to be killed after being infected, making a mockery of all those years of hard work and employment when they could have spent more time together, ought to be one of the most horrific things this series can do to anyone, but because it’s so quick (and, it has to be said, appallingly acted), with a marriage proposal followed by a plea for slaughter delivered as a joke (even though it couldn’t be told in a more upsetting way) this scene is one of the punchlines of modern Who, a scene everyone laughs at. You suspect that Benni must really hate Vilma to be this cruel to her, asking for her hand in marriage she’s clearly waited for before adding the detail he’s alien food. And we don’t feel that sympathetic to her in this awful predicament because, well, we pretty much hater her too. Just as bad is the over-exaggerated huffing and puffing of the Kane-Bella mother-daughter relationship, where they’ve grown up estranged from each other but meet up at just the wrong time when they’re running for their lives: it seems unlikely, no matter how scarring, that it’s the sort of thing that would get brought up immediately during a bit of clumsy flirting with Ryan or that a lifetime of hurt and rage and anger can dissolve just because there’s a monster playing hungry hippos with them down a tunnel. There’s no good reason for Bella to keep quiet that she’s Kane’s daughter Trixiebell only to reveal it at that moment, except the script needs her to reveal it sometime (and why is she so mad the mum who hasn’t seen her since she was a baby doesn’t recognise her? She’s done her best to be different to her in every way, so if anything its testament to how good she was at that). Even the detail of Graham randomly winning a free holiday in a spa that just happens to be the one over-run with monsters at the exact same moment they break free is one of those unlikely things that only happens in stories, usually in books by Roald Dahl. Dr Who, at its best, is an authentic portrayal about how the future might turn out to be (except for the few occasions where its lovingly re-creating the past in accurate detail). This is just a story that knows it’s just a story and everything feels fake.

The story could still have got round that problem had it looked amazing and storybooklike, if this had been an exotic spa full of impossible looking gadgets and glorious alien scenery to distract us from the plotholes and the dialogue. Other stories have done that too. Instead its about as interesting as going down to the Spa to do your shopping the way you have every week for the past forty-eight years. We keep being told how gorgeous this planet is but it looks like a dump, one of the most unashamedly penny-pinching quarries seen in the series, without even a computer-generated pink sky to look at. It’s hard to believe than any company would have built a tranquil holiday spa here with the whole universe to choose from and even the hint that this is one of those low budget chain places that spring up everywhere makes no sense: if you can build on any uninhabited rock and terraform it, surely you’d choose a prettier one than this? The views are the big selling point. You’d at least choose a bit of the planet that hadn’t been directly hit by atomic bombs, surely. When Yaz says ‘this place has everything’ and Vilma says ‘its gorgeous Benni’, you wonder if they should have gone to the planet Specsaverus next door instead. Oh and then there’s The Auditoria de Tenerife: they actually sent a film crew all the way out to shoot what could have just been added in post production and then unconvincingly blow it up so that it looks like a model anyway. This isn’t ‘Fire Of Pompeii’ that had to be filmed in the right place or it would look awful, or ‘City Of Death’ that makes good use of its location shots to tell a different story: it’s just a quirky building in the background of some shots. No wonder they had to save money on the rest of the story. In all its 58 years Dr Who never looked as cheap as this, even in the days when it was made for practically nothing. This is the third story in this particular series, even allowing for inflation and money being spent elsewhere, surely the budget hadn’t run out this quickly?  How wrong then: a Dr Who story that’s sort-of about the dangers of capitalism that suffers so badly from penny-pinching and wasting it in all the worst places.

The view is all this place has going for it. It gets worse when the spa is revealed to be a ‘fake’ simulation: if it’s been set up to fool people then why doesn’t it look prettier than this? We could have had a great ‘Keys Of Marinus’ style contrast between what people think it looks like and what it actually is, but instead it’s a detail that gets lost in the plot somewhere. The story would have made more sense if they’d turned it into a capitalist protest where everyone is grumbling about being fooled by the lights of a pretty brochure and have wasted the few credits they have left on a story and a lie, but instead it ends up an ecological protest about the damage we’re doing to this planet. There are a lot of worthy environmental messages in Dr Who, but they’re generally done with more care than this – everyone seems to think that the Doctor’s ranting speech at the end of the episode, about how we should take care of our Earth before it turns into an uninhabitable rock, is the whole point of the story, but it isn’t. This is a planet that’s been hit by a nuclear war: that wasn’t caused by climate change, for all the talk of ‘mass migration and collapse of the food chain and more’, something else must have happened here (if it was a nuclear war we were specifically told was fought over food shortages caused by drought, that would have been something). And if this planet has been abandoned for hundreds of years then surely with mankind out the way no longer pumping harmful things into the atmosphere nature would have fought back by now, I mean trees can grow in London overnight when asked (no seriously: see ‘Forest Of the Night’). They try to mirror this ending with the early scenes where the spa pumps carbon dioxide produced by humans back outside and oxygen is pumped in (the aliens feeding off it ‘like a really angry tree’), but this is only more confusing: if this is all fake and nature had died off too, where is the oxygen coming from to keep the humans alive? A machine? In which case shouldn’t that be the plot point, that mankind’s been messing around with nature again? And if these are creatures who feed off carbon dioxide and are allergic to oxygen, then shouldn’t they have wiped out the humans en masse rather than letting them run away and picking them off one by one? They’re powerful enough, except then this story would be over in the first scene so the script can’t do that. There’s a scene where its revealed the fake-cation is a byproduct of a company whose really interested in selling the planet, not the happiness of the holidaymakers. But surely this would only work if you never actually saw what you were buying, like one of those awful timeshare schemes, trying to get you to part with your hard earned cash on a holiday villa you never actually visit before it’s too late; this lot of holidaymakers are oddly pleased to be there, up to and past the point where they keep being eaten. Surely you’d want to fool them better than this  or better still make excuses why they can’t come?

The final speech makes a lot of good points, that ‘mankind is squabbling over the washing up while the house burns down’, with the threat that this ending could be ours one day if we don’t pull our socks up. But who is the doctor telling this to in the safety of the Tardis? Her companions aren’t the ones who caused the problem, they know all this already after spending all ay running for their lives. The Doctor would have been better travelling back in time to the Orphan 55 business meeting and ticking them off, undoing centuries of poor decisions with one carefully timed rant, showing why things have to change and using her sonic to turn them into primords in suits or something and give us all a break. But no, in other stories the 13^th Dr is oddly pro big business and sees them as the solution as much as the cause, so instead she lectures at us at home. We’re ordinary viewers. More than that we’re ordinary Dr Who viewers, we know all this stuff, we agree with it – heck anyone with a video or DVD of ‘The Green Death’ handy has been saying this stuff for years, long before the rest of the world caught up. If we could have done something on our own by now, believe me we would have done. But what can we do? Recycling and writing stiff letters to our MP doesn’t seem like enough in this context somehow. This story should be lecturing businessmen and politicians about doing the right thing with our support, not us, it should be making us go out and protest, not sit at home feeling guilty– it’s a sad fact that, as with most Chris Chibnall era stories, you end up feeing guilty and made to feel you did something wrong, even when you agree with the point the story is making, without the feeling of hope and possibly solutions you get from other eras of the show. If I wanted to feel hopeless I’d just turn over and watch the news, not watch the one programme that makes me hopeful about the future.

‘Orphan 55’ wouldn’t be the first Dr Who story scuppered by unbelievable supporting characters and ugly looking location filming. But it is one of the few that can’t distract us with decent scenes for the regulars. Dr 13 is at her rudest in this story, bossing people around without earning their trust first and barking orders like the worst UNIT soldiers. Even when she’s talking to herself she’s grumpy, barking ‘shut up!’ to the alarm system. She tells the room ‘with a crayon and the right accelerator particles I could create you from scratch’ but the most she does in this story is seal people off so the monsters can’t get in and look the other way when bombs are used – a chimpanzee flicking levers at random might have got there quicker. Worse than that, she chooses now of all times to act as if things are hopeless, just when morale is at an all time low and people need to pull together to survive. Top marks for honesty doctor, and it wouldn’t be the first person I’ve been on holiday with who got their kicks out of complaining how bad everything is, but there’s a time and a place (this is not the most socially savvy of Doctors, which ought to make us sympathetic to her, but at times she’s just a right git). Graham’s only plot function is to deliver bad jokes  even at times he shouldn’t be: that tends to be what Graham does when he’s scared (‘the worse the situation the worse your jokes get’ as Sarah Jane once aid to the 4th Dr), but that plot point is wasted by the fact that Graham appears to be having the time of his life for most of it. Much of the plot revolves around Ryan and his holiday romance, which is a problem because while Ryan was never the most scintillating or charismatic of companions and he chooses this story to be as hopeless and pitiable as we’ve ever seen him. Again, with a few tweaks that could have worked too – had Bella been the mothering maternal type – but she isn’t, she’s tough as nails, bitten and angry, with a home-made bomb in her back pocket and she’s itching to use it on somebody. She’s been through the school of hard knocks the hard way and has a feeling of urgency to make her mark, she’s not going to get distracted by an overgrown kid who keeps making the most basic of errors. She’s the last person to find a random stranger sucking his thumb because its just been bitten by an alien vending machine virus cute, nor his floundering attempts to talk to her as if he’s never been around a girl the same age before. Ryan, equally, is so laidback it seems hard to think he’d fall in love with anyone on first meeting, never mind get this tongue-tied around her and Bella doesn’t seem like his natural ‘type’ either: she’s way too high maintenance. Ryan’s the sort of person who can travel through space and time and then go back home without anything he’s seen affecting him whatsoever and pig out on the sofa: he’s not the sort to be led astray by passion and caught up in a person whose the whirlwind to his casual breeze. Most cringeworthy line ‘What have you two been bonding over Ryan?’ ‘We both have dead parents’. That’s it in a nutshell: they don’t belong together these two, not in this planet, not in this century, not ever and no two people would have this conversation on a first meeting, all the more so for the fact its interrupted by monsters, and if they did that’s not the sort of thing they would keep to themselves not say out loud to their mates after, even as an unfunny joke. Yaz gets the best of all three companions this week by the way. She barely says a word all episode. 

So is everything bad then? Well, despite their name and the fact there’s such a long delay seeing them on screen The Dregs are actually pretty good. They’re what The Drashigs from ‘Carnival Of Monsters’ would look like with a new-Who budget, only white, growly, toothy, with a hint of ‘The Silence’. It’s been a while since we had a feral, primal monster in Dr Who that didn’t talk and while it doesn’t make for the deepest bit of moral philosophising telly there’s something to be said for a relentless creature you can’t bargain with.  In a story that’s about mankind manipulating its environment and making thing worse for animals, the Dregs work well as an animalistic hunter, standing out against the surprisingly talky villains of other 13^th Dr stories. The problem is, though, the Doctor still lectures it as if it understand her point of view, asking it to ‘be smarter’. Why should it? This is a creature who exists and is trying to stop humans polluting ‘their’ planet with oxygen. If the rest of the story is about how mankind should leave nature well alone to do its stuff, why should that be any different for the Dregs? I mean, you wouldn’t want to invite them round for dinner, but they’re not cruel or sadistic: if you leave them in peace and stay the hell away they aren’t going to come after you with a spaceship and invade you – they’re just doing they’re own thing leading their own life. Honestly, for all the ecological talk at the end, the Doctor has a nerve helping to wipe them out just to save her own scrawny life and those of her companions, down to speeding up the bomb count with her sonic: the Dregs are only doing what comes natural and, whether fooled or not, the humans are on what’s their terf now. They should be a protected species under the Intergalactic RSPCA (The Roaring Species Preservation Company…Aaaaagh!) Partly because of their power, but mostly because of how irritating the humans are, you’ll be rooting for them by the end of the story like never before. The Dregs are a little bit ‘Shalka’ like too, their senses using noise rather than sight or smell like most people, which could have been interesting given that the Shalka only appeared in an animation. Had this been a story where everyone was hiding quietly, trying to save the world in a whisper, it could have worked. But no, people don’t talk in this story, they declaim at each other.

So, recycling then, its good for the planet, though it’s awful for scripts. There isn’t much that’s original in ‘Oprhan 55’ and what there is tends to be because other writers in other eras rejected ideas like this for being too awful to ever work. This is not, though, any one person’s fault. Everyone has bad days in a conveyor belt medium like television, ‘orphan 55’ is just unlucky in that everyone has a bad one at the same time. There are far worse Dr Who scripts than this one out there. The germ of the idea, a killer spa on a planet that went wrong because mankind treated the whole place as his own personal luxury toy and ignored the problems while enjoying creature comforts, is strong enough to drive most scripts. It’s the individual scenes that are so clumsy, the characters so unlikeable and the casting doesn’t do even the slight promise in the script any favours, while there’s no interesting scenery to divert your attention. Usually in this series there will be something to grab hold of, some bit of emotion, some scene that really hits home that rescues everything else, some character, some feeling this show gives you. There’s not one line that properly lands and the closest we get is an okay monster. At its best Dr Who is a show that can make profound comments on society, throw a light on what it means to be human and show actors grappling with multiple facets of emotion. This, however, is a show about a monster trapped in a vending machine and who lives under the floor that makes one-dimensional characters writhe around while people with un-pronouncable names and green hair run around blowing things up Then, at the end of sitting through one of the biggest waste of resources in the show’s history, and a rare story that doesn’t work as either morality tale or a diverting bit of escapism, money that could have been spent on something that really did add a drop of healing water to the bucket of problems the Earth is facing, we get lectured as if we’ve done something wrong. We didn’t do something wrong Dr Who, you did, you wasted money on this fiasco, not us. As holiday-related experiences go this one is on a par with Davros showing you his holiday photos of quarries in the British isles. O stars on intergalactic trip advisor. Horrid.  

POSITIVES+Erm…erm…err…umm…Aren’t the opening titles pretty this year? There’s a sort of pink mist from which the logo arrives, a subtle twist on the usual space and time corridors of other Doctors.

NEGATIVES - Bad timing I know, which couldn’t be avoided, but the opening days of a pandemic that attacks the nervous system and is causing fright amongst the nations children and existential dilemmas like never before is not the best time to have an alien virus that invades the nervous system and runs along it. They could and should have edited these scenes out, especially as the vending machine virus ends up having nothing to do with the actual plot. It would have saved us one of the all time worst comedy scenes in Who too, as Ryan sucks his thumb and the Doctor forgets to tell him he can stop now.

BEST QUOTE: Graham on Ryan ‘It ain’t the aliens that are going to kill me, it’s worrying about you!’