Orphan 55 by Ed Hime

The message alone is not enough.

The best thing you can say about Orphan 55 is that its an episode that ostensibly has its heart in the right place. Doctor Who has been doing environmental politics since at least the mid 1970s and it feels only fitting that the message that we live on a planet that is rabidly starting to boil is delivered with a lot more urgency and a lot less subtlety than it was back then. The broadcasting of this episode coincides quite effectively with the wildfires currently engulfing large parts of Australia. The problem is that before it gets to that final message, Orphan 55 fails at almost every basic element of good storytelling.

For a start, its narrative is utterly incoherent. It picks up ideas and drops them again a few moments later with casual disinterest. Everything is subsumed beneath the greater need of getting your characters from one location to another so they can fulfill the demands of the plot and discover the twists when they need to.

The major issue with structuring a story like this is that it requires your characters to behave like idiots. Taking the entire cast on a suicidal mission to rescue one old man. Bella deciding to kill lots of people because she's got abandonment issues. Nobody in the right mind would think any of this was a good idea. They're only doing it because the narrative demands that they do (see Season 8 of Game of Thrones if you want to understand more about what this looks like).

The guest characters are similarly under baked. Bella and Kane suffer the worst from this. The revelation that Kane is Bella's mother and abandoned her is supposed to carry emotional heft. But these characters never feel like more than thinly drawn sketches. I defy anyone that they reacted to that revelation with anything more than a shrug. Nevi and Sylas suffer from the same problem. I quite like the idea that the kid is actually the one with the skills to save everyone (particularly if you view it as a metaphor for how it's the younger generation that have the ability to actually deal with climate change even while no one in authority is listening to them), but it's done in another blink and you'll miss it moment. The characters never get the attention their relationship deserves, which is a great shame. I complained about Spyfall under-using Lenny Henry, and they've done it again here with James Buckley.

The twist that Orphan 55 is actually Earth is neat. It's directly stolen from the Colin Baker era story The Mysterious Planet, even down to an underground station sign being what gives the game away, but Doctor Who has a noble tradition of ripping off its own ideas. The Dregs, which are a good design well executed, are actually the future version of humans. The key difference between those two stories is that the former gave us some perspective on what this all meant through Peri's reaction to her home now being an uninhabitable wasteland, while here the revelation is smothered beneath another set piece action sequence with the Dregs.

After the resolution, the main characters get delivered back to the TARDIS so that the Doctor can (pretty much) turn to the camera and warn us about the catastrophe we've just witnessed. It's delivered with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer to the face. That in itself, I don't have a problem with. If there was ever a need for non-subtle calls to action about the environmental catastrophe unfolding around us, it's now. But the episode hasn't earned it. Its theme aren't developed enough. We're never given the space to reflect on what it means for Earth to have become a poisoned wasteland because the story is still too busy vomiting new set pieces and ideas at us. There's a lot to be said for weaving themes throughout the structure of a story, rather than just having someone unilaterally declare them at the end.

I hesitate to say this should have been two-parter, because then you're just asking for 45 minutes of pain to be extended to 90, but with a little room to breathe, this might have managed to form together into something slightly more coherent.

Random musings

• I vowed that the main section of the review would avoid talking about "BENNI!" but I can't resist bringing it up somewhere. Pity the poor actress who plays Vilma, the most unintentionally hilarious character in Doctor Who since...who knows when. We all breathed a sigh of relief when she was finally gobbled up by the Dregs.

• Speaking of Benni, I just don't get what was happening with the Dregs possessing him, or torturing him, or whatever it was. Were we even supposed to know what was going on? It feels like there's a scene missing that explains this. We can add that to the list of ideas this episode doesn't feel particularly interested in.

• "Give me crayons and half a container of spam and I could build you" is probably the only memorable line in this whole episode.

• Very little from the series arc here, but the Doctor's blunt reaction to Yaz saying she's in a "mardy" mood is a good character beat.

• If anyone ever tries to signal romantic attachment to me by sucking their thumb, I'm ending the date right there.

Verdict

According to the online reviewer database IMDb, Orphan 55 is the worst episode of post-2005 Doctor Who. Putting aside the fact that the IMDb rating system is basically broken for the Thirteenth Doctor's stories (even before they're broadcast, the site is flooded with tedious Not My Doctor types), this feels like an overreaction. Yes, the episode fails on almost every conceivable level. But it's not actively worse than say The Battle of Ranskoor av Kolos because I can at least see what this episode is trying to accomplish and can imagine a world where it kind of works. In contrast, there's no world in which the ideas in the Series 11 finale are anything approaching interesting. It feels a lot like damning the episode with faint praise when the nicest thing you can say is that it had potential, but there we are. It had potential.

Rating

4/10