Doctor Who – Orphan 55 Review

The Twelfth Series moves into horror territory with its third episode.

The Doctor and her companions get teleported to an advanced resort for a two-week spa break. But whenever The Doctor arrives in a new location trouble isn’t far behind and The Doctor soon discovers the resort is infested with monsters.

“Orphan 55” has quickly earned a reputation for being one of the worst episodes in the modern era. It has a 47% score on Rotten Tomatoes and a 4.1 rating on IMDB. “Orphan 55” is indicative of the issues blighting the Chibnall-era: the stink of mediocrity. Many episodes have suffered from boring storytelling.

To be fair to “Orphan 55” the set-up and ideas were solid: there were no stupid concepts like the Moon being a giant egg or trees suddenly growing around Earth to protect the planet from a solar flare. The idea of people building on alien planet and disturbing the local wildlife is a standard one in sci-fi. It shows humanity arrogance and hubris. Doctor Who has often used this type of storyline.

“Orphan 55’s” lifts from the Alien films, particularly Aliens. The monsters, called Dregs were lifeforms that had adapted to living in a toxic environment, were difficult to kill, and even have teeth like the Xenomorphs. The plot of the human villain was to terraform the planet and make a lot of money. In Aliens, Weyland-Yutani were terraforming LV-426 and disturbed the Xenomorphs, leading to the death of a whole colony.

The idea of orphan planets was an interesting one. The Doctor describes them as planets that were unable to substance life, resulting in the elite to abandon the planet and everyone else was left to die. But in Orphan 55’s case some people didn’t die, they were just horribly mutated. This led to the twist in the episode: Orphan 55 was actually Earth.

Whilst “Orphan 55” does have decent ideas the episode was bogged down by two major problems: production values and the portrayal of The Doctor. The production values were the lesser of the issues. The episode was filmed in Tenerife, taking advantage of land around Mount Teide. But everything else looked cheap. The monster costumes were unconvincing, and the make-up and hair were laughable. There was a character who was meant to be a cat-human hybrid but it looked like the actress was told she had to create a cat costume in five minutes and give a cheap tail, whilst James Buckley and Lewin Lloyd were forced to wear bad green wigs. It’s even more shameful because Series 11 invested heavily in the special effects and the cat make-up in the second and third series were a lot more impressive. It looks like the show has reverted back to the ‘70s.

Some audience members can overlook poor effects because story and characters are the most important aspects. The characterisation of The Doctor was where the episode fell the hardest. In the episode, The Doctor does a Vulcan mind-meld with one of The Dregs and discovers they use to be humans. Past iterations of The Doctor would have had sympathy for the creatures after this revelation and would have tried to reason with them. The Thirteenth Doctor has no problem threatening to kill The Dregs and doesn’t have any issues seeing The Dregs die in a fiery manner. The Doctor may as well go around with an Uzi.

At the end of the episode, The Doctor had a message that humanity has a choice, corrects its behaviour now to save the planet, or continue down the route and face destruction. The Doctor was telling her companions, but she was really speaking to the audience. It is a message that a lot of people would agree with. But she also tells her companions that this future is only a potential future and there was still time to stop these events happened. But this goes against the lore of the show where The Doctor doesn’t interfere with history and timeline run a certain course. By this episode’s logic, The Doctor may as well go back to 1919 to warn people about Hitler and Stalin.

“Orphan 55” continues with the issues that the Chibnall era has suffered from poor execution of decent ideas and more focused on spreading messages than entertaining audiences.