Thread by @ellardent

Let’s do some #tweetnotes on #DoctorWho: Orphan 55.

MUTE FOR SPOILERS

In short: Some nice details tries, and partly manages, to make new a few old ideas new, but forced beats, awkward reveals and a lot of unclear storytelling leaves the key message sadly bungled.

DW-O55: Let’s start at the ending. Why has that big ‘global warming’ speech wound everyone up so much, when we generally all agree with it?

It’s because this wasn’t a topic on our minds when we got there. It didn’t seem to be *about* climate change until the speech. #tweetnotes

DW-O55: This is different from whether it was *trying* to be.

In retrospect, the resort in a waste land was totally on theme. We make artificial oases in the desert, slap on sun cream and don’t think about it.

Though we never saw much resort stuff to get that. #tweetnotes

DW-O55: Meanwhile there’s stories about past generations and the kids dealing with their legacy - abandoned, bequeathed, not listened to…it’s all sort of in there.

So why isn’t it landing?
#tweetnotes

DW-O55: Mostly it’s because all those human stories are fumbled - they don’t quite do what they mean to.

Was the kid being ignored by his mechanic dad? Not at the start, there they seemed to be a real team. Later it was stated and it felt anomalous. #tweetnotes

DW-O55: And I’m honestly not sure how to think about the resort owner.

First off she read as ‘security chief’ not ‘owner’, and when that finally became clear she seemed focused on rescue and survival, not on profit and self-preservation. #tweetnotes

DW-O55: Meanwhile her daughter’s shown up to blow the place up. So which of these codes as the problem, related to climate change, and which is the hope?

It’s nether right?

And while it’s happening, *neither* makes you think about ‘a world taken for granted’. #tweetnotes

DW-O55: You can see how, writing this, it all feels on-point if you know the end scene is coming.

But what it doesn’t do is communicate that theme until you know what it is. So you get to the end and go “I wasn’t thinking about global warming - should I have been?’ #tweetnotes

DW-O55: That final scene feels like the show telling you off for missing the point.

Very unlikely that audiences will warm to that. Because maybe the fault isn’t that I wasn’t listening, it’s that you weren’t communicating things well enough.

Or bit of both.
#tweetnotes

DW-O55: Because what you *do* think about is all the forced story beats it’s taken to make this runaround plot happen.

The weird coincidental bad luck of the vending machine creatures who both prevent teleporting away *and* are the reason it ends up possible. #tweetnotes

DW-O55: The confusing way we end up all going off in a van; crashing on a rock and calling it ‘a trap’; the weirdest off-camera death ever; the sheer confusing nature of the owner; the logic that plants are dead but breathing like plants saved humans. #tweetnotes

DW-O55: The clunky, forced nature of why we go to places - movements technically explained in dialogue but are never felt, which climax with ‘go back to where we started’ - and the confusion over characterisation obscuring the subtext that’s trying to get noticed. #tweetnotes

DW-O55: Now sure, you shouldn’t watch a thing looking for holes to pick. (And despite what you mat think, I don’t.)

But if you fall down a hole, you have to climb out before the show has you in its grip again. #tweetnotes

DW-O55: Biggest omission for me: there’s no ‘mayor from Jaws’. The person who cares about profit, and avoiding blame, missing the human cost.

The people this ep is criticising are absent from the narrative. Instead we have a woman trying to build a small business. #tweetnotes

DW-O55: The owner is dumped into the Mayor role - bossing people around, not caring to be liked - and the episode criticises her for making an oasis on a wasteland, cos then she’ll own…more wasteland.

But she’s just trying to make something solid for her kid. #tweetnotes

DW-O55: It’s hard to make running around - trying to even make sense of the characters - speak to the job of changing the planet.

Learning that our bad choices, ignoring the impending doom, are going to destroy so much isn’t the story.

But we’re told it’s the moral.
#tweetnotes

DW-O55: So while “I always postponed proposing and now we’re dying” totally codes to the theme, it didn’t put the theme in your head. #tweetnotes

DW-O55: You know how Knives Out manages to be a detective story and thriller…but somehow you always knew it was about privilege? A class and cultural divide was articulated on screen, through who the characters were, even as we found clues and ducked cops?

That. #tweetnotes

DW-O55: The problem isn’t that last speech. It’s on the nose, but the nose is a fine enough place for it.

It’s that when you got to it, it felt like a jump. The dead Earth was in the story, but the episode wasn’t about the risks of complacency and profit. #tweetnotes

DW-O55: (If it was about profit - and one big line tried to hammer it there - then the person the episode personifies for that is a young small business woman who’s trying to leave her daughter something. You see the contradictions there.) #tweetnotes

DW-O55: Even the finale is about how if you exploit the creature resources on a world, you can obtain fuel to provide your salvation.

That’s…very much not ‘stop burning fossil fuels’! #tweetnotes

DW-O55: Okay, let’s talk about GOOD THINGS.

The angle of “generations listening to each other” really almost works, and creates nice bits. All the set-ups are mishandled, but still.

There’s much better dialogue than lately.

Orphan 55 is a brilliant name and title. #tweetnotes

DW-O55: And there are some nice twinkles. Yaz teasing Ryan. A medical oxygen tank keeping a man alive.

“Dregs” is a good name for what turn out to be the left behind ancestors of humanity, abandoned and forgotten. The dregs of human society.

No ‘Quazvakians’ here.
#tweetnotes

DW-O55: Less good is that once again Ryan gets infantilised - sucking his thumb no less! - which was a problem last season.

Yaz gets, like, five lines. Annoying a coup mid-proposal, showing up with the plot after everyone else got there. Not great. #tweetnotes

DW-O55: Btw, I thought this was a great point about how Yaz got used last year as explainer for the kids - it totally contradicts the idea that she’s seeking new thrills.

Each new thing she sees she equates it some banal Earth thing. #tweetnotes

https://twitter.com/rudolph_meadows/status/1218469849149722624

DW-O55: And the Doctor’s pretty good! Not just for being active, but for having things to play with the different characters.

Once again we split the cast up and the Doctor does more interesting things when she’s not talking to her companions. #tweetnotes

DW-O55: Arc stuff is welded on easily.

The Doctor has been “moody” Yaz says. Telling us something that isn’t dramatised - in fact the opening fights that, showing total playful Doctor Who fun.

“The Doctor can’t have fun, even on holiday” was right there. #tweetnotes

DW-O55: I think that big final speech meant to connect the Doctor’s feelings about a ruined Earth to her feelings about the blasted ruin of Gallifrey…but I don’t think that came across.

A shame, cos that was very much there for the taking, too.
#tweetnotes

DW-O55: So sure, the “resort gone bad” thing has been done in Doctor Who before.

And so has “this is actually the remains of Earth” deduced by tunnel signage.

There’s no rule against revisiting these things every few decades. That’s okay. #tweetnotes

DW-O55: To be obvious: Why does Russian writing mean Earth? We’ve seen plenty of far future English. Why wouldn’t it be something iconic, except to hide how it’s Planet of the Apes’ reveal?

(Note how Apes was ALL about how people factionalise, earning that ending.) #tweetnotes

DW-O55: And there’s some delight - as with this writer’s It Takes You Away - in the Who shape of it, like four old episodes done fast:
Ep 1: The resort, attack starts
Ep 2: Escape, van, deaths
Ep 3: The tunnels, reveals
Ep 4: The resort, escape
#tweetnotes

https://twitter.com/ellardent/status/1069951069051084801

DW-O55: But note how in It Takes You Away, each move felt organic.

To find out what’s going on of course you push forward - into the mirror though to the other side. That’s where the answers are, and thus solutions.

Here we have to shove them everywhere. #tweetnotes

DW-O55: But…

Design-wise, the Dregs don’t suggest the ruins of humanity. Not like zombies do. They don’t communicate the message aesthetically even if the dialogue insists they do.

They look like Weevils from Chibnall’s Torchwood. #tweetnotes

DW-O55: I even wondered if the reveal here was going to be a nod to that - Weevils revealed to be future humans thrown back through the rift to live on Earth in the past.

Thankfully even this show’s not daft enough to push hard on 12 year-old Torchwood continuity! #tweetnotes

DW-O55: So of course we have yet more body tech - nose clips for oxygen this time, at least they’re not called ‘donk-rings’ or something - but you never really worry about that. Not least because what, exactly, the Doctor needs to breathe is up for grabs. #tweetnotes

DW-O55: But the daftest thing was the Doctor explaining, at length, how breathing in and out works for the two species…to a rampaging, bitey, seemingly unthinking Dreg.

What was it meant to do? Say “Ah, yes, good point. I’ll back off’? #tweetnotes

DW-O55: The action was horribly unclear at times, I thought. Who was where, who was in and out of the van, or around to hear certain discussions. Feels very messed about in the edit. #tweetnotes

DW-O55: The run of us stuck in the van, the old guy outside, close enough to talk to, then nowhere to be seen, then blown away somewhere nearby was *baffling* to me.

When was she with him to shoot him? Why don’t we see the body? Wouldn’t his partner want to, need to? #tweetnotes

DW-O55: So we’re two for two on episodes this series that tell you in a big speech what they’re about while doing stories that don’t really concur with the message.

But this got closer to doing it. And did it with better dialogue twinkle and a decent Doctor.

S’okay. #tweetnotes

DW-O55: I enjoyed Spyfall more, but it cleared a lower bar of ‘Master Romp’.

This aspired to much more, and fumbled the message - just as It Takes You Away began as a story about a fearful girl and ended up rehousing her with the abusive man who made her so fearful. #tweetnotes

DW-O55: So that was Orphan 55. As ever, how much anything bothers or delights you is down to you, but that’s what it looked like to me.

If you like the #tweetnotes, please consider tipping me for the work here: ko-fi.com/ellardent

Ooh, one last thing - over and over this incarnation of Doctor Who, the show, seems to be saying different things than it means.

Send me your examples. Here’s a few:

Orphan 55: “The way to avoid the climate crisis is to use natural resources to fuel your escape”.

The Tsuranga Conundrum: “Adoption is for cowards, being a good person means keeping your baby.”

Arachnids in the UK: ”Making animals die through prolonged suffocation is better than you, personally, having to use a gun.”

Kerblam!: “The main problem with exploitative corporations is the people who stand against them.“

Twice Upon a Time (ending): “If a woman ever becomes the Doctor, she will drive the TARDIS badly from her first push of a button. #tweetnotes

Resolution: “You can make up for being an absent father by having the right prop to hand at a useful moment.”

Spyfall: “Weaponising a person’s race against them can be valid and heroic in certain situations.”

Re. “Things a Doctor Who story didn’t mean to say” - someone just emailed me this anonymously and...blimey, ouch.