Day 291 — October 18th 2021
Black Orchid Parts One and Two
Black Orchid — Part One
Well this has been the surprise sleeper hit of the season! As usual, going into a story not expect very much turns out to be the perfect way to enjoy Doctor Who, because I’ve absolutely loved this episode.
I think the thing which has stood out the most for me here is just how much fun everyone seems to be having. It’s a complete turn around from the way all the characters have been behaving since the start of the season, and it’s especially noticeable after the way everyone was snapping at each other in the last episode. Having decided that the new Doctor Who was a bit of an asshole for his behaviour towards Adric yesterday, here for the very first time he seems to genuinely like the people he’s travelling with, and they all seem to enjoy travelling together.
Even Tegan has has something of a personality transplant — where she had less than zero interest in seeing history in The Visitation, here she’s far more excited by the prospect, confirming that she’d like to stay and have a look around, and showing some genuine excitement in the idea that the TARDIS has landed in the 1920s; ‘I haven’t been born yet!’. Perhaps it’s the proximity to her own time which makes this feel more real to her, but I much prefer this approach and sort of wish this had been Tegan’s first exposure to history.
On that subject briefly, it’s a little unusual that Doctor Who’s concerned about the TARDIS bringing them back to Earth again so soon — it’s only the second time this incarnation has visited!
This being a Terrance Dudley script Tegan magically displays knowledge that feels out of place for her — in this case it’s that she recognises the name ‘George Cranleigh’ and knows of him as ‘the botanist and explorer’. In this instance, though, I sort of believe it. I can accept the idea that sixty years later his name is well-known enough for someone like Tegan to have heard it; perhaps she’s got an interest in exotic plants?
As with Dudley’s last script, he’s gone to great lengths here to give each of the companions a distinct personality, but it’s far more successful here than it was in Four to Doomsday. The regular’s arrival at the train station is the perfect example, with each of them getting in a good line which feels right for them;
Adric: ‘So what is a railway station?’
Doctor Who: ‘A place where one embarks and disembarks from compartments on wheels, drawn along these rails by a steam engine. Rarely on time’.
Nyssa: ‘What a very silly activity.’
Crucially those lines all made me smile, and that’s the other thing I’ve loved about this episode. It’s properly funny. I can’t remember the last time I chuckled my way through an episode of Doctor Who like this. I’ve made more notes for this episode than I have for any other in absolutely ages, and almost all of my notes are lines that I’ve laughed at. I could quote them all day, but I’ll spare you from that. It’s not only the dialogue which has made me laugh, either — the cricketing scenes are livened up immeasurably by occasional cutaways to Nyssa and Adric looking baffled by proceedings. My favourite comes in the shot where Tegan shouts ‘bravo’ — it’s the most I’ve ever liked any of these characters, and in a couple of instances it’s pretty much the first time I’ve liked them.
By the time we reach the party on the terrace of Cranleigh Hall and we get to see all three of the companions smiling and laughing — actually looking like they might be enjoying their time together — I was completely won over. This has been brilliant. Give me Tegan dancing the Charlseton over her complaining any day.
Even with her sunnier disposition, she still manages to get a couple of sarcastic jabs in at Doctor Who’s expense — including a return of one of my favourite gags from the last story, in which she refers to the TARDIS as ‘that crate’ — but it comes across far more like friends taking the piss here than genuinely bitter as they have in places before.
This feels like a real tonic in response to everything I disliked yesterday. 9/10.
Black Orchid — Part Two
Usually when I say that I think the perfect length for an Old Testament Doctor Who story is three episodes, it’s because it would cut out the padding and tighten the stories up. In the case of Black Orchid — our first two-part story in seven years — it’s because it would give the story more room to breathe, and make the beats of this second episode land much better. The biggest problem that this story has in its broadcast state is that there’s no room to explore anything, so revelations are simply sketched in when they should be proper story beats.
Take the disappearance of the TARDIS, for example. That should be the cliffhanger to the hypothetical Part Two of a three-part Black Orchid. Arrested and hopeless, Doctor Who realises that he has a way to prove to the police that he’s telling the truth about his identity. He takes them to the railway platform… and the TARDIS is gone! If we’re going totally pie-in-the-sky, I’d have a steam train come billowing past at that moment, too. Just for some added spectacle, you know.
As it is, we get the revelation that the TARDIS is missing and then in the very next scene a policeman says ‘Cor blimey, look, we’ve found a police box on the train platform’ and everyone gets on with the story. You sort of wonder what the point was of having it go missing if you’re not going to do anything with the idea.
Sadly that’s the case with several other story beats in this one. The fire in the house is so bad that there’s no way to get up the stairs… until they realise they’re running out of time and so Doctor Who just goes up them anyway. His racing to the roof is because he’s worried that Nyssa is in danger from George. ‘what will he do when he discovers he has the wrong girl?’ he asks, but when he gets to the roof the very first thing he does is tell George about the misidentification. And after all that it doesn’t matter; George hands Nyssa over without any fight or dilemma. Everything happens basically and quickly because there’s no time to explore anything deeper, and that’s a real shame because I could quite happily watch another 25 minutes of this.
There’s sadly a handful of other areas where this feels like a step down from Part One. The big thing is the location filming. On Part One it was, admittedly, a little overcast and grey which made the footage look a little washed-out. It could have benefitted hugely from having been filmed on the kind of day they had for Castrovalva’s filming, with gorgeous sunshine. Here, though, the weather’s properly turned and some of the outdoor scenes are so windswept you wonder if they’d have been better off cutting their losses and remounting in studio.
I know it sounds like I’m simply complaining now, having been so effusive about Part One, but I’m still going with a 7/10 for this one — it’s remained an enjoyable story to watch. A lot of that is down to the same things I loved in Part One, especially how much better the team is getting on here. When Nyssa and Tegan tease Adric about going back to the buffet for seconds, they all play the scene with a smirk, and the sense of joy is infectious.
We also get to add quite a few names to my list of ‘people who get to go inside the TARDIS during the Fifth Doctor Who’s era; Sir Robert, a police sergeant and an officer all get to look inside as another way of speeding up a part of the plot — clearing Doctor Who’s name — because there’s not time to do anything else. Seeing the TARDIS is enough to convince them that Doctor Who’s not mad, and they get a convenient phone call while in there to confirm that he wasn’t lying about his discovery of the other body either.
Interestingly, it’s Nyssa’s idea to show the TARDIS to the police… maybe she enjoyed having the android pop in yesterday? Oh, and I know the policeman’s reaction to the ‘bigger inside than out’ is ridiculous, as is his immediate ability to shake off the shock and get back to business, but I can’t help but finding it hilarious. Strike me pink!
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