One of NuWho's biggest issues for me is it's over-reliance on 45 minute episodes. These frequently suffer from being too packed with results in uncomfortably fast pacing, underdeveloped ideas and characters and rushed set-ups and conclusions. Only when the ideas in the episode are, at their base, very simple, do they work - Dalek is an excellent example, as the basic story is just that a Dalek is prisoner, it escapes and starts exterminating but what released it ends up being its downfall. What makes that episode so good is this exceptionally simple idea is added on with character development and emotional depth. Unfortunately, this basic idea is lost on so many NuWho writers who try to pack concepts and ideas that simply need more time to properly develop.
The point I'm trying to get at here is that stories of the 45 - 50 minutes length are generally unsuccessful because complex concepts cannot be shoehorned properly into a shorter length than they need. However, it should be noted that overcorrection is definitely not the way around this problem, as Black Orchid amply demonstrates - while NuWho's shocking fast pace is a problem, this story goes at the speed of a particularly idle snail, and who can blame it? There's so little plot to get through that it kind of has to in order to make up its running time in any meaningful way.
I really hate Black Orchid. In my initial 'Whoathon', I spent not one, but two blog posts during the Peter Davison era ranting about it, and I intend to change nothing with this one here. It's kind of baffling in its awfulness, but essentially its a bloated mess with barely anything resembling a plot - the entire premise rests on an annoying contrivance and the most important set piece in the story is the Doctor playing a game of sodding cricket, which goes on for a good five minutes, and intercuts with some really dreadful British upper class stereotypes commenting on what a cracking cricketer the Doctor is.
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| This is the lamest scene in Doctor Who history. |
Part One has five minutes (at most) of actual content - the rest is superflous nothing such as the aforementioned cricket game, a stupid fancy dress ball and the Doctor wandering around some dark passageways achieving precisely nothing. It's so staggeringly dull, and Part Two is not much of an improvement - the eventual resolution is stretched out and uninteresting and the entire thread of the Doctor being arrested could have been replaced by something actually helpful to the plot, like, I dunno, giving us any reason at all to actually care about the plight of the deformed brother.
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| The Doctor was desperately trying to find something more entertaining than what was on the screen. |
Most irritatingly is the bizarre fact that one of the main guest characters looks exactly like Nyssa. Writer Terence Dudley tried to justify this exceptionally transparent trick to avoid hiring an extra actor with some stupid 'The Parent Trap' style hijinks and has an exceptionally minor role in the resolution, but all it achieves is leaving the viewer wondering why Nyssa and Ann look the same. It was acceptable in The Massacre and The Enemy of the World as both times something interesting was done with it, but even then it was stretching the boundaries of believably a bit. We were willing to let it go there - here it's entirely pointless and feels like what it is - a cheap trick to avoid hiring another actor.
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| Maybe if all the supporting characters wear masks, we won't have to hire any guest actors! |
In addition to this, the story is littered with stupid shit - Tegan and Adric are almost entirely irrelevant to the plot, we're supposed to believe that the Doctor wanted to be a train driver as a kid (on an entirely different planet where from what we've seen of it, rail transport would serve little functional purpose), the Doctor's big idea to get himself off a murder charge is by claiming he's a time traveller and worst of all, that ACTUALLY WORKS. As well as all that, there's a distraction designed to pad the episode out every few minutes, and at the end the audience is left wondering what the bloody hell was achieved, apart from Nyssa learning the Charleston. Which is clearly a great basis for a Doctor Who story.
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| Adric was dismayed to find Southern Rail had cancelled his train home. |
This is really, really poor. These 2 episode mini stories of the Davison era were really not well advised - yeah some of the 6 parters were a bit padded, but I'd rather an extra capture and escape sequence rather than about 10 minutes of plot packed into 50 minutes of Doctor Who. I'd even rather the hour and a half of story packed into 45 minutes of NuWho over this, although that is admittedly a bit of a closer call. Particularly as nobody in this story made any Tumblr quotes. Thank heavens for small mercies.
Final Score: 1/10. One of my least favourite Classic Who stories. A wafer thin plot, some baffling moments, stupid contrivances and a general sense of very little gained or achieved marks this as one of the worst of the show's original run.
Next Episode: Carnival of Monsters
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