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Orphan 55 is the third episode of Doctor Who Series 12, and sees The Doctor and the Scooby Doo gang get teleported to a free holiday at Tranquility Spa.
Naturally, things are going to go tits up, starting with getting Ryan a virus from a vending machine…
Early on, it was quite amusing to see The Doctor cure his virus by telling Ryan to carry out all manner of actions including sucking his thumb.
But there’s a problem: there’s lots of monsters with great big teeth, and I’m not just talking about Ryan’s overbite!
Turns out, they built the hotel in on a planet (hence, the titular Orphan 55) and they shouldn’t have done. There’s not the right balance of O2 and CO2, but if they can make enough cash, they can terraform it back to health. In the meantime, the only thing that survives happily is the Dregs – those things that attack everyone… and when we do see the monsters, they’re just humans in crap rubber suits, with everyone running around a quarry.
The hotel guests were getting bumped off one by one in what’s like a lame rip-off of Jurassic Park, but then Jodie Whittaker‘s first series was mostly a series of movie rip-offs, too.
There was a wolf-faced woman called Hyph3n, Laura Fraser played the token angry Scot – instead of it being the Doctor, Bradley Walsh plays himself – at once point, walking into an invisible barrier, reminding me of the same thing in Time Bandits, and at the end, they just zoomed back into the TARDIS, and Ryan not getting a snifter of a chance of Bella’s poontang!
And there was one link between two characters which I won’t spoil, not in this case because I don’t want to give spoilers, but because I completely failed to care about it.
Oh, and what a joke the reason behind the Dregs was!
However, kudos to Poetsoup, who reminded me who Hyph3n looked like! I knew there was something there, but couldn’t quite place the character.
#DoctorWho straight up mining Barf’s home planet this episode. Wow. pic.twitter.com/lSdz7XTaXX
— Sean (@poetsoup) January 12, 2020
Orphan 55 is available on the BBC iPlayer.
You can pre-order this series on Blu-ray and DVD, ahead of its release on March 16th.
Out the same day, is the Limited Edition Blu-ray Steelbook.
Score: 0/10
Director: Lee Haven Jones
Producer: Nikki Wilson
Writer: Ed Hime
Cast:
The Doctor: Jodie Whittaker
Graham O’Brien: Bradley Walsh
Ryan Sinclair: Tosin Cole
Yasmin Khan: Mandip Gill
Kane: Laura Fraser
Nevi: James Buckley
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.