Yeah, no, I'm not buying that, and even if that was intentional, I'd think it was crap. Sigh.

Please tell me the person who came up with that interpretation is Black Dynamite!

Also, Crisis-related, justice for baby Sarah!

Yeah, that was nice. I wonder what else has changed.

So, looking at past adventures as they relate to Orphan 55. The Second Doctor had an adventure set at a holiday resort too, namely The Macra Terror. (This was a lost adventure, but the BBC released an animated version last year.) The Seventh Doctor too hit up a resort in Delta and the Bannermen. They're neither of them particularly well regarded, especially Delta; it's not a setting with which DW has had much success.

The Planet of the Apes reveal has also turned up in Doctor Who before. The Sixth Doctor started his final season with The Mysterious Planet, in which he and Peri discover that said planet is actually the Earth. (It's a somewhat more interesting reveal, in that the planet is nowhere near our solar system at the time. The twist also sets up a different mystery.) They even make the discovery from a sign in a railway station as in Orphan 55. It's not a terrific story but certainly not his worst, in part because Peri actually looks like she's enjoying herself and the Doctor treats her with somme affection.

Finally, there's the environmental theme. Two classic adventures did this to great effect. The Third Doctor era was produced by Barry Letts, who often brought his personal interests into the show (notably his interest in Buddhism). In the early 70s the big concern was pollution rather than global warming, so he co-wrote The Green Death (a.k.a. The One With The Maggots), where an oil company's efforts to increase the energy output of fossil fuels was creating massive quantities of chemical waste that created huge mutated maggots. It's my favourite Third Doctor adventure.

More relevant is The Curse of Fenric. This was the Seventh Doctor's penultimate adventure, and was something of a tour de force. It's stuffed with ideas, such as the Cold War, artificial intelligence and Norse myth, and manages to get them to work together. The cast is quite excellent, and very entertainingly includes Nicholas Parsons, host of Just a Minute, as a vicar. (I don't know if Just a Minute has made any impact in the States, but it's very funny.) It's my favourite Seventh Doctor story, which is a pretty common position to take. This adventure set in the dying days of World War II turns into a relentless horror story as a British army base is beset by vampires (or rather haemovores). The relevance here: these haemovores are in fact mutated humans from Earth's far future, the outcome of centuries of chemical pollution (which itself is being initiated right now as the villain's master plan).

Both of them, obviously, were much better than Orphan 55. In large part this is simply because they remembered what storytelling looks like. Fenric in particular has good characters and a somewhat complex, interesting plot that is conceivably about things. Green Death is exciting - the characters, outside the main cast, are underdeveloped but comprehensible - and also clearly about something. Green Death particularly is not overly subtle about its environmental message.

What I'm trying to decide here is if Orphan 55's preachiness is a fatal flaw, and I don't think it is - if done well. The Green Death was pretty much just as preachy in its own way, but not nearly as annoying. It too had speechifying, right in episode 1. Jo Grant has a go about the need to curb pollution. But: it arises from a story conflict. (She wants to protest the oil company, the Brigadier's been tasked with protecting it.) It's played for laughs - she gets lost in mixed metaphors and peters out. Even so, the entire adventure is saying "You know, she wasn't wrong". (Not to say there wasn't condescension, but it was by the Doctor towards Jo. As usual.) I'd add that beyond talk, there were characters trying to take practical steps towards making things better. (Developing protein-rich fungus to cut down on the need for meat, for instance.) That in itself raises an interesting parallel. Global Chemicals is all about the need for more oil energy. The Nuthutch is about fungus. Both oil and fungus are, in their way, products of decay, of putrefaction. The story is to some extent about what kind of decay - productive and part of nature, or destructive and a distortion of nature (giant maggots!).

Finally of course there's Oxygen from Season 10, which was an utterly over-the-top anti-capitalist rant, and a great episode to boot. Doctor Who is well capable of delivering political messages - including shoving 'em down people's throats on occasion - in quality adventures. Which makes the failures of Orphan 55 just that much more disappointing.

In conclusion, the Orphan 55 monsters should have been the haemovores, not because callbacks are cool, but because they were simply more interesting monsters than the Dregs.

(PS: I have seen Nikola Tesla's Night of Terror and am happy to report that it's a definite improvement on Orphan 55. It's an episode with little ambition but reasonable competency, and manages to be about something in a consistent fashion. So that's nice.)

ooh, I think there's going to be an actual Legends of Tomorrow episode on tonight - hope so!

Is anyone watching the Canaries pilot on Arrow tonight?

Nikla Tesla's Night of Terror: aside from being better than last week's, I think there was a lot more going on too. It's a bit sad that this is noteworthy, but it's nice to see an ep with some conceptual cohesion. Mirroring the central theme, the argument between Tesla and Edison, in the showdown between the Doctor and the Skithra smacks nicely of competent storytelling. Felt a bit Davies era. (As did the Skithra, which were a pretty obvious reskinning of the Racnoss from The Runaway Bride. Right down to the Queen's particular brand of scenery-chewing.)

By my count, this is Chibnall's fifth historical, and fourth celebrity historical, in 1.4 seasons. That's quite a number. Not that I'm objecting, I think they're better than his average strike rate. More interesting to me is comparing the celebrity historical in Chibnall's era to those done by Steven Moffat and Russell T. Davies, because there are some sharp differences. Moffat's celebrity historicals are looong on celebrity, very short on historical (to their detriment, IMO). Churchill: cuddly curmudgeon with resolve and a cigar. Henry Avery: concerned pirate father, pretty much nothing of his actual depredations. Nixon gets the most superficial treatment he's ever been subjected to. We even get comedy Hitler, for goodness' sake. They're barely even theme park caricatures, they're so stripped down and sanitised.

(There is one important exception - written by someone else - namely Vincent and the Doctor. That one actually felt like it could be about a real person.)

Davies was more grounded in material conditions, so one might think he'd do better. But there's an odd quirk in his celebrity historicals - of his five such adventures, three of the names were: Shakespeare, Dickens and Agatha Christie. All writers. All mash-ups throwing Doctor Who into their own genre. It's a neat trick really, but it means that these aren't explorations of history, they're explorations of literature. If you take them out, the only other figures from the Davies era are Queen Victoria and Madame de Pompadour - not a lot for four seasons.

And then there's the Chibnall adventures. There's been a drop in the quality of the show, no doubt; but I'm going to say that this is one thing he does better. His celeb historicals feel like they care about the historical aspect. More than that, they strike me as being closer to the original intent of the show. I've mentioned before that at the outset, Doctor Who was supposed to be an educational show, alternating between imparting scientific and historical knowledge. In The Aztecs, the viewers were supposed to learn something about the Aztecs. The Reign of Terror was a French history lesson (more breadth than depth, but still). Viewers were intended to come away knowing more than they did before watching.

A single episode of the modern series, especially since it's now compulsory to make space for monsters, can't teach that much; but it can try to pique some interest. Moffat's historicals largely picked figures everyone knew and said "Here! You all know these two or three things about this guy!" (All guys, with one exception.) Chibnall, it's "Here's a figure you maybe don't know that well, but they're pretty interesting! Why don't you go google them?" I think that's a decently solid idea for the show in the modern era.