Orphan 55 is a very strange episode, for sure, written by It Takes You Away’s Ed Hime, which is also very strange but more confidently & aggressively weird, so I like it way more. Orphan 55 has such the tone of a S24 McCoy for me, like the plot of this (a companion wins a holiday to a galactic spa which turns out to be in a climate controlled dome on an otherwise inhospitable world populated by aggressive mutants) could slot right in there with Paradise Towers or my beloved Delta. Plenty of things are well done about the production, from location shooting in Tenerife to the monster design and the way they are shot and teased for so long before we see them clearly (and man, these Dregs are freakin’ JACKED lol, they all have a full eight-pack). Several things are done in an aggressively silly way, like Hyph3n’s whole look and of course poor James Buckley’s wig. There is the lady endlessly yelling “Benni,” which is not the same as a character lol. And the saboteur’s plan seems quite a bit too intense and insane for the understandable human reason she’s doing it. Unclear why absolutely all characters have to go to so many of the plot points together, it’s weird to trundle like 10 people out into the dangerous wasteland to look for one person.

And then there is the twist, and ending. I don’t mind it particularly, I don’t even know that it does necessarily contradict The Ark In Space (could feasibly be long after or way before) or The Mysterious Planet (this is way before that) etc etc. It seems to me that what The Doctor says at the end is relatively reasonable, that on this show we’ve seen myriad future and alternate Earths and they may contradict each other because their future is still being written. Now, the actual message is certainly delivered with the opposite of subtlety, and I feel personally that the message of the story, which I’m of course fully on board for, could’ve been better explored if this was a completely fictional alien planet and the drama helped us understand what a rich and vibrant planet had been lost and turned into a cheap holiday facsimile. I also might have preferred if the saboteur’s plan was less familial and more about some kind of activism related to the planet or the mutants, essentially to make this more like S24 we’d want this to be some kind of corporate satire, the parent company is exploitative or even causes the disasters that create orphan worlds for their galactic hotel chain. All kinds of elements are here to play with, and I like lots of them, but the story or the edit doesn’t present them too favorably. Can’t manage much more than a 2.5/5, unfortunately.