Wibbly-Wobbly Timey-Wimey (Orphan 55)

It’s January 12th, 2020. Stormzy, Ed Sheeran, and Burna Boy are at number one with “Own It,” while Lewis Capaldi, Dua Lipa, Justin Bieber, Billie Eilish, Harry Styles, and The Weeknd also chart. The family has been busy—we’d spent the late fall looking for a place to rent for all four of us, and in the early weeks of 2020 secure it and work on signing a lease, with a move-in date at the beginning of April. Life’s a busy blur of social engagements and planning, and Doctor Who is little more than my career obligation—the thing I have to find space on Sundays to deal with. In this case, it happens at Skulls, where the only television space involves us pulling kitchen chairs into a small bedroom if we want to get four people to watch it. We do so this week. Nobody enjoys it.
And of course, why should they? To say that this episode appears to have production problems is an understatement. It’s the ultimate “Chaos in Cardiff” production, such a self-evident shambles that they blatantly did not actually have the monster costumes on set for the bulk of it, having to shoot the bulk of confrontations with them as a shot-reverse-shot with the reverse just being a flash of a couple of them hissing in a dark room. It’s embarrassing like Underworld or Timelash is embarrassing—a colossal basic failure of television production. Which is, of course, no surprise. Like we said, last week all meaning collapsed as the show simply went into a long term nervous breakdown.
This week, then, it’s not even much of a surprise when time itself breaks. That is, ultimately, the only way to understand this episode. The fact that this cannot easily be reconciled with The Mysterious Planet (an episode that, being a corrupted Matrix visualization, arguably has no inherent continuity implications in the first place) is easy enough to get around given that the Doctor explicitly declares this to only be one possible future. The problem is just that, well, the Doctor explicitly declares this to only be one possible future.
It’s not, obviously, that the idea of possible futures is new to Doctor Who. Time can famously be rewritten, and Kill the Moon explicitly introduced the idea that seemingly major events in history and future history were explicitly unfixed points. Nevertheless, the idea that there is a relatively singular timeline has clearly been the default. There are multiple instances in which the TARDIS has repeatedly visited broadly coherent notions of the future, including instances that span vast stretches of the Doctor’s subjective timeline. Put simply, if the sort of relationship with the future that Orphan 55 is suggesting were in play, it would be much more remarkable that the Doctor should encounter Alpha Centauri in both The Curse of Peladon and The Empress of Mars than the Doctor ever suggests. The timeline clearly has comparatively malleable bits, and you can certainly argue that it’s undergone massive revision over time, but there’s still generally supposed to be one of it. Indeed, that’s arguably part of the central premise of Twice Upon a Time, which really doesn’t make sense unless the Testimony Foundation actually has a coherent timeline to zoom up and down—one that goes at least as far up as New Earth.
Does this matter? I mean, you’re reading an episode by episode blog of Doctor Who, so I have to say I hadn’t taken “mattering” to be one of your priorities in your media consumption. But yes, sure, I’m avowedly not a “give a shit about continuity” sort of Doctor Who fan. But there’s a world of difference between an accidental profusion of Atlantises and aggressively changing the basic way in which time works in a show that is about a time-traveller. And while I’m not inclined to think that Orphan 55 poses a problem for any other episode by fucking up the basic concept of how time works, I do think it’s a pretty damning indictment of the episode itself. But more to the point, breaking time gives me an opportunity to do some fun romping around in questions of Doctor Who continuity, and frankly, what the fuck else am I going to do here? Discuss the nuances of Vilma and Benni’s relationship? Exactly. So let’s get into the weeds.
The obvious point of comparison for this notion of multiple possible futures is the Doctor’s demonstration of why they can’t simply fuck off in Pyramids of Mars, not least because it has the same basic structure: a dark potential future as a spur towards present action. There are two possible explanations for this. One—tacitly supported by the fact that the scene is reprised in The Devil’s Chord—is that the alteration of the future is specific to the threat. As the Doctor says, “it takes a being of Sutekh’s almost limitless power to destroy the future.” That, however, provides no real help here—quite the opposite, in fact. The other possibility, then, is that the mutable nature of Sarah’s present day was being impacted by the presence of the TARDIS. That is to say that the TARDIS arriving somewhere unsticks time to at least some extent, and it becomes the Doctor’s responsibility to conduct themself in such a way as to leave an intact timeline instead of what would have happened if they’d skedaddled and left 1911 to its fate. This is implicit in the Doctor’s explanation there that Sarah has “looked into alternative time,” which tacitly suggests the existence of mainstream time.
But several problems arise if we try to apply this to Orphan 55. For one thing, this isn’t a jaunt away from some climate change focused adventure in which the awful future is glimpsed. For another, the TARDIS isn’t even involved in this adventure; the fam gets to Tranquility Spa via a teleport cube. This introduces its own set of problems—how, for instance, this teleporter both breaches the TARDIS and is able to drag the fam into an alternate future. (Although, actually, breaching the TARDIS is also supposed to require a godlike being. Perhaps this is all just the work of Goronwy, God of Holday Camps.) There’s a superficial resemblance between the teleport cube and the Time Lord distress signal used in The Doctor’s Wife and The War Games, but again, we’ve only really added more questions to the mix with that theory.
The other special case we could plausibly invoke here is, of course, the Time Lords, or rather the lack of them. Perhaps the unity of the timeline was something largely maintained by the Time Lords, and in the wake of their re-annihilation everything is simply going to shit. That has some useful implications for the rest of the Chibnall era, during which we’re going to have to address questions like “so, um, about the large portion of the universe that got destroyed,” but it requires us to figure out at least some reason why time continued to operate during the first seven seasons of the new series. The fact that Gallifrey wasn’t actually destroyed in those seasons might offer some explanation, but ultimately anything you try to throw at that problem is going to run aground against the fact that the Doctor didn’t notice this and realize that the Time Lords must still be around. Indeed, in Father’s Day the Doctor seems to have a pretty good idea of how a universe without the Time Lords would operate, and the answer is something much closer to “fully deterministically, with time aggressively resetting itself to the correct history” than it is to whatever is happening here. Reinforcing this, in Rise of the Cybermen the point where you could pop between realities and be home in time for tea was expressly linked to the presence of the Time Lords.
And anyway, we still haven’t touched the weirdest part of how time works in Orphan 55, which is that the branching point for this alternate future is expressly tied to the present day. It’s not just that there are a wealth of alternate universes out there—it’s that these worlds overtly branch out from what is seemingly an arbitrary point in Earth’s history, at least according to any logic other than the metatextual circumstances of its transmission. I’m certainly not averse to understanding episodes that way—indeed, this is almost certainly how Orphan 55 is meant to be read, with the Doctor’s final monologue being much more “Happy Christmas to all of you at home” than “1980, Sarah, if you want to get off,” and with the anthropocene extinction instead of Christmas. But it still makes no diegetic sense to speak of.
Although speaking of that Pyramids of Mars exchange, it actually does provide one compelling possibility. The implication there was that the TARDIS’s arrival at a given point in time destabilizes that point of time. In which case what are we to make of a semi-permanent intervention like actually removing people from time to travel? In other words, perhaps the fact that the Doctor has altered the early 21st century by bringing the fam onto the TARDIS is what destabilizes the timeline in the 21st century to allow for multiple futures. It’s notable, after all, that relatively few companions have ever ended up in a significantly different time period than they left. Perhaps the reason for this tendency is that returning companions to their own time is necessary to stabilize the timeline around them. Since that hasn’t happened yet in Orphan 55, time is still profoundly unstable.
Just to show my math here, my count of companions who have swapped time periods is Susan, Vicki, Katarina, Steven, Victoria, Leela, Romana, Adric, Nyssa, Peri, and the Ponds. (You can also argue Clara and Bill, but both are left with access to time travel, so there’s an infinitude of options there. And no, Rose doesn’t count—she swaps universes from her own time, so as far as the TARDIS is concerned there’s no continuity error there.) Four of those—Susan, Romana, Leela, and Peri—intersect Gallifrey in various fashions, and so can be handwaved while humming Flavia’s theme. Several others can also be resolved amicably: Adric, being from another universe, doesn’t really count for these purposes, the actual dating of The Savages is impossible to discern, Nyssa’s home planet is destroyed shortly after her departure so there’s nothing to destabilize, and Victoria travels with the Doctor again in Season 6B so might well have been returned to the 19th century after all. That leaves only Vicki, Katarina, and the Ponds as companions who are straightforwardly not returned to their own time periods. In other words, for the most part this is something the Doctor seems to have stopped letting happen eventually, presumably because he screwed it up a few times early on. The only time this has happened since The Daleks’ Masterplan is both something he was desperate to avoid and, more to the point, something that explicitly destabilized time such that the Doctor cannot even take the TARDIS anywhere near the event. This theory is in fact surprisingly robust for something completely pulled out of my ass far enough into Doctor Who continuity that I had a lot of constraints. In fact, given that Fury From the Deep is apparently set in 1975, I’ll further assert that the damage to the timeline caused by rehoming temporarily rehoming Victoria is why UNIT dating is so fucked up, and presumably why the Doctor stopped letting this sort of thing happen afterwards.
So yes, if you really want to you can just about bludgeon this into making any sense. But the best case interpretation is still a janky stretch of a theory that doesn’t especially explain why this has literally never come up before, little yet how the fuck a teleporter accomplished this or how magazines were being delivered to the TARDIS or, really, much of anything. (Maybe Goronwy was the better explanation?) It’s a fun textual game to play, but the reality is still the reality: this is a profoundly shoddily made piece of television despite being made in the second production block after a year long gap, and among its shoddiness is a tediously didactic ending that doesn’t even make sense in the context of the show it’s a part of.
Still, it at least made it easy to get two thousand words out of it, so fuck it, as far as I’m concerned, best episode of Series 12.
July 15, 2024 @ 5:57 am
“This theory is in fact surprisingly robust for something completely pulled out of my ass far enough into Doctor Who continuity that I had a lot of constraints.”
The best theories always are.
Your suggestion that the arrival of a Tardis inherently destabilises time around it could also retrospectively explain why their officially sanctioned use was so carefully restricted by the Time Lords (who were keen to establish and keep Time in check). Also, that – as suggested a while back – the Doctor’s habit of stepping outside the ship and getting “involved with things” has always been his worst breach of Gallifreyan law.
July 15, 2024 @ 9:35 am
I don’t like it, but an insane theory always gets bonus points from me if it manages to contradict Widely And Forcefully Established EU Canon. Given how much work the Virgin EU put into hammering the idea “The presence of the TARDIS makes time EXTRA stable such that not a single molecule can go any way other than what was shown on-screen”, I would be delighted if “Actually the TARDIS showing up makes time a free-for-all” turns out to make more sense.
July 15, 2024 @ 10:03 am
I read “the virgin EU” and immediately my mind summoned into being “the chad Big Finish”, I’ll see myself out.
July 18, 2024 @ 11:31 am
Maybe time works differently when the Doctor travels without the TARDIS?! Other examples include Inferno (yes the console but with an unusual power source) and Genesis of the Daleks…
July 18, 2024 @ 12:07 pm
My (memory-based, classic series) list also includes
The Keys of Marinus*
Evil of the Daleks (Skaro)
The Three Doctors (Omegaworld)
The Sontaran Experiment*
Revenge of the Cybermen
Mawdryn Undead (Earth 1977/1983)
The Five Doctors (Hurndall, Troughton and Pertwee to the Death Zone, Davison to the Capitol)
Resurrection of the Daleks (ship stuff)
The Trial of a Time Lord (space station/Matrix)
At least some of those are useful from an ‘opportunity to deny canonicity’ perspective!
Maybe Keys and Sontaran Experiment don’t count because they only involve travel in space rather than dimensions/time.
July 15, 2024 @ 9:50 am
“You can also argue Clara and Bill, but both are left with access to time travel, so there’s an infinitude of options there.”
Minor nitpick — Clara definitely doesn’t count because it’s made clear that she’ll eventually have to return to the moment of her death in “Face the Raven,” which takes place in her native time.
July 15, 2024 @ 11:25 am
You can probably handwave the Ponds, too. Mutter “Angels” and don’t blink.
July 16, 2024 @ 5:05 pm
You don’t even need to handwave the Ponds because they are in roughly their own time when they leave the TARDIS. It’s only the angels that move them elsewhen, and the theory does not seem to apply to angels (though their shenanegans do seem to allow more cause-effect looping, so Time is not entirely immune to their influence).
Actually, I reckon you can handwave Katarina too by fanoning that she was about to die in the chaos and was taken out of time at the end of her life; therefore she was going to have hardly any more impact on the world of 1200 BC.
That just leaves Vicki. I can’t make a similar argument there (the rescuers were on their way), so I guess we just have to rely on her sheer awesomeness as a cure-all.
July 20, 2024 @ 10:15 pm
Unless Vicki was never supposed to be rescued, or the rescuers finding an empty, abandoned ship is actually part of the timeline. (Actually, I went back and I read the synopsis of The Rescue-the rescue ship never arrived. The real natives of the planet Dido destroyed the signal to the rescue ship after dealing with ‘Koquillion’. Vicki was the only survivor left from her ship, and she had no family. Basically she probably was supposed to die then, and the fact the Doctor rescued her just handwaved her disappearance. Not to mention the fact that she switches places with Katarina in Troy, leaving with Troilus and…she turns into a myth, Cressida. So she’s displaced from time in a way.)
July 15, 2024 @ 3:27 pm
“Although, actually, breaching the TARDIS is also supposed to require a godlike being. Perhaps this is all just the work of Goronwy, God of Holday Camps.”
We all know that there’s only one God of Camps on this show, and it’s the Master.
Which works, actually.
Two options:
1. This is a glimpse into alternative time where Doctor Who is shit. Unfortunately, we don’t return to the “regular” timeline for quite a while yet.
I really like El’s hasty theory: it even makes sense if you consider the Time Lords to be the sort of people who would want to insist history needs to continue in a fixed and unchanging way but also opt to travel to points in history while retaining the ability to do anything they like. It’s the ultimate imperialism: history binds everyone except for us.
July 16, 2024 @ 5:20 pm
The Cube daft but it’s obviously meant to be, in the same way the “junk mail” that breaches the TARDIS in The Greatest Show In The Galaxy is. It makes sod all sense, it’s just there to get the story underway.
Yeah, even as someone lighter on the Chibnall era than some, that’s the best thing I can find to say about this. Simply awful.
July 16, 2024 @ 8:09 pm
Of course, that junk mail did in fact have god-like power behind it.
Goronwy hypothesis looking better all the time.
July 15, 2024 @ 3:45 pm
This is awesome. Headcanon accepted. Thank you.
July 15, 2024 @ 10:28 pm
Literally all I remember about this episode is someone repeatedly calling ‘Benny.’ The only reason I remember that is that’s my name, and I was finding it really irritating.
July 17, 2024 @ 1:08 am
they were fucking benny to death
July 18, 2024 @ 10:41 am
Perhaps more than any other script of the era, this is one that I suspect really could’ve been an absolute classic in the hands of a competent production team. I would dearly love to read some of the drafts since I largely like Ed Hime’s work, both on DW and elsewhere, and I suspect the script did not read nearly as incoherently as the finished broadcast work does, suffering as it clearly does from unfinished effects work and brutal footage/editing shortcomings. I also think the director and team did not grok that much of the disaster movie element going on here was meant to be a blackly humorous comedy, and it’s just not played like that at all, done as deathly serious/dour action film on a budget in a way that doesn’t have a chance in hell of working. I’m convinced Benny’s proposal-slash-euthanasia-request is supposed to be funny and chilling at the same time, for example, rather than just … bafflingly poor.
July 19, 2024 @ 3:07 pm
If anything can inspire you to revisit the genuinely worst era of Doctor Who, it can be the kind of creativity that you mustered in this post. Like a lot of the commenters said, it actually makes a lot of sense for the story of the Doctor’s having annoyed the Time Lords so much over the years if landing a TARDIS and exploring destabilizes the history and timeline of where you end up. You can think of this as why the Doctor was so dogmatic about Barbara not “changing history” back in The Aztecs: not only because there was no guarantee that changing their human sacrifice rituals would have saved them from Spanish conquest, but also because they were actually in a very precarious situation that could change history. Barbara might have changed history so radically that it could have prevented her having even been born. So the theory works a lot with what we’ve seen on screen over the decades.
I found the story itself so difficult to watch that every shout of “Benni!” felt like being hit in the head with a brick. To see it all come down to a climate change warning story so didactic and ham-fisted that it isn’t even halal to watch the episode was an equal measure of pain.
July 20, 2024 @ 10:22 pm
Not to mention ‘Space Babies’ and how stepping on that butterfly changed Ruby Sunday, and the Doctor had to fix it. Time is always in flux there.
July 20, 2024 @ 10:26 pm
At the risk of ruining a good time, it seems reasonable to interpret the Doctor’s statement as symbolic rather than literal – not necessarily that these specific events are only one possible future, but that the interpretation of these events as Earth’s “ultimate fate” is only one possibility – something more similar to the Doctor’s musings in “Kill the Moon” that the moon hatching into a space-dragon doesn’t necessarily contradict the appearance of an identical moon further in the future.