The decision to spend two episodes of Peter Davison’s debut season trying to revive the “pure historical” – a subgenre of Doctor Who where the Doctor and the TARDIS are the only science-fictional elements, which hasn’t been attempted since Patrick Troughton’s sophomore story – is usually regarded as a baffling one. Yet it makes a certain amount of sense. The Fifth Doctor’s first three stories have all attempted, with varying degrees of success, to find a more cerebral style of Doctor Who story. It’s easy to see what’s motivated this. The current Doctor has been conceived as the antithesis of Tom Baker’s domineering, reckless Doctor; his companions are also unusually heavy on academics and scientists. It’s not so ridiculous to suggest this TARDIS team might flourish if the show took the occasional step off the saving-the-universe treadmill and allowed them to take part in some low-stakes, factually-based stories of the kind William Hartnell starred in.
Writer Terence Dudley even seems to have thought about which kind of pure historical would be the best fit for this era, rejecting the fan favourite, SF-adjacent time travel dilemma The Aztecs in favour of a version of the “Doctor takes a holiday” model showcased in The Romans. This offers less of an opportunity for the aforementioned geniuses on board the TARDIS to flex their intellectual muscle, but just because the characters are dissatisfied doesn’t mean the actors are. All of the regular cast appear liberated by Black Orchid‘s laid-back narrative: Peter Davison gets to play, rather than just cosplay, cricket, Sarah Sutton, who seems to be most frequently overshadowed or left behind, gets to play a double role as Nyssa and Ann, Tegan gets to loosen up and dance the Charleston, and Adric gets to be new Watson who likes jam.
I’m not sure there is a world where this would be a universally acclaimed triumph which returns the pure historical to Doctor Who‘s armoury. For a start, Earthshock was about to re-route the show in a very different direction, and in any case Black Orchid isn’t funny enough to work as the breath of fresh air it needs to be. This isn’t surprising, considering that the show’s current producer made it his loudly-trumpeted mission to reverse the silliness of late 1970s Who, but it does severely restrict what Black Orchid can do. There is also a Gothic element to the story, which we’ll get into later, but early Davison Who is also under strict instructions not to do any of the things that got Philip Hinchcliffe and Robert Holmes fired, so there’s another potential avenue for the serial that’s closed off.
Much like the Doctor in his endless quest to get out of a room in episode one, we are left with one door to open, and it’s murder mystery. This is a problem, because writing this kind of country house murder mystery is a very particular talent, and Terence Dudley doesn’t have it. He is too wedded to the structure of a Doctor Who story to successfully push the series into a different genre – and not that different a genre, because detective fiction is an under-appreciated ingredient in Doctor Who‘s essential format. (For a new series example, look at Nikola Tesla’s Night of Terror, where the Thirteenth Doctor looks at the Skithra’s weapons, looks at who they’re targeting, and works out what their aim is) As with Dudley’s later two-parter The King’s Demons, he seems fixated on the idea that a good Doctor Who story should introduce its threat in the episode one cliffhanger, which in a four- or six-part story can indeed be a good structure. In a two-part story, this means you’ve wasted half your run-time.
Even if Dudley had been granted four episodes, there’s still little evidence that he could structure a workable mystery. The very start of episode one shows us that the killer is restrained by ropes and held in a darkened room, which means it’s not going to be any of the people we meet at the masked ball unless there’s a very clever twist. (There isn’t.) Relevant information is dropped in with remarkable gracelessness; there’s no reason to end a scene with Ann talking about the mole on her shoulder unless it’s going to be used later on to differentiate her from Nyssa, and sure enough it is. Similarly, anyone who maintains consciousness during episode one will be able to work out the identity of the murderer, as there’s no reason at all for him to be mentioned in dialogue unless he’ll come back later.
I’m not even sure there’s a suitable red herring – I did wonder if Latoni, the Native Brazilian who Lady Cranleigh takes to the ball, was going to be the prime suspect in the same way that the Whitechapel police famously assumed no Englishman could be the Ripper. But that’s not the case – the only prejudice directed his way seems to be the script’s own, with even the Doctor constantly referring to him as “the Indian” rather than by his name. (Between this and his stated boyhood dream of being a train driver, the Doctor is awfully human here) The police’s suspicions instead fall on the Doctor, who attempts to prove his innocence by showing them the inside of his TARDIS. Fascinating though this is, it doesn’t prove that he’s not a murderer, and there is a cut scene where one of the officers notes that time travel is not a valid alibi – a better joke than anything which ended up on screen.
The killer problem with Black Orchid is, well, the killer, which is one of the most unjustifiable depictions of a disabled person in the show’s history. The roots of Doctor Who include mid-century adventure fiction and Gothic horror, and maybe it’s inevitable that a series with this DNA would include a lot of deranged, disfigured villains. But Magnus Greel and Davros are, at least, fully rounded characters, and their presence in science fiction narratives means they don’t touch too explicitly on real-world issues. Greel’s facial disfigurement is caused by failed time travel experiments, and who knows what bizarre Kaled bioweapon left Davros looking like that. There is no such distancing for George Cranleigh, a real-world character suffering from real-world conditions who is nevertheless depicted as a snarling beast, scaling the walls of the house with Nyssa in his arms like King Kong. Perhaps this is the most disappointing failure of Black Orchid; it promises a very different kind of Doctor Who, but in the end it’s just another monster story.
Next: Earthshock (1982)
