Black Orchid Part Two

The one where the Doctor gives the locals a tour of his TARDIS...

A lovely afternoon's trip to the countryside for a game of cricket and a fancy dress party has gone terribly awry for the Doctor. He didn't even get to take his bath before he stumbled into a secret passage and happened across a dead body. While everybody else is outside on the terrace scoffing a cold collation and dancing with strangers, the Doctor meets a Brazilian with a big lip, "an old friend", according to Lady Cranleigh.

It's quite ingenious how writer Terence Dudley gently but cruelly unravels the Doctor's perfectly fine day. He finds the body of Digby the male nurse in the cupboard, but when Ann accuses the Doctor of murdering James the butler, his appeals to Lady Cranleigh for an alibi fall on deaf ears. Madge clams up and refuses to corroborate the Doctor's claim that he was elsewhere when the murder happened. What a cow!

You have to feel sorry for this most vulnerable of Doctors as all fingers point to him and any attempt at explanation gets shot down in flames. "Lady Cranleigh, please help me," he asks, but the lady's not for helping, and when it gets to the point where the Doctor is trying to tell everybody that there was "an Indian, with a lip", all hope drains from his face and he says, resignedly: "I give up." He knows he's been framed, and there's no proof at all that he didn't kill James, dressed as the harlequin. His day is in ruins, plagued by accusations and mistaken identity.

As everybody gathers in the drawing room in classic Agatha Christie style, it is Tegan who stands up (literally) for the Doctor when he is accused of being an imposter. The thing is, the Doctor kind of is an imposter. OK, he never said he was Smutty's sub, but neither did he ever deny it or explain who he really was. So the Doctor is there under false pretences, and now it's come back to bite him on the bum.

However, Lady Cranleigh seems to believe everything will be alright in the end, and that the Doctor will be fine because she knows he's innocent! Yes, she does, but nobody else does, because you helped frame him, Madge!

In a quite frankly crazy attempt to prove his innocence, the Doctor invites Sir Robert and the police inside his TARDIS, which he believes will somehow exonerate him. Surely all this does is prove that he is a time traveller, as he said he was, but does not prove he didn't kill James. Fortunately, the moment Sir Robert sees the TARDIS, the Doctor suddenly becomes miraculously innocent, and it's off back to the mansion. The whole idea of the Doctor showing Sir Robert the TARDIS to prove he was telling the truth about one thing is such a waste of time, and narratively vacuous, even to the point that we go on a jolly detour to the train station, from where the TARDIS has been taken to the police station. I'm thoroughly bored just writing it, to be honest.

Plus, this is the second story in a row where the Doctor has wantonly flouted the laws of time by showing people alien technology way beyond their means or understanding (Richard Mace in The Visitation, and Sir Robert, Sgt Markham and PC Cummings here).

Back at the house, the disfigured attacker has slipped his bonds once more (Latoni is really bad at knots) and starts a fire in his room in order to escape. If the clobbered Brazilian hadn't hidden the key in the floorboards, the twisty-faced firestarter wouldn't have had to start a blaze in the first place. So the ensuing fire (which looks spectacular) is all Deter Latoni's fault really.

It's not long before the truth is out, and Charles admits to Ann that her fiance George isn't missing in the rainforests of Brazil at all, but has actually been held prisoner in a closed wing of the house by his mum all this time. In 1923, George was in search of the prized black orchid in South America, but seeing as the flower is sacred to the indigenous Kojabe Indians, they punished him by disfiguring him and cutting out his tongue. Latoni, chief of a neighbouring and much less judgemental tribe, rescued poor George and brought him all the way to England, back to mummy, who promptly locked him in the attic.

Now George is out, and he wants his Ann back. It's understandable that the guy's pretty annoyed, after all he's been through: disfigurement, glossectomy, madness, imprisonment, and now his brother's pinched his girlfriend. He snatches Nyssa, thinking her to be Ann, and makes for the roof of the house (not sure why), which is now well ablaze. Director Ron Jones manages to convince the viewer that Cranleigh Hall is on fire using just light, smoke and sound effects, but there's not a lick of flame in sight. The filming atop Buckhurst Park is done really well, and Jones manages to get plenty of jeopardy into the camera shots looking down to the terrace, and up to the roof from the ground.

That's the thing with Black Orchid: it looks great, it's really nicely made. Great locations, great costumes, great sets. It's the writing that lets it down, and badly. It leaves you with so many questions about the sense of it all. Like, if the Doctor knows George might harm Nyssa if he learns she's not Ann, why does he then go up on the roof and tell George that Nyssa isn't Ann, placing her in danger? Why did Latoni decide to remain in England after bringing George home, rather than return to his people in Brazil? Why did George kill Digby and James? And how could the Doctor possibly know there was a crazed George Cranleigh imprisoned in the attic just by knowing there was a Brazilian and a black orchid about the place? And come to think of it, it's pretty unlikely that George would have got the black orchid safely back to England after being so thoroughly mutilated by the angry Kojabe.

George's demise is pretty gruesome, toppling from the roof to the terrace below with quite a thud. Sound effect supremo Dick Mills must have been feeling overzealous that day! Surprisingly, the Doctor, Adric, Nyssa and Tegan stay on for George's funeral, which I guess must have been the best part of a week later, so there's potential for many more terribly genteel murder mysteries between the penultimate and final scenes of part 2! Tegan is gifted her flapper's fancy dress outfit (well, she did look great in it!), and the two-faced Lady Cranleigh gives the Doctor a copy of George's book Black Orchid as a memento of the time she framed him for murder. Quite when the crazed, imprisoned, murderous George found time to write and print the book remains a mystery.

Black Orchid is just two episodes long, but struggles to fill its 50 minutes with anything of any real substance or value. It's the first pure historical (ie, no alien/ sci-fi elements apart from the TARDIS) since 1966's The Highlanders, but while it's a nice idea to bring the genre back, it fails because it makes so little sense. If you're going to do a murder mystery, you need a lot more mystery and a much cleverer more plot to pull it off.

First broadcast: March 2nd, 1982

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: The fiery finale works quite well, with some great rooftop camera and stuntwork.
The Bad: So many characters with so little to do or say.
Overall score for episode: ★★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆ (story average: 4 out of 10)

NEXT TIME: Earthshock...

My reviews of this story's other episodes: Part One

Find out birth/death dates, career information, and facts and trivia about this story's cast and crew at the Doctor Who Cast & Crew site.

Black Orchid is available on BBC DVD. Find it on Amazon - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Doctor-Who-Black-Orchid-DVD/dp/B0015083M6