The Doctor and company have a historical adventure, the first fully historical one since the 1960s, and even have time to play a game of cricket. The problem may be the brevity of the episode and a resemblance to a certain Vincent Price film.
The TARDIS arrives on Earth in 1925 where, due to a case of mistaken identity, the Doctor (Peter Davison), Adric (Matthew Waterhouse), Nyssa (Sarah Sutton), and Tegan (Janet Fielding) end up playing in a local cricket match. The travelers then accept an invitation to a masked fancy dress ball by Lord Cranleigh (Michael Cochrane).
Everyone has been looking strangely at Nyssa and when the Doctor and his companions arrive at the Cranleigh estates they discover why as Nyssa looks exactly like Ann Talbot (Sutton again, obviously), Lord Cranleigh’s fiancée.
The Doctor comes under suspicion when a dead body is found and Ann is attacked by someone wearing the harlequin costume that the Doctor was to be wearing at the fancy dress ball. So now the Doctor must solve the mystery before he’s taken to jail.
Black Orchid is the first Doctor Who serial to only have the Doctor and his TARDIS as the only fantasy elements of the show since the Highlanders in the 1960s. Brevity is the soul of wit, but in some ways it’s good for this short jaunt and in some ways works against it.
At only 50 minutes the mystery is rather abbreviated and is solved way too quickly in episode two and has the Doctor showing off his TARDIS to way too many people to move the plot along. I’m surprised nobody spilled the beans in the timeline about meeting an alien with a police box that was bigger on the inside than on the outside since about three folks are given a guided tour of the time and space craft.
The plot also bears much resemblance to The Oblong Box, a film from 1969 starring Vincent Price and Christopher Lee. In the defense of the episode sometimes you need a little snack and there are some nice things found here. Such as Davison’s cricket match. Perhaps stretching it to a three part episode would have served it a bit better, but you don’t want to stretch it too far as some of the other Doctor's episodes did.
The short running time also gives the DVD a low cost and the delightful amount of special features makes this one a steal.
Black Orchid is presented in fullscreen. Special features include a commentary with Peter Davison, Janet Fielding, Sarah Sutton, and Matthew Waterhouse and a pop-up info text feature. The 9 minute “Now and Then” takes a modern look at the locations used in filming the episode.
There are also 7 minutes of deleted scenes and a 2 minute look at the restoration done to the episode. An 8 minute Blue Peter episode is really about a British costumers but the costumes of Black Orchid are also highlighted. The excellent 16 minute “Stripped for Action – The Fifth Doctor” looks at comic strips produced during Davison’s term as the Doctor.
The 2 minute “Points of View” is from a Brit chat show and has some letters to the host about unhappiness about the change in when Doctor Who was being shown. Finally, there’s a photo gallery, 1 minute preview for the DVD release of Trial of a Timelord, and the PDF of the radio times listing (DVD-ROM).
Black Orchid is a bit of a snack for Doctor Who fans, but it does entertain and features Davison’s Doctor playing a ripping game of cricket. An amusing bit of dialogue is when one of the character’s states the Doctor’s cricket performance was “worthy of the Master” which causes some alarm on the Doctor’s part until he’s told that they were referring to cricket master Dr. W.G. Grace and not the Master that we love to boo and hiss at.
A low price and some great special features make this a must have even though the episode is rather slight.
Doctor Who - Black Orchid is now available at Amazon and AmazonUK . Visit the DVD database for more information.
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