Doctor Who Series 12: 10 Huge Questions After Orphan 55
6. What Else Did The Story Remind Us of?
The big reveal that Orphan 55 was Earth was lifted straight out of The Planet of the Apes and its sequel Beneath the Planet of the Apes. It has also been done before in Doctor Who (The Trial of a Time Lord parts 1-4) in a very similar context when Peri and the Doctor discover the remains of the Marble Arch tube station on Ravalox.
This was far from a parody episode, so it is rather unfortunate that the furry appearance of Hyphen with a 3 brought to mind John Candy’s Barf in Spaceballs. Her name was also a call back to Doctor Who’s series one finale and Lynda with a Y. Whilst Jodie Whittaker continues to occasionally channel David Tennant’s version of the Doctor, she went full-on Troughton with a smidgen of all the others thrown in for good measure with “when I say run, run” (the nearest thing we have to a multi-doctor catchphrase).
There were so many nods to other franchises that it would take up a whole other list to note them all, from Sylas as young Anakin from The Phantom Menace, to Alien, but most striking of all were the sheer number of visual similarities to various video games. Of course, a planet destroyed by nuclear weapons is always going to resemble Fallout, but the Dregs looked like they had been lifted out of the Doom series and the armoured truck like something out of Mass Effect.