Episode 3

Welcome to Tranquillity Spa. This exclusive retreat on the planet Orphan 55 is somewhere to escape all your stresses and anxieties. Or is it?

ALAN BARNES

Spoilers: the ‘fake-cation’ planet Orphan 55, with a holiday spa built in the middle of an irradiated, airless, monster-infested wilderness, is actually future Earth - and the bestial Dregs who inhabit it are humanity’s descendants.

Let’s be honest: these aren’t new ideas. In The Sontaran Experiment (1975), the Fourth Doctor (Tom Baker) materialised in the strangely Dartmoor-like landscape that had been central London hundreds of thousands of years before, prior to planet Earth being razed by solar flares. More pertinently, in The Trial of a Time Lord (1986) the Sixth Doctor (Colin Baker) discovered that the tunnels hidden beneath the backwards, feudalistic world of Ravolox had once been Marble Arch tube. Not unlike the Thirteenth’s realisation, in Orphan 55, that the Dreg-infested underground she and her companions have got themselves stuck in used to be a sub-Siberian train station, when she uncovers signage for the Novosibirsk Metro…

But the secret subterranea of both Ravolox and Orphan 55 have a common ancestor in the Hollywood sci- fisequel Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970), in which the only survivor of a rescue mission sent out in search of lost 20th-century astronaut Taylor (Charlton Heston) escapes into the tunnels of Queensboro Plaza station on the New York subway… and realises that the alien planet he and Taylor have both crash-landed on is actually 40th-century Earth. With apes having inherited the Earth above, the last surviving humans have mutated into telepathic, nuclear bomb-worshipping freaks with horribly malformed faces - the dregs of humanity, you might say.