Customer Rating:  
Summary: excellent change of pace DW story
Comment: A quick 2 part story that has no sci-fi elements in it (expect the Doctor & co. & the Tardis). A purely historical adventure (first seen The Highlanders in season 4) although they6 don't meet anyone famous. Davison gets to play cricket which is what his Doctor is all about. The Tardis crew get to change clothes, dance, refresh themselves and even stay long after the adventure part is over instead of taking off as soon as the villain is pronounced dead. Nice to see things like in the midst of a season of faster paced stories. The plot is a bit slight, borrowing from Agatha Cristie and Bronte's Jane Eyre as well. If you're not a Doctor Who fan, not the place to start.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Largely forgettable
Comment: "Black Orchid" is a milestone of sorts. It marks the last of the historical episodes of "Doctor Who", and it's fitting it was released at the same time as Doctor Who - The Time Meddler (Episode 17), which contained the first "pseudo-historical" adventure.
The plot here is basically silly. The Doctor and crew ends up in 1920's England. There's a girl who somehow ends up looking exactly like Nyssa. Ok. That makes sense, I guess. Sort of.
After suspending as much disbelief as one can, the plot kicks into gear and it's... it's... meh. Nothing special. It's a short, two-part story which is probably for the best. It's not bad, exactly, just not anything great.
What is great on this DVD, however, is the actors sitting around talking about the show during the commentary. It's hilarious, especially hearing them say how much the episode basically sucked. They were trying to be polite at times, but it wasn't happening. Loved it. :)
Also of note is a series they've started doing where they talk about the "Doctor Who" comic strips, this time focusing, of course, on the Peter Davidson strips and how hard it was to make the Doctor look right when drawing him.
This is worth buying if you want a cheap "Doctor Who" episode. It's slightly entertaining, but nothing great. I wouldn't use it to introduce someone to the series or anything like that, but it's perfectly acceptable.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Black Orchid
Comment: The use of "twins" in this story was a nice change for Peter Davidson's doctor role, and the setting was a good represintation of the 20's.
Customer Rating:
Summary: "Why do I always let my curiosity get the better of me?"
Comment: "Black Orchid" is like a trip back in time. Well, obviously so in that the Doctor and his three traveling companions wind up in 1925 where a series of mistaken identities and coincidences conspire to have them taking part in cricket matches and fancy costume balls as the guests of a certain Lord Cranleigh only to come under suspicion for murder. And this is the BBC, mind you, so all their expertise with period dramas comes to the fore in this relatively short "Doctor Who" storyline to convincingly authentic grand effect. But it's also a brief return (or the last belated gasp?) of this long-running show's original premise, wherein strictly science fiction stories alternated with strictly historical ones (not counting the Tardis, which lands the characters in a past time and so gets the ball rolling). This latter type of story gradually began to take a back seat and apparently saw its last with "The Highlanders" in 1966--until this story a full sixteen years later. No anachronisms, no aliens, no robots, no Cybermen, no lasers nor spaceships are to be found. Just a very terrestrially human and somewhat tragic threat.
Which is somewhat refreshing but also borders a tad on the dull side. It's a welcome change to see the Doctor along with Tegan, Nyssa, and Adric enjoying themselves for a change, living it up in good old 1925 fashion. After all, the vague suggestion (at least in my mind) was always that this is how the Doctor and company occupy themselves most the time, and the death-defying adventures come along ever so often in the meantime. Too much of a good thing could get tiresome, of course, which is why "Black Orchid"'s noticeable brevity betrays a canny wisdom here on someone's part. The belatedly appearing threat is less than earth-shattering but still very real all the same, giving just about the right amount of dramatic tension to the tale. The only actual downside really is that the whole plot is set up like a fine specimen of the British "whodunit", only the cat is unfortunately let out of the bag virtually from the get-go, leaving even the minimally attentive viewer with little doubt as to who actually did the murders. Leaving a little mystery here, maybe even leading one to wonder if the Doctor isn't somehow inexplicably the culprit, might've added nicely to the suspense and made for a somewhat more memorable story. But so it goes. "Black Orchid" keeps to the low-key from start to finish, and that is both its strength and its weakness. Anyway, as a brief respite for both the Tardis crew and us viewers, it's quite topping in its own manner.
Customer Rating:
Summary: "We're sorry if you enjoyed it!"
Comment: I'm sorry to say that "Black Orchid" is one of the few misfires from the Doctor Who DVD restoration team. Not that there's much wrong with the story itself -- that's a genial little 45-minute murder mystery set in the 1920s, with lots of moments where the cast just gets to enjoy themselves (cricket matches, dances, buffet tables). Indeed "Black Orchid" is reflected heavily in this past TV season's "The Unicorn and the Wasp", another '20s-era skeletons-in-the-family-closet comedy.
The problem with the DVD release then is in the usually reliable extra features. Peter Davison, always the alpha male in the audio commentary booth and generally very funny and insightful, just doesn't have great fondness for the story and takes to mocking it relentlessly. This approach worked well for his commentary on leser-appreciated stories such as Doctor Who - Time-Flight (Episode 123) and Doctor Who: Warriors of the Deep (Story # 131), but for poor little "Black Orchid" one feels sorry for the whole affair and wishes Davison had given it a chance to breathe.
Reunited in the booth with Davison are his fellow TV cast members. Janet Fielding (Tegan) holds her own as usual, trading barb for barb with Davison. Fielding's distaste for the story is somewhat surprising, as "Black Orchid" is one of those few instances where the character of Tegan actually smiles and appears to be enjoying herself -- dancing throughout much of Part One and even flirting a bit with an older police constable. Sarah Sutton (Nyssa) gently leaps to the story's defense -- indeed "Black Orchid" was one of the rare moments she was allowed to dominate the screen as an actress across parts of three seasons on the show; here she plays a duel role and impresses as her innocent doppelganger Ann Talbot. Matthew Waterhouse (Adric), soon to be written out of the series, had nothing to do in the story but eat, and in the booth is a light foil to Davison, attempting to praise trivial aspects of the story while Davison laughs at him.
The production notes option is also surprisingly light. The first such option I've seen not written by either Richard Molesworth or Martin Wiggins, the new text commentator on the block stops dispensing information early in Part Two and chimes in only occasionally the rest of the way only to mock the story (while not telling us, for example, how the impressive in-studio fire stunts were performed).
The rest of the included featurettes are nicely done. The recurring "Now and Then" segment seamlessly contrasts clips from location filming against how the areas look today, played over with a 1920s soundtrack. Seven minutes of deleted scenes are impressively portrayed, with existing material screened in sepia and only the "missing" segments aired in full color. Finally, the nifty new "Stripped for Action" segment features several talking heads from Doctor Who Magazine describing the early 1980s "Doctor Who" comics, examples of which are unfortunately not included on DVD-ROM.
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