The Twin Dilemma

I'm falling to pieces! I don't even have any clothes sense...

Lots of 'bad' stories are often just mediocre, but seem worse due to being directly after brilliant stories. Revenge of the Cybermen isn't so bad, but when you've just seen Genesis of the Daleks? The Long Game after Dalek? Pretty much every Season 17 story after City of Death? Lets face it, no story could have started up after The Caves of Androzani and not suffered.

I, however, was fortunate to see this on video without having seen the masterpiece beforehand.

It ultimately dulled the pain, but it didn't help. I wish I was a funky rebel Who fan, able to hold up the most pathetic of stories and scream it's genius, but sometimes the majority are right. Not always, but when The Twin Dilemma ended up the least-liked official Doctor Who story, it was not by bad luck.The Twin Dilemma is bad. And worse, it's important. It's the first story of a new Doctor. It needs to be good, or at least, entertaining. And it fails. Anyone who has seen the new Children in Need special (which I insist on calling Afterlife), you can see the whole point of this story - the Doctor's regeneration is going wrong just when he needs to get his companion to accept him - done far better in seven minutes.

It gives me no pleasure to say it's a stinker.

In a way, the troubled background of the story (Anthony Stevens collapsed while writing it and his typewriter blew up, forcing Eric Saward to take over at the last minute) means it's got a better excuse for being crap than Resurrection of the Daleks which had plenty of time to have its wrinkled smoothed out only for the writer to simply make even bigger problems. However, the gloss to Resurrection means a first viewing leaves you bouncing with exploded Daleks and a massive death toll. It may not survive anything other than a cursory viewing, but Resurrection still beats Twin.

OK, the problems with Twin are if not obvious then at least very noticeable.

First off the scene where the Doctor strangles Peri. Now, on the one hand, it sets up one of the theme of the stories - the newly regenerated Doctor isn't so much mad, he has no self control. He sees a course of action and continually exaggerates it until it gets silly. Even his attack on Peri is justified in the plot. Here is a woman he risked total death to save and... she doesn't even thank him. She calls him old, ugly, rude and insults his fashion sense but expects him to applaud hers. Can you honestly blame the Doctor for being annoyed at Peri? But then it starts. The paranoia - Peri got the Doctor killed, Peri's not sorry, Peri's rude to him, was it all a plot? Is Peri some kind of saboteur trying to kill the Doctor? Is he going to let her get him killed again? Can he risk her killing anyone else? No, he's got to kill her now!

Of course, it's ridiculous and stupid. But that's the horror of the regeneration crisis, the Doctor can't help himself. When he realizes how dangerous he can be, he comes up with a simple and effective plan - put himself out of harm's way until he's settled down. Except he gets carried away: he's becoming a hermit, thriving on desolation, chanting in Latin and requiring eternal atonement! No wonder the production team wanted this idea for a regeneration story, it's brilliant - a Doctor going rogue, trying to stop himself screw up everything and somehow helpless...

And like so many brilliant ideas, Twin buries them under gastropod slime.

Like the gastropods themselves. This is the series that, twelve episodes previously showed the most horrific and stomach-churning insectoid grubs imaginable in the Gravis and his Tractators. I'm shocked that Doctor Who's cash-strapped ingenuity didn't step in and re-use them - not only were the monsters already made and shown to the public, there's not much difference between these slugs wanting to move planets and these grubs wanting to move planets. It would have been very interesting to see the blunt, coarse Sixth Doctor up against an enemy the Fifth Doctor defeated by never having an angry word with. Instead, we get the wittily-named Gastropods.

And they are rubbish.

We only see Mestor do anything, but apparently there are two other slugs waddling around, not even noticing that there's a huge blue box marked POLICE blocking their empty corridors. Mestor looks crap too - fat, cross-eyed and morbidly obese. Its embarassing to see him wobbling on his throne waving his paws on either side of his dumbfounded face. And why is there a frog outfit on a pole beside his throne? Why does he fancy Peri? Why is he supposed to be scarier because he is "half humanoid half slug" a phrase the Doctor trots out over and over again? Why does he have these mental powers? Why does Mestor go all the way to Azmael's room for a quick Q & A he could have done via telepathy, especially when he could have sent a vision of himself like he does to Titan 3? Why is he apparently determined to blow himself up? Just... why, full stop?

And the most painful thing is that Mestor could have been terrifying. Yes, even with that costume. His origins seem to be less oversized garden pest, more Skagra from Shada, who was determined to become a God by making his mind and personality spread like a disease, washing across civilization. We get a tantalizing glimpse of this, with Drak dropping dead and Azmael being possessed. There are a few moments when Noma implies that its not him talking, but Mestor when he euphemistically says that he does what Mestor 'would have wished' and he 'too, has duties' - but its all undone when it turns out Noma was genuinely working on his own bat. The suggestion that anyone might just turn out to be possessed by Mestor would be great thriller material, as well as explaining why the hell anyone puts up with this ranting, rude megalomaniac. It could also explain why no one realizes this last, desperate plan is so obviously doomed to failure and no one notices - because Mestor is blocking their thoughts.

A creature whose mental powers can control an entire planet would surely be calm, disarmingly polite... a bit like Noma... but Mestor shouts things like "Never argue with me again!" and goes to all the trouble of zapping workers to death instead of the cheaper bullet-in-the-back-of-the-head. It's not embarrassing when the Doctor denounces Mestor as crap, because he is. It's embarrassing because a story that is meant to establish that the Doctor is more cunning and cleverer than his opponent sets him up against an incredibly stupid slug. That looks stupid. And fancies Earth women.The Twin Dilemma also crystallizes the part of the Sixth Doctor's era I hate. Not the continuity, the companions, the costume or Colin Baker, but the no unity of action. It happens again and again. This story encompasses Earth, Titan 3 and Joconda and only the last one is in any way relevant to the plot - and we don't get there to episode three, where the plot finally starts. The first scene of the story should be (an unseen) Mestor ruthlessly executing the thief (in front of assembled masses to prevent further rebellion), not Rom and Re playing backgammon. We don't even see the regeneration sequence again, and it's far more important to the plot than it was in Robot and it was repeated then as well.

Why does the story stop at Titan 3 anyway? Why not have the Doctor simply mis-steer the TARDIS straight to Joconda and have him mistake its raped landscape mistaken for the quarry he was aiming for? Why do we abandon Earth after the worst episode - we never get to see Rom and Re meeting up with their parents, for Elanor and her boss be glad to see Hugo's alive and well. And if we're not going to see them undergo the whole 'growth over the adventure', why the hell include them in the first place?

In fact, the twins themselves baffle me. What on Earth inspired anyone to have a story where identical twin geniuses are kidnapped? It would make more sense for Azmael to be stealing some nifty computer designed for it - hell, I bet I wasn't the only one expecting the twins to be revealed in episode four to be badly-programmed androids (and would explain why we never see their mother). The twins are like Adric clones - something Saward flags up in his novelization - where you would expect something more like Chloe and Radcliffe from The League of Gentlemen. They should be creepy, speaking in unison, ideally freakier than their kidnappers. But they're not even as interesting and need to wear different colours in order to be told apart (colours also inexplicably mirrored in the pens they use, their backgammon set, their home computers and the ones the Jocondans helpfully provide).

Come to think of it, why have their memories removed? In prose, I might get that, having a novel hinge on these twins trying to remember where they are, where they came from and to be revealed at the conclusion. But we already know. And the amnesia does nothing to stop the twins asking awkward questions, causing trouble and whinging. Remove those circles and does the plot change? No! Hell, I don't even care they've been kidnapped, because their first scenes show them to be arrogant, emotionless, smug, gormless and rude. When they're kidnapped my sympathies are for Professor Sylvest when he gets home, not for dumb and dumber. Why is their "game of equations" so dangerous anyway? Looks like a dull computer game to me. And if its so dangerous, why on Earth allow the twins access to the computer to use it anyway?

Azmael doesn't grab me either. Why does he insist on calling himself Professor Edgeworth? If he had established this identity on Earth in order to infiltrate the twins' room, I could buy it, but he just teleports in and teleports out again. The character is written a bit like the Doctor in Caves of Androzani, a tired Time Lord desperate to save the day any cost. Part of me wishes it wasn't Azmael but Maxil involved, ironically regenerated into Peter Davison. You could believe him when he tells the twins either they help him or they die, and you can see him grimly setting the base on Titan 3 to explode because he honestly can't risk the Doctor interfering. Maurice Denham does a wonderfully tired old man, even though he does resemble that big-headed monster from an Original Star Trek episode (I do love his sad "I can if I have to" as he uses his mind power to freeze the twins in mid-stance).

Colin Baker's first full story. And he's far from perfect. I've met the man, he's a lovely human being and Big Finish have proved both he and the Sixth Doctor got a short rift. Here... he's intermitent. Sometime he's acutely embrassing (though not as embarassing as Peri's sobbing at the end of part two - the only time Doctor Who makes me want to hide behind the sofa), but I don't look at these moments and think 'Colin, you're crap!' I think Colin is deliberately acting badly, for the moments to show that the Doctor isn't thinking straight. Watch the bit where the Doctor makes a ludicrously overblown and passionate speech that just because there's a minor mystery to be solved the whole universe is about to fall about and only HE and PERI can POSSIBLY stop it, only for Peri to meekly ask "How?" and the Doctor blows out his cheeks, shrugs and changes the subject. That's brilliant, that is, fantastic.

However I can only really appreciate it because I know it's the latter that speaks of natural Colin Baker than the former. The Doctor is given countless stupid things to say, but knowing its awful doesn't stop it being awful. Just as good as the moments when you're not sure if he's having a fit or not: when the Doctor goes on about how old and useless he is, it's said with rising hysteria rather than self-pity; when the Doctor calmly and reasonably insists he and Peri leave the TARDIS to face, if not certain death, then a horrible, harsh life; and when he suddenly starts baiting Mestor. The moment where the Doctor's wandering mindset causes him to deride existence as boring and laughing hysterically is wince-inducing, but the moment were he goes Hannibal Lector on Peri/Piri is definitely scary.

But it happens in the first episode! That's what's wrong with it, not the act but it's timing!

Imagine it happening not just after the Doctor's finished changing, but instead happens towards episode three. The universe is in danger, the Doctor needs to get in action but we can see his thought processes have got muddled, he's moving off topic, getting enthusiastic, and now he thinks Peri is the danger to him and she can't reason with him and the Doctor attacks her - bang! Cliffhanger! And it's made all the more poignant because we know, like Maddox in Warriors of the Deep, the Doctor doesn't want this to happen...

The whole relationship between Peri and the Doctor is skewed. She starts off by treating him with open contempt and when she finally realizes the Doctor is not in the best of moods to be taunted with, she instantly becomes meek before finally snapping. Yet, this happens in the first episode! If you're going to have an emotional arc to the four episodes, it shouldn't be over in part one and then get repeated. I admit, Peri's tirades against the Doctor are brilliant (her taken-aback shout of "I'm not letting a manic-depressive paranoid personality like YOU tell me what to do!" is killingly funny), but they are not consistant. Peri has as many mood swings as the Doctor, being quiet and contemplative while tending Hugo to blubbing at the thought the Doctor's dead to giving the impression she'd want to do the deed herself. Peri was timid around the Fifth Doctor (did she have a crush on him?), and it would have been more effective if that had stayed until the end of the story where she finally snaps and earns the new Doctor's respect. The bit where he marvels she still cares about him is a case in point - he should be touched, not baffled!

The suit, also, is another thing I'd do differently. Actually, I don't hate it (my biggest issue is that it's a bugger to draw), but it is a massive problem. The Twin Dilemma might look like the cash-starved end-of-season four-parter it is, but it's doing better than The Caves of Androzani (where spy cameras are studio cameras, personal computers remote controls and laser guns replaced by machine guns with sparks added in post-production). The reason Twin looks worse is because its decked out in awful greens, purples, silvers, blues and browns. And why? Because of that coat! There's a whole chunk of The Sixth Doctor Handbook explaining that due to the way TV works, brighter colours cause others to fade out so everything in The Twin Dilemma had to look so gaudy otherwise they would litterally wash out by the coat. As Eric Saward notes in his novelzation, all the colours clash and don't add up to anything - a bit like the story itself. It would also, in my humble opinion, have been better had the Doctor not chosen the bloody outfit in the first place but rather grabbed the first thing to hand because the TARDIS was out of control and needed something to wear. Four episodes go by and the only person who thinks the Doctor looks stupid in the coat is Peri - hardly the evidence needed to show the Sixth Doctor is 'totally tasteless', is it?

The problems are shared by the plot. Anthony Stevens seems to have been making it up as he goes along and Eric Saward is constantly building up elements only to end up ignoring them. Mestor wants no link between Joconda and the twins' kidnapping... but he has the power to wipe out entire space fleets by just thinking it! Mestor tells Azmael to reveal what he knows in the belief learning the mission will be benevolent will convince the twins to cooperate - which begs the question why he didn't do this from the beginning, and maybe just write a letter to the twins asking for the answer on the back of a postcard? If Mestor is so powerful, why doesn't he slam the planets into the sun instead of going through the charade? And why is his plan's aim appear to be to increase his species but not himself when every other scene shows him to be an arrogant megalomaniac? What are the 'consequences' the twins foresee about the planet juggling, because it clearly isn't the one the Doctor twigs to? Why does Noma, clearly a smart cookie along the lines of Lytton, honestly believe Mestor is benevolent? If the Gastropods eat everything and food is running out... why don't they just eat the Jocondons? Why does Azmael have a couple of handy 'anti-Gastropod' juice hanging around and never used it? Just how and why did Mestor have the X3773 captured, and why doesn't he change the number plate if he doesn't want it traced? How come he can communicate with Azmael, but Azmael needs a pager to talk back to him? And why oh why does Hugo pull a gun on the Doctor and threaten to kill him if he becomes unstable when he's never seen the Doctor unstable? As far as Lang knows, the Doctor's just a prima donna!

The last scene doesn't work. I wish it did. The Doctor's line ("And whatever else happens, I am the Doctor - whether you like it... or not.") is delivered firmly but not angrilly, and the smile between him and Peri makes the story end on a happy note. But there's no resolution - otherwise we wouldn't have most of Season 22 where the Doctor and Peri are arguing all the bloody time. The line is given such heavy emphasis you wonder if the Doctor was originally supposed to say the same thing in episode one, only this time Peri actually believes him.

Oh, and the cliffhangers... Not good. Not good at all. I can forgive episode one as we see the Doctor's face (just in time for it to be blown off), but Peri's strange snorting sobs are off-putting. The extremely long lingering shots on Colin Baker's face for the other two are bad. Really bad. Especially the final one, where the Doctor is clearly staring straight at camera and looking gormless - and not at all like the genuine smile he was giving to Peri seconds earlier. You would have thought someone would have noticed and done something... And the music is terrible - bar the scene where Azmael detects the TARDIS following his ship and, not recognizing it, wonders what it might be as a militaristic version of the theme tune plays.The Twin Dilemma just doesn't work. And that's not just bad, it's a tragedy. Because new Doctor stories are the only stories in Doctor Who that HAVE to work. There are crap Dalek stories, Cybermen stories, companions can have bad arrivals and worse departures, and even regeneration stories have been known to below par. But a story introducing a new Doctor just can't afford to go wrong, and The Twin Dilemma hits the ground burning - there are good elements but the don't gel and we're left with a bad start to the Sixth Doctor, a terrible continuation of The Caves of Androzani and lacklustre end to Season 21. Eric Saward easily improved the whole story for his novelization, which proves that Twin was one rewrite short of greatness. JNT was not perfect, but fighting to keep the half-thought-out The Twin Dilemma in Season 21 rather than finish it in Season 22 was the only big mistake he'd made since taking the reigns.

If there's a story Big Finish are going to replace in the canon, don't let it be Shada, let it be this.