The Twin Dilemma: Ranking - 223

 The Twin Dilemma

(Season 21, Dr 6 with Peri, 22-30/3/1984, producer: John Nathan-Turner, script editor: Eric Saward, writer: Anthony Steven, director: Peter Moffat)

'A Peri is a supernatural being of Persian folklore descended from fallen angels and cast out of paradise until atoning for their sins...Or it means a beautiful and graceful girl. Mind you, Tegan means 'darling' or 'loved one', Sarah means 'princess', Barbara means 'exotic' and Dorothea means 'God's gift' so ha, what does the dictionary know? 

Ranking: 223

 

 After the walking plants it seems only right to follow it with the story that gave us talking slugs. Also fittingly, I’ve got a bit of a twin dilemma with this story myself. You see, despite this story’s critical pasting to the point where it’s bottom of many fan lists, over the years I’ve grown quite fond of it and admire it in a way i don’t similar turkeys like ‘Time and the Rani’ ‘Orphan 55’ ‘The Timeless Child’ or ‘The TV Movie’. Those stories are all, for different reasons bad television and bad Dr Who, story ideas that were already flawed before production mishaps piled mistake on top of mistake. It’s hard to envision a version of any of these stories that ‘works’, even if they’d been by my favourite writers, given the perfect place in a series running order (Towards the end but not so much the end it matters if it all goes wrong) and given a budget Hollywood could only dream of. There is, however, a great story in ‘The Twin Dilemma’ somewhere that takes a lot of brave courageous moves but a combination of misdirection over who the new 6^th Doctor should be and getting the end of season short straw means that what does end up of those concepts on screen ends up becoming badly mangled, to the point where this relatively brave and mature story that takes a brave and mature stance on who this incarnation might be ends up looking like bad children’s television. Here there’s one fatal flaw that dominates everything: timing. See this episode out of context it looks a bit cheap, a bit wild and is a bit under par, suffering from the old 1970s problem that the last story of a season tended to be the one that made up the budget shortfall. See it in the order it was meant to go out (following Peter Davison’s heroics in ‘Caves Of Androzani’) and it’s the biggest slide from the sublime to ridiculous within two consecutive stories in the DW run. We needed a darker, edgier Doctor after Davison though and I like Colin Baker’s portrayal a lot: there’s an unpredictability about him that hadn’t been there since Hartnell and you’re never quite sure what this Doctor’s going to do in any given situation: fight, sulk, pontificate or save the universe which after three years of Davison talking about morals to monsters and then more often than not shooting them anyway makes a refreshing change. Finding something distinctive to do with the character after so many people have played them must be daunting, but the idea to seize on the pure theatricality of the Doctor that’s been lurking under the surface for four previous Doctors (and, let’s face it, all of them since) is a good call I think. There’s nothing that wrong with the actual story either I don’t think: the twins are a bit wet but then they are playing mathematical geniuses (and even then not as bad as some say, considering neither had much acting experience) and the Jacondans are a bit Sylvanian Families, but there’s a neat 'Village of the Damned' factor in there somewhere and Maurice Denholm’s Azmael, the Doctor’s old mentor, is a great character we should have seen more of. The dilemma is, though, some really bad mistakes are made along the way with the god ideas. The Doctor’s instability is pushed too far without explaining why. I mean, it makes perfect sense to me that this new incarnation would be snippy to Peri, the person that inadvertently caused his regeneration but we needed one or two scenes of him exploring his frustration, not a dozen scenes including him strangling her for good measure. This maybe wouldn’t matter if the story looked big and epic but the low budget only emphasises the wrong aspects: everyone pulled all the stops (and indeed the budget) out for Androzani, which feels as close to a big movie as you can have on a 1980s BBC budget and which made the 5^th Doctor seem more noble and moral than he ever got to be in the rest of this run. This story makes the new Doctor look like a git floundering around on a planet made out of tinsel full of bright colours and looks just like a pantomime. This is the one time we needed a whole season to get to know the Doctor again, to see how aspects of him that are unlikeable straight away calm down and change over time, but no – producer JNT didn’t want people to wait to see what the new Doctor would be like and so added this story to the end of the season, with a six month gap before anyone got to see sixie acting ‘stable’ (as much as he ever did). The plan was always going to be to soften the character by degrees after starting with a bang that made him unlikeable, but when your ‘hero’ has just been replaced by a big-headed twonk and it’s a wait between seasons so no wonder so many people thought DW wasn’t for them anymore and watched something else. Because of all this Colin Baker has gone down in folklore as the Doctor nobody liked, not least because that’s what the controller of the BBC said and sacked him.  But they’re all wrong: Colin’s great in all his stories, it’s his character that isn’t. Thankfully he’s become a popular Doctor now thanks to his Big Finish audios for many good reasons, several of which are already here in his debut. To appreciate his Doctor though you need to know what comes next including spin-off audios made a quarter of a century later, to not watch this story back to back with ‘Androzani’ and perhaps above all to read the novelisation instead.

+ There are a couple of rather good and impressively different monster designs in this story (and when did we last have two races who weren’t related in the same story?) The Jacondans are a really good 1980s design, very different to anything else the series ever did, velvety and whiskery.  The gastropods meanwhile are pure slugs, like a folk memory of the Optera crossed w the Tractators but much more workable than either. They have one of the best motives of monsters in DW too: instead of power or control or using the the planet’s core as a space shuttle to explore the universe with (?) they’ve run out of food and want some more.

- That costume. I’ve read the reasons behind why they gave Colin Baker such an outfit: this is a Doctor whose all about bad taste, who liked everyone staring at him and why would an alien wear just one thing when they can wear several clashing things at once? These arguments are all nonsense though: yes this Doctor likes making an entrance but through his own brilliance not what he’s wearing. He’s actually got good really good taste in other things and name-drops more theatre, literature and film quotes than the others - he just looks down on everyone else for not being able to match him. Plus no self-respecting alien with all of time and space at their disposal would choose something that so screamed ‘1980s Earth’ as this.