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

 

 We’ve been infested by slugs lately, dear reader. They arrived during the ‘Seeds Of Doom’ review (yum, all those Krynoids to munch) and have been hiding ever since, leaving silvery trails at night all over the carpet (one even looked like the diamond Pertwee logo). But during re-watching ‘The Twin Dilemma’ last night what is hopefully the last one came out into the open and I was able to shoo it out the door (I did wait until the closing credits though – I’m not a monster). So I for one am perhaps the only Whovian in the world grateful that ‘The Twin Dilemma’ exists. After all, most fans hate this one with a passion and shudder when they hear it’s name. It’s a regular at the bottom of story polls (usually alternating with ‘Time and The Rani’ or in more recent polls ‘Fear Her’ ‘Orphan 55’ and ‘The Timeless Children’)  and was the point at which the ratings began to fall away drastically, with so many people put off by this season finale that a lot didn’t bother to come back the following year. I can well understand why this piece of cheaply made nonsense flopped so badly hot on the heels of ‘The Caves Of Androzani’,  a tightly plotted gritty tense drama and it was a colossally stupid move giving us just one story where the new Doctor is an absolute arse (who’s even rude about the Peter Davison regeneration everyone has come to know and love and is still grieving for) before taking a long break off the air and leaving a bad taste in the mouth. Some of the effects are laughable, the Gastropod costumes risible and like many a 1980s season finale the money clearly ran out before we got to this story.

But 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 ‘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 6th Doctor should be and getting the end of season budget 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.

You see, unlike a lot fans who thought this plot was stupid, I also think that writer Anthony Steven is the one writer who’s been asked to write about a ‘regeneration’ story and considered that in a wider sense beyond what happens to The Doctor. Steven is another refugee from Who producer John Nathan-Turner’s ‘other’ series ‘All Creatures Great and Small’ (like Johnny Byrne) and JNT had particularly admired his ability to write organic stories that resulted from the tension between characters who clashed rather than artificially constructed plots about something else. That was what JNT was looking for in a story that would have The Doctor as unlikeable and untrustworthy, a deliberate contrast to the Peter Davison Doctor who was safe, solid and unreliable. For even poor Peri wouldn’t trust him, thanks to a bit of post-regenerational trauma that would leave the Colin Baker version unstable. After all, the Doctor did just give up a ‘life’ to save her – and even for a selfless being like him there must be some residual resentment rolling around in there. JNT figured that if the viewers at home could no longer rely on The Doctor to do the right thing, the way they once did then it would keep them on the edge of their seat wondering what would happen. JNT also wants his second every regeneration story to be different to his first, ‘Castrovalva’, where The Doctor was weak and helpless: he wanted this new Doctor to be the centre of attention. It’s an idea shared by the new leading man, who wanted his Doctor to be darker and more alien and slowly learn to soften round the edges, basing his characterisation on ‘Mr D’arcy’, the ‘Pride and Prejudice’ protagonist who seems like a total pain the first time you meet him but who you slowly grow to like (well, barely if I’m honest – Jane Austen is no Elizabeth Gaskell when it comes to three-dimensional characters). Colin’s original idea, too, was to have the Doctor seem alien by remaining calm in the face of danger then blowing up at the smallest thing going wrong – something that never quite comes across in his portrayal but sounds a good one to me. So Steven, who has never written for the show before and doesn’t know it that well, is asked to go away and write a story that’s basically two people who don’t like each other stuck in a lift together for an episode (even if the Tardis is a pretty big lift) and where the lead saves the day but nearly ruins it quite a few times along the way too.

Not being a Whovian Steven doesn’t see regeneration the way past writers/script editors like Gerry Davies/Kit Pedler, Terrance Dicks, Barry Letts, Christopher H Bidmead or Bob Holmes do. For them regeneration is a spiritual change as much as anything else, where karma catches up with each Doctor and he has to pay for some fault, changing into a new person because he’s learned something. He stays basically the same Doctor all the way through, with the same moral compass and drives, but the way he goes about best saving the universe changes with each lead actor. But Steven doesn’t see it like that, he sees regeneration as a physical change, a ‘violent eruption of atoms’ where everything is different and the Doctor has to re-learn his identity all over again. After all, if the Doctor’s body physically changes so dramatically, why would their brains stay the same? Why wouldn’t their brains re-set too? So, given that he’s asked to make the new guy shifty anyway, the writer makes the new Doctor schizophrenic and gives him an identity crisis, a breakdown if you will that has him veer from being so up himself it’s not true to panic attacks of anxiety and self-loathing. The Doctor has been regressed to childhood but with an adult ability (hence all those long pontificating words), back at the stage all toddlers go through when they learn to be independent and that the world doesn’t exist purely to suit them (the point at which many children learn to have tantrums – one or two adults never grow out of them or thinking life revolves around them). He also struggles with telling truth and fantasy apart, especially trust issues, attacking Peri for being a ‘replacement’ even though it’s him who’s the replacement (and it’s worth nothing that Peri only stops him from strangling her completely by shoving a mirror in his face so he sees who he is for real).A lot of fans criticise the way they made the new Doctor unstable and violent and I’d probably be one of them if I had to wait a whole year to see what happened next, but luckily I wasn’t one of them which means I can see what this story was trying to do a bit more: this is a Doctor who has lost all his yardsticks to judge himself by and is now back at the beginning again, resentful of having to prove himself morally all over again and caught between moments of adoration and self-hatred. For this Doctor isn’t as up himself as the guidebooks usually say: instead he’s a narcissist with self-doubt, who will make some self-effacing quip after a grandiose one, or who decides, a few seconds after being proud of his new self, that he’s a menace that ought to be locked away from people as a hermit. Like a child learning to see themselves from another person’s perspective it’s a rollercoaster ride of trying to work out where he fits, as hero or monster and his brain isn’t yet adept enough to see that everyone is a bundle of contradictions who largely keep their suffering to themselves. As Peri, the closest thing to a parent substitute, yells at him at the end of episode one ‘We all have to repress our feelings from time to time’. The Doctor is still struggling to think beyond the self because everything is so new to him. The schizophrenia this causes is also half of the pun behind the title ‘The Twin Dilemma’ as The Doctor slowly learns across this story to integrate the whole of his personality, good and bad. Note also that the new Doctor says the old one was ‘on the verge of a nervous breakdown’ after being so relentlessly good for so long: this one intends to embrace his darker, shadow side and become more whole (up until the point where he realises that he’s strangled Peri anyway. Although given the look on her face she’d probably prefer that to being The Doctor’s assistant when he becomes a hermit).

The other half revolves around actual twins, in a story that’s more or less an extension of that idea, of thinking beyond yourself. For there’s long been a fascination with twins who have a relationship with each other that the vast majority of the public can never have: someone who’s been with you your whole life through, who grew up in the same womb from the same genes and who often shares much of the same DNA. There’s long been a history in science fiction of making twins who share the same face and near enough the same brain that allows them to finish off each other’s sentences both special and creepy. Many times they’re given telepathic abilities that make them seem alien. Because most of the Human condition is to struggle to look for a connection, to find someone who thinks like you – and twins seem to have a head start in this and know things other people don’t. But Romulus and Remus (their dad must have been a Roman historian) are an extreme set of twins who are impossibly bright child prodigies  and have the ability to do complex mathematics. In terms of the plot there only needed to be one of them (and the casting took an age, as the casting director could only find one girl and one boy and JNT wanted matching boys – things were desperate until actor Les Conrad, who played one of the gunrunners in ‘Androzani’ mentioned he had twin boys who’d done a bit of acting at school but never in front of the cameras. Things were in such a panic that their equity cards arrived virtually the first day of filming and poor Paul Conrad had to have his name credited under the pseudonym ‘Gavin’ as there already was an actor with that name on the books). But having twins, of having a pair of people who didn’t ‘need’ to separate themselves the way The Doctor does and always has someone around to enforce who they are makes a fine contrast. They’re also vulnerable for that reason though, gullible and selfish enough to be hired by an alien slug who wants them to move a few planets around using their calculation. They’ve never stopped to think about how what they’re doing might affect the rest of their home planet Joconda or even the rest of the universe. Like The Doctor they need to do the Doctor Who thing and learn to see things from the point of view of everyone, not just themselves.

The twins are also the first time Dr Who realises that it’s now been running so long that it kids of sides with the ‘adults’ now, not the children. You might remember that a lot of our 1960s reviews are about generations, given that Dr Who was the one show parents and children watched together. As a general rule the 1960s wonders what the future might be like when the baby boomers watching on first transmission grow into adults and take their hippie ideals with them, the 1970s sees their stop-start progress into adulthood and the 1980s wonders ‘what the hell just happened?’ as Britain falls head first into a Thatcherist trap of capitalism and greed. ‘The Twin Dilemma’ is the first story, though, that realises that there’s another generation that’s come along and, well, they’re a bit weird aren’t they? The twins are that 1980s invention, the teenage coder. They spend their days in their bedroom punching numbers into what looks like a cross between a gameboy and an i-pad, don’t go outside to play with other children and don’t connect with the ‘real’ world. Yes, this is the first Dr Who story to tell the nation’s youth to put the screens down and play outside and hug a tree, possibly decades before you might have expected it. The adults are more than a bit scared of them and their abilities, which now have such power that they don’t relate to or understand at all (‘in my day we thought pocket calculators were the height of technology’ you can hear the audience saying) which is the wrong way round from how the 1960s series imagined the future, with the children of the day growing to be the adults in charge – they’ve been sidelined again. They reject their mother coldly and are rude to their mentor, Azmael, as if they have no responsibilities or empathy to anyone if they have each other.   But in keeping with the Dr Who ethos the twins aren’t monsters. They’re kind kids who, once they learn what’s really going on, are as brave as anyone we see in the show and rather horrified at what they’ve nearly done (admittedly that doesn’t come over that well given that they’re acting newbies, but equally they’re not all that bad. There are definitely worse child actors in other episodes. And their lisps are quite sweet, showing how young they still are despite all that power they’ve been given on a plate without being taught how to use it).  

That sense of schizophrenia comes up again in Azmael’s story arc. He’s one of The Doctor’s  oldest friends (not that we’ve ever seen him on screen, though he mentions a riotous night out drinking at a fountain with the Tom Baker Doctor – presumably the Doctor was on the ginger beer as the actor was careful to never be seen by kids to drink) and the ‘best teacher he ever had’ (don’t let Borusa hear you say that Doctor!) As The Doctor so often does Azmael is working undercover, trying to get close to the evil Gastropod Mestor. Only to do that Azmael has had to ‘pretend’, to become something he doesn’t want to be, to the point where he himself is having a mild form of breakdown. For that’s another stage of becoming independent in childhood, learning that you have a responsibility to do things you don’t want to do but that need doing (although, admittedly, for most children it means doing chores or attending school rather than blowing up suns and moving planets). Interestingly the original plan, suggested by ‘fan advisor’ Ian Levine, had been for Azmael to be the ‘hermit’ mentor The Doctor mentions in ‘The Time Monster’ (and quite possibly the man he meets in ‘Planet Of The Spiders’), a sort of spiritual guru who helped The Doctor think beyond himself when he was little (and must have had a profound effect on him given how insular and selfish most timelords appear to be but what a hero he’s become). This would mirror well with the idea of The Doctor trying to become a hermit himself and shutting himself away – even though his real hermit mentor knows that it’s only through engaging with people and being in a community with them that you really learn life’s ‘truths’ (it’s also why the twins learn to look beyond themselves and why Mestor sending his protégé into space without caring for them as individuals makes him a ‘baddy’ in a very moral story). It’s a shame they took that aspect out as it would explain a lot of The Doctor’s continued instability, seeing his spiritual guru who helped him see beyond himself apparently acting selfish.
I wonder too if there’s some wider satire going on here. For this is, at the heart of it, a planet of bird-like people the Jacondans and find freedom who’ve become pressganged into work by their invaders, the slug-like Gastropods. Bear in mind that the slugs literally stick people into place with the slime they ooze, which traps people to the floor like concrete (with the detail that the monsters smell repellent, like rotting vegetables – we hardly ever hear about smell in Dr Who stories). The Jocondans ought to be able to fly away (both literally and given their technology figuratively) but they’ve gone too far the other way, staying out of a sense of duty and obligation the Gastropods really don’t deserve. They’re both really interesting races, at least on paper: the Jacondans have a back story and myths and legends, believing in a sun god who brings them life – which is why they’ve stayed out of duty of their world when the Gastropods come along and see them as a ‘punishment’ from their God. Its only when Mestor talks about exploding their sun they start to have second thoughts (and this idea of becoming independent from religion and thinking for yourself is another of those steppingstones towards identity. Of course, in reality the costumes for the Gastropods especially are stupid, the actors stuck in suits so dense that they can only act with their tiny little arms and voices muffled by the thickness of the costume; the Jacondons seemed to get all the costume budget.  They can’t cope without the other and have grown dependent, but while the Jacondans are long suffering the Gastropods remain ambitious, with a plot of spreading their eggs across the universe, oblivious to the harm this might cause other alien races. They’re the two extremes of this idea, the selfless and the selfish, which The Doctor and to some extent the twins ate trying so hard to learn. That’s actually a really interesting idea for a Dr Who story and one unlike any other in the series’ history a psychological look into the impact people have on each other, even though this is a series that’s always been about community (going right back to the tribes in ‘An Unearthly Child’) and the impact that we all have on each other and the duty of care that comes with it. Mostly the JNT years have had writers who remember Dr Who from their childhood or who were avid fans of it from yesteryear so for me I really like this slightly different take from someone coming to the series fresh.

Of course most fans don’t see any of this because that’s a hard sort of plot to put over successfully on screen. All you see on first broadcast is a madman being hysterical and strangling his assistant in a story that looks super cheap (all the money having run out by the time of this final story) and has a couple of first time actors being creepy in a story that’s basically a fight between some over-sized birds and some daft looking slugs, like some gonzo David Attenborough documentary about survival of the fittest. This story looks as bad as everyone laughed at Dr Who for being (it’s the episode Ricky Gervais takes off in ‘Extras’). It doesn’t help that Mestor the Gastropod’s plan is one of the most absolute bonkers in the history of the series: he plans to spread his eggs into the universe by…having the twins move a few planets around using mathematics (what?) and the gravitational effect blowing up a sun (how?)  Mestor, for all his supposed genius never seems to have stopped to think what that means for his eggs: space is big. I mean you might think it’s a long way to the shops but that’s peanuts compared to space, as Douglas Adams would no doubt have pointed out had he still been watching Who at this point. The explosion will scatter them in different directions at random, meaning that most of them will die in space and the few that land will no doubt land on uninhabited rocks unfit for life. Even on the infinitesimally small chance that one of the eggs lands on a planet where it can survive there will be no mummy or daddy to help hatch it and even if by chance it somehow does survive into old age it will die alone, unable to mate. Not exactly a foolproof plan of conquest is it? It doesn’t help that the planet Jaconda looks cheap and nasty in the TV studio and boring outside it, Colin being the first Doctor unfortunate enough to wind up in a quarry in his very first story (our old friend Gerrards Cross Sand and Gravel Quarry where Sylvester McCoy will wind up in his debut ‘Time and The Rani’ too, alongside some filming in Springwell Quarry, Hertfordshire).   

The real fatal flaw that dominates everything though: 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 Dr Who run. The differences between these two isn’t a dip, it’s a chasm. That story was dark and gritty, written by Bob Holmes to exploit all the ways that he felt the 5^th Doctor wasn’t working to take his idealism and throw him against a story that’s a struggle to survive (a struggle he loses). You feel every bruise, every bump and The Doctor could have regenerated multiple different ways before dying in the perfect 5^th Doctory way by giving his life to save Peri. ‘The Twin Dilemma’ immediately undoes all that good work by having The Doctor try to kill her anyway and having him act like a big kid having a tantrum in a series that suddenly seems to be made for adults again. 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 5th 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. ‘Androzani’ is also the perfect season finale that, even though I see flaws where a lot of fans don’t seem to, nevertheless stays in your memory long after you’ve watched it and makes you think more fondly of the Davison Doctor in retrospect than you did across the rest of his three years. However it isn’t the season finale. People have talked a lot about the mistakes JNT made with this story (one he went to his grave defending as a genius story that fans didn’t understand) but the biggest one by far was giving us a regeneration mid-season for only the second time (see ‘Power Of The Daleks’) but by far the biggest was ending on a story where The Doctor is at his most unstable and unlikeable and having fans sit on it for the ten month break the series was off the air. No wonder people never tuned back in when all they’d seen of The Doctor was an obnoxious loud mouth degenerate regenerate who strangled his assistant and who’s big idea to solve the story was to throw acid in the face of the baddy (a last minute replacement by Eric Saward, who hated the original expensive ending in space where Mestor wasn’t even seen – even so it can’t possibly have been as bad as what we got).

I do like the plan though to have a darker Doctor who is gradually softened across time to become nicer, very much like the one Steven Moffat had for the 12^th Doctor, who himself suffers a similar identity crisis and only slowly learns to become a ‘good man’ on aggregate (because he can’t tell from the jumble of memories inside him and has to make a few mistakes to get there). We needed a darker, edgier Doctor after Davison rather than just a straight copy and I’m one of those fans who likes 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. After three years of Davison talking about morals to monsters and then more often than not shooting them anyway makes a refreshing change. So does having The Doctor going back to being the loudest thing in the room around which everything else revolves: the 5^th Doctor had a tendency to hide in the corner and moralise while no one else listens to him, but this one just takes charge whether he fully knows what he’s doing yet or not. 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 to a degree) is a good call I think. I wonder, too, if Saward (who resented the casting from the beginning and thought Colin was awful in his Blake’s 7 appearance ‘The City At The Edge Of the World’ – to be fair the part is written for an OTT ‘Brian Blessed’ type) was having fun at his producer’s expense. For the Doctor we have throughout his run but especially here must surely be modelled on JNT or at least his worst qualities: he’s loud, brash, arrogant, keen on publicising himself and has a shock of curly hair. JNT was also known for his loud Hawaiian shirts and brash dress sense and larger than life personality (this is a change: I reckon David Whittaker based the 1^st Doctor partly on himself and the Barry Letts/Terrance Dicks put more than a little of themselves in the 3rd Doctor but usually script editors write themselves in as the companions. This Doctor acts like a bully and then expects everyone to be his friend, sulking when he doesn’t get his own way and remembering petty feuds. Wjich if you’ve read a few of the other JNT era reviews might sound familiar. Of course this Doctor isn’t as good in a crisis and doesn’t have a head for numbers ut even so there are times when Saward seems to be…laughing, both at Cplin and his boss. Only when Russell T Davies becomes comfortable does he make the 10^th Doctor an exaggerated version of himself. Eric is still the only Doctor ‘originator’ who appears to have based The Doctor on someone he doesn’t seem to like…) 

Colin also acts his socks off despite difficult circumstances indeed, a naughty boy let loose in a school full of bowl-cut headed goody-two shoes (he even sits cross-legged for much of the story, like children do at schools even though it cripples their backs as adults). He was JNT’s only choice for The Doctor (much against the advice of script editor Eric so he revealed years later) and impressed him twice: once during his guest appearance in ‘Arc Of Infinity’ (as Commander Maxil who shoots the 5^th Doctor – ‘I was after his job even then’ Baker later joked in conventions) where the cast really warmed to him and again at the wedding of Who assistant floor manager Lynn Richards where he had the guests in stitches with his jokes and anecdotes. Part of being in a long-running show is the ability to get on with people and, despite the regeneration he plays, by complete contrast everyone who’s met the real Colin loves him (well not his ex wife Lisa Goddard or her close mate BBC controller Michael Grade as things turn out but that’s another story for another time: most people do). His bulk and curly hair also meant a great visual contrast to Davison. What’s more, unlike last time (when Davison demurred for a long time and other actors turned the part down) Colin leapt at the chance: he was the show’s original fanboy (give or take William Hartnell) and had always been open about wanting to be in it. For a time he was even room-mates with David Troughton and the pair used to watch dad Patrick’s Who stories together it’s why they got on so well in ‘The Two Doctors’ as they’d met a few times). Colin was practically Who family already and his enthusiasm for the role was infectious especially after the long faces Davison had been pulling across his final year. JNT and Colin had both independently come up with the idea of a darker, shiftier Doctor too, while the producer approved of Colin’s plan to start using long words and get kids looking things up in dictionaries again. Had they had a full year to prepare this Doctor, to work out the rough edges and work out a proper decent arc for the character, I really do think he might have been a fan favourite that beat Tom Baker’s seven year record (Colin’s ambition when he started). After three years of Davison for me it’s a welcome change – you could certainly never accuse this Doctor of being bland even if they do got a bit too far the other way...   

Alas it was not to be for a series of unfortunate decisions that ended up with this story being a huge rush that didn’t give the actor time to give his best. One of the reasons Colin said yes straight away was that he and his wife had just had a baby, Jack, in September 1983 and he could do with the extra money and a regular wage, more or less the time he was announced to the press. But unfortunately Jack died in October, a victim of infant cot death, and dad was understandably distraught. The last thing he cared about was what sort of Doctor he was going to be so his conversations with the production team became thin on the round as he threw himself into becoming the figurehead for the Foundation For The Study of Infant Deaths. No one would have blamed him for dropping out there and then, but one of the reasons Colin took the job was for the higher profile it would give the charity – to this day a lot of the money he makes at conventions goes directly to it and there have been many fan-organised fundraisers for it. Colin had just two months before he had to appear in front of the cameras and if his performance is even more wild and erratic than even the script for an unstable Doctor demands, well, there’s a good reason why. Unfortunately by the time he works out how to play a more friendly version of The Doctor the next year fans have stopped watching and the long gap means this one is burned in their brain. 

Something else that really doesn’t help: the technicians strike of 1983. The run of four stories at the end of season twenty-one were all affected by a technician’s strike. Already it’s resulted in the postponement and remount of ‘Resurrection Of The Daleks’ and eaten into deadlines for ‘Planet Of Fire’ and ‘Caves Of Androzani’. However it’s ‘The Twin Dilemma’ that’s worst hit, losing one of its three production blocks entirely (while even JNT’s ‘danger money’ kept in reserve for things going wrong could only add an extra day). Director Peter Moffatt was hired because he was known to work at speed and get things done on tight deadlines but even he found this story a struggle to get done on time, getting this story on time only by working up to the wire and doing overtime at home (he even had the rough cuts copied onto video so he could take them home and work out timings for ‘preliminary edits’ to be done the next day in the editing suite). Things aren’t helped by having two young actors who have never been in front of camera before. There’s also no time for Colin to be eased into his character,  no time for the japes and jokes he’ll become known for (though he did have an unofficial competition with Kevin McNally – Hugo – over who could get away with annoying Nicola Bryant the most. Colin won after biting her bottom in the scene he’s meant to hiding behind her. They didn’t know each other too well at that point and she had been teased mercilessly by Peter Davison about how awful Colin could be – without realising he was joking – so took it all at face value and kept her distance. Colin took her out to lunch to say sorry and they’ve been best friends ever since – their chemistry, which only really arrives by the end of the story, will become one of the best things about the 6^th Doctor era but admittedly they really do seem as if they hate each other in episode one). It’s not as if the strike meant extra rehearsal time either: instead Colin was roped into spending his extra time doing all the publicity Peter Davison hated doing and he was suddenly on everything: Blue Peter (with a competition to win one of the egg props!), Breakfast Time (where he and Nicola got a call from Anthony Ainley!), Saturday Superstore, Russell Harty, Pebble Mill…Not since Jon Pertwee had a Doctor done this much promotion (the first two of these five are on the DVD).

It’s down to Peri to handle most of this story, a big responsibility for an actress who was herself only on her third story and third month and hadn’t had a lot of experience in front of the cameras either. Yet Nicola is excellent: we’re used to seeing her sarcastic to alien threats and monsters and holding her own and she does the same with Mestor with some withering put downs. But look how she acts when she’s alone with The Doctor: this is where she’s most terrified, with the person who should be keeping her safe. Fans complain that she’s a victim in this story but she spars with The Doctor too (and while it will get wearing by story nine it’s quite a fresh change here after everyone kowtowing to Davison), telling him ‘I never saw anyone who loved themselves so much without reason!’ She’s also clearly dead guilty at the old Doctor giving up his life for her though she never says anything (not even a ‘thankyou’!) This is all new: other companions have been doubtful of their Doctors before now (especially ‘Castrovalva’ ) but they’ve hung around out of pity and because they’re kind. Peri hangs around out of guilt, because she wants to do the Dr Who thing and save the person who saved her, but this Doctor really doesn’t make things easy for her. She plays every scene slightly differently to match his shifting moods to, as if trying to see what will work with him: scolding him like a parent,  joking like his best friend, treating him with the condescension of a nurse with a patient, appealing to his better nature for help. It’s not Peri’s fault none of it works.
There’s nothing that wrong with this story then – nothing a bigger budget and being the start to a full series rather than the end of another wouldn’t have fixed. Yes the plot doesn’t make the most of its ideas (and you can tell that Saward wrote most of the second jhalf when the story becomes less metaphorical and more ‘normal’ – Steven was incredibly late with his deadlines and became too poorly to do re-writes, though it’s his excuse ‘I’m sorry Im late, my typewriter blew itself up and I had to get a new one’ that’s gone down in the production office’s folklore). Yes, 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. The acting is pretty fine all round:Maurice Denholm’s Azmael, the Doctor’s old mentor, is a great character we should have seen more of. Edwin Richfield, who did such a good job as Captain Hart in ‘The Sea Devils’ does as well as anyone can in a suit like Mestor’s. Unbelievably Hugo is played by the same actor (Kevin McNally) that played Professor Jericho in ‘Flux’ (they couldn’t be more different). Yes the new Doctor is a big headed twonk, but already by episode four he’s calming down and becoming more likeable. There are more than a few duff sentences along the way 9’May my bones rot for obeying it!’), but Steven gets Dr Who more than Pip ‘n’ Jane Baker ever did and if this script is 50 Saward’s then it’s some of his better work, especially when The Doctor speaks (he calls his regeneration a ‘stroll in the park of psychic tranquillity’ at one point, which is a neat way of putting ‘regeneration’). Yes the Gastropods look absolutely ridiculous, but I’ve seen worse. The music is pretty decent, Malcolm Clarke adding a ‘harpsichord’ to his synth score, which helps underscore either how intelligent or how pompous the new Doctor is (depending who’s side you’re on). Yes the story slows down a lot in the middle (ironically becoming sluggish during the part where we see the most slugs) but it’s not as slow or dull as some others and it has a proper beginning, middle and end a rarity in this era. There are some pretty decent model shots, including a nifty looking freighter ship. Above all its brave and had this not been the end of a season would have been the right time to do it: for the first time since the 2^nd Doctor there were no other changes happening with the same companion, producer and script editor who knew what they were doing (in theory) – with everything else running like clockwork this is the perfect time to experiment with the lead. It’s not their fault that a strike meant everything else collapsed so nobody really felt in control all story along. I would never ever claim that ‘The Twin Dilemma’ is a long lost masterpiece or anything given that it’s cheaply made with a wonky script and some daft costumes but…There have been a lot worse haven’t there? It’s not really that bad is it? Is it? Surely I can’t be the only fan who thinks this story is ‘disappointing and cheap’ rather than ‘the worst bit of television ever made’? (Notoriously when W H Smith asked the BBC for a Dr Who ‘exclusive’ on video that no one else would sell this one got nominated because everyone figured no fans would actually pay to own the thing anyway; actually thanks to Smith’s promotions it became the 6^th Doctor’s biggest seller not to have Daleks in it). Or is it me having the identity crisis and those pesky slugs have warped my brain and this story truly is as bad as everyone always says it is? Answers on a postcard…

POSITIVES + 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. They’re noble, peace loving people despite the horns. The gastropods meanwhile are pure slugs, like a folk memory of the Optera crossed w the Tractators. Only when they stand up do they look as stupid as everyone says. They’re also the most 1980s monster imaginable (they’re wearing deely boppers!)  

NEGATIVES - 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. Colin wanted a dark coat but JNT over-ruled him on the grounds that he would look too much like The Master. There’s no reason to go the other way though: perhaps this new regeneration suffers from colour-blindness too? Of course the big question is why The Doctor has this coat in the Tardis wardrobe anyway as it’s a rare costume he gets from there rather than nicking from someone (other options on the rails are the costumes worn by the 2^nd and 3^rd Doctors in ‘The Five Doctors’, the 4^th Doctor’s scarf, costumes worn by Tegan and Romana, a Vogan Guard Uniform (‘revenge Of the Cybermen’. How the heck did The Doctor get hold of that?!), some trousers from the Manussians in ‘Snakedance’ (ditto!) and even Dayna’s costume from Blake’s 7!) There’s this awful thought that one day the Tardis is going to land on a planet where everyone dresses like this…  Please pity poor costume designer Pat Godfrey who has been blamed for the costume ever since but who was dead set against it. he had six versions rejected by JNT for not being ‘tasteless’ enough and sent this version in more in hope that he would say she’d gone too far and wanted one of the old ones back again. She was horrified when he said it was perfect. Even so, it sort of works (if you turn the contrast on the TV down): this Doctor is the epitome of someone tasteless who think she has the most perfect taste and doesn’t realise everyone in the room is laughing at him.

Colin hated the coat but added his own touch to the lapels, a cat badge added every story, an actually pretty pricey addition from a specialist shop in Earlham Road, London considering we don’t see it much. Colin liked the Rudyard Kipling quote ‘I am the cat who walks by himself and all places are the same to me’, though he felt it applied to the Doctor if you added ‘and times’. His Doctor is very much a cat, haughty and working alone, whereas most Doctors had been pack animals (fun can be had deciding which Doctors should have which pet: I see the 4^th Doctor with a string of giraffe badges, the 9^th is clearly a whippet (all planets have a North), the 12^th is a grizzly bear and the 11^th is a duckbilled platypus. 

BEST QUOTE: Dr: ‘I can sense some massive danger to the universe’.  Peri: ‘I thought you were the danger to the universe!’

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: This story, slugs and all, was ruthlessly parodied in the finale of Ricky Gervais-Stephen Merchant comedy Extras’ (2007), in which Gervais (as extra-turned-proper-actor Andy Millman) is so desperate for work he agrees to appear in the ‘deeply camp’ series in which he plays a giant slug. David Tennant gets to do some manic running around and is clearly having the most fun, but then kills the alien with salt in a rather un-Doctorily cruel scene (admittedly that part is straight out of ‘Image Of the Fendahl’ but the costumes has to have been inspired by Dilemma…) Like most of Ricky Gervais’ work it’s funniest when he’s laughing at himself and making his character the butt of the jokes rather than other people.

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