;THE TWIN DILEMMA by Anthony Steven
Season 21 would be unique in Doctor Who’s history (excluding the Hartnell-Troughton changeover) in that a complete adventure for the next Doctor would be screened at the end of the season, instead of the regeneration ending the season and fans having to wait another year before they could see the new Doctor for the first time. The flipside to this bonus is that the last story of the season almost always loses out in terms of budgeting (think of stories like Time-Flight or Dragonfire), and it is these stories which turn out to be major clangers in Who history. And guess what – The Twin Dilemma is by no means an exception to that rule!
The major problem, like any other ‘bad’ Doctor Who story, is the script itself. Time and the Rani has a giant brain (made of paper, incidentally), Time-Flight has Concorde in the Stone Age, and The Twin Dilemma has… well, pretty much everything. A giant slug allied with an old man kidnapping twin maths geniuses to make planets crash into a sun and then scatter, of all things, gastropod eggs? Talk about suspension of belief, this is positive belief bungee-jumping, and it doesn’t add to the serial one bit. It seems the main problem was the frankly incompetent writer, Anthony Steven, who, among others, came up with such brilliant excuses as his typewriter “literally exploding”. Quite frankly, if I’d come up with this drivel, I’d have liked a way to dispose of the evidence; it’s a pity it didn’t work here. Such excuses required a top-down Holmes-esque rewrite by script editor Eric Saward, and this obviously affected the script, with input of two writers but almost no conference between the two of them.
We can forgive Steven and Saward, however, for one thing, and that’s design. However they wrote it, they could not possibly have imagined a computer console covered in tin foil, giant slug costumes which look like they have been formed from soil, and a secret base on an asteroid shaped like a nipple (don’t lie, you were all thinking it!) – only the (as Family Guy put it) “boob nipple gun” from The Empire Strikes Back supersedes it in the breast-lookalike contest. Then, of course, there’s the travesty that is the new Doctor’s costume, which apparently came from a frustrated designer’s “how about this?!” moment, and producer John Nathan-Turner’s frankly stupid acceptance. As Peri actress Nicola Bryant notes on the DVD commentary, if Baker had had this costume on briefly, or maybe just for this story, it’d be forgiven for being a moment of insanity caused by an unstable regeneration. However the fact that he continues to wear it (we’ll exclude the slightly less ridiculous version offered up in Real Time), even up to his regeneration in Time and the Rani, gives cause for serious concern. The natty tuxedo offered up in DVD feature Look 100 Years Younger looks far better – though somehow it seems wrong on Baker: goddammit JNT’s made me used to that darned costume!
Acting is one thing which can be credited here. Two greats of English theatre, Maurice Denham and Edwin Richfield, star as the Doctor’s Time Lord friend Azmael and the gastropod leader Mestor respectively, but one must feel sorry for the latter, being so restricted in both body and voice by the hideous costume. Unfortunately Nicola Bryant’s acting is as naff as ever (though it would better going into the next two seasons) and future Pirates of the Caribbean star Kevin McNally’s turn as intergalactic policeman Hugo Lang is pretty wet (just look at that crappy ‘water pistol’ gun!), and woodenly acted.
The “new Doctor story at end of season” experiment is one of many in JNT’s era which didn’t pay off. Another one which wouldn’t (well, viewing figures-wise, anyway) was coming up in Season 22: 45-minute episodes, here we come…
Next Episode
ATTACK OF THE CYBERMEN
