The Twin Dilemma

Chapter The 125th, where giant slugs should be taken with a pinch of salt.

Plot:

An exiled Time Lord and former mentor of the Doctor (yes, another one, but not premiership material, a few divisions down) is the friendly dictator of bucolic planet Jaconda, which becomes overrun by giant slugs. These slugs are a legendary Jacondan menace that was thought dead many years ago, but turned out just to be dormant. In no time at all, the leader of the slugs Mestor has used mental powers to enslave the populace, and has stripped the planet of all its vegetation. The Time Lord, Azmael, thinking he's fulfilling a scheme to create new food sources by bringing other planets near to Jaconda, kidnaps two twin maths prodigies as he needs their unique skills in arranging blocky graphics on a BBC Micro (which will help somehow). The kidnap attracts the space police, who dispatch a patrol led by Lieutenant Hugo Lang, but Mestor uses his mental powers to destroy the police ships. Meanwhile, the newly regenerated Doctor has gone nuts, shouted a lot and tried to strangle Peri. During his mania, the Doctor lands on an asteroid, Titan 3, during the aftermath of Mestor's attack, rescues Lang, and discovers Azmael's abduction of the twins. He, Peri and Lang follow to Jaconda, where the Doctor works out that Mestor's true plan is to blow up Jaconda's sun, causing an explosion that will scatter heat-activated slug eggs throughout the universe. The Doctor and Azmael confront Mestor, and defeat him, but at the cost of Azmael's life. The Doctor hasn't really returned to normal, and still seems a bit nuts at the end.

Context:

Watched from the DVD with all the kids (boys of 13 and 9, girl of 7) over a few days. The Better Half sat down with us for the odd stretch here and there, but it annoyed her too much for her to bear it for long. Sample comments: "They're playing space chess", "Why can't they act? Did they just drag someone in off the street to play it?", "He's rubbish", "Don't put one of the Doctor's stupid jackets on!", "He's clearly acting" "Not very good acting, though". And everyone chorused "Noooo, Peri" together and thought it was the most hilarious thing to do in the world.

First-time round:

This isn't one I'm likely to forget. By March 1984, when The Twin Dilemma was shown as the final story of that year's season, I had become the producer of Doctor Who. Well, no, not really, but that's what kids at my school seemed to think. Since falling for Doctor Who big time two and a half years before, I had been seen reading Doctor Who Magazine during break, sketching Target novelisation covers in art lessons, and was in general known to be the school Doctor Who fan. I would be asked questions by the curious about my favourite programme. "When's Doctor Who back on, Pezzer?", for example. I would do my best to answer, because - as you'd likely anticipate, if you were around in those days - being the fount of all Who knowledge was an irresistibly pleasant thing to be. Everyone liked Doctor Who, and it gave me an 'expert authority' which - for a nerdy but not massively academic or sporty fellow, who was never going to be trusted to be a prefect - was the only authority I was ever likely to have.

There was a tendency in my young peers to believe that I in some way had ownership or control of Doctor Who, as well as knowledge of it. But that seemed harmless enough. If you hadn't, like I had, analysed every page of Doctor Who Magazine, and Look-In before that, and the TV and Radio Times whenever you could get your hands on them, and every interview with an actor or visual effects artist on Saturday morning kids' TV, you possibly didn't even know that TV shows had producers. Maybe some kids did believe that the shows on the idiot box sprung fully-formed from the minds of the fans at home. Anyway, Peter Davison, who in his own way was every bit as popular in the playground as his predecessor Tom Baker, bowed out; a scant few days later, Colin Baker's first episode was broadcast. I watched it go out live on BBC1, and... I didn't like it that much. It was a bit rubbish. Despite my heavy investment in the programme, this didn't seem too big a deal that evening. I suppose I had faith that any duff episode would be followed up by a better one soon. I didn't even worry too much about whether the new guy was up to scratch or not; I'd become a fan watching a series of repeats: five stories on the trot which each had different Doctors in them; even if I didn't like the lead actor, I knew this wasn't the end of days. The kids at school the next day, though, did not share my laid back attitude.

Don't ever fall for the line, which I've heard expressed in the past, that The Twin Dilemma's bad rep is a product of hindsight, whereas at the time it wasn't so badly received by the kids watching. It was hated instantly, at least at my school. This wasn't some group of jaded sixth formers, either - I was 11 at the time, and everyone else was around that age or younger. No matter what age, nobody liked the story, nobody liked the performance of the lead, nobody liked the costume. They were angry. I know this, because I saw it. After all, what outlet did these schoolchildren have for their disappointment? To whom could they complain? It wasn't like there was any convenient authority of the show anywhere nearby, was there? Oh. So, they took out their ire on me (this is no exaggeration - there was more than one threat of physical violence thrown my way). I had taken the reflected praise for two and a half years, so I had no choice but to soak up the - less reflected, pretty direct - outrage. It is likely the reason I never was tempted to go into politics.

Such was the general disgust with the story as it played out over the next few days that this heated debate found its way into the classroom. Our teacher of the time, Mrs. Rawlings - like any good teacher would - turned it into a lesson, where each member of the class designed our own replacement for the hated eyesore costume of the Doctor's. Mine was, if anything, worse than the creation debuted in The Twin Dilemma, and that was likely the reason I never was tempted to go into fashion design. The story and the season finished, and by the time Colin Baker was back on screens in 1985, I was at secondary school where hardly anybody knew and nobody cared that I was once a Doctor Who oracle. All things must pass. Doctor Who's standing, though, was more significantly damaged than mine, and it took much longer to recover.

Reaction:

If you have a significant birthday party, there's probably two ways it can go: maudlin introspection at one extreme, or if it's a huge, fun one and all goes swimmingly, you'll feel invincible. Either way, you might have conversations during that party with people - after the nth cocktail, or glass of champagne, or beer - about any number of ways you're going to take on the world in the days to come. Once the party's over, though, only the misguided would follow through on those drunken ideas. Colin Baker's casting as Doctor Who happened during the 20th anniversary year - he was featured in the Radio Times 20th anniversary Doctor Who special when Davison still had a TV special and whole series left to air - and the decisions about how he would play it, and the arc of how his performance would develop over time, show tell-tale signs of having been made in such a giddy celebratory atmosphere. The show had lasted 20 years, and there was no reason to think it wouldn't last 20 more, so it might have fleetingly seemed like a good idea to dress the Doctor in something deliberately bad, or have him act in such a horribly nasty way in his first episode, because time could be taken in gradually softening him over several years. Nobody woke up out of this intoxication fast enough, though, and the hangover pretty much did for Colin Baker in the role.

With a misconceived long-term plan for the lead character, it would be very hard for any individual story, particularly the first one, to be well written and made to the extent required not to be fatally damaged. Not impossible, but very very hard. The Twin Dilemma doesn't even try - everything is wrong. It is an indelible film and video record of bad choice following hard upon bad choice. It would be churlish to list them all here, obviously. Obviously. So, colour me churlish. Talking of colour, let's start with the look of the story: it's late in the season, so the budget's lower as the money's running out. To make the very brightly colourful design of the Doctor's costume work with its surroundings means turning up the saturation levels for all the other costumes, sets and props. Cheap but very brightly coloured = tacky, but this isn't just any old tacky - this is so tacky as to be damaging. One example that epitomises this is when Kevin McNally dispenses with his already garish uniform and dons a rainbow glitter tinfoil dressing-gown, which makes him look exactly like the opposite of a hardened space detective.

The performances are almost all off - either rubbish, or fatally undermined by some other aspect of the piece. The regulars are given deliberately unlikeable stuff to say (this goes for Peri too), and the script goes out of its way to point this out multiple times. The twins are wooden and one-note, and unlikeable too (within a few seconds of being on screen they've been given dialogue explicitly to make them look rude, entitled, ungrateful and superior). Maurice Denham as Azmael is okay, but he's hamstrung by a character who doesn't have any plausible motivation - is he a good guy, is he a bad guy, or is he both and switching between the two several times in a single scene? Edwin Richfield might be doing good work, but you can't hear him in his muffled immobile monster outfit. Helen Blatch only has about four lines and fails to deliver any of them convincingly. Her reading of an infamous line about an unpalatable order from her superiors "And may my bones rot for obeying it" is deservedly held to be one of the worst single moments in the history of Who. Is this the fault of the actor though, or of the aimless, plodding direction? It's very talky - all tell and no show. The dialogue is almost without exception clunky, overblown, preposterous, but with an unpleasant edge that stops it from ever becoming the fun, kitsch kind of OTT.

The story is illogical: how are the twins so important that the police are aware of them? But, if they are, why did their father leave them alone to get kidnapped? How exactly can their mathematical skills impact the universe? How are their skills more advanced than Mestor's pet Time Lord on Jaconda - couldn't Azmael have worked out the power equations himself? If Mestor has the ability to control people's minds, how did he use those powers to destroy all of Lang's command's ships? Why do this? It would have attracted less attention just to hypnotise them into thinking they'd lost the ship that the kidnapped twins were aboard, and that's got to be possible for someone who can keep the minds of a whole planet enslaved, hasn't it? Would bringing smaller celestial objects into orbit round a planet really make that orbit decay? If it did, and the planets fell into the sun, would that really cause the sun to explode? However hard they were, would the slug eggs really survive an exploding sun? Isn't this a risky way of distributing them? Mestor has at least one ship capable of warp drive and he can control people's minds - why doesn't he just transport the eggs around the galaxy in a freighter? Gotta be less expensive.

Is it all bad? It's hard to find many positives, but there are a few. The idea of centring the story round a pair of identical twins is at least an original and interesting visual idea, even if it isn't delivered very well; Kevin McNally is good, the Titan 3 location scenes are well staged - it really looks like a crash site - and Malcolm Clarke's incidental music is great (if you ignore the pictures it accompanies).

Connectivity: 

Both stories highlight the negative consequences of leaving children home alone of an evening. Also, it's two post-regeneration stories on the trot: so, both introduce a new Doctor, both have new title sequences, and both share all the standard tropes of such a story (which had established themselves by the time of The Twin Dilemma): the Doctor is finding out his new personality and is a bit scatty, he has a scene where he dons his new outfit, he tries to murder his companion... you know, the usual!

Deeper Thoughts:

The first rule of showbusiness. My day job is not necessarily the most interesting one, and it hardly ever has resonance when talking about Doctor Who; but, just this once, to allow me to continue to pick at the scab that is The Twin Dilemma, it might be pertinent to discuss it a little. My entire career (with a little bit of screenwriting on the side) has been in software development and operations, mostly on web-based products, mostly for large companies. In the time I've been working, there's been a slow evolution of how such products are built and delivered, which mirrored similar changes in manufacturing in earlier decades. In the old days, everything was "waterfall". Someone would have an idea about something they wanted to build, systems analysts would work up what it should do exactly, architects and designers would then draw lots of diagrams about how it should be designed. Next, software developers would write the code. Then, testers would test it. Finally, it would go live to customers. Each stage would flow to the next, sort of like a waterfall, hence the name.

As may be obvious, this would take ages. Software projects would often take many years to deliver, by which time the person who championed the project would have moved on to other things. More importantly, the world would have moved on too, and whatever problem the original idea was meant to fix would have mutated, and the software would no longer be fit for purpose. Nobody does it this way anymore (even the UK government seem to have woken up to this finally, but if you were wondering what the story behind any number of "Government software project over budget by millions and doesn't work properly" headlines was, it was probably this). Nowadays, instead of 'waterfall', software development is 'agile' or 'iterative'. Which means that instead of building a big thing over many years, you build a little bit of it (going through all those phases of analysis, design, build, test, and often even going live to customers) in a shorter time (say, two weeks). Yes, it's going to be a bit basic and small at that point, but it should work to do some tiny thing. Then, you start again, building another little bit in two weeks, and as the weeks go by, more and more builds up. Why? Because every two weeks, you can change direction if the prevailing winds have changed. You only carry the risk of being out of date for two weeks maximum. It's best to find out sooner rather than later if you're making something rubbish. This brings me back to The Twin Dilemma.

Why is this story so disliked, coming bottom of every poll? There are many other terrible stories I've covered for the blog - my personal low points up to now have been The Time Monster, The Armageddon Factor, The Rings of Akhaten, Twice Upon a Time, Resurrection of the Daleks, Sleep No More - but these are never as consistently lambasted as is Colin Baker's debut story. My theory is that this is because most of what's very wrong about The Twin Dilemma is not accidental. The script regularly comments on its worst excesses. At one point, the Doctor cannot understand Peri's lingering compassion for him and says: "I have spent the day using, abusing, even trying to kill you". So, the character - as well as the writer, script editor and producer - knows he's being a git. Then, to this awareness they add a tacit admission that, even when he's calm and lucid, he still wouldn't mind if Peri was dead: "If you'd have behaved as I have, I should have been pleased at your demise." Ugh. The people who made this programme wanted it this way.

Despite dramatic art taking a long time to produce, the agile or iterative way of working is not so incompatible. Theatre shows are often previewed, tinkered with and re-previewed before the full opening night, for example. Even the sort of rehearsal that 20th Century Doctor Who did - running through the action over and over, amending blocking and script bits that don't work before the studio is booked and the cameras are rolling and money's being burnt - has echoes of it. Ultimately, one of the key tenets of showbusiness, that you're only as good as your last hit, highlights the importance of a flexible approach. The long-term plan for Colin Baker's characterisation as the Doctor was based on the false premise that they could take as long as they wanted to play out the arc of his gradual 'humanisation'. Colin Baker often joked in interviews about wanting to match the other Mister Baker's seven year tenure playing the role. The star, the producer and the script editor had conceived between them a waterfall project, thinking they could take as long as they liked to finish it. So, it made sense for them to start from such an extreme point: the Doctor strangling the audience's identification figure. He may as well have been choking the life out of the fans watching at home.

Doctor Who was being made episodically, so there would regularly have been the opportunity to change tack, but everyone involved must have thought they were on the right lines. I can't imagine that none of the schoolroom criticisms I heard were echoed in the feedback that got through to the production office, but the next season doubles-down on the unlikeable Doctor approach (though at least he never strangled anyone again, just gassed them or pushed them into an acid bath). The waterfall project might have carried on like this for many more years, but - as will happen - something in the wider world changed, and the waterfall crashed down onto the rocks that were Michael Grade and Jonathan Powell.

In Summary:

Yes, it probably is the worst, but it's still not all bad, and the show survived it - this demonstrates just how good Doctor Who is, as a whole.