The Twin Dilemma

There has, perhaps, never been a bigger nose-dive in quality in Doctor Who as occurred here. The Caves of Androzani is one of the absolute high points of the programme as a whole, so following it would always be a daunting task, even if it wasn't the début for a new Doctor. The script is not particularly good, but offends more in the execution rather than the plot. It tries to take on concepts like myth and modelling space-time events with mathematics. If Christopher Bidmead had edited the script, we might have had a far better story. Unfortunately, the story unfolds in a haphazard way, with some atrocious dialogue and poor characterisation, which only makes the central idea of slugs engineering supernovas seem even more ridiculous.

However, this is only the start of the horror. The production is not bad, in the sense of technical incompetence or poor budgeting, for what we have is reasonably convincing. However, the overall look sears the retinas with its garish, horrible colours. It is this story which really shows John Nathan Turner's limitations as a producer of a televised drama. He wanted the Doctor to have a horrible brightly coloured costume, not realising (or, perhaps more damningly, no-one telling him) that the limited colour bandwidth of videotape meant that everything else had to be garish as well- to say nothing of the fact that it detracts from the ability of both the viewer and, by connection, the fictional characters he meets, to take the Doctor seriously. The director is Peter Moffat, who, whilst reasonably good at directing actors, was never the most visually adventurous director. The score by Malcolm Clark is either tunelessly listless or aggressively flatulent. It has to be said, however, that the costumes and make-up for the Jocondans are first rate. The performances of the Conrads as the titular twins further cripple the story. As Womulus and Wemus, they manage to be both bland and hugely annoying. There are some great actors such as Dennis Chinnery, Kevin (A)R(R) McNally and Maurice Denham, but the terrible twins are placed in the foreground.

Of course, this is the first story for Colin Baker as the Doctor, and his portrayal is good throughout. Unfortunately, what he portrays is a raving, unlikeable madman for the first half of the story. It is a bad mistake to have the new Doctor criticising his previous incarnation- it has never been done before and this insufferably arrogant portrayal of the Doctor wasn't the best place to start. It was a good idea to have the Doctor be genuinely unpredictable, but the writing for this stinks. This, plus the awful costume, unfairly handicaps Baker's performance. Nicola Bryant manages to come out reasonably unscathed in this mess.

This is the worst debut story for a Doctor- at the time I remember missing Peter Davison at the start and still missing him at the end, something which hadn't happened with Logopolis/ Castrovalva. What I get from it now is a Doctor Who story that looks like it had deliberately been made to look bad. If you do watch it, your retinas, optic nerve and brain will never forgive you.

NEXT: Attack of the Cybermen