These two episodes are terribly uninvolving, and Azmael's lab set is competent enough to not even be a disaster worth looking at. There are some decent moments from Colin Baker (the part where he proclaims Jaconda134 to be a paradise without actually looking around him is rather nice, and Azmael's death scene is played with a deft touch and a quietly understated delivery -- an encouraging sign if you were worried that Baker could only play the character large), and Kevin McNally is a lot better in these two episodes than he was in part one. But the twins aren't any better, Maurice Denham seems to be sliding into a sort of confused matter-of-fact-ness (as if he's hoping that if he just delivers the lines as written, that will be sufficient), and Mestor... Edwin Richfield (who, you may be surprised to learn/remember, was Captain Hart in The Sea Devils) is really trying, but he's been saddled under a rather immobile costume (although they've done a good job of making the Gastropods look repulsive) and has to rely almost entirely on his voice.
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| Azmael, Peri, and the Doctor in Azmael's lab. (The Twin Dilemma Part Four) ©BBC |
But more to the point, if you're going to spend all this time introducing an unlikable and unstable Doctor (and if you want him to be unlikable, why make him grin like an idiot in the title sequence?), why bother putting him in the most straightforward adventure possible, where all he can do is generic Doctor-ish things? Why make his debut the last story of a season, when all the money's run out? (See, among others, Time-Flight and The Armageddon Factor.) Why make his debut the last story of the season at all, if you're going to make him unpleasant? I understand you want to make a contrast from Peter Davison's portrayal, but is this really the impression you want to leave viewers with for nine months?
Rather infamously, The Twin Dilemma is generally regarded as the worst Doctor Who story ever televised, and it's not too hard to see why. It's a poor script (by veteran writer Anthony Steven -- who had no other SF credits to his name -- with a lot of work from Eric Saward), with some awful moments and hideous design elements, as if everyone had chosen that moment to go blind. It's not completely without merit -- there are a handful of decent performances and a few well-executed moments, like Mestor's death -- but in general it's misjudged on almost every level and a lot further off the mark than any other story we've seen yet.
It's somewhat unfortunate, then, that this is the story that ends season 21. This has been an uneven season with its ups and downs, with some missteps next to some real triumphs. The worrying trend (not just this season, but for the last couple) has been an increased reliance on the show's past to base stories on, with increasingly limited success. When they want to make original stories they can do so with impressive results -- Frontios and The Caves of Androzani are proof of that -- but when they want to draw on the past they're getting fewer and fewer returns. Fortunately, the regular cast of Peter Davison, Janet Fielding, and Mark Strickson were able to make a lot of this work (or at least be watchable), and so even some of the least interesting stories were elevated by their presence. But now they're gone, and we don't know enough about their replacements to be comfortable with the show's future.
In 2009 Doctor Who Magazine held a poll ("The Mighty 200") which ranked every Doctor Who TV story up to that point. The Caves of Androzani was voted the best story ever. The Twin Dilemma, the very next story broadcast, was voted the worst. Somehow, that sums up season 21 better than anything else.
134 Incidentally, there's confusion in the script as to whether it's Jaconda or Joconda, as both spellings appear.
135 Macbeth, Act V, Scene V.