Book review: Doctor Who – The Twin Dilemma

Cross-posted from my Hardcore Nerdity blog:

Title: Doctor Who - The Twin Dilemma
Author: Eric Saward
Publisher: Target Books
Publication date: 1986

"The Twin Dilemma". Oh dear. Oh dearie, dearie dear. Okay, some background on this novelisation of a Doctor Who story.

A couple of years ago, the Doctor Who franchise hit its 200th televised story (not episode, but story - back in the day, stories were several episodes long) with "Planet of the Dead". So Doctor Who Magazine held a poll, wherein readers picked their favourite stories. The 1984 story "The Twin Dilemma", written by one Anthony Steven, came dead last. 200th out of 200. Sure, some story had to come in last. Such is the nature of lists. "The Twin Dilemma", however, mostly deserved it. It's really not a good story. Really, really not a good story.

"The Twin Dilemma" was the first full story for Colin Baker, the 6th actor to play the part of the Doctor. Having just regenerated from the Peter Davison incarnation, the new Doctor goes completely insane for much of the story, shouting at his companion Peri, attempting to strangle her, deciding to become a hermit (with Peri in tow) to atone for the strangling, and choosing to wear the ugliest coat in existence. Somewhere in there, in a setting of the year 2300, there's a couple of brilliant, but annoying, young twins (played by a real-life pair of annoying twins who can't act), an old Time Lord friend of the Doctor, a space cop and a giant slug named Mestor. It's not as good as it sounds.

So, why the hell did I read the novelisation of this story? Because I'm a hardcore Doctor Who fan, who will read, watch or listen to pretty much anything to do with the program. Plus, I thought, surely the story must be better in written format. Right? Right!?

Well, it might have been better, if it hadn't been adapted by Eric Bloody Saward! Eric Saward was the script editor for Doctor Who for a number of years, including most of Colin Baker's time in the role. Saward, unfortunately, was kind of a prick. He seemed determined to suck the joy out of the program. Every interview I've ever seen with the man makes me want to slap that self-important smirk off his face. But, hey, maybe he'd write a good novelisation and improve the story a little. He did, after all, write at least one decent story for the show, 1982's "Earthshock".

Oy.

Saward even writes smug. He really does. He tried to liven up "The Twin Dilemma" by giving it a little humour. But Saward is trying to write like Douglas Adams, with bizarre tangents, which might have been funny if worked into a story that was humourous in the first place. It just comes across as... annoying. "Hey, look at how funny I am!" Just when the rambling plot finally starts to do something, along comes another comedy aside, which is almost certain to include a reference to a fictional alcoholic beverage called Voxnic. Maybe Saward was drunk when he penned this. (Hell, I'm willing to bet he was drunk through much of his time as story editor for the show.)

He screws around with the characters a bit too much as well. Azmael, an old friend of the Doctor, is a renegade Time Lord too, not content with life on their home world of Gallifrey. In this adaptation, Saward turns him into a mass murderer, having, in a fit of pique, killed the entirety of a previous Time Lord Council as part of his back story! And we're supposed be sympathetic towards the guy! Hugo, the space cop, is made into a shallow mercenary, who only cares about getting a promotion. Saward's answer to a story full of unlikable characters, is to make the characters even more unlikable.

The plot, like the original, just sort of ambles along until the Doctor stumbles onto things. He doesn't really have much to do with what's going on, something that much of Colin Baker's tenure suffers from.

So, no, I guess I wasn't terribly impressed with this novelisation. Still, onwards. What's up next in my Doctor Who pile? "Attack of the Cybermen". Enh. Again, not a highlight of the Colin Baker years. Still, it might be an all right adaptation. Let's see who wrote-- Oh, frak me.

Eric Bloody Saward!

My current laptop wallpaper

This is my current laptop wallpaper. Because it must be so. It must.

A sort-of post

So, once again, I return briefly to my woefully ignored blog.

As I seem to have little to say here (I really need to work on that), for the time being I will be posting links here to the blog I do contribute to every once in a while, at Hardcore Nerdity. This past weekend, I contributed to an ongoing feature called "Soundtrack Sundays", where HcN grand poobah Jonathan Llyr talks a little about a soundtrack of his choice, along with accompanying YouTube clips of the music.

I got to write one up myself, detailing the history of the "Doctor Who" theme song, for reasons given in the post.

Have a gander.

A visit to the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame

(Copied from my blog at Hardcore Nerdity)

In early October, my wife Lynn and I took a couple of days trip to Seattle with another couple, mostly to do a little cross-border shopping. (Fortunately, we managed to squeak this in before the sudden recent plunge in the value of the Canadian dollar. Excellent timing!) But as part of the trip, I decided I needed to visit the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame. It's very close to the the city's famed Space Needle and was practically across the street from our hotel.

That's a view of the building from our hotel room. Only half of it is the SFM, with the other being another museum called the Experience Music Project. That funky design is thanks to Canadian designer Frank Gehry. Oh, and the Seattle monorail runs through a big hole in the building.

The entrance is pretty cool. The windows are plastered with collages of SF book covers...

...and images from a host of SF films and TV programs.

However, these scenes are all in danger from the nasty looking spaceship digging its way into the windows!

Eek!

Anyway, once inside, photography is not really allowed so I only have a few photos from this point on (all of them washroom related - you'll see) and will just list some of the highlights. (I'm sure you can see some pictures at the Museum's site).

The first thing you see when entering is a great big replica of Gort from The Day the Earth Stood Still. And, damn, he is tall. Immediately after that are some public washrooms. We didn't need to use the facilities, but spent some time gazing at the signs on the doors. And why is that? Here:

When we finally entered the Museum proper, we were greeted to the sight of a large ball hanging from the ceiling with a projector inside, flashing montages and planetscapes onto the ball-shaped screen.

Then, the first true display. And it's for (surprise, surprise) Star Trek. They've got a nice little selection of actual props and costumes from the classic series. An actual captain's chair from the set and an actual captain's uniform worn by William Shatner. And, man, you realise how slim the Shat used to be. There's also a replica of Nichelle Nichols' script for "The Deadly Years". The script is "annotated" by Nichols, which seems to mean doodling and underlining her own lines.

Further along, one display includes Neal Stephenson's hand-written manuscripts for his massive "Baroque Cycle". Hand-written. It's four and a half feet tall.

Blade Runner outfits. Neat. But, boy, was Sean Young tiny.

A section on Social Commentary in SF, mostly literary. Books about subjects like gender issues and overpopulation.

Ooh, a big video wall made to seem like we're looking out on a massive spaceport with dozens of ships from TV, film and books flying by. It's a little jarring seeing the Enterprise followed by the 5-mile-long Red Dwarf.

There's an actual Gemini astronaut's space suit. We boggle at how... flimsy it seems. It reminds one of the crazy/brave thin line. I can't believe people went into the vacuum of space in these things!

A display of vehicles, both large (although in reality small, like the model of the Galileo 7 from Star Trek) to the one-person (like Griff's hoverboard, "Pit Bull", from Back to the Future Part II).

"The Armory"! Nice selection of weapons, both long-range laser types and close-range melee types (bat'leth anyone?). And I can't believe it when I see a Fun Gun from the Doctor Who (classic) story "The Happiness Patrol"! "I'm glad you're happy!" "And I'm happy you're glad!"

A Mars display featuring original editions of The War of the World by Wells, The Martian Chronicles by Bradbury and Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy.

And now, the SF Hall of Fame. Looks pretty slick.

All the images of the inductees are etched into blueish glass in a 3D fashion. Very spiffy. There's also a console which allows you to watch brief bios of a number of the inductees.

Next up, a neat display of a number of SF awards, including a number of Nebulas and the 1953 Hugo given to Forrest Ackerman, basically for being the uber-fan that he was.

Speaking of fans, there's a nice, big display devoted to fandom, with a whole bunch of fanzines and a selection of fan-made costumes. We boggle slightly at the incredible detail put into the costumes.

Now we reach the robot display. There's Twiki from Buck Rogers; I discover that it is in fact impossible to see Twiki without automatically going "bidi bidi bidi". There are also copies of Robbie the Robot from Forbidden Planet and the robot from TV's Lost in Space. They each go through a loop of lines they delivered in their movie/series. The thing is, they've been set up to make it seem like they're having a conversation! They introduced themselves to each other, have a big of an argument and then make up!

Speaking of Forbidden Planet, at some point, we found one of Anne Francis' outfits from that film. Damn, again, another actor who must have been insanely tiny! She must have been something like a size -1!

Another video display, cycling through views over a number of future cities. There's the placid, imaginary world from The Matrix, the dark dystopian Los Angeles from Blade Runner and... the world of The Jetsons! Well, I know which one I'd rather live in.

It just goes on and on. It's delightful! There's just too much to describe it all here. Any SF fan visiting the Seattle area really must give this place a visit. Just make sure you give yourself a good couple of hours.

One last picture. We used a second set of washrooms. I started slightly on entering, confronted with a huge movie poster of Alien Vs. Predator. When exiting, Lynn smiled at me and asked, "Did you have one in yours as well?" "What, you mean the AVP poster?" "That's not what was in mine. I took a picture. I'll show you later." We get back to the hotel room, and Lynn shows me this:

She knows me so well. Now, I just need to find one for our home bathroom.

I wonder how Carl from Liverpool is doing. Who, you may ask, the hell is Carl from Liverpool? Well...

I'm looking through an old Doctor Who Magazine from a few years back, just as a little background work on my Doctor Who Chronology. This issue (specifically issue 343) saw print sometime in the year before Doctor Who's return to TV. Much had been announced about the show. Russell T. Davies as show runner, Christoper Eccleston as the Doctor... But it seems that Carl from Liverpool had... well, a wee problem with Russell. Thought he was "arrogant" (whahey?!). And, possibly, had a wee bit of trouble with Russell's sexual orientation. To quote a chunk of his letter to the editor for the issue:

I'm surprised that Russell T Davies didn't cast himself -- after all, there must still be some people in the world who don't know that he is 6ft 6in and gay, and this could have been his chance to spread his message.

Due to the arrogance of Davies, I won't be watching his new series, and I sincerely hope that it will be a critical and ratings failure.

To quote Nelson from The Simpsons: Haw-haw! I am very much looking forward to seeing this week's finale for Series 4 of the massive critical and ratings success that is the revived Doctor Who.

As for Carl from Liverpool... I wonder he'll be up to this weekend...

Haven't had much to blog about the last little while. But I don't want to let the blog slide, so I need to post something.

Ah. "The Sound of Drums" on Doctor Who. Wow. Just... wow. Super drama. Super-duper drama. I seriously have no idea how this story is going to wrap up. The episode also allowed me a couple of Geek Level Doctor Who Knowledge moments. The orange skies of Gallifrey: yup, Susan referred to orange skies waaaaaay back in the original's first season (maybe in "An Unearthly Child", but also possibly in "Marco Polo"). And the Master watching Teletubbies: the original Master, while imprisoned during the Pertwee story "The Sea Devils", found himself enthralled by the British children's TV series The Clangers. Heh. The Master offering people jelly babies: well, that one's a gimme, really...

Oh, got myself a Facebook account. Lynn got one after discovering some friends having one, I decided to give it a shot, too. Kinda fun. Lynn and I can actually play Scrabble through it, even while one of us is at work. Just log in during a break and take a turn.

Just finished watching the new episode of Doctor Who, "Utopia".

Holy.

Snappin'.

Crap.

(Derek Jacobi really is one kick-ass actor, isn't he?)

Oooooeeeeoooooooooooo! He's back (again)! And it's about time (again)!

Yep, with the episode "Smith and Jones", series three of my all-time favourite show, Doctor Who, premiered on the BBC last night (and was immediately bittorrented by us). With a new companion! (Sob... my Rose... she's really gone...) With a hospital on the Moon! With... talking bipedal rhinos? Um... Okay, sure, what the hell? Why not? A few random thoughts (and be warned, this'll be spoilery):

Martha Jones, the new companion. Okay, she's not Rose. No one could ever be Rose. But, you know, she'll do. She's a medical doctor (well, almost), that should come in useful. She certainly could use a break from her insane, always argueing family. And she's, well, if I need to describe her in one word, I'd pick "sensible". While her family bickers away, she's the calm in the middle of a storm. And when things go seriously pear-shaped at the hospital, she keeps the coolest head (next to the Doctor).

The Judoon. Possibly just a leeeetle close to the Sontarans. Fortunately, their motivations are plenty different. The Sontarans are all about combat and conquest. The Judoon are about enforcing rather extreme laws and sheer bloody-mindedness.

The Doctor. Well, he's the Doctor, isn't he? Gotta love this look:

One especially interesting character moment for him, though. When asked if he had a brother, he responds, "Not anymore." Oink? Where's that headed?

Ontological paradox alert!

The Doctor appears to Martha early in the episode, takes off his tie and says, "Like so? See?" Martha tells the Doctor about this later on. The Doctor travels back through time to prove he can do so and takes off his tie in front of her. So... where did the tie-removal idea come from? The Doctor took of his tie because, well, because he took off his tie. It's Bad Wolf all over again!

All in all, a very good episode to introduce a companion in.

He's back!