Warriors of the Deep vs Twin Dilemma

Twin Dilemma by a mile. A pisspoor way to begin a new doctor.

Definitely Twin Dilemma: Warriors has at least a reasonable story hampered by bad production while Dilemma is just poorly made.

Warriors by a mile everyone's just so bored!

Regards

mark687

I prefer Warriors, but it's a tough choice! After telling friends at school to watch, because 'the Sea Devils are in it, and they're great', I looked at the first few moments of this and hoped they had ignored me. Yet although some of the acting is bad, the sets are overlit, and the monster costumes are pretty shocking (Samarui Sea Devils???) and didn't always fit, the story is a real guilty pleasure for me. There's much to love - the sets are actually really good and solid looking, the TARDIS team are great, and Ian McCulloch is in it! The story, too, is a good one, if a little over ambitious.

So to The Twin Dilemma. Before the first episode aired, a clip was shown on children's show Blue Peter, featuring Mestor on his throne, surrounded by bird people. Instantly, the alarm bells were ringing - and that was before they showed the performance of the twins! Good on them for trying something new, but Colin's Doctor never really recovered from trying to kill his companion (just let your mind dwell on that a moment - a big lad squeezing his hands around young Peri's neck) and the costume, which could have been a success in the way Tom's scarf was, was just too over-the-top. To such an extent, that Colin needed to overact just to be noticed. Add to that, Jacondan bird people that would have looked at home in a 1930s Flash Gordon series, some very cheaply realised locations (a handful of branches sticking out of a quarry representing a war torn planet) and gaudy set designs, and one of the least effective/mobile/convincing monster costumes in the show's history ... and really, it is not an auspicious start.

I dislike negativity, believe it or not, but Twin Dilemma is very bad, both technically and story-wise. At least Warriors could have been good if a few thousand quid was thrown at it.

Trying to be the mot unlikeable Doctor since Tom Baker was putting one over on the Vardans? The production side is clearly the weak link for Warriors, but Twin Dilemma showed the end of season shoestring budget. I don't see Mestor on any Best Bad Guy lists. And the less said about Hugo Lang's outfit the better.

What a dilemma!

'The Twin Dilemma' has so many things wrong with it that it's hard to know where to start, but let's skip the (ahem!) troubled regeneration opening and be charitable by ignoring one or two actors and one or two costumes - and oddly enough, I quite like it! The planet-shifting plot is much better than it once seemed - I've read science news articles that planets can shift their orbits, maybe did even in our own solar system in the distant past. So the giant slugs of Jaconda got it right first? Who knew?!

The bird-people makeup is really good and Sluggor mostly needed more money (the whole thing needed more money really, a snazzy uniform for Mr Star Cop would have been good.)

So some of it looks naff-ish, not everyone can act and it was obviously short of budget.
But Maurice Denham is totally wonderful as always, I think it's entertaining and could have been a good story if done right.


'Warriors of the Deep' was one of my favourite Fifth Doctor stories, when I was young and foolish. Now, I think it's a mixture of tedium, out-of-place incidents and preaching about the 'superiority' of the Silurians over us nasty warmongering humans. The preaching is especially irritating because the story undermines its own idea of a totally peaceful ancient civilisation. If Silurians were all so culturally committed to peace, why did they ever build “battle cruisers”, why are the Sea Devils in hibernation as ready-to-go “warriors” and why did they develop the Myrka? When they were the unchallenged rulers of the Earth long before humanity, who could they possibly have been preparing to fight – except each other?

There is no way the Doctor would ever set a nuclear reactor on overload as a diversion just so they can get back to the TARDIS – not with a base full of people. He seems far less concerned with their safety than he would later be with the Silurians’. Then the Doctor appears to have drowned - it is a great stunt sequence. But Turlough gives the Doctor up for dead instantly and pulls Tegan away – this would have made sense if Turlough was still working for the Black Guardian, but he wasn’t.

The Sea Devils used to be able to run, this lot waddle as if through treacle because they have nowhere to go and two episodes to get there, but the Myrka was a great idea and could have been impressive - with modern CGI.


For both stories, there should have been another budget and they could both have been successful.

As it is, I prefer 'The Twin Dilemma' because for me the one unforgivable sin that 'Doctor Who' can commit is to be boring.

For me, both were very poor episodes of Doctor Who. But where Warriors of the Deep is bad, The Twin Dilemma is bloody awful.

I'd put it more squarely at 50-50: neither was ready to go and needed a considerable rethink on multiple levels.