Day 626: The Twin Dilemma Part 4

Around a year and a half ago, I watched Jurassic Park for the first time in a lecture theatre with friends. At a certain part of the film, a velociraptor bursts through a wall suddenly, and I screamed incredibly loudly. This incident revealed to most of my friends that I am terrible with jump scares, a fact which was confirmed this past weekend when I watched two of the other films in the Jurassic Park saga, Jurassic Park: The Lost World and Jurassic Park 3. In those films, I screamed quite a bit with major moments being: a baby stegosaurus roaring, a vending machine being broken, and my personal favourite: the title for Jurassic Park 3 appearing on screen. And I guess what I'm trying to say is, if I were given a choice between watching the Jurassic Park films again or The Twin Dilemma again, I would willingly put myself through the pain of watching those films again than watch this sorry excuse for a story one more time.

It's not just the bad story, although that does provide the root of many of the serial's problems, leading to poor and uninspired acting, that certainly doesn't help the work of Peter Moffatt, who has never been the best director when it comes to innovative work, but is certainly very good at helping actors work through the story and give their best performance. Here, that's not as feasible, because there's just nothing to inspire anyone. There's also a severe lack of budget, which affects things like design and costume badly, making everything feel cheap and not worth watching.

But the absolute worst part of this is the scheduling. This story was scheduled at the end of Series 21, before the programme went on a break. Thus, viewers were left, not with the image of Peter Davison dying on their screens, but with Colin Baker's smug and unlikable portrayal of the Doctor for however long it took between Series 21 and 22. It does nothing but leave people with a bad tadte in the mouth for the upcoming stories. If I were a viewer at the time, I would be very unlikely to be at all excited for what was to come ahead. Because if the quality of anything in the future is going to be based on this, then I have to say that things need a desperate improvement, otherwise the show will be going on a bit of a break, possibly never to return.