The Twin Dilemma

Target novelisation Doctor Who - The Twin Dilemma

Author	Eric Saward
Published	1986
ISBN	0 426 20155 8
First Edition Cover	Andrew Skilleter

Back cover blurb: The Doctor has regenerated, having sacrificed his fifth persona to save Peri's life. But things are not going well... On this occasion the process of regeneration is by no means smooth, for the even-tempered, good-humoured fifth Doctor has given way to a rather disturbed and unsettled successor. In a particularly irascible moment the new Doctor comes dangerously close to committing a shocking crime. Overwhelmed with guilt for his violent behaviour, the repentant Time Lord decides to become a hermit...

• Better than Bad; Not Good by Jason A. Miller

Better than Bad; Not Good by Jason A. Miller 13/10/23

How do you solve a problem like The Twin Dilemma? How do you take Classic Who's acknowledged Worst Episode Ever, and turn it into a book that people will buy, let alone read? This is a scary, but also a somewhat liberating prospect. To date, Eric Saward's only other novelization had been The Visitation, which was an excellent traditional book. The Visitation follows its camera scripts to the letter, and weaves in mature and nuanced prose. And it's based on a pretty good story. But The Twin Dilemma is not a pretty good story, and its camera scripts were presumably a mess of cross-outs, corrections and missing scenes.

So it's not a surprise that Saward produced a book that bore no relation to the tone and style of his first one. Instead, he ignored both the TV plot and script and went the full Douglas Adams, with a satiric, mocking book that spent 80% of its time on acerbic tangents and the rest of its time having the main characters comment on how absurd the plot was. This causes problems structurally, because the TV plot was wafer thin, coming into play really only at the end of Part Three. But the novelization is so front loaded with Saward's Adams-esque riffs that, by the time he reaches the big plot revelation, he'd already used up most of his allotted word count, and there were very few pages left with which to address the plot.

Now, I don't blame Saward for going the experimental route. If there's any Doctor Who story that deserves the ignore the TV episodes and write something different, The Twin Dilemma is totally that story. I didn't exactly love the end result, but I do love that the Target book line could take risks like this and go so out of left field.

Chapter 1 is a self-contained short story about a man named Archie Sylvest, a character played for two scenes on TV by Gharman from Genesis of the Daleks. Sylvest is a brilliant mathematician who hates his twin sons and has been encouraged by his psychiatrist to plot their perfect murder. He lives in an expensive Georgian mansion in 24th century London, is addicted to an alcoholic beverage called Voxnic, and is having an affair with a woman whose husband rings his doorbell and breaks his face at the end of the chapter. None of this matters by Chapter 10, but it's bold and different. Especially for a regeneration story where you'd think you'd want to meet the Doctor first.

Chapter 2 is largely an irreverent, again firmly tongue-in-cheek look at Time Lord regenerations, owing more to the first five Douglas Adams-penned minutes of Destiny of the Daleks than to anything else in Doctor Who, ever. The story of Councillor Verne and his regeneration misadventures is comically awful, but, taken literally, not the kind of story you want in your Doctor Who head canon. The 6th Doctor complaining about the just-regenerated 5th ("feckless" and "effete") sounds like Saward being cruel and spiteful about Peter Davison. But he's not kinder to Colin's JNT-selected wardrobe: "Now it can be said that the Doctor's taste had never been haute couture, but the jacket and trousers which he had decided suited his new persona should have warned Peri of something -- they were the choice of a maladjusted personality". Later, Peri laments of the Doctor's new volcanic personality, "She now wished he had killed her. At least that would have been quick." This is funny, but not warmly so. It's cruel and bullying funny. Donald Trump funny, if Donald Trump knew big words.

And rather than burying the inept mistake that was the Doctor trying to strangle Peri, Saward describes the attempted murder in graphic detail. Though one might argue that violent misogyny is just another day at the office for Saward.

Saward doesn't get to the plot until Chapter 3, but bizarrely chooses to narrate Professor Edgeworth's abduction of the titular twins through the eyes of a ginger tomcat, spending a good couple of pages explaining why cats are the most intelligent creatures in the universe. In the same chapter, Peri remarks that if the Doctor wants to seek hermitage in a desolate place, he should choose "downtown New York". That paragraph hasn't aged well -- downtown certainly ain't desolate no more. (Regards, the guy who works in the West Village.)

Saward reveals, much earlier on than on TV, Edgeworth's true identity as Azmael and secret plan to avenge Jaconda by killing Mestor. The story of Azmael's Time Lord past is ludicrous but, interestingly, almost perfectly presages the plot of The Trial of a Time Lord. We're well into Chapter 5, nearly halfway through the book, when Saward stops Adams-ing (temporarily) and gets back to the plot. He rushes through the Part One cliffhanger, though this at least has the advantage of eliminating all the woeful TV dialogue of Colin and Nicola sniping at one another. A later scene where the Doctor cowardly hides behind Peru and blames his intrusion on her is also axed. So that's actually a good thing. Much of the TV narrative is missing, in fact, including the Chamberlain, one of the only interesting characters from the Jaconda half on TV (Parts Three and Four). The Chamberlain is mentioned only in one short passage at the end, and is arbitrarily named "Slarn", a name Saward would reuse later. Also lost in print are the only two non-Peri female roles, at Hugo Lang's police HQ from Part One. I guess that's what Saward really didn't like about The Twin Dilemma: its women.

By the time Saward invents a history for Titan Three (thou craggy knob), which involves people reading Mein Kampf for light entertainment and committing mass suicide, you're almost ready to subject yourself to the same fate. Or at least accidentally transform yourself into a bottle of booze, another charmless Saward anecdote. Better are subtle references to vintage pop culture, such as one to the now-forgotten adventure novelist Rafael Sabatini, the muse of swashbuckle-era Silent Hollywood.

There's a long riff on Sherlock Holmes in Chapter 6, with the Doctor literally adopting the Holmes persona and telling an almost funny story about midwives and childbirth. Also interesting is Peri's observation that the Doctor, should he adopt an evil persona instead, would be impossible to thwart -- so that's another prefiguring of The Trial of a Time Lord, isn't it?

Saward is very casual with the cliffhangers. He improves the limp resolution to the Part One cliffhanger (the Doctor physically disarms Hugo, instead of cowering in fear while Hugo merely falls back asleep) but removes the Part Two and Part Three episode endings entirely. Which is no loss to the story at all, mind you.

My biggest issue with the book is that it needs a serious resolution and doesn't quite get one. After all the cynical humor of the first eight chapters, the plot is shoehorned into two final chapters (given the MCU-esque names "End Game, Parts One and Two"). There is a shockingly raw eulogy to Adric. But even then we get pointless and ever more tiresome asides, right in the middle of the (what passes for a) climax: "Professor Vinny Mosten discovers the acid which bears his name quite by chance when on an expedition to the planet Senile Nine". You don't even need to finish that anecdote to know that Professor Vinny, if that is his real name, doesn't survive the paragraph. Nobody survives an Eric Saward anecdote.