abstract
| - The Twin Dilemma was the seventh and final story of Season 21 of the programme Doctor WhoTheFuck. The best thing that can be said for it is that it wasn’t a Pipe and Gin Baker script. Oh, and the barely-used spaceship that was inspired by the Battersea Power Station is alright too, I guess. It was the first full story to feature Colman Barker as the Sixth Doctor, the last story to feature half-hour episodes until Season 23 and the first to completely shed any sort of dignity the series might have hopelessly clung to up to this point. The fact that it is universally reviled in the fandom comes as no surprise if you’ve ever seen it. Fan polls in 1998, 2009, and 2014 voted it the worst Doctor Who story ever, even when Dimensions In Time was included in the running. Now let that sink in for a second... just.. let it... sink in. Another poll in 2003 used a different voting system and The Twin Dilemma was not among the twenty-five stories which received no votes, which means people went out of their way to down-vote it rather than just ignore it. Both the Dalai Lama and Nelson Mandela petitioned the UN declare it an atrocity against televisual story-telling, but only Callow Barker was out on trial over it, documented in 1986's Trial Of a Timelord season. Baker was sentenced to pies for his participation and has been suffering under the harsh sentence ever since. The real tragedy of all of that is that this is the only canon episode of Doctor Who. The previous serial, The Caves of Androzani, is frequently said to be among the very best Doctor Who serials in the history of the series, while The Twin Dilemma is cited as one of the worst, if not THE worst, and it's the most commonly blamed target for the show's Dark Age, which leads one to wonder how the hell that happened. The review in Doctor Who: The Television Companion describes The Twin Dilemma as "painful to watch,” which handily won The Daily Mail’s “Greatest Fucking Understatement Of The Goddamn Year” award for 1998. The Twin Dilemma was even parodied by Ricky Gervais (aided by David Tennant) on his television programme Extras, which is second only to “being praised by Ricky Gervais” as the worst insult one can possibly receive.
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