“Shame!”
This was Doctor Who’s concession to the fact that military types often use post-watershed language when stressed. The main military figure in this episode, Brigadier Winifred Banbera, uses this motif on a number of occasions to express, in a typically British manner, that she’s just a little bit cross – quite possibly because the pre-9pm showtime forced her to restrain her preferred expletive!
This story is certainly a prime candidate for referral to the Advertising Standards Authority – if ever there was a misleading (and far too long!) title for a Doctor Who story, this is the one!
With this post, those fans who were holding their breath and thinking “Good grief, don’t tell me he likes The Twin Dilemma!” can now breath that sigh of relief – yes folks, it’s in the bottom ten, and quite rightly so!
After that brief interlude of acknowledging other Doctors had less celebrated serials, I am afraid we now return to Sylvester McCoy – but not however to Season 24!
One of the greatest assets of Doctor Who is the breadth of its fanbase – it is broad enough to encompass my best friend’s dad, who thinks that it was a mistake to replace William Hartnell with Patrick Troughton, all the way to another friend who loves the seventh Doctor. There really is something for everyone!
For a long while this was one of only two serials in Peter Davison’s first season that I hadn’t watched on VHS. For that reason, when my dad arrived home from whichever video outlet (most probably HMV) he had bought the video, I rather looked forward to watching it, having enjoyed rather a lot of the fifth doctor’s other episodes – as you will see later on in this blog!
I thought after my last review that I should provide a short apologia on behalf of the episodes I am currently working through – not least because I do not want to discourage my readers with wave after wave of excessive negativity!
It’s good news! The next serial is not from Season 24!
The bad news is that Timelash is a serial with very little to redeem it – it was a very strong candidate to finish absolutely rock bottom – which unfortunately therefore says a lot about the two serials that finished below it!
I’m afraid my list doesn’t make any better reading for fans of the seventh doctor …
I first encountered this serial as a TV repeat on UK Gold (now foolishly renamed Go On Laugh Daily) – only catching the first episode by chance as a young teenager. As with Paradise Towers it was yet another triumph of youthful hope over seasoned experience – I quite wanted to watch the rest of it, but my ever wise dad advised against it.
One had to be the worst, and this is it. Already I am imagining some of the exclamations:
“Surely you’re not saying the awful cliffhanger from Dragonfire is better than this?”
“You think there’s something worse than the gigantic slugs from The Twin Dilemma?”
As I have mentioned, I began the exercise by grouping the stories into broad categories – and around ten stories fell into the bottom category with ease, leaving me to deliberate which of the ten I had the least warmth for.
Ahead of beginning the process of ranking and reviewing each episode, I thought it would be good to establish exactly what criteria I have used when judging each story, in anticipation of what will hopefully be good-natured discussion about why a certain story has been ranked so high/low in my list!
In the first instance – it was very hard! I was shocked to see certain episodes outside of my top 50 that I recall enjoying thoroughly when I watched the DVD. This simply reflects the fact that some episodes are exceptionally good (or woefully dire …), but for the most part Doctor Who produced a consistently good standard of enjoyment.
That meant that I began by categorising each story into a number of distinct categories – roughly speaking these are:
1. Absolute Favourites
2. Stories I strongly enjoy
3. Good stories
4. Less-memorable stories
5. Stories I did not enjoy
6. Awful stories
As you can imagine, categories 1 and 6 were perhaps the easiest! What was quite interesting was pulling each story into the middle categories. By and large, not many episodes fell into category 5, although some were definitely on the border between 4 and 5. The tricky thing is that a lot of category 4 stories are good enjoyable stories – they just weren’t as enjoyable as the ones above them! Similarly, category 3 stories are often very strong – I just happened to enjoy category 2 stories more!
So then the important question – what criteria did I judge the stories on? First and foremost, I set a very high regard on how much I personally enjoyed the story. The Deadly Assassin is often pilloried by Doctor Who fans (not least for the tautology of an episode title) – but it appears very high up my list for no other reason than I enjoy it! Beyond that however, I do consider a number of variables that impacted my enjoyment – principally these would be:
While personal enjoyment is the main factor, the factors set out here obviously had some bearing on my overall impressions, and I will refer to those as I rate each episode. I’m looking forward to hearing the impressions of others as I go through the episodes!
Dan Talks Doctor Who 