Doctor Who: The Twin Dilemma (15 page)
PART TWO: The Doctor and Peri actually witness Hugo’s crash-landing. Hugo doesn’t pass out in the TARDIS; instead, the Doctor gives him a quick chop to the neck and renders him unconscious.
The twins are forced to use chalk and a blackboard to do their equations. Although Azmael tells the Doctor the truth straight off the bat, their discussion is actually much shorter than on TV. All that garbage about a temporal transmat and a ten-second offset is gone; the Doctor just converts the revitalising modulator into a matter transporter. Instead of explaining the desperate situation to Peri, the Doctor simply shoves her into the modulator and transports her back to the TARDIS. The cliffhanger has, to all intents and purposes, been cut (yes, the Doctor has to kick the modulator once or twice, but isn’t that just technology for you?).
PART THREE: The ‘death-by-embolism’ scene has been cut.
Azmael is called before Mestor; he is embarrassed and humiliated in front of his courtiers, but we do not see what is actually said.
When the TARDIS arrives on Jaconda, the Doctor and his companions witness the devastation wrought by the gastropods as the Time Lord recites the legend of the giant slugs (they don’t find any sort of mural). They also find a starving child, whom Peri wants to help; the Doctor tells her that the only way to help is to destroy that which has devastated Jaconda. Later, they return to the TARDIS to materialise closer to Azmael’s laboratory. Hugo actually considers deserting the Doctor and Peri and piloting the TARDIS alone, but the Doctor is no fool; when Hugo becomes trapped in gastropod slime, the Doctor doesn’t feel any real inclination towards saving a potential thief. Mestor doesn’t insist that Azmael reveal all to the twins – it’s the Time Lord’s decision
– so that entire discussion has been cut. After explaining the plan, he threatens to kill Romulus and Remus if they don’t assist him (an action seen earlier in the TV episode). They understand his desperation, however, and agree to help. A brief typo calls Drak
‘Drax’. Although quite angry, the Doctor doesn’t try to throttle Azmael. Hugo doesn’t rush in to warn the Doctor (Mestor himself will deliver the news later), and the cliffhanger is therefore cut.
PART FOUR: An unconscious Hugo is brought in by the Jacondans. Even though Noma arrrives to take the Doctor to Mestor, the leader of the gastropods materialises – in hologram form – right in Azmael’s laboratory. While considering why Mestor wants to destroy Jaconda’s sun, the Doctor takes a quiet moment to reflect on his many past companions. Romulus and Remus don’t need to delete their equations, as they’ve never used the computer. Azmael doesn’t give the Doctor his ring. Although Hugo tells the Doctor he will lead the Jancondans, he really just wants to blackmail the Chamberlain for all he’s worth.
DIVERGENT CHARACTERISATION
THE SIXTH DOCTOR: When he regenerated, ‘his features…matured slightly and his waste thickened a little, but overall his appearance was quite presentable.’ His jacket is ‘long and not dissimilar in design to that worn by an Edwardian paterfamilius. […] The main problem [is] that each panel of the coat [is] quite different in texture, design and colour. This wouldn’t
[matter] quite so much if the colours…blended, but they [seem] to be cruelly, harshly, viciously at odds with each other.’ Add to that a ‘pair of black and yellow striped trousers, the hems of which
[rest] on red spats, which in turn [cover] the tops of green shoes.
The whole ensemble [is] finished off with a waistcoat which
[looks] as though someone [has] been sick on. […] The final touch
[is] a livid green watch chain that at some time must have been stolen from a public lavatory.’ At one point, the Doctor wants jellybabies, asserting that he “[thinks] much better when [he’s]
chewing.” During his confused ramblings, the Doctor veers through the personas of a Victorian actor, an Old Testament prophet, David Livingstone, Sherlock Holmes, Herk the Hunter,
‘someone called Musk…the greatest explorer in the known universe’, and a country squire. In his Sherlock Holmes persona, he tells Peri a story about how he deduced where babies come from, which, if true, would validate that he lived in a ‘large city’
with (at least) his mother, and visited the zoo, where he saw storks
– all very unlikely.
PERI: She is twenty years old. She lives in the Bronx in New York, or close to it (within the distance of a train ride).
AZMAEL: His first name as Professor Edgeworth is ‘Bernard’.
He’s ‘an elderly man with a shiny bald pate’, wearing ‘a long brown smock and [looking] a bit like Father Christmas without the beard.’ It is known that he once had a wife, although she is now dead. In his childhood, ‘[he] found comfort in watching flashing lights.’ When Azmael left Gallifrey, the Time Lords were so concerned his knowledge and experience might fall in the wrong hands, they trumped up some charges and sent out an execution squad of Seedle warriors after him. The Seedle warriors tracked him to Vitrol Minor, where they ‘set about eliminating the populace, justifying the genocide as the elimination of witnesses to the destruction of a Time Lord.’ After three days of bloodshed, they realised their target had escaped. Azmael ‘returned to Gallifrey and started proceedings to indict the Lord President and High Council’, on grounds that they had broken their cardinal rule of non-interference by slaughtering the inhabitants of Vitrol Minor.
For their part, however, the Time Lords twisted the evidence to show Azmael hired the Seedle warriors himself. Furious, the renegade gunned down the entire High Council with a laser rifle.
The new High Council were in debt to him, but they decided to investigate his assassination methods instead – so he took off for somewhere new. Finally, he found Jaconda ‘after many years of travel’. Not long after that, a heavy storm caused the re-emergence of gastropod eggs, which were nourished by weather and hatched to reveal a gastropod army led by…
MESTOR THE MAGNIFICENT: ‘Nearly two metres tall’,
‘everything about him [is] ugly – even to other gastropods.’ He
‘[stands] upright, using his tail as a large foot. To aid his balance, he [grew] two small, spindly legs, so that when he [walks] it [is]
necessary for him to gyrate his body from side to side.’ He also grew ‘two tiny arms and hands which [resemble] the forequarters of a Tyrannosaurus Rex. And as with that particular dinosaur, they
[serve] no useful function, except when he [speaks]. Then he
[gesticulates] with them, prodding the air to emphasis a special point.’ He has ‘large rolls of fat that [cover] his body’; therefore,
‘everything [wobbles] as he [moves]. So instead of a neat, mincing gait, he [appears] to undulate, like a large beached walrus, desperately struggling to regain the sea.’ His ‘face, what there [is]
of it, [is] humanoid in form. As he [does] not have a neck, head or shoulders, the features [have] grown where what would have been the underside of a normal slug’s jaw. As though to add to the peculiarity of a gastropod with a human face, the features [are]
covered in a thin membrane.’ This makes him look like he’s
‘swallowed someone and that the face of the victim [is] protruding through the skin covering his gullet.’
LIEUTENANT HUGO LANG: He’s ‘a tall, slim, good-looking man in his twenties. He…graduated top of his year from Star Fighter pilot school’. The Doctor knows that he is ‘lazy and immature.’
Romulus and Remus: They are ‘twelve year old identical twins’
who take ‘enormous pleasure’ from their parents’ inability to tell them apart. Although they are mathematical geniuses, ‘in many ways they [are] dumb.’ For instance, ‘it…required several psychologists and a battery of complex tests to establish the evidence’ that they achieved any ‘emotional maturation’, and this feature is so lacking that they will ‘forever remain immature mischief-makers with the mathematical ability to destroy the universe.’
THE CHAMBERLAIN: His name is Slarn.
ARCHIE SYLVEST: He’s ‘a tall man with a grey, matted thatch of hair that [won’t] lie neatly however much it [is] combed. His face [is] florid and his waist thick from drinking too much Voxnic’, but that’s okay, because both girth and Voxnic are very chic this season. He loves his wife, but that doesn’t stop him
‘drinking too much Voxnic with computer programmer Vestal Smith, a person of deep warmth, deep personal understanding and even deeper blue eyes.’ He ‘[wallows] in the company of his students’ and ‘[revels] in the respect shown by his fellow lecturers’. In fact, the only thing that scares him are his sons! He desperately wants to kill them, which his psychiatrist feels is quite normal. He even goes so far to suggest to Archie that he plan out the perfect murder in his head, which will either allow him to find a calm, positive, non-violent solution to his problem, or give him the means to kill his kids and get away with it.
NIMO SYLVEST: Wife of Archie. Instead of becoming an alcoholic, she covers her fear with ‘the accumulation of academic degrees.’ Even she, however, is starting ‘to wonder whether embarking on a fifth Ph.D [is] really a worthwhile way for a grown-up person to spend their time.’
THE SYLVEST FAMILY: They live in No. 25 on Lydall Street, as part of ‘the only Georgian terrace left standing in the metropolis.’ The entire family is composed of mathematical geniuses – Professor Archie Sylvest, his wife Nimo, and their twin sons, Romulus and Remus.
THE SECTOMS: This is the particular variant of gastropod Mestor represents. They are legendary on Jaconda as ‘slugs the size of men…capable of devouring forests, destroying meadows and reducing to desert once fertile land. Not only [do] they support a massive appetite, but also a brain and cunning equal to any intelligence in the universe.
MOSTEN ACID: It ‘doesn’t burn or corrode, but ages whatever is immersed in it by a unique process of dehydration.’ It was discovered by ‘Professor Vinny Mosten…when on an expedition to the planet Senile Nine.’ Mosten was a chemist ‘who was visiting the planet to authenticate a recent priceless discovery of Senilian vases and figurines.’ He revealed that the artefacts were really
‘modern copies, carefully aged’ –which, when put on auction as authentic, would have formed part of the Senilians’ plan to bring a more steady cash flow into their slowing economy. Mosten went on to find the source of the ageing technique, and called a press conference to publicise the acid, but one of the flasks broke and aged him to death. Fortunately, the other was recovered, and
‘declared a breakthrough in the science of chemistry.’ A use for Mosten acid was found in the shaping of metals into forms (without drilling, filing or any other mechanical technique), and Senile Nine has thrived on the business ever since.
AZMAEL’S DOME: It has a ‘kitchen, complete with adjoining storeroom which [contains] enough food to keep a schoolful of hungry children sated for a millennium’, bedrooms, laboratories, a greenhouse, a power plant, workshops, a ‘compact cinema equipped to show film, video and many other visual mediums’, and a ‘library, considered the best this side of Magna Twenty-eight’.
THE REVITALISING MODULATOR: It acts like a matter transporter, but ‘instead of…transporting [them] to a pre-set destination, the modulator bombards the atoms of the body with Ferrail rays’, which ‘induces a feeling of well-being and contentment. Although no substitute for natural sleep, it does allow a person without time for sleep to continue working at maximum efficiency for a short period of time.’
TITAN THREE: Although it is ‘accused of being the bleakest, most miserable planet in the universe’, it ‘is no bleaker than any other small planet devoid of vegetation.’ Instead, ‘the real problem…is that its thin atmosphere contains a very rare gas nicknamed Titan Melancholia. It isn’t at all poisonous, but prolonged inhalation can cause depression in humanoid life forms.’
A colony was originally established ‘to house a research unit and monitoring base for the solar system, Maston Viva.’ Although the Mastons detected the gas, ‘it wasn’t until some time later that it was noticed that people who spent more than six months on the planet became strangely depressed.’ Eventually, the Mastons
‘started to abandon their work in favour of writing long, introverted, painfully self-critical novels and essays. […] Such was the all pervading gloom of the place that Mein Kampf and the works of Strindberg were read as light comic relief.’ While the colonists calmly ignored their duties, ‘an enormous burst of radiation wiped out the population of Maston Viva’, which could have been prevented had attention been paid to it. Now, ‘there was little left for the [colonists] to do. After each of them had completed a long, soul-searching autobiography, they committed mass suicide.’ Since then, nobody has chosen to live on Titan Three, although a daily glass of Voxnic has been found to counteract the effects of Titan Melancholia.
THE FIFTH DOCTOR: His successor says he had a “feckless charm”. Peri remembers him as being “almost young.”
TIME LORDS: Regeneration explained! It is made possible ‘by a massive release of a hormone called
lindos
, which, at lightning speed, is transported around the body causing [its] cells to reform and realign themselves. Although much work has been done by genetic engineers on Gallifrey, the process still remains a random and, in some cases, rather erratic one. Some Time Lords are able to proceed through their allotted twelve regenerations with enormous grace and dignity, growing older and more handsome with each change of shape. Others leap about to a startling degree, finishing one regeneration a wise and noble elder, only to start the next a youthful, boastful braggart.’ They obviously have some sort of sexual drive, as demonstrated below.
PROFESSOR JAMES ZARN: He developed the revitalising modulator to do away with his hangovers, and consequently increased his party-going. In ‘2130 AD he won the coveted Astral-Freed award for his contribution towards the eradication of space plague’, which gave him more money to go to more parties.