Really? Really?!? More than eleven months of hard work, enjoying even the mediocre and bad stories, coming off of arguably the best of the Fifth Doctor ere, and here we are with the most annoying, unpleasant, screw-you-fans Classic Who story ever made. I get the desire to shake things up and move in a new direction, but this? This is just gross malpractice.

So let's talk about it.

The Twin Dilemma - Parts 1 & 2

(TARDIS Data Core recap)

Remember how, when the Fourth Doctor regenerated, he became unstable and erratic? And Peter Davison made his mark by doing spot-on impressions of all four previous incarnations, and managed to be dangerous and scary but still unmistakeably the Doctor? Yeah, the writers decided to go a different way with Colin Baker. They decided that twenty one years of the Doctor being an unshakably-good person had been enough. They decided that his core ethos of protecting the weak and helpless, and confronting the cruel and ruthless, well that just doesn't work anymore.

Putting it bluntly, the Sixth Doctor is an egotistical prick who spends the entirety of these two episodes alternately berating, dismissing, and even physically attacking his companion Peri. He is content to explicitly leave a wounded man to die. When confronted with a dangerous situation, his first instinct is to prevaricate, equivocate, and slink away like a coward. Even the costuming is aggressively and deliberately awful, and not in a charming way.

I like Colin Baker. By all accounts he is a stand-up guy, a great ambassador for the show, and there is no question that he was treated very poorly by the BBC during his tenure. I don't blame him at all. But that doesn't change the fact that the Sixth Doctor is far and away the least enjoyable to watch. 

The plot of this story is that, I really don't care. Regeneration gone bad. Twin teenaged boys who are some kind of mathematical prodigies, and who have been kidnaped by an extremely low-rent Jabba the Hut clone and his pantomime werewolf lackeys. The mid-point cliffhanger has the Doctor apparently killed when the building he is in explodes. If only we were so lucky. He'll be back tomorrow, and I'll have to watch every awful minute of it.

These three weeks can't go by fast enough.

STATS:

Doctor(s): Sixth
Companion(s): Peri
Episode(s): The Twin Dilemma - Parts 1 & 2
Steps Walked: 7,399 today, 2,210,749 total
Distance Walked: 4.06 miles today, 1,136.46 miles total
Weight: 246.24 lbs (five day moving average), net change -61.06 lbs