Doctor Who_ The Twin Dilemma - Eric Saward [49]
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