21b – Twenty-First Season – Colin Baker

The Twin Dilemma

The Doctor is a post-regeneration state where he is manic-depressive, paranoid, and violent. He attempts to choke Peri, then decides he must atone for this by going to the remote asteroid Titan 3 to find a cave and meditate. But when they arrive there, they find a man (Hugo Lang) lying unconscious and bring him into the TARDIS. His ship was attacked and forced to crash here. Meanwhile, an elderly gentleman called Professor Edgeworth has just kidnapped two twin boys who are also mathematical geniuses, and is serving an alien named Mestor, who turns out to be a giant combination of slug and human (Gastropods). Hugo says the place to go is Joconda, and when they get there they find that the planet has been devastated by the gastropods. “Professor Edgeworth” turns out to a Time Lord (Azmael) who was the Doctor’s favorite tutor, and was the previous ruler of Joconda. Mestor has stated that his plan is to xenoform the two outer planets of the system into places for the gastropods, but the Doctor realizes this is a lie, and that the real plan is to use the calculations from the twin geniuses to throw the planets into the Sun and trigger a supernova, which will scatter the gastropod eggs all over the galaxy. But the Doctor and Azmael together defeat Mestor and kill him.

Colin Baker later explained that his plan was to start out as unlikable and then gradually become more attractive over time. In this story he certainly was unlikable, but sadly he never recovered from this and as a result has a very short stint as the Doctor. He hoped he would be the longest serving Doctor, but instead he became the shortest until Christopher Eccleston. But he has blossomed in Big Finish audio dramas. But giving him a whole story to display his unlikableness, ending it with “I’m the Doctor whether you like it or not¨, and then leaving the impression to sink in over months before any new stories appear…well, you can understand that this is the point people target as when the classic series started to die.

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Season 21

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