With the Silurians taking over a third of the story to begin their plan of besieging a base under siege, it is a slow start, with the Doctor acting out of character (his rigging a nuclear reactor to overload as a distraction is ridiculously over the top and irresponsible) just to pad out part one and lead to the first hilariously bad moment of the story - the cliffhanger, when Turlough asserts the Doctor must have drowned when he had been in some water for scarcely a few seconds.
There's not much entertainment to be had from the slow invasion of the base, except for unintentional entertainment such as seeing the Doctor and Tegan trying to act as though Tegan's leg is trapped under a heavy door, when it visibly wobbles at the slightest movement.
The Myrka is hilariously bad, being both the best and the worst thing in the story, and the highlight/lowlight is when the evil base doctor tries to fight it before getting electriced.
The battle scenes between the Sea Devils and the base mannys are also laughable, because they are directed so badly and undramatically - the two sides standing around shooting at each other until occasionally a manny goes
At the end of the four episodes, every single guest character who had a speaking part is dead. "There should have been another way," says the Doctor, and I can't help thinking he's right, and that would have been to not watch this story at all.
In an attempt to make Warriors of the Deep look good by comparison, next we watched The Twin Dilemma, a story which always - and it really does seem to be always - comes last in fan polls. It isn't hard to see why: it is dreadful, with every part of the production (writing, acting, directing, design, and - of course - costumes) failing in such a way that even the few things that aren't so bad still seem bad because they are surrounded by other things that are bad. Take the Jocondan alien costumes, for example - in a lot of other stories of that era, they would have seemed perfectly alright.
As the first story with Colin Baker playing the Doctor, this is the first appearance of his costume and cost. Putting a cat badge on the coat is not enough to make it okay, and that is saying something! I wonder if the real reason Space Policeman Hugo Lang (played by Kevin McNally - he was in I Claudius a few years earlier, what did he do wrong to end up in this?) changes from his uniform into a loud, colourful shirt was to try and make the Doctor look good by comparison?
It works about as well as our trying to make Warriors on the Cheap look good. Not very, mew.
The best thing that can be said in defence of The Twin Dilemma is that there are some quite witty lines of dialogue in part three.
The most unforgivable fault of The Twin Dilemma is, of course, the newly-regenerated Doctor's behaviour (which does indeed put the Doctor's out of character antics in the previous story into perspective), which should never have been done the way it was. The Peri-strangling scene may be the most infamous moment in the original series run, and may even have killed Colin Baker's era as the Doctor (he just took a couple of seasons to stop moving, that's all) by making him impossible for viewers to like and think of as the same Doctor as came before.
Having the Doctor act oddly for a time after regenerating is one thing, but this was exactly the way not to do it. It's horrible.
Delta and the Bannermen was, with hindsight, a mistake to include in a "worst" Doctor Who Night. It is actually pretty good - almost certainly the best story from Season 24, although that's not saying very much.
It is funny and silly and entertaining for the right reasons - the only reason I can think of that it might be considered bad is if you wanted to watch a serious science fiction story, as then you would be disappointed. Even the incidental music joins in by pastiching songs and music of the 1950s era where much of the plot takes place.
It is also three parts rather than four, so the plot zips along. The Doctor and Mel get involved in events quickly and Sylvester McCoy's Doctor seems properly the Doctor - even if he is still doing his getting-sayings-wrong thing of his early stories - in a way that the bad writing of Warriors of the Deep and Twin Dilemma meant Peter Davison and Colin Baker didn't.
It may deviate from the standard of Doctor Who's format as a lightweight comedy, but Delta and the Bannermen is easily the most Doctor Who of the three.
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