Round the Twist S1E11: "The Copy"
This review was commissioned by @ArlequineLunaire
The existence of this review is an unlikely coincidence.
"Round the Twist" is an Australian supernatural sitcom that aired throughout the 1990's. Featuring the adventures of the recently motherless Twist family as they move into a haunted lighthouse. It's haunted by the ghost of its previous occupants, who were mad scientists. And it also seems to act as a weirdness magnet for other supernatural phenomena from outside. The writers just gave themselves a blank check to make episodes about literally anything lol. The series was highly successful within Australia, reasonably popular in the UK, and also got limited airing in a good number of other countries. However, it's still not particularly well known outside of Australia and the UK.
However, I had an Australian elementary school English teacher who sometimes had us watch Australian videos. Including several episodes of "Round the Twist." Including this episode of "Round the Twist."
So, this isn't a blind review. It is, however, a review of something I haven't seen in at least a quarter-century, and that I completely forgot existed until I got this commission. And man, hearing the intro theme really brought me back.
"The Copy" starts, as many episodes of this show do, with the three Twist children (teenaged twins Pete and Linda, and preteen Bronson) chasing the ghostly music that often plays from the top of the lighthouse at night. Said music often leads them to discovering weird things left behind by the mad scientists, and this time is no exception. A hidden attic space, a false wall panel, and they find themselves looking at a duplication device.
You know where this is going. I'm pretty sure every paranormal children's show had an episode like this.
After testing it out and discover its ability to both create and uncreate perfect replicas of things, Linda, Pete, and Bronson make an agreement between the three of themselves to not use it any more. They don't know what the consequences might be, etc, etc. And, predictably, none of them keep the pact.
Bronson's transgression is the least dangerous. Probably. Depending on the consequences of digesting and assimilating duplicated matter.
Pete's is less of a bodily risk, but more of a legal one.
He does encounter a brief setback in the form of the duplicator's chirality-reversing effect. He gets around it by making copies OF the copy, with the double-mirrored bills being perfect counterfeits. This is the show's opportunity to demonstrate the mirroring issue early on, and also sets events in motion to demonstrate something more important later on.
The real plot of the episode is kicked off by Linda, who - in desperation to win a sporting event that would net her a train trip with a football captain she's crushing on - decides she needs another of herself to pull off a cheat. So, after testing the device's ability to duplicate living organisms on the family's pet rabbit, she creates Adnil. So named because she happened to be wearing a shirt with her name stencilled on it before hopping into the machine.
Shenanigans ensue.
While Linda is the focal character of this episode, most of the best moments actually involve the children's offbeat father, Tony. Tony is kind of a weird, tricky balance between your usual sitcom "divorced dad" archetype (technically widowed in this case, but archetypes), the "struggling artist whose brilliance will not be understood in his own OR PROBABLY ANY OTHER time" archetype, and the "embarrassing busybody parent" archetype. Those all have some overlapping characteristics to begin with, but it's still an unusual combination, and the actor and scriptwriters all do a good job with it. Funniest scene of the episode is when Linda's crush comes over, and Tony is just openly and proudly sanding away at the life-sized sculpture of a human ass he's been working on.
I know that quality child actors are a rare commodity, so it might not be a fair comparison, but the fact that Tony's actor is just that much better than the other (children) characters' also makes him a standout just by default.
Anyway, the dramatic twist (heh) of the episode comes when it turns out that the process of duplicating matter has the side-effect of destabilizing it. The mad scientist whose ghost is always leading the kids into his contraptions basically never got anything to work *properly* before their death, hence why none of them ever left the lighthouse-lab, and for the duplicator the problem was this. Naturally, the money that Pete duplicated many times over (via duplicating the first duplicate) is the first thing to melt into a thin, steaming soup. The clock that they tested the machine on first comes next, simply on account of it having had the most time to decay.
The antique mask that they duplicated and then un-duplicated just seconds after the clock, meanwhile, has had its structural integrity restored and thus never suffers the decay.
So, Linda's life is in danger. And so is Adnil's. Unfortunately for both of them, their cheating at the relay race was successfully, and both of them have now smuggled themselves onto the train to share their stolen date with the football bro. A little weird that Linda didn't get taken aside for medical examination, after the way she signed her name in the notebook at one of the two ends of the relay race.
While on the train and using bathroom visits to tap each other in and out so they can share the football bro, Linda and Adnil realize how pointless their transgression was, as he turns out to be a boring, narcissistic, sexist douche. Oh gee, who could have ever seen that coming?
...
Even as a kid, I noticed and was bothered by this. In the three decades' worth of family sitcoms spanning the 80's, 90's, and 00's, it's almost a constant. If the teenaged son is pursuing a girl, he's going to get her in the end, and any creepy or otherwise unethical things he does in pursuit of her will be downplayed even if he has to make amends for them (and he often doesn't). If the teenaged daughter is pursuing a boy, then the boy is always an unethical creep who she should have known better than to give herself up to (gay crushes, of course, were not permitted to be shown). "Round the Twist" has some other episodes involving Pete's crush on a girl, and I think you'll be totally unsurprised if I were to tell you how that goes.
I know these shows were written by a demographic range of TV creatives, for an audience of mostly children. But sometimes it really *felt* like they were all made by dipshit beer dads and for dipshit beer dads.
...
Fortunately, Linda and Adnil ditch the douche and take a train back home before their sickness becomes too paralytic. Unfortunately, the rabbit that Linda tested the machine on before jumping in it herself has for some reason been allowed to just keep running around the room freely, and accidentally cloned itself a dozen more times.
I...feel like that should have melted all of them by now, but I guess not. Anyway, there's a legitimately touching scene where Linda and Adnil, realizing the enormity of what they've done, start fighting each other to save each other, rather than fighting to be saved. One of them will have to be deleted in order to prevent both from melting, and the episode actually manages a bit of poignancy amidst the silliness as they tearfully beg to be allowed to take the fall for each other.
It's taken out of their hands when the rabbits' overuse of the machine causes it to overload and break down. Which has the effect of causing all extant duplicates to be reconciled back into their original templates. Adnil vanishes in a tearful Linda's arms, albeit saving her in the process.
The emotionality of Linda and Adnil's relationship didn't have enough buildup to make this hit super hard. And the show goes right back to just being silly a moment later. But still, it managed to make this one death feel actually feel sort of weighty and serious for the length of the one scene. Like, even as the show continues being lighthearted and minimal-continuity henceforth, you have to wonder if the experience of creating another human life and then watching it end has had a longterm impact on Linda.
The epilogue has them making a commemorative statue of Adnil, incorporating both the mask they used to test the machine earlier, and the father's stupid butt sculpture.
The end.
Is it high culture? No, not even remotely. Is it particularly good even by sitcom standards? Eh, maybe better than average. But "Round The Twist" has a sort of chaotic potentiality to it - in terms of both how weird and varied the McGuffins of the week could get, and in terms of the tone and weight of certain scenes that sort of happen out of nowhere - that forces you to remember it more than you would most of its peers. And the theme song is catchy.
