I also was affected by this bug, caused by the third party package Scrivener (see comment #30 above by Rofko (lukejtmason)), and resolved it by editing removing the improperly encoded characters from /var/lib/dpkg/status.
I also was affected by this bug, caused by the third party package Scrivener (see comment #30 above by Rofko (lukejtmason)), and resolved it by editing removing the improperly encoded characters from /var/lib/ dpkg/status.