Doctor Who has long been my favorite show, but it’s been a couple of years since I’ve actually watched anything but the newest episodes. Before that, I was making a respectable run at getting through the original series, most of which I haven’t seen for decades. For various reasons, it feels like time to get back into it.

Mawdryn Undead

Starring Peter Davison as the Fifth Doctor.
Companions:  Janet Fielding as Tegan Jovanka, Sarah Sutton as Nyssa and Mark Strickson as Turlough.
Special Guest Stars: Nicholas Courtney as Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge Stewart and Valentine Dyall as the Black Guardian

Written by Peter Grimwade. Directed by Peter Moffatt. Produced by John Nathan-Turner. Script edited by Eric Saward.

Format:  4 episodes, each about 25 minutes long.
Originally Aired:  February 1983 (episodes 9-12 of Season 20)

When I was first getting to know Doctor Who, Mawdryn Undead was a big deal—it was the one that brought the Brigadier back!  Back then, as a young fan, the return of a beloved character felt really signficant. Now, I’ve come to feel that a character’s original material is more interesting and more important that whatever “special” episodes that featured their return visits.  And given that Mawdryn Undead is over 40 years old itself (!) now, it has certainly lost some of that “special episode” luster. But still, it’s interesting to visit the Brigadier at a different stage of life, even if it does some unusual things with the character.

Spoilers Ahead!

Ok, there is no getting around this: Mawdryn Undead is a cluttered story. The poor, overworked script has got a lot to accomplish. It must reintroduce the Brigadier back into the show, and in particular in a completely unfamiliar public school setting. It has to also introduce a second, younger Brigadier, and manoeuvre the characters to inevitably encounter each other at the end, even though pretty much every other character is trying their best to prevent this. It has to introduce a new companion, Turlough, and also position him in a modern English public school, even though he is obviously not from earth.

And it also has to re-introduce the Black Guardian, set-up his scheme to force Turlough to kill the Doctor (a story thread that will continue through the two following serials). Oh and that’s right, it has to set up, develop and pay-off its own plot about Mawdryn and his efforts to use Time Lord energy to end his own life and that of his fellows. Given all these requirements, it’s no surprise that there are some issues with the pacing of this thing.

The area where those issues are most apparent are with the Turlough / Black Guardian story. It’s interesting in concept–an old villain putting someone in the Doctor’s orbit who is acting like his friend, but is actually trying to kill him. But there is, arguably, way too much of it. Or more specifically, too many scenes with the Black Guardian pushing and prodding him, threatening him, acting nice but obviously being evil, and so on.

It’s kind of cool to see the Black Guardian again, and Valentine Dyall makes for a genuinely menacing presence, but we don’t need to see him in every episode. It begins to feel like he’s showing up just to fulfil the actor’s contract. It eats run time that could have been used to better develop what is going on with Mawdryn or the Brigadier, both of which could have used it.

Or at the very least, the scenes didn’t have to be so repetitive. Once it’s established that Turlough is being compelled to kill the Doctor, we don’t learn anything new. Those scenes could have been used to establish more about why the Black Guardian is showing up now, after all this time, or even better, to unpack Turlough’s backstory, giving us something other than establishing how much of a weasel he is.

It’s kind of strange that we learn almost nothing about Turlough here. He’s obviously an alien who doesn’t like living on earth, but what is he doing here? I’ve heard that his being introduced as a student at the Brigadier’s school is the result of another script (which would have introduced him) being dropped. If so, it would explain why he is so awkwardly shoe-horned into this setting, but even if there is a real-world reason, that doesn’t make up for the fact that his introduction is needlessly confused by an utter lack of clarity for what he is doing there.

It becomes very obvious that nobody had come up with anything, especially when It’s also not addressed in the next serial. Those of us looking back at the show from today know that the Black Guardian-trilogy, as it is known, is well-over and long in the past before anyone bothered to give Turlough a backstory, and that only really happened because it was time to write him out of the show.

What makes up for this is Mark Strickson’s performance, which is very specific and strong. He makes Turlough vulnerable, which doesn’t exactly make us like him, but does make it possible for us to grow to like him as his story continues. It’s interesting actually to contrast him to Adric, who he is more-or-less replacing (albeit after a gap of several stories). Adric was also often unlikable, but he didn’t have the vulnerability that Turlough does, which meant that he came across as more annoying.

Of course, the other big thing about Mawdryn Undead is the return of Nicholas Courtney as the Brigadier.

He hadn’t been seen on the show since 1975 (Terror of the Zygons), which is presumably where the idea of the Brigadier retiring in 1976 came from. Courtney is notably older in the role here, but he does a great job distinguishing the two versions of his character–the younger one, who is more confident and recently retired, and the older, more soft-spoken but dealing with an unresolved trauma. His older version lacking a moustache helps to separate them, but even without that I think the acting would have done the job.

Back in his heyday, the Brigadier could sometimes be written as pretty one-note–brave, loyal but a bit stuffy and narrow-minded. In Mawdryn Undead, the younger version still displays many of those attributes, but the older one shows us a side of the character we’ve never seen before. Again, like with Turlough, there’s a vulnerability that comes through which I appreciate.

Another place where we see something similar is in what is more-or-less the story’s central conflict between the Doctor and Mawdryn. Mawdryn is an interesting villain–he’s not trying specifically to harm anyone or to do anything evil, it seems. But he is determined to get what he wants and doesn’t care if this means lying, deceiving or even threatening Nyssa and Tegan with his disease as a by-product. David Collings is good in the part, and nicely show’s the man’s desperation.

And when the story works around to the idea that a Time Lord’s remaining regenerations could be traded to set Mawdryn and his fellows free of the perpetual regeneration they’ve cursed themselves with, it gets very personal for the Doctor as well. In a rarity for the show, what’s at stake with the conflict with Mawrdyn isn’t the universe or the galaxy or even a planet–it’s the Doctor’s identity as a Time Lord. That is a nice idea that sets Mawrdyn Undead apart from almost anything else in the classic series. And Peter Davison does a good job with the material. The Doctor agreeing to the procedure so that he can save Nyssa and Tegan (from being caked on with old-age makeup or replaced by child actors who resemble them!) is a great moment for the character; I’d even argue a defining one for this particular incarnation of the Doctor.

The fact that it’s resolved not by the Doctor figuring out a solution, but by the strange twist of the two Brigadiers meeting and touching each other (in a bit of pre-ordained time travel shenanigans) just makes the story more interesting.

It’s a disappointment, then, that all of this is nearly buried under all the other requirements of the script. It’s not just the inclusion of all the Black Guardian scenes, or the repetitive business with Turlough–it’s all the business with the various groups of characters going back and forth between earth and the ship, in both the TARDIS and the transmat capsule. It actually becomes quite a confusing story, not because of the two time zones (that’s actually quite clear), but because so much time is spent with people going back and forth, or trying to go back and forth but not being able to, or trying to make the transmat capsule work but struggling, and so on. I suspect it all makes sense if you really keep track of what everyone is doing, but I found it easy to get lost in the moment.

So I liked Mawdryn Undead, overall. I think it’s got a lot going for it and when you dig past some of the clutter there is a really nice story in there. But you do have to dig.

Other thoughts:

• It’s well-known that the story was set at a school because the hope was that William Russell as Ian Chesterton would reappear. I am very much of two minds about whether I’d have liked this to happen. Ian is one of my favorite characters and I think it’s really sad that the show didn’t revisit both him and Barbara back when it was still possible. But, if Ian had been the guest star in this story, then I assume that Barbara would not have been part of his life, simply because the idea of him forgetting the Doctor would never work if Barbara was there. And just like everyone who ever wrote Ian and Barbara in the show’s ancillary material (comics, novels, etc), I have always assumed that Ian and Barbara were married after they left the Doctor. I would not have liked it if they’d “canonised” anything else.

• I’ve also heard that before settling on the Brigadier, they considered using Harry Sullivan as played by Ian Marter. I think that would have worked great–it’s a lot easier to imagine Harry becoming a teacher than the Brigadier. And given Ian Marter’s untimely death only a few years after this, it would have been nice to see the character again in a meaningful role.

• This story is, of course, the origin of much of the confusion over the dating of the original UNIT stories. When those stories were airing, it was the assumption that it was supposed to be a few years in the future. The Web of Fear is implied to take place in 1975, for instance (or at least 1971, based on other interpretations), and Sarah Jane Smith claims to be from 1980 in Pyramids of Mars. Clearly, the according to these ideas, the Brigadier could not have retired in 1976, as Mawdryn Undead claims. In more modern days, there are numerous references in the show and other material about the timing of the UNIT stories being confused–it could be the 70s, it could be the 80s, with a variety of explanations offered for the uncertainty.

• I always mis-remembered that the Brigadier retires as a result of his breakdown (itself a result of the trauma of seeing / touching himself in another time frame), but it’s clear in the story that the pre-trauma Brigadier had already come to live at the school, and thus had already taken up a teaching position.

• The second episode features some flashbacks to previous stories as the Brigadier regains his memory. We see the First-Fourth Doctors (although in the order the Brigadier met them–2, 3, 1, 4), as well as a bunch of monsters, and a young Brigadier). Sgt Benton, Harry Sullivan, Jo Grant, Sarah Jane Smith and Liz Shaw are all name-checked as well. I have always loved this sort of stuff (although some franchises can definitely overuse it), but I also was a bit disappointed that all those other characters didn’t show up in the flashbacks as well. It would have been fun to see them, as well as Captain Yates and the Master maybe.

• I wouldn’t say this is a great story for either Tegan or Nyssa. It’s not terrible, but they both feel mostly along for the ride. Tegan fares a little better, thanks to her suspicion about both Turlough and Mawdryn, but Nyssa doesn’t really get anything to do that’s not just functional. They are also part the worst of the serial’s cliffhangers, where they walk into the TARDIS, see Morbius with his weird alien brain, and shriek.