Mawdryn Undead
(Season 20, Dr 5 with Nyssa, Tegan and Turlough, 1-9/2/1983, producer: John Nathan-Turner, writer: Peter Grimwade, director: Peter Moffat)
'Here is today's homework class. If it takes Sergeant Benton three hours to chase a stone gargoyle that’s just come to life round a church with five rounds rapid, would he be faster or slower than Captain Yates being chased round town by an Auton? Also, if a Silurian sleeps for 10,000 years without leaving a ‘do not disturb’ sign out does that mean that mankind has evolved to a point where he can consider the planet his? OK next if I have an Axon offering bountiful gifts times however many food-giving plants they offer us, how many Humans can we feed…to them? No I don’t know where those examples came from. I told you, I lost my memory...'
Ranking: 198
T ‘Mawdryn Undead’ is one of those stories that hits a little differently now compared to when it was first on. Watching it for the first time, somewhere in the early wilderness years, it seemed like a really curious anomaly, a story that patently refused to go where you expected it to, which had a plot that covered different timezones, had the Doctor’s companions mourning the loss of their friend who they think has died in a fireball and going through emotional trauma when other scenes patently show him still alive and a most curious back story for an old friend that we wouldn’t have guessed in a month of stories. Oh not to mention an ambiguous character being introduced whose shifty and untrustworthy but not necessarily a straight-out baddy (his biggest crime is wanting to live, if it means he has to kill one person that he’s been told is the biggest scoundrel in the universe, which is kind of fair enough really). In the context of the overly cosy Peter Davison years it feels like as big a shock as, well ‘Earthshock’, a story that’s casually cruel in the way it treats yesterday’s companions, today’s companions and a future companion all. Re-watching it anywhere past the Steven Moffat years it totally makes sense: this is a Matt Smith story right down to the youthful lead being silenced in a world of hardened elder adults that are used to taking charge, which keeps making us change which side we’re on as more information hidden to us comes to light, that keeps pulling the rug out from under our feet and playing around with timey wimey. Most of all is the way its constructed, with two plotlines going on pretty much in parallel, involving most of the same people: ‘classic’ Who simply didn’t do this by and large: generally speaking you got an A plot with a B-plot arriving when the regulars got separated or the writer ran out of steam towards the end. In ‘Mawdryn’ though there’s a bunch of alien scientists in the sky doomed to live forever and hating it having their own story while an aging Brigadier is having his own adventures reflecting on his growing frailty and mortality down below, the two plotlines mirrors of each other. That’s very series five-seven! Not to mention the complete clash of styles which means we forever lurch from scenes that are really quite deep and moving mood-pieces about what it is to be growing older in a world that feel as if it’s made for the young which you’re doomed not to fully understand until you hit your thirties and really bad children’s telly that’s doomed not to be watched by anyone under ten. Steven Moffat was 22 when this went out and busy writing his first creative work ‘War Zones’ (a play performed for the first time at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1985), a point when many writers heading out into the world for the first time pick up most on all the influences around them, especially their favourite programmes from childhood. Could it be that this little story, forgotten and overlooked by all but the most committed Whovian, had a bigger influence on how the ‘modern’ series turned out than we realised? Either way ‘Mawdryn Undead’ had enjoyed a shift in perception like few other classic stories (the only competitors are stories believing missing and then rediscovered and proving to be either loads better or far worse than fandom’s collectively memory put them), a story that once seemed so weird, now seems positively modern.
Well, I say overlooked. There was a real buzz in the air around this story when it first went out which raised all sorts of interesting questions from the past (the long awaited return of the Brigadier, seen on screen for the first time in eight years), the present (the introduction of a new companion in Turlough who, we were promised, was not like any other companion we’d seen before) and potentially the future (what impact would the return of the Black Guardian have on the universe and especially the Doctor, after the key to time season ended with him vowing revenge?) Mostly though its remarkable how a story that features one companions’ much-anticipated return and the debut of another was forgotten, wiped out the minute the next story started (and given that the next story was the mind-numbingly slow ‘terminus’ that’s quite saying something). Fans were puzzled by all three of these things in turn though, not getting what they expected at all (a feeling that was unusual in 1983 when Dr Who stories tended towards the predictable but again a feeling common to anyone who’s ever seen a Moffat season-ender!) The Brigadier wasn’t how we remembered him at all (either version for there are a couple of them, in 1977 and 1983: he’s like a bus, you wait eight years for him to appear again and then two turn up at once), as a youthful unruffled soldier, calm in the face of mortal peril and being incredibly dashing, never asking his men at UNIT to do what he wouldn’t despite being so much older in years. For a start, he’s no longer a Brigadier but a teacher, working in a boy’s school and teaching mathematics. Eh? This wasn’t the glorious future we’d seen for our hero. He should have been either still out there fighting with a zimmer frame or enjoying a full and happy retirement, enjoying the fruits of a planet he’d helped keep safe all those years. The Brigadier might snap at the Doctor at one point that ‘you hardly need to be a timelord to teach A-level maths’ but you also need to have a certain level of intelligence and a passion for the subject: in all those years of living with the 3rd Doctor the Brigadier shied away from maths and it’s close twin science as if it was Axonite and part of his character was being regularly teased for being delightfully thick (something that would have been unwatchable had Nicholas Courtney not played the Brig with such dignity and indulgent bemusement; they also miss a trick here: how much fun might they have got out of the Brig’s struggling attempts to teach science and being in need of a ‘scientific advisor’ even when he can’t remember the Doctor?) He’s not the Brigadier we remember at all and it’s only the brilliant subtly of Courtney’s acting, hinting at the youthful swagger wrapped inside the old and weary late middle-age, that makes this seem like the character we saw on telly between 1968 and 1976 at all. It was a change that still left any fans puzzled though: why bring back a beloved character and then not make him like that beloved character at all? Even in a series all about the inevitability of change, including characters that simply can’t regenerate, it felt weird.
There’s a good reason for
that. ‘Mawdryn Undead’ makes so much more sense when you learn that writer
Peter Grimwade was asked to write it for Ian Chesterton, the equal-first
companion ever seen on screen. It was, as producer John Nathan-Turner’s ideas
go, one of the better ones: he wanted something that would celebrate and remind
people of Dr Who’s by now impressively longish twenty years legacy in the
anniversary year above and beyond the official anniversary story. Going back to
the start, to remind people where it all began, was a smart move while Ian was
a natural choice, having returned to Earth and lived out half his life as an
ordinary Human on Earth, in the right order, after all those times with the
Doctor. The whole point of Dr Who in its early days was about Ian and Barbara’s
desperate need to return to their own times. Had Ian ever regretted that
decision eighteen years out of the Tardis? (Why they didn’t ask grim wade to
write for Barbara too was a mystery: it could be that Jacqueline Hill’s turn as
Lexa in 1980’s ‘Meglos’ meant she’d been in the series too recently and so
would be too recognisable, or that she was busy recording ‘Tales Of The
Unexpected’). Either way Grimwade wrote an entire script round Ian (still a
science teacher) working in a public boy’s school and curious about a young
pupil whose really smart in some ways and really thick in others: Turlough, a
pupil who reminds him so much of Susan, with the story a neat mirror to where
the series all began in An Unearthly Child’ (only with the teacher the one in
the Doctorish role of knowing more than his pupil). It could have been fun, a
real chance to show all the ways this series had stayed the same across twenty
years, but also how different, as Dr Who literally goes back to school, with a
class reunion twenty-three years before Sarah Jane turns up at the same time as
the 10th Doctor 9see literally ‘School Reunion’). Only there was a
mistake, a confusion over dates. William Russell had been interested in the
idea but as all tied up for the year on stage with offers too good to refuse
even for Dr Who, the part of Alphonso in The Tempest’ and Pinchard in ‘Absolute
Turkey’ by Bill Kenwright and Peter Hall, one of the first non-Shakespeare
productions put on at the Globe Theatre.
His agent sent the Who production an apologetic note that he simply
didn’t have time to do ‘Mawdryn Undead’ this year. JNT could have simply put the story on ice
till then, except this was the story that introduced Turlough, his new
companion and so had to be made in 1983 somewhere. Besides, there were no other
usable scripts in the filing cabinets: ‘Mawdryn’ was itself a bit of a
last-minute replacement for the ongoing oft-revived saga of ‘Song Of The Space
Whale’, a story that was nearly made with Drs 4, 5 and 6 before eventually
being made (well, sort of) as ‘The Star Beast’ in 2010. The only alternative
was to plough on with as few changes as possible. But what other companion
could possibly be working in a school? They thought of Harry but Ian Marter was
also busy (with a pile of Dr Who novelisations to write for target with tight
deadlines, amongst other things). In desperation more than design rang up
Courtney, who’d once talked to JNT at a
convention about coming back to Who ‘one day’ and got them out of a gaping
hole, much the way he did during his first appearance as the Brigadier in ‘The
Web Of Fear’.
There are worse places to
end up than a public school I suppose, but not many (pity poor Benton, who
apparently left UNIT to all second-hand cars despite showing no interest in,
say, Bessie at any point when we met him. Odd that the Brig doesn’t say what’s
happened to Liz, Mike Yates or Sarah, while Jo probably sent him letters too). When
Courtney was finally cast the plot was changed to match, but only slightly. In
theory Ian and the Brigadier are similar characters used to taking charge and
having authority while being slightly out of their depth around the Doctor, but
in truth they’re very different; Ian has a tendency to go acidic and sarcastic
when out of his depth; The Brigadier stays neutral and deals with everything
thrown at him with no more than a raised eyebrow. The lines spoken would have
really suited Ian, who longed for creature comforts alongside his love of
adventure during his time in the Tardis; The Brig, though, wasn’t the sort to
ever be slowed by anything, even age. You can imagine Ian getting bitter and
morose and reflecting on being stuck with a bunch of snarky kids when he’s
travelled the universe, something Grimwade seemed to play on but the Brigadier
simply got on with what was in front of him, enjoying sarcastic banter when
thrown at him but never giving it and so concerned with duty that he’d never
out his job down, even when stuck in a backward public school. One odd thing
that the script would have got ‘wrong’ even with Ian though: the one thing he
and the Brig share is courage, an ability to rush into danger when people are
in trouble without thinking about it, a strong part of both personalities that
isn’t used once in this story. That’s why this doesn’t feel much like the
Brigadier: as much as he perks up when Tegan mentions someone he can’t remember
called The Doctor being in trouble this is a Brig whose given up and settled
for a quiet life and neither man would ever have done that. In a series that’s
so often about the ordinary becoming extraordinary when the Doctor enters into
it, it’s sad but relatable to see the Brig’s worlds become ordinary again once
he’s no longer in it. Nicholas Courtney is brilliant as ever, papering over the
cracks though, even though he admitted to all and sundry he hadn’t got a clue
what was going on!
There are other things
wrong with this idea beyond the character choice too: Dr Who started out a
series that was once firmly on the side of the children (teenagers aren’t
really alien and strange mums and dads, even Susan who really is an alien, so
nothing to be afraid of here!) but now these young whippersnappers feel like an
alien race to use oldies even when they’re Human: there’s Hippo, a craven
coward easily pushed into doing things by new boy Turlough whose a positive
nuisance in every way, a bully even before he’s rescued at a point of death by
The Black Guardian in return for killing the Doctor. They’re not treated with
the same care as Susan: you’re meant to dislike them on sight (even if
Grimwade, who’d been a teacher himself, admitted to a soft spot for Hippo and
gave him many of the best lines). And people wonder why youngsters stopped watching
Who in the 1980s! This is the weirdest boarding school going too, full of wet
public school boys and what-hos and yaroos; if it wasn’t for the Brigadier and
the jubilee dating it to 1977/1983 I’d assume it was Edwardian and even then
think everyone was a bit backward about being forward, if you see what I mean. Much
as I love Hippo too, the pessimist bespectacled Derbyshire to Turlough’s
optimistic Jennings (from Anthony Buckeridge’s tales of public school), these
two characters wouldn’t last five minutes in a real classroom circa 1977, even
one this posh and ‘retro’: they’re hopelessly out of touch with the times and,
despite Grimwade being a teacher up to the end of the Troughton era, feel more
like memories of his own youth at one in the 1940s. Turlough himself is a brave
attempt at something new that never quite comes off. I know he was written to be deliberately
unlikeable before we got to know him, but he really is un-sufferably irritating
for most of his first story, a bully and a coward who isn’t even an interesting
bully or a coward. The character is all over the place in his first story, veering
between being cruel and kind, egotistical and with low self esteem, which is
understandable given that writer Peter Grimwade kept being told ‘we’ll fill it
in later’ when he asked why Turlough ended up at this school and what happened
to make him the way he was but doesn’t help us get to know him. Mark Strickson
hasn’t got the first clue how to play such a contradictory character and
doesn’t yet have the experience (Turlough is one of those characters whose a
lot better now an older actor an play him over at Big Finish, with nuance an
actor ion their twenties just doesn’t have yet, in stories set both during and
after his Black Guardian possession) so instead he’s played very OTT, never the
same from one scene to the next (and it doesn’t help that Strickson’s clearly
at least a decade too old to still be at school: Turlough on the page is an
impressionable youth however old he is in alien years and needs to look young;
a lot younger than the Doctor does anyway: there are a mere eight years between
him and Davison). It’s not even that Turlough’s a ‘complex’ character either
because he isn’t: while I like the idea that an obvious bully is secretly a
coward at heart Turlough's not given to deep thought and just chooses the easy
way out every time: when faced with life or death he chooses death; when faced
with someone whispering in his ear about killing someone – even an obvious
baddy who liked giggling and wears a black crow on his bonce – he never thinks
to question it; when the Guardian’s around he vows to do his biddin because the
Doctor seems less scary – when faced with actually doing it he figures he’s
better off with the Guardian shouting at him. Turlough’s whole character point
seems to be to hide out on earth for as-yet unknown reasons, to lay low and
keep out of trouble (except for, y’know, the scenes where he steals a car and
makes trouble). The fact is nobody knows who Turlough is yet and whenever Grimwade
asked JNT or script writer Eric Saward who he was they told the writer not to
worry, that he was meant to be a mystery and they would rope in some poor sod
to explain his backstory in his last adventure. As it happens that poor sod
turned out to be…Peter Grimwade, hired to write ‘Planet Of Fire’ – and who
spent it wishing he’d invented a proper back story for ‘Mawdryn’ that would
have made his life much easier! Brave as it is to have an assassin on board the
Tardis, with the audience not knowing when he’ll strike next, it’s also quite
boring and repetitive. Grimwade also can’t find enough excuses to stop Turlough
killing the Doctor, which gets boring as early as episode one (and to think
there are two moe stories of this to come!), with the audience shouting ‘get on
with it!’ already while wondering why The Black Guardian didn’t simply recruit
someone else to have a go as well (Hippo for starters a boy we’ve seen can be
easily pushed to do anything even by Turlough).
So that’s two characters
they’ve messed up, for different if understandable reasons. They go for a third
with The Black Guardian, who was hardly a nuanced character in the ‘Key To
Time’ season but at least had a back story and an adversary, while the theme of
the need to balance good and evil in the universe without one gaining control
was very in keeping with the general Buddhist zen air of the series. Here
Valentine Dyall is wasted again as the Guardian, just a one-dimensional bully,
less interesting than even Turlough and no quarter is given to the audience at
home who might have missed or forgotten his last appearance in ‘The Armageddon
Factor’ (which was, after all, five years ago now). You’re just meant to accept
that he’s bad and has special powers over life and death and just happens to
rock a crow on his head. All that laughing really gets to you and its only
belatedly, in ‘Enlightenment’, that he seems like a threat when we properly
understand that the fate of universe is at stake. The question remains too, in
all places of space and time why on Raxacofalipatorious does the most powerful
being in the universe choose a whingy pupil from a public school on Earth to
try and trap the Doctor? Why not use someone who really wants revenge over the
Doctor, like say someone killed by his
mistake (and there are plenty of them: as Nyssa’s on her way out why not get
another Trakenite, someone naturally kind and gentle turned angry by revenge:
it would have given Nyssa a reason to trust them and get their friends to do
the same straight away and made the twist that much more shocking). Talk about
needing to go back to school!
Make that three things
‘Mawdryn’s messed up then, with all that buzz around this story for its three
different reasons underwhelming. Is there anything this story gets right? Yes.
Lots. Even if it would have worked better with Ian there’s no denying the ump
in your throat when the Brigadier turns up, looking so much older and frailer,
suffering the after-effects of amnesia and who after all those years of
invasions has apparently ‘settled’ for a tiny corner of a tiny school in an
backwater county of England, as if his job has worn him out. Using the Brigadier,
once a representation of Who’s youthful vigour in middle aged malaise as he
heads towards retirement, is a brave move indeed and really quite emotional for
anyone whose fond of the UNIT stories, not least because the Doctor himself is
younger than when they met thanks to the process of regeneration and seemingly
going the other way as his friends age and die. Though its clearly just clever acting
(Courtney is much more his older self with his stick-on moustache back in 1977,
a clever way of showing us instantly which era is which. Would they have asked
William Russell to keep the beard he worse by 1983 for the ‘current’ scenes
then shave it off for the 1977 ones?) it feels as if the Brigadier really is
aged and slower now. And if it can happen to the brigadier, the unstoppable
dashing hero, then it can happen to any of us. Dr Who has been running long
enough by now for people to have grown up with it, going from children to
adults and facing mid-life crisis of their own, so having a character remind
you of how things used to be in your youth when you were full of hope and
dreams and felt you could do anything and how you ended up settling somewhere
along the way )unless you had a career actually working on Dr Who of course,
which is like a second youth for many) is incredibly brave. Not many series
ever ran along enough to try something like this; even fewer were brave enough
to run with it as here. Even braver are the hints of the mental toll on the
brig as well as the physical one: while we find out just what caused the memory
loss in episode four, ina brilliant
setup that explains everything retrospectively (and the single Moffaty scene in
all of ‘old’ Who) at first its treated like PTSD, that the Brigadier went
through something he wasn’t tough enough to handle. And again, if they can do
that to the brig, a man who could handle
anything without even showing outward signs of stress, then it can happen to
any of us. I wonder, too, if it’s the writer ans script editor riffing on an
idea that was already one of the producer’s favourite sayings, that ‘the memory
cheats’ (meaning past Dr Who stories weren’t better than the ones being made in
the present day, they just seemed that way with rose-tinted glasses). There’s a
delightful indulgent nostalgia fest too, picking up on the first time they
tried something similar in ‘Earthshock’, that really works, the Brigadier
remembering his past adventures alongside the Doctor and growing stronger and
more like our old friend with every memory. That’s what the Doctor does, even
to his oldest friends; he turns up at difficult times in their lives and makes
them better (even if, typically, he’s partly responsible for making them
worse). There’s a point when we first arrive, though, where the Brigadier seems
resigned and waiting for death, fed up of having lived too long in a body that
keeps letting him down which is incredibly brave – and it’s perfect that the
Brigadier ends up like his older self by the end of the story, his vigour
restored after being reminded of who he used to be before life ‘got’ to him. Usually
they simply ignore it when characters turn up in this series looking older with
‘The Five Doctors’ at the end of the year a case in point – the fact they make
it part of the plot is very clever.
Contrast this with
Mawdryn, the outer space scientists whose ship collides with the Tardis –
coincidentally containing the one being who can help him end his suffering on
being doomed to live forever (Grimwade takes the chance in his novelisation to
say that Mawdryn himself knows about the Tardis and caused the crash
deliberately, but that’s not how it comes across on screen). This element of
the plot is a straight re-telling of ‘The Flying Dutchman’ folk tale, of the
doomed mariners doomed to sail the seven seas forever without being able to
die, only because this is Dr Who transplanted to space (it’s more by
coincidence by design but it’s such a neat mirror to the end of the Black
Guardian trilogy, ‘Enlightenment’ in two serials’ time, with the Eternals using
sailing boats in space for fun that I have to give the production team some
credit). Mawdryn is a fascinating character seemingly riffing on ideas put
forward for ‘The Five Doctors’, the big anniversary special at the end of the
year, about the dangers of immortality and living too long. The name, too is
apt and clever: ‘Mawdryn’ sounds suitably space-age but it’s actually Welsh and
means ‘alive man’ (so the titled basically means ‘Undead Undead’). You sympathise
with Mawdryn even though he’s the ‘baddy’, blackmailing the Doctor into giving
up all his future regenerations not out of malice or a desire to take over the
world but to put an end his suffering. While the other scientists we meet are a
shifty lot who don’t do much and the costumes leave a lot to be desired (they
wear their brains outside their heads, which is meant to look horrible but just
looks daft like a five year old’s Halloween costume that ended up looking more
cute than cut-throat) Mawdryn himself is a worthy adversary, using the Doctor’s
usual techniques against him, appealing to his better nature and playing tricks
with time-travel. The way he ‘arrives’ in the plot is clever, confusing Nyssa
and Tegan into thinking that he’s a regenerated Doctor whose suffered the after
effects of a transmit (itself a neat nod to the post, having once featured as ‘the
future’ in ‘The Seeds Of Death’ back in 1968 and recalling the teleports of Star
Trek and Blake’s 7). This plot point recalls another thing from the past, the ‘is
it really the Doctor?’ regeneration of ‘Power Of The Daleks’ when the audience
wasn’t sure what had happened at the end of ‘The Tenth Planet’, only to have it
turn out to be not the Doctor (who the companions have already seen regenerate
once of course) but a trick by a walking corpse. That’s clever, with Tegan and
Nyssa in mourning for their friend – I just wish they’d played with this in the
script a bit more, making us at home question what was going (a la not only ‘Power’
ut also ‘The Massacre’ ‘The Enemy Of the World’ and ‘The Invasion Of Time’,
classics all) rather than simply cutting
to an alive and well 54th Doctor in the very next scene! Still, it’s a very clever idea and Mawdryn is
played with just the right layered serene desperation by the always excellent
David Collings, returning to Who after roles in ‘Revenge Of The Cybermen’ and ‘The
Robots Of Death’ and fresh from playing Silver in the last Sapphire and Steel
story.
What’s particularly neat
is how Mawdryn’s plight is juxtaposed with the Brigadier’s, even though they
don’t meet for three and a half episodes. It is a debate that’s been raging in
rock and roll since 1979 when Neil Young asked the question ‘is it better to
burn out than to fade away?’ on his album ‘Rust Never Sleeps’, a discussion
that split the rock and roll community in half between those who wanted to live
forever at all costs (like, say, his pals David Crosby and Graham Nash) or
those who wanted to die young before the system got them and they faded away
(like Keiths moon and Richards). You could, if you so wished to, see this story
as a debate about euthanasia, something Dr Who only covers once more (in ‘The
Magicians’ Apprentice/The Witch’s Familiar’) and which was in the news a lot after
the publication of the text ‘How To Die In Dignity’ in 1980 by the British
Euthanasia Society. They argued that top keep human beings alive against their
wishes and when suffering terrible pain was cruel: we put down animals out of
kindness so why not Humans? However the law was rigid: neither relatives nor
friends nor Doctors could help someone die – and if you died by your own hand
then there was the stigma of death by suicide. To counteract this a lot of
people said that patients simply didn’t have all the facts: that when you were in
pain and miserable you couldn’t imagine a brighter future but that medicine was
making things better for patients all the time – maybe a cure for your
particular illness would be just around the corner? (maybe, say, six years
given that’s the gap between the two Brigadiers?) ‘Mawdryn’ answers this thorny
issue sensitively – or at any rate as sensitively as a scifi story with
characters whose brains are hanging out their heads can – by showing it both
ways. The Brigadier is shown mercy by being reminded of who he used to be and a
chance meeting that immediately made him better and like his old self, a ‘regeneration’
of spirit if you will; all it took was a visit from his ‘Doctor’. By contrast
though Mawdryn and co deserve mercy by being allowed to die with dignity to put
an end to suffering that simply can’t be resolved (also by a ‘Doctor’). It’s a
sweet nuanced answer to a difficult nuanced question and shows Grimwade was a
much better cleverer writer than he’s ever given credit for (if only the
production team would, you know, leave him alone and stop asking him to add things!)
I particularly love the
ending, where the two parts of the plot that have been kept separate all the
way through collide in spectacular form thanks to the invention of The Blinovitch
Limitation effect, gobbledegook that basically means you can’t ever meet
yourself t different times in your life or you’ll explode a hole in the
space-time continuum. It was an idea slightly ahead of its time (The first back
To the Future film is still a couple of years away) and brilliantly handled: it
turns out that by accident the Brigadier not only saves the Doctor (a neat
switch on the usual formula of the Doctor saving him) and Mawdryn’s lot but
what’s more he saves himself, ending a six year cycle of amnesia and confusion
he’s caused himself all along (like I say, the single most Steven Moffat moment
of Dr Who ever, even more than the scenes he wrote!) This is also a clever way
of getting the Doctor out of a predicament: giving up his remaining lives means
he would well and truly die, for possibly the first time in the series with a
scenario where he wouldn’t simply regenerate, and it’s a thorny dilemma for
him: morally it’s the right thing to do, but it’s bigger more daring step than he’s been asked
to take before – but he finally decides he’ll make it for the greater good
until the brigadier puts his size elevens in it. That’s a clever poetic end to
a story that didn’t seem as if it was really going anywhere, like a rabbit
pulled out of the hat at the last minute. There are other great moments too though: the time
distortion trick that rapidly ages Tegan and Nyssa in the tardis is clever (the
latter of whom is played by a young Lucy Benjamin who, when all grown up, is
the graphic designer in ‘Press Gang’, Steven Moffat’s superlative break-through
series. Like I say Moffat’s fingerprints are all over this story. I wonder if
he ever discussed this scene with her while working on that series?) So much of
this story recalls ‘An Unearthly Child’ and Ian and Barbara being whisked off
away from home, but this is a neat
inversion, the idea that Tegan and Nyssa can never travel in the Tardis again
now they’ve been touched by the curse of Mawdryn. The fact it was accidental
(or so he says) only makes it worse and harks back to the theme of life passing
you by and you aging (though hopefully not quite as violently as here). This is
one of the best uses of makeup in the series too: nowadays you can’t go five
minutes without a companion being aged impossibly (it happened to Amy, Clara
and Ruby to name but three) but somehow they never look quite right; the older
Tegan and Nyssa, though, are a real triumph of scars and wrinkles. I love the way, too, that Tegan immediately grasps that The
brigadier knows the Doctor and if the Doctor knows him then he’s a useful ally – it saves
another scene of ‘who are you and what is going on?’ in 1997 so soon after the
1983 version and the pair are a good double act (although poor Nyssa is hard
done by in her penultimate story, left inside the Tardis for the most part
again!) I love the deadly ‘farce’ element too which is typical Dr Who, taking
another genre and subverting it, with two Brigadiers constantly just missing
each other every time you think they’re about to meet and ‘explode’ each other:
usually in farces its something silly you’re afraid of, like being caught by
the vicar with your trousers down – trust Dr Who to make a twist on such a
silly idea and make it deadly!
Above all any one scene,
though, it’s the feel of ‘Mawdryn’ I enjoy, that elegiac air. While ‘The Five
Doctors’ was a big party ‘Mawdryn’ points at deeper darker more melancholic
feelings of having been around a long time and seen too many changes, not all
of them good. Setting this against a backdrop of 1977 (recent history when
screen in 1983) when the burning punks and the rusting Jubilee celebrations
were both in the air and Britain was at a sort of crossroads between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ is a masterstroke too, a celebration
of another long-running person/concept that was also tinged with the
melancholia of big milestones that you might never reach another, with the
feeling of time passing and being out of touch. Even this is not without its
problems though, given that it contradicts the entire established dating of the
3rd and 4th Doctor UNIT stories which, at the time, were
supposed to take place ten years in the future (and which means that the Brigadier
is a year away from meeting the Doctor in ‘The Web Of Fear’ at the time of the
jubilee). It’s one of the biggest continuity mess-ups and one they’re trying to
explain now, however perfect it may be for this one story (and if you’re thinking
to yourself ‘why did nobody spot it?’ fan consultant Ian Levine did – and got
told to hush because it was only a TV show. Charming!) There’s another, too:
the Brigadier is handed a homing device by Tegan in 1977 and he finds it in his
collection of odds and ends in 1983, taking it with him to Mawdryn’s ship; after
the explosion the 1977 amnesiac Brigadier pockets it. But that means the 1983
version has two of the things now. What happened to the other one? Or does the
Blinovitch Limitation Effect affect objects as well as people?) Oh well, we all
make mistakes, it’s a side effect of growing old you know, which is very in
peeing with ‘Mawdryn’. There’s a great and very Dr Who message in this story too
that it isn’t how much time you have that matters but what you can do with it
that matters and that it’s never late to remember who you once were. The fact
that a time-travelling show that hardly ever touches on time once the Tardis
lands goes to town with two stories in a story in an anniversary year is clever
too and quite daring for its time (the only real precedent for this are ‘The Space
Museum’ where the Tardis lands an episode early and ‘The Ark’ where it lands on
the same planet a century apart, but neither are quite like this episode where
both plots happen at once). Unfortunately
those bits – the clever grownup adult bits – live in the same story as the
juvenile adventures of Turlough and Hippo with the cardboard cutout superhero villain
The Black Guardian and a decidedly less nuanced take on murder.
Of all the stories I wish
I could have gone back in time and changed it’s this one: surely there’s a way,
if a fan finds a real working Tardis, we can make a pledge that they go back in
time and lock JNT and Eric in a cupboard so they couldn’t mess around with this
story? Because in a parallel universe somewhere ‘Mawdryn’ is hailed as a top
ten classic a poignant reflection on aging and loss with Ian Chesterton taking
time out from near-retirement to relive his youth, with a genuinely interesting
character with a proper back story in a
thoughtful debate about what it means to grow old, with no Turlough no Black
Guardian, no ‘baddy’ except the merciless effects of time on all of us. It’s
such a shame that this story had to be limited, by circumstances more than just
Blinovitches. Even under orders to accommodate
Turlough and tweak the script towards the Brigadier though you can’t help
feeling that this script should have been so much better than it is: had they
made this an army academy instead of a school, had Turlough mirrored Susan by
thinking the Earth was still using pounds shilling and pence and talking in
four dimensions, had the Black Guardian chosen a real assassin to kill the Doctor
rather than a hopeless cowardly wannabe, then I would have still loved this
story. Instead it’s curate’s or at least a Slitheen’s egg: some of it is great,
some of it is ghastly, some of it is just bland and average. Which if nothing
else is still kinda fitting I suppose for a story that’s all about missed
opportunities and paths untaken.
POSITIVES + The setting.
We didn’t get much location filming in this era of Dr Who and when we did it
was usually a field somewhere pretending to be from the past so it’s great to
get a (supposedly) contemporary school. The building is Trent Park, then and
now home to the university of Middlesex (so just think, you can go there and
become a ‘Doctor’ – why didn’t I think of that for my uni?!) chosen for three
reasons: it looked exactly what a ‘public boarding school’ looks like, was
close to the tube station Cockfosters for easy access of actors and crew coming
from London and it had a whacking big obelisk on the grounds (it’s real not a
prop; Grimwade was an inexperienced enough writer to know that things change on
location shoots so he is only specification is that it should be old and look
out of place). Some guidebooks say this is Grimwade’s actual school
he taught at and wrote for but that’s not true: he was a teacher in Truro.
Previous ‘Snakedance’
next ‘Terminus’
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