Doctor Who: Mawdryn Undead [1983]

In an attempt to recapture the earlier days of Doctor Who, when it was on for most of the year and serials ran into one another, the production team under John Nathan-Turner were given to themed seasons or trilogies. This fits into both, in a season which found the Doctor [Peter Davison] trying to retain his popularity by running into old comrades and enemies in every story, and kicks off three serials linked by the reprised villain The Black Guardian [Valentine Dyall] of The Key to Time and his attempts to get the new companion, Turlough [Mark Strickson], to murder the Doctor. This was probably an overdue idea: after the heroic Adric [whom nobody much liked], a deliberately unsympathetic companion struggles with his worse instincts over twelve episodes before turning out all right, and then becomes less interesting if less overacted.

The set-up, which has echoes of the show's very beginnings, is that alien kid Turlough is somehow stranded at an English public school; it would have been even closer if William Russell were the returning old friend as teacher Ian Chesterton, but he wasn't available so we learn that the Brigadier [Nicholas Courtney] has retired from UNIT and become a Maths teacher at a minor prep school. The actual plot has to do with semi-immortals who have stolen a regeneration device from the Time Lords and are now miserable and infirm and want the Doctor to sacrifice his future incarnations in order that they can die - a contrived premise, with a crux that the Doctor is willing to sacrifice himself for his companions, but there's a way out as Mawdryn and his comrades die off some other way. There are clever ideas: a plot taking place in the same place in two time periods, with two versions of the Brigadier wandering around and the possibility that if they meet there'll be cosmic trouble; the mangled Mawdryn [David Collings] trying to pass himself off as a sudden new regeneration of the Doctor and semi-fooling Nyssa and Tegan.

In this outing, Turlough is almost a real villain - a sneak at school, who sucks up and shifts blame - and it's a shame his arc, handled by three writers, didn't continue smoothly; in the sequels, he wavers between being bullied by the Guardian and wanting to be a goodie, but there's no sense he really evolves [say by admiring the Doctor] from the character introduced here, and some of his arrogant TARDIS tinkering could have been scripted for Adric. Courtney allows for some nostalgia and fan-pleasing updates of the UNIT era characters [Sgt Benton sells second-hand cars] and the Brig gets some Falklands era army slang [he refers to 'yomping'] and is more seasoned than the current regulars in the show.
KIM NEWMAN

First published in this form here.

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