20x3. Mawdryn Undead
Writer: Peter Grimwade
Director: Peter Moffatt
Script Editor: Eric Saward
Producer: John Nathan-Turner
Synopsis: While the Black Guardian
attempts to manipulate the alien schoolboy-impostor Turlough into
killing the Doctor, the TARDIS crew become embroiled in a crisis
involving two separate time periods, a group of alien criminals whose
theft of Gallifreyan technology has backfired and left them in a state
of eternal mutation, and retired Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, now
teaching mathematics at a local school and initially unable to remember
the Doctor.
Review: "Mawdryn
Undead" is probably the best serial yet of the Davison era, weaving
together a labyrinthine but logical time travel plot with the right mix
of suspense, solid characterization, and occasional humor. While it has
its missteps, this is a story that proves sufficiently engaging that
most viewers will enjoy the ride even though it takes a few
questionable turns.
The Brigadier is back for the first time
since "Terror of the Zygons," and while it's a bit unusual to see him
outside of a UNIT story, Doctor Who could certainly do worse than to drop in on his post-military career. He
may no longer be commanding a clandestine international
organization, but his intelligence and take-charge manner are on
display in
both timelines, and the Doctor is clearly pleased to see him, greeting
him with an exuberant, "Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart!"
Giving him partial amnesia could have backfired, if only because
it's such a worn-out plot device in fiction. Here, however, it works
for a couple of reasons: (1) it doesn't linger for very long, with the
Doctor helping him recover his memories shortly after encountering him
at the school; and (2) it ties into the serial's twisting plot, with
his younger and older selves accidentally crossing paths towards the
end and thus presumably inducing his younger self's memory loss due to
shock.
"Mawdryn
Undead" also manages to work without a clear villain driving most of
the story - the Black Guardian shows up, but that's as much a pretext
for introducing Turlough as anything else. Instead, what we have are
competing priorities and viewpoints. Mawdryn and his colleagues on the
ship are not
trying to regain the power they once had, or acquire a mutation-free
form of immortality, or exploit Earth - rather, they want to be allowed
to die a natural death. Their methods are certainly manipulative and
dishonest at times, but for the most part, they don't deliberately set
out to harm anyone else. Turlough, meanwhile, is introduced as an
intelligent but somewhat amoral character:
he's self-centered, certainly, and initially willing to kill the Doctor
if it will get him off of Earth (which he claims to hate), but he
starts to have second thoughts when he realizes that the Black Guardian
was lying when he claimed that the Doctor was some sort of evil and
dangerous person. And the
Brigadier, for that matter, made his mark as an ally of the Doctor who
isn't always
on the same page with him, and we see some of tht here too. His younger self rather chauvinistically
suggests that the "girls" (Nyssa and Tegan) let him handle things, at
which they rightly bristle, and one gets the sense that he is among the
more traditionally-minded, disciplinarian teachers at the school. There
is, however, one scene in which he threatens Mawdryn that seems a bit
over the top - maybe it was a bluff, but even so, it felt like it might
have been thrown in to create context for Mawdryn's subsequent
expository dialogue. Tegan and Nyssa, meanwhile, are at first unsure
whether to believe Mawdryn's ruse of pretending to be the Doctor's
latest regeneration after a supposed transmat capsule accident, not
realizing that they have traveled back to 1977.
A
story like "Mawdryn Undead" is naturally going to play a bit fast and
loose with science, and ironically the final episode offers clear
examples of both the right way and the wrong way to do this. It turns
out that the only way to free Mawdryn and his colleagues from their
state of immortal mutation is for the Doctor to interface with the
equipment on their ship in a way that will use up his remaining eight
regenerations. He actually refuses at first, agreeing only after it
emerges that Tegan and Nyssa have somehow been "infected" by the
condition that afflicts Mawdryn and the others and now cannot leave the
ship. All this is probably about 1% "sci" and 99% "fi," and the script
never acknowledges the fact that, with Tegan and Nyssa in the equation,
the procedure ought to cost the Doctor ten
regenerations (which he doesn't have) rather than eight. And yet it
works because it requires the Doctor to make a meaningful choice and
demonstrate just how much he is willing to sacrifice, and for whom. The
one aspect of this that could have been improved would have been to
elaborate on exactly why the Doctor refuses until Tegan and Nyssa are
endangered. I can think of several reasons why he might - their
dishonest and deceptive methods, the fact that their own crimes are
what caused their predicament, a general distrust of anyone who tries
to manipulate nature to achieve immortality - but it's never spelled
out, and for a character who does tend to be relatively selfless, it
could have used some explanation.
While
I wouldn't have expected the serial to end with the Doctor actually
losing the ability to regenerate, the script gets him out of this
predicament with a bit of a cheat. After a series of near-misses
between the two Brigadiers, they wind up in the control room together
just as the procedure is about to take place. The older Brigadier,
despite having been warned by the Doctor that they must prevent this
from happening, reaches out to touch the h nd of his bewildered younger
self, causing some sort of energy discharge that "shorts out the time
differential" and cures Mawdryn and the others without the Doctor
having to lose any regenerations. What had been a character-driven
narrative in which the Doctor's choice is the critical turning point
becomes a technobabble-driven narrative in which the Doctor's choice is
rendered irrelevant by what amounts to dumb luck.
I object to this partly there
has been an awful lot of this kind of plotting in recent serials, such
as Nyssa just happening to be the spitting image of a human woman in
the 1920s in "Black Orchid," the Cybermen's technology accidentally
causing a ship to travel 65 million years back in time in "Earthshock,"
pretty much the entire plot of "Time-Flight," and the labored
justification for the use of Amsterdam as Omega's headquarters in "Arc
of Infinity." But perhaps more to the point, there could have been a
much better (and still character-driven) ending even within the confines of this concept. If the two
Brigadiers meeting really would have this effect, why not have the
Doctor and/or Mawdryn deduce this and then let the Brigadier make the
tough choice, accepting that he'll suffer six years of partial amnesia
in order to spare his friend an even greater sacrifice? I do think
the Brigadier would do this, especially since he would know that he'll
eventually recover, and it would preserve what I did like about the
ending, which was how it tied the Brigadier's memory loss into the
other intersections of the two timelines.
Other notes:
-
Tegan seems the most skeptical of Mawdryn's claim to be the Doctor,
whereas Nyssa and the younger Brigadier are more open to the
possibility. Perhaps they're just more used to thinking outside the box
given their past experiences (Nyssa as an alien who left her homeworld
and the Brigadier as a UNIT veteran)?
- I'm not a believer in
assisted suicide, and at times I was a bit uncomfortable as I wondered
if the script meant to draw any parallels to that issue. On the other
hand, Mawdryn and his colleagues have what might be considered the
exact opposite of a terminal illness (since they can't die), and ended
up in this condition because they *weren't* willing to let nature take
its course.
- One thing that was left unclear to me was
whether anyone - the Doctor, Tegan, Nyssa, or the Brigadier - became
aware at any point that Turlough is an alien. He clearly demonstrates
more knowledge of the technology at work than a British teenager would
logically have, but it's never addressed in the dialogue.
Rating: *** (out of four)
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