Day 300 — October 27th 2021
Mawdryn Undead Parts One and Two
Mawdryn Undead — Part One
Ooh, it’s nice to see the Brigadier, isn’t it? It’s been ages since he last showed up (July for me, eight years for the programme) but he somehow just feels right showing up again. It’s also interesting — from the point of view of who the programme is being aimed at now — that you’re expected to just understand who the Brigadier is. I suppose there’s an argument to be made that if you don’t know about his history with Doctor Who then it’s not relevant until the pair of them meet up again later in the story, but all the same I’d have expected some introduction for him, even if it were just Doctor Who musing that he should phone up his old friend because it’s been a while.
Elsewhere, this is also a bit of an unusual introduction for Turlough as a companion. I know his backstory (well, I can remember roughly; I know he’s from the planet Trion at the very least) but they don’t go out of their way to make it clear in the episode itself. When he meets the Black Guardian he says that he hates being on Earth, but that doesn’t necessarily mark him out as an alien. It’s not until later on that he specifically says he can use the spaceship to fly home. It’s a strange choice to be so obtuse with the information — I’d have had the Black Guardian bring it up and spell it out for the audience.
Along those same lines I’m a bit confused by the ‘strange man’ at the solicitors in London whom the headmaster deals with regarding Turlough. The implication seems to be that it’s the Black Guardian in disguise, directing events from long before this story begins… but I’m not sure that’s actually the intention. I think once I’d decided that they were being oddly cagey about who or what Turlough was everything was going to stop making sense to me!
As much as it sounds like I’m having a moan here, I’ve enjoyed this episode. It’s nice to see Doctor Who and his companions finding and exploring a seemingly abandoned spaceship, and it feels like a change of pace for them to do something a bit more traditional. Davison is good value while working out how the transmat works, and he hits the ground running with Mark Strickson — the way the pair of them slowly make eye contact across the TARDIS Console is great fun.
Tegan and Nyssa get some great material here, too. Their banter feels far friendlier here than it did last season, and although this is the whiniest Tegan has been since she returned to the series, it all feels far more justified than when she was last around, and I can’t help enjoying her little digs at Doctor Who;
Doctor Who: ‘There’s a chance something’s on a collision course with
the Tardis.’
Tegan: ‘Don’t you know?’
Doctor Who: ‘Well, there’s a chance of anything, statistically speaking. If you gave typewriters to a tree full of monkeys, they’d eventually produce the works of William Shakespeare. Now, you and I know that at the end of the millennium they’d still be tapping out gibberish…’
Tegan: ‘And you’d be tapping it out right along side them. I only asked you a simple question.’
I love that Nyssa has found her voice, too, and isn’t afraid to cut Tegan down to size from time to time. Their discussion about the trustworthiness (or otherwise) or Turlough is a special highlight;
Tegan: ‘Nobody from Earth is just going to walk into a transmat capsule.’
Nyssa: ‘As you did into the TARDIS on the Barnet bypass?’
7/10
Mawdryn Undead — Part Two
I’m not sure I’ve ever appreciated just how clever some of the ideas in this story, are, or how well they’re seeded in, with the information established in time for each reveal to really land with maximum impact. The big one, of course, is the revelation that Tegan and Nyssa have arrived in 1977. I love that the revelation comes in the form of the Brigadier remembering that he once met a Tegan, and it turning out to be our Tegan. I also love how simply the two time zones are differentiated — the Brig has a moustache in 1977 which has been shaved off seven years later! It’s such a simple idea but it really helps to keep the two time zones distinct.
This episode feels quite ahead of its time in having us follow the two narrative strands in tandem, revelations in 1977 being recalled in 1983 as we see them happen. It’s the kind of thing I’d expect to find in a Steven Moffat story, but I wasn’t expecting it in a Peter Davison story, and especially not in a script by the man who wrote Time-Flight!
I also wasn’t expecting to find the story so funny. Nicholas Courtney gets all the best lines, which feels somewhat fitting, and I’ve struggled to work out which one might be my favourite. ‘If I was suffering from amnesia, I’d be the first to know about it’ was a strong contender, but I absolutely love his dead-pan reaction to Doctor Who trying to reveal his true identity;
Doctor Who: ‘What would you say if I told you I was looking for my TARDIS?’
The Brigadier: ‘Very little.’
If anything I sort of wish we had a bit longer with the Brigadier not remembering who Doctor Who is and being baffled by the man — Courtney plays his irritation very well, and it’s funny watching Davison’s Doctor Who squirm around trying to impress. Ultimately I think they play it for about as long as they could get away with, and there’s so much else in this episode to get on with that they need the Brig back on form again before too long.
The return of his memories is this year’s montage of old clips but that’s no bad thing — it’s a wonderful flash of nostalgia to see clips from The Web of Fear and The Invasion especially. Fans who watched this go out on broadcast tend to talk about thinking of the 1960s stuff as some mythical ‘golden age’, and it certainly feels that way watching this. There’s something a bit magical about these glimpses into the past. There’s a lovely bit of directorial flourish when the sepia-toned montage cross fades from a shot of The Three Doctors to the Brig as he appears now, which feels a bit special. This does a much better job of telling us how important this man is than they managed in Part One, and the montage feels better than the one in Earthshock if only because they make a point of including all the previous incarnations.
If there’s one thing in this episode which doesn’t work for me, it’s the total belief Nyssa and Tegan have that the man they find in the capsule might be Doctor Who. It’s a great idea, and I expect it read very well on the page, but in realisation you can’t escape the fact that David Collings looks so unlike Peter Davison that I just don’t believe either of them would mistake him. All it needs is a line earlier on where they think he may have regenerated, but when it comes up Nyssa makes it clear the thought hadn’t occurred to her.
Still, I can add Mawdryn to the list of guest stars who get to enter the TARDIS (literally dragged in, on this occasion), and the Brigadier steps inside at the end, too. If I’m remembering correctly this is only the second time he’s been inside the ship, and it’s interesting to think that from his point of view the last time he saw Doctor Who — in Terror of the Zygons — was only about 18 months earlier.
8/10
