Mawdryn Undead

The TARDIS narrowly avoids collision with a ship in a fixed temporal orbit and then becomes trapped on board. The Doctor's efforts to free his ship lead him to Earth in 1983 where he meets his old friend, Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart, who is now teaching maths at an all-boys school. One of the Brigadier's students, a young man named Turlough, has been coerced by the Black Guardian to kill the Doctor in revenge for denying him the Key to Time, and although Turlough does not want to commit the act, he feels that to save his own life he must. Tegan and Nyssa end up in 1977 and encounter a younger Brigadier, as well as the mutilated alien Mawdyrn, whose misguided experiments in biology turned him and his associates on the ship into "undead" entities fated to circle the galaxy forever, unless they can use the Doctor's Time Lord powers to save themselves.

Okay so here's another one of those "chaos theory" time travel episodes where the actions of the Doctor and his companions in the past greatly influence the future. As with most scripts for the series the Doctor and his companions are split up, but in this instance the Doctor is in 1983 with Turlough and the Brigadier, and Nyssa and Tegan are in 1977 with Mawdryn... and the Brigadier as well. Both sets of characters work in their own timelines, contributing to the overall picture with the Doctor in 1983 piecing together what happened to his companions in the past.

Note that at this time the Brigadier hasn't been seen in the series since Terror of the Zygons, and what better way to bring him back into things than by using him twice as much. The flashback sequence in part two was a real treat for viewers at its original broadcast, offering younger viewers (such as myself at the time) the first glimpse of the Yeti and the Cybermen from The Invasion. And the Brigadier has not changed, even if the Doctor has, aside from leaving UNIT and taking up teaching maths. Out of character, you suggest? Maybe. After all this was hardly the kind of adventure one needed UNIT for, but the Brigadier is not the type of character to leave something he obviously loves doing; indeed, one would have thought that the Brigadier looked upon retirement - and even death - as nothing short of desertion of duty. Still, in the years that have followed this episode a lot of writers have had a bash at the Brigadier's personal continuity, and those adventures will be examined as well in this blog as they come along.

Turlough joins the TARDIS crew this adventure but he is a departure as a male companion. With Adric's death still relatively recent Turlough is a sharp contrast; devious, manipulative and untrustworthy, secretly being guided by the Black Guardian. Why the Black Guardian has waited this long to exact revenge on the Doctor and why he has chosen someone like Turlough to be his instrument are both very good questions; the Guardian says he must not be seen to act in his own revenge, which makes one wonder exactly who else is out there watching the Guardians and ensuring that they play fair. Turlough obviously isn't going to try and kill the Doctor. For starters Tegan does not trust him, and the Brigadier is always around in one way or another. The Doctor might even know what Turlough is up to, casting a suspicious glance at the control cube the Guardian uses to communiate with Turlough as if he knows what it is. And it's a plot thread that is not immediately resolved, carrying on into the next adventure.

And somewhere in all this there's Mawdryn and his undead friends, scientists who tried to turn themselves into Time Lords and give themselves a regeneration cycle with stolen Gallifreyan equipment. What they got, however, was a sentence to spend eternity as half-rotted mutants with their brains hanging out of their skulls like so much Big League Chew gum. And it's not their fault, they maintain; oh no, this is a Time Lord curse, even if no-one from Gallifrey made them hook themselves up to the machines. But they're keen enough to hook the Doctor up to it and suck away his remaining regenerations to cure themselves.

Oh and Nyssa wears a new outfit; her fourth in the entire series.

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