Mawdryn Undead (TV story)

Synopsis

A warp ellipse draws the TARDIS off course. The Fifth Doctor's companions are separated from him not in space, but in time, and he has to deal with a treacherous schoolboy named Turlough. But why does the Doctor's old friend the Brigadier not remember him at all?

Plot

In 1983, the former Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart teaches mathematics at Brendon Public School, where Turlough is a student. Turlough convinces Ibbotson to go on a joyride with him in the Brigadier's car, which crashes. While unconscious, Turlough is contacted by the sinister Black Guardian. The Black Guardian offers Turlough transportation off Earth if he will kill the Doctor.

At the same time, the Doctor, Tegan and Nyssa have problems of their own. The Doctor's TARDIS is caught in a warp ellipse and materializes on board a starliner locked in a perpetual orbit in time and space. Turlough, under the Black Guardian's instructions, transports himself onto the liner from Earth by means of a transmat capsule and encounters the TARDIS crew. The Doctor travels to Earth via transmat, taking Turlough with him, to get rid of the transmat interference that is trapping the TARDIS on the liner. Unfortunately, when the TARDIS tries to materialize on Earth, it vanishes. The Doctor meets the Brigadier at the Brendon school, but is puzzled when his old comrade-in-arms does not remember their time together at first. When the Doctor says he has to find Tegan and his TARDIS, the Brigadier remembers meeting her in 1977. The Doctor realizes that the TARDIS is right there - just six years earlier - and tries to get the Brigadier to remember the events that led to his nervous breakdown in 1977.

In 1977, Tegan and Nyssa encounter the transmat capsule, but inside is an alien-looking humanoid whom they initially believe is the Doctor, horribly injured. Meeting the younger Brigadier, they bring him and the alien back to the starliner, which is actually the prison of a group of alien scientists who had been trying to discover the Time Lord secret of regeneration. As Mawdryn, the leader of the group explains, they only succeeded in trapping themselves in a cycle of perpetual mutation and regeneration and now long for death. When the Doctor finds out that there are two Brigadiers aboard, he has to try to keep the two apart lest the resulting energy discharge prove catastrophic.

Trying to leave in the TARDIS, the Doctor discovers that Tegan and Nyssa have been infected by the same malady as Mawdryn and his compatriots. The only cure, it seems, is to do what Mawdryn demands: the Doctor must give up the energy from his remaining regenerations. Hooking himself up to Mawdryn's apparatus, the Doctor is about to sacrifice himself when the two Brigadiers meet and touch hands, causing a discharge of temporal energy at precisely the right instant. Tegan and Nyssa are cured, the alien scientists succeed in ending their undead existence, and the Doctor remains a Time Lord. The younger Brigadier, however, will not remember his time with the Doctor until they meet again in 1983.

After returning the Brigadiers to their respective time zones, Turlough asks if he can join the Doctor in his travels. The Doctor agrees, apparently not realizing he is taking an assassin into the fold.

Cast

The Doctor - Peter Davison
Tegan Jovanka - Janet Fielding
Nyssa - Sarah Sutton
Turlough – Mark Strickson
Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart – Nicholas Courtney
The Black Guardian – Valentine Dyall
Headmaster – Angus MacKay
Ibbotson - Stephen Garlick
Dr Runciman - Roger Hammond
Matron - Sheila Gill
Mawdryn – David Collings
Mutants - Peter Walmsley, Brian Darnley

Crew

References

The Doctor cites the Blinovitch Limitation Effect.
Tegan is still wondering if she'll be free of the Mara.
The Doctor lists off several people to try an jog the Brigadier's memory including: Harry Sullivan, Jo Grant, Sarah Jane Smith, Liz Shaw, Yeti and UNIT.
Sergeant Benton left the army in the 1970s and is now a used car salesman.
Harry Sullivan went to work with NATO on a project in Porton Down.
During the series of flashbacks the Brigadier sees; The First Doctor, Second Doctor, Third Doctor, Fourth Doctor, a Yeti, a Cyberman, an Axon, a Dalek, K1 Robot and a Zygon.
Tegan (somehow) knows a lot about transmats.
Tegan and Nyssa refer to seeing the Doctor regenerate.
They also mention the Zero Room.
Mawdryn stole a metamorphic symbiosis regenerator, used by Time Lords in cases of acute regenerative crisis, but it induced a perpetual, deathless mutation.
The Doctor talks about reversing the polarity of the neutron flow.

Story Notes

Every story during Season 20 had the Doctor face an enemy from each of his past incarnations. For this trilogy, the enemy was the Black Guardian, who last faced the fourth incarnation of the Doctor at the conclusion of the Key to Time saga in "The Armageddon Factor" (1979).
David Collings, who played Mawdryn, also appeared in the Fourth Doctor stories Revenge of the Cybermen as Vorus and The Robots of Death as Poul, and would himself play an alternate Doctor in Big Finish Productions' Doctor Who Unbound audio drama, Full Fathom Five.
The original intent of the production team was for the character of Ian Chesterton, one of the original regulars from the series' first two seasons from 1963-65, to return for a guest appearance in this story, hence the school setting as Chesterton was a science teacher. However, actor William Russell proved to be unavailable. Some consideration was given to using instead the character of Harry Sullivan, who was a regular in the programme for a season in the mid-1970s, before the return of Lethbridge-Stewart was eventually decided upon.
Former producer Graham Williams, the creator of the Guardians, did not know about their return in this season and learned about it only years later during an on-stage interview at a Doctor Who convention.
Originally the slot that this story occupies would have been given to the long-delayed "Song of the Space Whale" (or "Space Whale"), in which Turlough would have been one of a group of colonists, however this was once again cancelled and this story took its place.
Peter Grimwade's previous story, Time-Flight, also takes place in two different times.

Ratings

Part 1 - 6.5 million viewers
Part 2 - 7.5 million viewers
Part 3 - 7.4 million viewers
Part 4 - 7.7 million viewers

Myths

to be added

Filming Locations

Trent Park campus of Middlesex Polytechnic, Cockfosters, Hertfordshire
BBC Television Centre (Studio 6), Shepherd's Bush, London

Discontinuity, Plot Holes, Errors

"Mawdryn Undead" has the unfortunate distinction of contributing to one of the biggest and most widely discussed contradictions in the Doctor Who universe: the "UNIT dating controversy".
"Mawdryn Undead" also makes the first explicit statement in the series that the current Doctor is the fifth incarnation, contradicting earlier stories such as "The Brain of Morbius" where previously unseen incarnations were apparently shown. (That serial is the only reference to previous incarnations. As it had already been stated in The Three Doctors that Hartnell was the earliest version, then we can assume that the error is actually in Brain of Morbius or that the incarnations in that episode were in fact Morbius' earlier incarnations.)
The Brigadier states that he has seen the doctor regenerate twice. In fact, he has only seen him regenerate once, in Planet of the Spiders (The former might refer to The Touch of the Nurazh or his thoughts on that the Third Doctor had changed back to the Second in The Three Doctors)

Continuity

The "Black Guardian Trilogy" continues in the story DW: Terminus.
The Doctor last encountered the Black Guardian in DW: The Armageddon Factor, in which he also hinted that what he thought was the White Guardian in DW: The Ribos Operation may have been the Black Guardian posing as his counterpart.
At the story's opening, Tegan is still unsure if she is finally free of the Mara, a reference to the previous story, DW: Snakedance.
Turlough's origins are finally explained in DW: Planet of Fire.
There are a series of flashbacks as the Brigadier remembers including:

The Web of Fear: a Yeti,
The Invasion: a Cyberman and the Second Doctor,
Spearhead from Space: Third Doctor,
The Claws of Axos: an Axon,
Day of the Daleks: a Dalek,
The Three Doctors: seeing inside the Doctor's TARDIS and the First Doctor,
Robot: the K1 Robot,
Terror of the Zygons: a Zygon and the Fourth Doctor.

DVD, Video and Other Releases