Review of Mawdryn Undead (#125)

DVD Release Date: 03 Nov 09
Original Air Date: 01 – 09 Feb 1983
Doctors/Companions: Five, Nyssa of Traken, Tegan Jovanka, Vislor Turlough, the Brigadier
Stars: Peter Davison, Sarah Sutton, Janet Fielding, Mark Strickson, Nicholas Courtney
Preceding Story: Snakedance (Five, Nyssa, Tegan)
Succeeding Story: Terminus (Five, Nyssa, Tegan, Turlough)

I’ll be the first to admit that the Fifth Doctor’s era is not at the top of my list of personal favorites. Maybe that’s why so many of them are vague and nebulous in my memory, including Mawdryn Undead. Yet nearly the only thing I clearly remembered about it turned out to be pretty much the last plot detail in the whole story.

As the introductory story for clearly-not-from-Earth schoolboy Turlough, MU might seem like one that would be rather memorable. And while I rarely hear anyone loudly singing its praises, neither does it get regularly ripped on within fandom. Falling at #63 of 254 in the io9 ranking, it just squeaks under the wire into the top quartile. That all puts it solidly in Hidden Gem territory, a not-bad-but-rarely-a-favorite adventure that’s worth revisiting.

When we meet Turlough, he’s being generally mischievous, crashing the Brigadier’s one-of-a-kind car that’s been parked in front of the boarding school where Turlough is a student and the Brigadier has been teaching. He’s immediately unlikable to me, and I can’t even really feel sorry for him when the Black Guardian appears to manipulate him into doing the Guardian’s dirty work.

Since I have, over the years, come to have a greater overall appreciation for Turlough than this story alone warrants, it’s a little easier to overlook the character’s obvious flaws. If, however, this is your first encounter with him, you might want to brace yourself for a not-very-sympathetic proto-Companion. He is at turns whiny, entitled, and manipulative—definitely an acquired taste.

On the other hand, MU gives us one of the most crowded TARDISes ever, so if you don’t like Turlough, you can just ignore him for one of the other Companions. We have Tegan (fresh off her second experience with the Mara in Snakedance, and still feeling traumatized), Nyssa (sporting the denim skirt set that will follow her into her final adventure, Terminus) and the Brigadier.

To my personal delight, we get not just one Brigadier, but two. One of the major story conceits of MU is that our beginning TARDIS crew gets split up, and ends up in two different time zones, six years apart. Then a version of the Brigadier from each zone gets caught up in the Doctor’s adventure, leaving two of them wandering around and everyone else trying to keep them apart.

For me, it is all these character interactions that make Mawdryn Undead so enjoyable to watch. While the storyline itself is not too shabby and reinforces some of my favorite Doctor Who tropes (we get both “I can only regenerate twelve times” and “reverse the polarity of the neutron flow”), it is especially the interactions of the Brigadier and the Doctor that make it worthwhile for me.

Having thus refreshed my memory, I think I need to move MU up my own list, or at the very least try to keep it in mind as one I’d enjoy watching again. Now I wonder if I can remember that before six years have passed.