| Production Code: 6F
First Transmitted
Cast The Doctor - Peter Davison
Crew
Plot Outline from Wikipedia In 1983, the former Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart teaches mathematics at Brendon Public School, where Turlough is a student. In the aftermath of a car accident, Turlough is contacted by the sinister Black Guardian, whom the Doctor thwarted during the quest for the Key to Time. Seeking revenge, the Black Guardian offers Turlough transportation off Earth if he will kill the Doctor. Meanwhile, the Fifth Doctor, Tegan and Nyssa have problems of their own. The 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.
Mawdryn Undead is a very popular story and it is easy to see why. It is one that old fans can cling to as a link with the glory days. The beautiful sepia flashback to old adventures in the Brigadier’s memory was a trip down memory lane for us all. It was interesting to note how, before The Doctor triggered those memories The Brigadier had forgotten everything involving The Doctor. That was why he remembered Benton and Sulliva, who he worked with separate to The Doctor, but not Liz, Jo or Sarah. The plaudits go especially to the make up and costume department for this story. Making the Brigadier appear to be six years younger in the 1977 scenes was achieved with subtle differences. The 1980s Brigadier was slightly heavier, slightly greyer, more lined and tired. But both of them were instantly recognisable, even in civvies. Once the Brigadier, always the Brigadier. Less subtle make up effects give the dramatic aging of Nyssa and Tegan when the TARDIS tries to get away from Mawdryn’s ship. An excellent job. Making young people look old usually doesn’t work. This was very well done. Likewise the two young girls who represented them at the opposite extreme. And of course the make up and prosthetics on Mawdryn and his unfortunate companions was amazing. The first time we see Mawdryn with his exposed brain and dreadful mutated body it is a real shock even on second or third or fourth viewing. The Doctor’s dilemma about Mawdryn is clear. As a Time Lord he feels some responsibility for them. Their ghastly immortality as undead yet decaying remants of themselves is a result of their having stolen Time Lord technology, but the Time Lords washed their hands of them. The Doctor COULD give them what they need, but only at expense of his own life. This he had no intention of doing until Mawdryn forced his hand by infecting Nyssa and Tegan. Then he prepared to sacrifice his own remaining lives for his friends. But he didn’t have to do that. Saved by the Blinovitch Limitation Effect. The two Brigadiers finally meet and the energy expelled when they touch doesn’t cause the end of the universe, because they are in the rarified atmosphere of Mawdryn’s ship, but it does kill all of the mutants, and as death was what they craved, after discovering that immortality is not all it is cracked up to be, it is a happy ending of a sort. Meanwhile, to the subplot in which Vislor Turlough, the oldest schoolboy in the universe, and his pact with the Black Guardian – he can return to his home if he kills The Doctor. Turlough would seem to be a viper in the nest as he joins the crew of the TARDIS, but there are already signs that he is not completely happy with the deal. He has a lot of respect for The Doctor already.
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