Doctor Who Week: "Mawdryn Undead" (1983)

At a boy’s school in England in the late 20^th century, a student named Turlough (Mark Strickson) steals the antique car of his math teacher, the former UNIT Brigadier, Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart (Nicholas Courtney), and proceeds to total it. 

Thrown from the vehicle, Turlough experiences a vision of the Doctor’s long-time enemy, The Black Guardian.  This sinister individual promises to help Turlough escape from his life on Earth if only he will murder the Doctor.

Meanwhile, the TARDIS encounters a colossal spacecraft that has been trapped in a “warp ellipse” around Earth for three thousand years.  A metamorphic symbiotic regenerator -- a device apparently stolen from the Time Lords -- is aboard it.  The Doctor meets the ship’s denizens including Mawdryn (David Collings), who claims that his people stole the device in hopes of becoming immortal.  But instead of merely granting immortality, the machine mutated them.  The eight crew members will live forever, but suffer mortal pain for eternity too.

The aliens hope to die, but need the help of a Time Lord to do so.  They want to steal his eight regenerations so they can rest in peace.  Meanwhile, the Doctor must determine why the Brigadier seems to have forgotten their mutual history…

I am not the world’s most ardent admirer of 1980s Doctor Who, I should state right out the gate. 

I feel that the last great era of the series, pre-2005, is Tom Baker’s first four years in the role, which featured a strong accent on Lovecraftian space horror.  

The series grew increasingly absurdist and comical in tone both during and after the Key to Time saga, and an absurdist Doctor, frankly, has no reason to exist at all.  If all of life in the cosmos is but meaningless and absurd, why devote your life to helping the helpless or defending the weak from tyranny?  

The Douglas Adams-inspired years of Doctor Who produced at least one great serial (“City of Death”), to be certain, but otherwise made the Doctor’s very reason for being obsolete.

When Tom Baker left the role of the Doctor after seven years, there was an opportunity for the long-in-the-tooth series to re-trench and change directions.  That indeed occurred, and Peter Davison -- the youngest actor to play the Doctor at that point -- became the fifth incarnation of the Time Lord. 

Because Baker was so widely-loved for his sense of humor and larger-than-life performances the fifth doctor was a dramatic…pull-back from that aesthetic.  Davison quickly proved much less charismatic, humorous, and discernibly alien than all previous incarnations.  And the series promptly surrounded this new Doctor with several companions, instead of just one.  This team-up may have been an attempt to hark back to the Hartnell years, and the “full house” TARDIS we saw with Ian, Barbara, and Susan.

The experiment might very well have worked except for a few key points.  

First, 1980s Doctor Who is a text-book reminder that black-and-white photography hides seams very nicely.  The monsters, costumes, and sets of the 1980s era look ridiculously cheap in color.  Some may argue that this is also the case for Tom Baker and Pertwee’s color era, but they miss a significant point.  The Third and Fourth Doctor are such charismatic, commanding personalities, that even in the presence of Axons, Zygons or Wirrns, we’re gazing at the Doctor as much as we are the “monster of the week.”  

Remove that command performance for a more subdued, “human” Doctor like Davison’s mild-mannered incarnation, and suddenly the unbelievable cheapness of the production is immediately apparent.  The Myrka in "Warriors of the Deep" may have gotten a pass in black-and-white, for instance, but in the basic, uninspiring color photography of the Davison Era, it’s a horrible, humiliating embarrassment.

All that history established, the subject of this retrospective, “Mawdryn Undead,” is a relatively strong serial of the Davison Era (and Season Twenty).  It makes innovative use of a Doctor Who Time Travel conceit first mentioned in the Pertwee story “Day of the Daleks -- “the Blinovitch Limiting Factor”-- and also features a strong, affecting performance by Nicholas Courtney as the retired Lethbridge-Stewart.   Best of all, there's a sort of didactic element at work in the story, and so all the elements of the narrative cohere.  

Such would not always be the case in 1980s Doctor Who.

The Brigadier’s sub-plot in "Mawdryn Undead," in particular, reflects Mawdryn’s aspects of story.  Both men must choose how to age -- with grace and humility, or with stubborn, violent resistance -- and so the tale makes a trenchant comment on human nature, and the quest for immortality. 

Better to live a “normal” human span with dignity and humility, then to risk up-ending nature to live an eternal life of pain and suffering.  Mawdryn, in threatening Nyssa and Tegan and making the Doctor choose their fate, demonstrates that in his quest for eternal life he has lost all sense of decency and fairness.  The quest for more life simply begets…the quest for even more life.

Yet commendably, “Mawdryn Undead” treats Mawdryn as a sympathetic character, especially since he is the piece’s villain.  His people stole Time Lord technology (much like another series character we know…), hoping to reap its benefits, only to live perpetually in an “undead” state.  Now Mawdryn needs to commit another robbery, this time the "theft" of the Doctor’s future regenerations, to endure.  

Davison gets a terrific moment in this serial when he realizes that to rescue his companions, he must forgo his nature as a Time Lord.  He must give up his future as a Time Lord and live as a mortal...just one life to live. 

And indeed, in some way, this agonizing decision also reflects the story's commentary about seeking more life than nature has afforded.   Davison plays the moment powerfully.  For a flash, we see something dark cross his visage -- fear, sadness, or recognition of inevitability? -- and then the Doctor's mask of resolve returns.    Davison may not take a larger-than-life approach, but he is still a solid actor.  He gives this scene just the right aura of mystery and pathos. Not too much.  Not too little.  I wish he always had material this good to vet.

The heart of “Mawdryn Undead” is undeniably the (double) performance Nicholas Courtney as the former Brigadier.  He is no longer the crisp, commanding military man of the Pertwee years.  Though he retains his dry wit and sharp tongue, Lethbridge-Stewart is clearly older and more melancholy.  Courtney also gets some wonderful moments here, for instance when he remembers old enemies and old friends (such as Sgt. Benton…now a used car salesman), and it is wonderful to see him in action again.

One can detect in this story (and in other Davison serials such as “Four to Doomsday”) a concerted attempt to bring Doctor Who back into the realm of telling good, solid science fiction stories and morality tales in an almost ensemble setting.  The attempt was noble.

Unfortunately, many other stories of the era called out, it seems to me, for a strong central presence to hold together all the disparate elements.  Davison possesses many virtues as the Doctor, to be certain, but he does not seem represent the galvanizing figure that the series required in a time of such obvious transition. Tom Baker carried the weaker stories to the finish line in his era.  Doctor Who in the 1980s -- following his departure -- mostly limps to that goal.  

Delightfully, "Mawrdyn Undead" holds up pretty well for 1980s era Doctor Who.  But that may be damning the serial with faint praise...