October 26: Mawdryn Undead Parts Three & Four

The two Brigadiers just avoid meeting each other. (Mawdryn
Undead Part Three) ©BBC

While the first two parts of Mawdryn Undead were interested more in the interwoven timelines, these two episodes are concerned more with the idea of assisted suicide, filtered through an SF lens.  Of course, it takes a bit of time to get to that point (since it ends up being the cliffhanger to part three -- "It would be the end of me as a Time Lord!" the Doctor exclaims upon hearing of Mawdryn's wish for the Doctor's help in letting them die), and so part three is filled with a decent amount of wandering the luxury spaceship, combined with some more attempts by Mawdryn to convince Tegan, Nyssa, and the '77 Brigadier that he's the Doctor (even though we the audience know he's not).  It's entertaining, but it's not, strictly speaking, doing much in the way of plot advancement.  We learn that Mawdryn has seven compatriots on board, and that Turlough is still doing the Black Guardian's bidding (although he seems quite reluctant to actually kill the Doctor; most of his plans seem to involve trying to strand him instead), and that there are two Brigadiers on board, and should they meet, the result will be catastrophic.  And that's really about it.

Part four deals more with the assisted suicide subplot, albeit in a manner which coerces the Doctor into helping them; he's not particularly keen on giving up his remaining regenerations to free Mawdryn and his fellows from their unending regeneration cycle (which they're suffering from thanks to some pilfered Gallifreyan technology), but when it turns out Nyssa and Tegan are infected with the same problem as Mawdryn, the Doctor feels he has little choice but to grant the poor fellows their wish.  It's not a situation that's explored with any complexity, but the fact that they're even bringing up euthanasia at all is somewhat surprising.  Of course, thanks to a deus ex machina (the two Brigadiers meeting at exactly the right moment, shorting out the time differential and supplying the power needed to cure Nyssa and Tegan and end the eight travellers' lives -- this event, incidentally, is why the '83 Brigadier had amnesia at the beginning of the story) everyone gets what they want without the Doctor no longer being a Time Lord, but it's interesting that the Doctor was willing to go through with it -- and it's nice that Tegan thanks him for that.  And although Turlough was unable to kill or strand the Doctor, he's apparently going to get another chance, as he joins the TARDIS crew at the end of the story (although there's the moment where Turlough discovers that his Black Guardian communication crystal is cracked -- is he free of the Black Guardian's influence now?).

On the whole, Mawdryn Undead is a success.  It's nice to have such a small stakes story (it's not the universe at risk, it's just eight people with a simple request), and there's enough going on otherwise (the return of the Brigadier, the Black Guardian's delayed revenge over the events of 1978's The Armageddon Factor, the mingling of the two time periods) to keep the audience happily entertained.  Even the inclusion of the Brigadier feels right, even if he is a maths teacher -- the story originally called for Ian Chesterton to be the returning character, but the Brigadier slots in surprisingly well.  It's not a "big" story, but it's not trying to be (as opposed to, say, Arc of Infinity, which does want to be a "big" story but fails at it).  There may be a section of fandom who wish this story had never happened (albeit for the wrong reasons¹²³), but they can be safely ignored.  Mawdryn Undead is a charming tale.







¹²³ All right, let's tackle the big one: assigning dates to the UNIT stories.
     When the UNIT stories were first conceived, the assumption was that they were taking place some 5-10 years in the future.  So The Invasion was supposed to be 1975 (at least, according to the continuity announcer before Episode 1), Spearhead from Space 1976 or so, and so on -- hence Sarah Jane's otherwise bewildering comment in Pyramids of Mars about being from 1980.  However, while this may have been the guiding philosophy of the production team, it's never actually stated anywhere in the programme proper (Pyramids of Mars aside), and there are enough hints in the broadcast episodes to suggest an earlier '70s date (i.e., 1-2 years in the future) -- although, again, nothing definitive, and there's sufficient leeway to keep both sides happy.
     The real problem comes with Mawdryn Undead.  By 1983, the UNIT stories were already looking a bit vintage and thus were more or less placed in the "early '70s" category in the view of the contemporary production team -- and so this story has the Brigadier retired by 1976 and teaching at a public school, even though that contradicts the "late '70s" approach that the Pertwee team was going for.  For some reason, even though the year is explicitly and repeatedly stated on-screen in Mawdryn Undead, this is still a hugely controversial issue in some circles, and some fans are incredibly unwilling to go against the Letts' team's original intentions, despite the on-screen evidence -- to the point that they're still making jokes about it (see, among others, 2008's "The Sontaran Stratagem" and 2013's "The Day of the Doctor").
     (Although while they're making jokes about it, nevertheless things like The Sarah Jane Adventures (explicitly in the same continuity as Doctor Who) are going around reinforcing the early '70s dating -- see, for instance, the SJA episode "Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane?", which establishes that Sarah was thirteen in 1964, and then note that she gives her age as 23 in Invasion of the Dinosaurs.)
     However, looking at the evidence objectively, it's pretty clear that placing the Pertwee stories in the early '70s works without any real insurmountable problems (or, at least, without any problems that aren't also confronted by late '70s dating -- the British Space Programme doesn't really fit with either time period), while going with late '70s dating requires you not only to pretend Mawdryn Undead never happened, but also to believe that a number of real world events (e.g., Britain switching to decimal currency and the death of Mao Zedong) happened differently in the Doctor Who continuity.  In short, early '70s dating simply makes more sense, and we can move on to something more productive, like trying to work out when the Russell T Davies stories are actually set.