Doctor Who A-Z #125: Mawdryn Undead (1983)

Following on from Snakedance‘s exploration of the Fifth Doctor’s character and particular brand of heroism, here’s another road not wholly taken. The problem the Fifth Doctor keeps running into isn’t that Peter Davison is a bad actor – he may be second only to Patrick Troughton as the most technically gifted performer to take the role in the classic series – but because his Doctor’s characterisation is too often boiled down to “not Tom Baker”. Baker’s Doctor was impulsive and domineering, so the writers for Davison’s Doctor frequently run so far in the opposite direction that they make him meek and indecisive.

“Meek and indecisive” might not be my dream characterisation for the Doctor, but it could work – and it does, once Davison gets a writer whose starting point isn’t “we can’t do the things Tom did any more”, but rather “what can we now do that Tom couldn’t?” Peter Grimwade’s script for Mawdryn Undead is a sterling example of this. It’s not the first story to make the Fifth Doctor’s relative lack of authority and tendency to see both sides of an issue into a springboard for original storytelling; again, Christopher Bailey has successfully used these characteristics as a way to explore the relative moralities of truly alien cultures. But Bailey’s vision of Doctor Who was too weird, inscrutable and deeply personal to be a guidebook for other writers. Grimwade’s take on Davison-era storytelling here feels like something the show could have used as a template.

Strange that the series escapes Baker’s shadow in a story which, on paper, seems to be made from his offcuts. We have the reappearance of the Black Guardian, a new companion who outdoes even Leela in his questionable morality, and the first appearance of the Brigadier since Tom’s second season. The serial’s themes, from the title down, look like pure Robert Holmes gothic, and yet the treatment is entirely different. That difference isn’t always positive; the Davison era’s beige and pink colour palette is an acquired taste that I’ve never acquired, and Paddy Kingsland’s incidental music makes you pine for Dudley Simpson. Ultimately, though, removing the horror aesthetics from a story about mad scientists turning themselves into zombies in the pursuit of eternal life freshens up what could have been little more than an arrangement of Universal Studios cliches, and offers a radical new set of narrative possibilities in place of the expected scares.

Indeed, the fact that this era of the show is so bright, shiny and free of Gothic visuals ironically means the horror content can sometimes be pushed a little further than usual. Episode two, for instance, begins with Nyssa and Tegan finding a horrifically burned man who seems to be very slowly, painfully regenerating. It’s hard to imagine this depiction of severe, realistic pain being permitted if it wasn’t defused by the placid tone of the rest of the serial. Tegan and Nyssa seem very unsure of how to deal with the burned man, despite this being a much more everyday crisis than most of the other problems they face. It’s as if the audience’s shock at seeing something approaching real-world injury in Doctor Who has rubbed off on the show’s characters. The closing reveal that the burned man is actually a freaky monster with his brain poking out of the top of his skull represents, to us and them, a perverse return to normality.

Ah, except he’s not. Mawdryn and his fellow scientists might be scary-looking, and they might represent a threat to the Doctor, but they’re not evil. They’re not out for galactic domination or anything a Doctor Who villain might usually be interested in. The story of Mawdryn Undead becomes less of a threat to avert, more a puzzle to be solved, and that’s where the Fifth Doctor really shines. It’s hard to imagine Davison’s Doctor being particularly effective against militaristic baddies like the Daleks or the Cybermen, and indeed Eric Saward’s Dalek and Cyberman stories seem perversely designed to prove that point; he rarely, if ever, manages a non-pyrrhic victory in such serials. But if it is hard to imagine Davison in The Mind of Evil it’s impossible to imagine Jon Pertwee in Mawdryn Undead, a story in which the Doctor placidly accepts that he might have to die, not to save the universe but to end innocent people’s suffering. Who else would make this choice, in this fashion, bar the Fifth Doctor?

Grimwade doesn’t get the same praise as Christopher Bailey or Barbara Clegg in terms of figuring out the Fifth Doctor’s strengths, largely because his stories aren’t always this well-executed. He is still an interesting figure in the show’s history, though. He is the first person since Barry Letts to make a significant contribution to Doctor Who as director and writer – Terence Dudley directed Meglos before being shunted over to the writer’s room, but even I can’t make the case for Meglos as a significant contribution to Doctor Who, and I sort of like Meglos. Unlike Letts, though, Grimwade was never a script editor or a producer, the two Great Offices of State in classic Who. Thanks to his double-hyphenate status, then, we can get a clear sense of his voice, while also seeing how it occasionally clashes with the dominant tone of the show.

Looking at Grimwade’s stories as a body of work, what strikes you is how ahead of his time he is. 1980s Doctor Who was nowhere near ready to realise a script like Time-Flight, but the idea of Concorde crashing into prehistoric Earth is exactly the kind of big, splashy, iconographic image that Russell T Davies would relaunch the show with. Similarly, the loopy time-travel plot of Mawdryn Undead, with its two Brigadiers from different time periods, is the sort of thing that would slot very easily into a Steven Moffat script. Some fans were perturbed by the idea of a retired Brigadier going into teaching, feeling it was insufficiently heroic for such a beloved character. Speaking as someone who went to a school whose senior staff seemed to have accepted running a school as a consolation prize for not being able to run the British Raj, it rang true to me – and more to the point, it opens up a debate about what kind of life would tempt someone away from the TARDIS, a debate that continues throughout new Who.

It’s also clearly patterned on Jim Prideaux’s storyline in John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the BBC version of which has Grimwade on board as a production assistant. It’s also worth remembering Grimwade’s script for Dramarama, The Comeuppance of Captain Katt, whose central character (a prima-donna SF star) was acknowledged by the writer as his revenge on Tom Baker. Might there be a similar significance in how, when Nyssa and Tegan mistake the regenerating Mawdryn for the Doctor, they hand him the Fourth Doctor’s burgundy coat?

The most interesting way in which Grimwade bucks the conventions of early ’80s Doctor Who is Turlough. Turlough is a surprising companion anyway – he’s introduced as a villain, and despite this being a good decade or two before people in British TV routinely used the phrase “character arc”, his journey is executed pretty well. The most surprising thing about him, though, is that it’s hard not to read him as gay – and this at a time when producer John Nathan-Turner was famously opposed to any sexuality in the show. A slender, waspish outsider, his morality – aloof, villainous but still somehow sympathetic – is a constant in queer literature from Wilde to Highsmith. After the Porterhouse Who depiction of his schooldays, he is tormented by the Black Guardian, whose clerical air and spectral appearance suggests religious guilt, until he accepts the love of the Doctor. 

It’s a shame this rich metaphor has to be tethered to the Black Guardian, who was a just-about-acceptable plot device in the Key to Time stories but here is somehow both too powerful and not impressive enough for his role in the story to work. But it’s a Fifth Doctor story: if there’s only one thing that backfires, it’s a good week.

Next: Terminus (1983)

Graham’s Archive – Mawdryn Undead

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