Great location this, the school and its grounds.
I applied to go to college there, all because of Mawdryn. Didn't get in. Not quite evil enough, I now presume...
Really striking opening shot. Nice score. This is a story I first saw on VHS, years after reading the book.
Same here :-) I'm a sucker for the scores of the early 80s, and this is a gem.
"Hippo" is based on his name (Ibbotson), but perhaps he could have done with a bit more weight as well, yeah.
Not convinced a public schoolboy as a companion was a smart move, even with the "wants to kill the doctor" twist. Not really an identification point for many viewers.
The Black Guardian, who's taken to wearing roadkill on his head since we last saw him, wants Turlough to kill the Doctor. The Guardian is too panto for words. JNT, not Saward, this time. Could and should have been better.
"In 30 yrs of soldiering, I've never encountered such destructive power as displayed here by the British schoolboy!" Slight bit of hyperbole from the Brigade Leader there.
Hope it's not the Brigade Leader! No eye-patch, should be safe.
Tegan gives a call back to the Mara. These kind of soapy post-mortems were presumably supposed to echo Hartnell's more linked stories of s1, but really just paved the way for Eastenders & only further highlight the pisspoor glossing over of Adric's death.
Tegan's whinging again, but then the 5th Doctor does seem to have gone into 'bore' mode.
A good story but you can see why the dialogue & negativity of Tegan was such a massive turn off for Davison.
A spacecraft heads right for the TARDIS on a collision course...
Turlough tells Borusa that Hippo was driving, then lights up his Guardian pager.
Great set that ship, the black, gold & red colours & the vaguely art deco stylings make for a v. distinctive look. It's a luxury cruiser of some sort, seemingly abandoned.
The Brig's got Turlough's number. "You've got a rotten one there."
Turlough takes the transmat - which he seems to know a lot about...
...to the ship & sees his chance to escape without having to do any murdering.
The Guardian turns up to remind him of the deal.
The Brig indulges in a bit of bullying Ibbotson about his appearance. Righty ho then.
The TARDIS can't take off as the transmat beam is interfering with its dimensions.
Paddy Kingsland giving it some right welly as Davison legs it out of the TARDIS.
Turlough has sneaked aboard the TARDIS.
The Doctor seems very trusting of him.
Tegan not so much.
Does the Doctor allow Turlough to come with him because he wants him where he can see him?
Turlough seems to have caught Nyssa's eye. "I thought he was rather nice..."
Arriving on Earth the Doctor begins his repairs of the transmat;
the Guardian orders Turlough to kill him...
These film sequences around the part 1 cliffhanger still look very washed out to me. Always looked bad on the VHS but not great even restored. The sun's very bright I guess.
Turlough prepares to smash the Doctor's head in with a big rock. The 1st Doctor would be proud.
The control unit explodes, knocking Turlough back and saving the Doctor as a result.
The TARDIS arrives then disappears again. They do land in the same place, but the Doctor & Turlough aren't there..
I smell timey wimey...
The Brig turns up.. but doesn't recognise the Doctor. Something's definitely not right here.
Tegan and Nyssa find a badly burned man aboard the transmat capsule, and assume it's the Doctor. Always feels very "durrr" to me. Makes it hard to care.
Have to assume they think he's regenerated, but continued to be burned... dunno.
The Doctor tries to jog the Brigadier's memory with a wonderful sepia flashback of UNIT's greatest hits.
Do love this montage of clips, and though I know it has ommissions, I still feel the original version is somehow better than the SE version.
The Brig doesn't take kindly to reminders of his alleged nervous breakdown.
You'd like to believe the wolf-whistle for Tegan is *supposed* to show they've gone back in time, but I doubt it.
"Right now I'd settle for half a TARDIS..." great line.
Lovely twist now as we get confirmation it's time shenanigans - the Brig knows Tegan!
Turlough is back in bed having a heart to heart with the headmaster...
...who turns out to be the Black Guardian.
The Guardian tells Turlough he can never escape and gives him an out of body experience he won't soon forget.
Hell's teeth, that ruddy bird on his head. If it was more obviously a stylised head-dress, I dunno...
If it was sort of bejewelled, or just a stylised piece of material obviously sewn into his skullcap... but no, it's just plonked on top like an actual bird.
The younger Brig *does* know the Doctor, and Tegan rumbles they're too early. 6 years too early.
Back aboard the TARDIS, the burned man is recovering, his skin healing.
He calls himself Mawdryn, and he wants to be a Time-Lord...
The Brigadier claims to have seen the Doctor regenerate twice. Not on screen he hasn't...
Mawdryn's appearance changes rapidly, but the top of his head doesn't seem to have fully healed as his brain is visible... Spaghetti Head Cliffhanger alert!
The Doctor needs information from the Brig & realizes he needs to make sure Turlough can't nick the TARDIS.
Mawdryn's taken a shine to the Doctor's burgundy coat from season 18.
Turlough's off for another joyride, this time in the transmat capsule, but he can't get it to go.
tin foil on the wall helping to maintain the Dr Who myth
Not quite following the young Brig's logic about having to give Mawdryn the benefit of the doubt.
I wouldn't be without the return of the Brig, and I do enjoy this story, but this would've been better with Ian Chesterton & set at Coal Hill school in (e.g.) 73 & 83. Then Turlough could've come from Coal Hill School, and bookended with An Unearthly Child for the 20th anniversary. (I know Chesterton was the original plan).
The Doctor knowingly returns Turlough's glow cube & waits for him to wander off before conspiring with the Brig.
It's all just very badly script-edited; it seems clearly intended that the Doctor knows about Turlough all along but we never get any such pay off, making it seem he doesn't know or simply has no interest in anything going on. If the characters don't care, why should the audience. Slow handclap, Eric.
The Brig has Tegan's homing device so the Doctor can finally track down the TARDIS.
The Brig orders Tegan & Nyssa to stay in the TARDIS. So they do. Oh, alright then. Really?
The Doctor & older Brig find that Mawdryn's ship has Time-Lord medical equipment aboard.
Mawdryn is crawling around the ship looking for his mates.
The Guardian has Turlough wake them up.
The mutants are obviously tip-toeing around to make it look like they're gliding, but they bounce around too much.
shame the mutants dont look like zombies, they look like camp toffee wrappers, what were they thinking?
Between the dull scripts & strike blighted shooting, you can see why Davison made the decision to quit during this season.
The younger Brig hides from the zombie mutants. Come on Brig, where's your 5 rounds rapid?
The mutants stole the machine from Gallifrey. Really do hate how in JNT & Saward's time the world & his wife know about Time-Lords & Gallifrey is just another planet anyone can waltz in & nick stuff from.
The mutants want the Doctor to give up his remaining regenerations to end their lives.
Well, as it now seems he can just get another regeneration cycle whenever he fancies it, why not?
The Doctor declines to help the mutants...
Mawdryn warns him there'll be consequences.
Turlough goes to round up the younger Brig and stashes him out of the way.
I find it so odd that considering they were twice weekly at this stage so ep3 always *should* have started a new week with a bang, but almost without fail in this era, ep3s are water-treading bore-fests. Saward's fault to my mind; he ran the scripts.
When the TARDIS takes off, Nyssa & Tegan begin to age to death; Mawdryn contaminated them somehow.
Ah, reverse the polarity of the neutron flow... like what (at this point) Jon Pertwee said ONCE before.
The Doctor tries to get the TARDIS out in reverse, but that just turns his companions into future Eastenders.
The Doctor has no alternative than to return to the mutants' lab.
The younger Brig nicks the homing device from the capsule & sets off to find the Doctor.
"He is a deviant!" Do the mutants know something about the Brig that we don't?
Those are some crazy sideburns the Doctor has in this story.
And the Brig saves the day with a BLT, sorry the BLE.
They deposit the stunned younger Brig in 1977 & take the older one back to 83. Quick, dump Tegan again!
Turlough is safely aboard the TARDIS. He asks to join the Doctor, who agrees. They shake on it, which blows up the mutant ship. That's one powerful handshake.
I do like that story, great characters, style & soundtrack but the plot badly falls off in the 2nd half.
Yes, true! Of course, it was supposed to end with what eventually became Resurrection of the Daleks.
Coming Soon... Dragonfire
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