Mawdryn Undead

May 29, 2011

Village People

Jack Graham amy pond, amy's choice, Black Guardian, dream lord, entropy, father ted, immortality, Mawdryn Undead, series 5, simon nye, Terminus 0

A (positive) review of ‘Amy’s Choice’. Because not even I can complain all the time.

Okay, that’s better. The best episode for quite some time. The first really good one since ‘Turn Left’. Nothing major… but genuinely clever and verbally playful, with nice imagery and a texture of ideas, hints and suggestions.

Simon Kinnear called this, with his customary acuity, a “Freudian farce”. The Dream Lord is the truth of the Doctor as an older man, lusting after a young redhead… or at least, lusting after her attention and loyalty and esteem. He and Rory compete over her as though she’s territory. The Doctor wants Amy’s bump to disappear so that the bumpless reality will prove to be real. Meanwhile, the ancient beings inside the elderly Ledworth residents annihilate the village’s children. The aliens are even ‘oral’. “They’re not going to be peeping out of anywhere else are they?” asks Rory pertinently.

This is all played for laughs and, refreshingly, it’s actually funny. (Thinking back, I remember quite liking How Do You Want Me? whereas Chalk just made me want to kick things.)

The unreal tweeness of Ledworth, which was such a bore in ‘The Eleventh Hour’, here becomes the perfect figurative backdrop to a story about people who are negotiating and renegotiating (with themselves as much as with each other) their emotional priorities and allegiances, their desires, etc. In this story, Ledworth manages to be less the unironic cutesy St. Mary Mead / Avengers setting and becomes a bit more… well, it’s funny but here they manage to make it both more real (with the snobbery of “Upper Ledworth” for example) and more genuinely dreamlike. All the more dreamlike for being sparing with the wanton surrealism.

There’s a witty aesthetic connectedness about it, even down to the way the shifts in reality (which seem like multiple awakenings from dazed unconsciousness) are heralded by the sound of birds tweeting, which recalls the cartoon way of signifying concussion as much it reminds us of Ledworth’s rural pleasures. The first instance of this sort of thing even has a neat verbal pun. The Doctor slips into and then wakes from oblivion as he tries to say the phrase “good old days”… or should that be “daze”?

There’s something smart about the way the three characters compare their different interpretations of the same dream. The differences in emphasis are telling. Amy’s “little village” becomes Rory’s “sweet little village”. The Doctor’s “nightmare” becomes, for reasons of tact, “a really good… mare”. These are gags, but also failures to communicate. For once, the constant quipping seems to actually be playful with language rather than just showoffish… and actually serves plot, concept and characterisation (at least some of the time). And then, just as the puns are about to get tiresome, the episode realises this and starts playing them self-consciously, with the Dream Lord complaining that they’re lost on the Doctor (and us).

Toby Jones is excellent… and his character is effective, not least because he seems more like the old Doctor (I mean the old, prehistoric, C20th Doctor) than any of the new fellas, least of all the latest incumbent (who is good, by the way, given something interesting and not-entirely-glib to do). …

May 22, 2011

Rolling the Boulder

Jack Graham 80s, binro, Black Guardian, class, day of the moon, Enlightenment, fiona cumming, history, immortality, JN-T Day, John Nathan-Turner, Mawdryn Undead, nixon, peter grimwade, sam harris, steve gallagher, Terminus, the x files, uneven and combined development 4

It’s JN-T Day! In honour of the late and much-maligned Mr Nathan-Turner – who rescued Who from the stylistic doldrums, produced a slew of stone classics and stuck around longer than he wanted to because he knew his departure would mean the end of the show – here is my Timelash II stuff on the stories usually called the ‘Black Guardian Trilogy’. Much undervalued, all three of them.

For John Nathan-Turner.

‘Mawdryn Undead’

Once you get past the Billy Bunter bibble of the opening (and even that is pleasingly unexpected) this develops into a highly satisfactory bit of concept-driven sci-fi, cleverly using time travel (never a major concern of the old-style show) as part of a complex but admirably clear plot, aware of itself as myth-reiteration (immortality as curse, the Flying Dutchman, etc.) and with a submerged political sense in its depiction of crime, power, unscrupulousness and luxury.

It engages with the Who mythos without being enslaved to it, using concepts from the show’s backstory to create a genuinely dramatic conflict situation in the characters’ here and now.

You can see everyone’s point of view here, even if you don’t like the way they’re behaving. There are no clear goodies or baddies except for the jarringly satanic Black Guardian, but even he works as a figure on the sidelines trying to manipulate and influence events through his conflicted avatar Turlough, who constitutes a bravura bit of experimentation: the companion who is unsure whether he’s bad or not!

The production design is superlative… with the mutants’ ship, the obelisk, the transmat capsule, the crystal, the stolen gallifreyan machine, the hall of portraits, etc., all impressing and lingering in the memory.

The acting is very good, with David Collings giving it the full RSC and Nick Courtney very carefully and skillfully delineating the differences between the alternate versions of the Brig. Davison is never better than when called upon to play the Doctor as thinking through events and figuring out his situation… and this story plays to that strength… also allowing him to bring an almost suave air of intelligence, particularly when he tosses the crystal back to Turlough with a look of sardonic calculation.

And you have to admire the sheer off-the-wall combinations. A public school comedy that develops into a story about time travelling mutants on a luxury cruise liner, featuring an alien teenager (though obviously played by a grown man) and one of his teachers being split into two personas… well, we’ve come a long way from stomping monsters invading Southern England every week.

It may not be as spectacular as some of the other stories from this era, but if this is the 80s show chugging along as normal then they’re obviously doing something very right.

I make no apologies; I love ‘Terminus’.

It’s almost relentlessly cold, austere, alienating, unsympathetic, brutal and nihilistic, set in an explicitly godless universe which is depicted as teeming with sickness, decay, cowardice, failure, pettiness, selfishness and great crashing waves of existential boredom.…