Mawdryn Undead

Target novelisation Doctor Who - Mawdryn Undead

Author	Peter Grimwade
Published	1984
ISBN	0 426 19393 8
First Edition Cover	Photographic

Back cover blurb: The Doctor's time-travelling machine is trapped in the flight-path of an alien spacecraft in orbit around the Earth. To avoid the fatal impact of a head-on collision the TARDIS resorts to the only escape possible and materialises onboard the on-coming liner. This solves the immediate problem, but a new difficulty arises - the TARDIS cannot get off the ship until a radio signal transmitting from Earth has been disconnected. The Doctor sets off in a Transmat Capsule, having programmed the TARDIS to enable Tegan and Nyssa to follow him once he has dealt with the interference. Naturally enough, things don't go quite as planned...

• Grimwade Immortal by Jason A. Miller

Grimwade Immortal by Jason A. Miller 15/9/22

Pergola. Knurled. Cascara. Taramosalata. No, not alien monsters from the Russell T. Davies era. They're words. Obscure vocabulary words, words that I didn't know before I first read the novelization of Mawdryn Undead. But I know them now.

Where I was faintly disappointed with the novelization of Time-Flight, I positively adore Mawdryn Undead, a case of Grimwade finally finding his voice. To be fair, it's not just the book I love. The TV story is in my upper tier of Classic Who, although it does suffer a little bit by the abrupt shift from English public-school comedy in Parts One and Two to becoming a Star Trek: TOS episode in Parts Three and Four; the Black Guardian subplot, while welcome and well done, takes real estate away from the underlying A plot. The book doesn't rectify the change in tone, but Grimwade's way with words, and his dotting in character touches and continuity references, keeps things sailing eternally, like Mawdryn's ship.

This is a clever book, and a nice change of pace after the previous two (in story order) Terrance Dicks books. Arc of Infinity and Snakedance are eminently readable, but are not Terrance's masterworks. Mawdryn changes things up by starting off as a comedy of manners, using the above-noted vocabulary words -- Doctor Who's best writers over the past 25 years all grew up on the Target books, and you know that they went to school on Grimwade's vocabulary choices -- and flashes of wit, to make this the most enjoyable book in the novelization line (going in story order) all the way back to Black Orchid or The Visitation, if not Castrovalva.

Make no mistake, this is no mere exercise in fancy vocabulary words and self-congratulatory prose. Grimwade, in fact, excels at comical insults and dry asides. A history of Brendon School features the aside: "[T]he battle had raged fast and furious as to whether Brendon Court should become an independent school for boys or an institution for the criminally insane. Education had trumped (though not noticeably so...)". Ibbotson (who I wish hadn't disappeared from the plot so early in Part Two), contrasted with Turlough's "unwordly, pre-Raphaelite appearance", is "a lump". The school matron is a "dictatorial old harridan". Turlough likens the 1983 version of the Brigadier to a "cantankerous old pedagogue". Brendon School's chaplain, Canon Whitstable, is mentioned so many times that you almost forget he wasn't even mentioned, let alone seen, on TV.

It takes a while for the Doctor and the TARDIS and Tegan and Nyssa to show up, but that's no matter, because Turlough, the POV character for the first chapter and a half, is a deliciously wicked unreliable narrator. Grimwade hides the clues to Turlough's true nature in plain sight in the first few pages, using the word "alien" to describe him, and foreshadowing the importance of the obelisk on the hill overlooking Brendon School to his eventual escape from Earth.

Grimwade also suffuses the adventure with wit and poetry. The Doctor believes that a ship traveling in a warp ellipse, like Mawdryn's, "existed only in the imaginations of engineers and storytellers". The Brigadier has a "long and acrimonious conversation with his insurance company" (a scene I wish Nicholas Courtney had gotten to act in). The Headmaster at Brendon (played on TV in all-too-few scenes by Angus Mackay) "was of the firm belief that excess of leisure could only lead to an unhealthy interest in music or the reading of books for pleasure. Or worse".

Grimwade also seasons the characters' internal thoughts with continuity references, as a reward to the reader going in story order; there are callbacks to Captain Stapley (from Grimwade's Time-Flight), to Logopolis (which Grimwade directed, and from which he borrows the line "wheezing like a grampus") and to the death of Adric (which Grimwade also directed).

Other bits of verbiage are too obscure for this American reader. One character smiles like a Dutch uncle. I don't know what that is. But, fine; that was about the only sentence I didn't appreciate. The rest of the time, Grimwade writes picturesque and poetic prose, seemingly without effort:

"There was a splendid view over the tops of the trees into the valley below; the sun dappling the lake; the old house seeming to dose in the afternoon warmth; the distant pirouette of white-flanneled boys on the cricket pitch. How typical of the Earth -- of England! So complacently pastoral! Hardly the time and place for acts of destiny."

"As they looked closer, Tegan and Nyssa could recognize vestigial limbs, and the outline of a mangled trunk that wept pus through charred clothing. Then, as the deformed boy twisted itself towards them, they gazed upon a face that, though ravaged beyond all recognition, had once been that of a man."

Once the story shifts locales from Brendon School to Mawdryn's ship, the poetry and humor recede into the background. Grimwade places considerable emphasis on the luxury of Mawdryn's surroundings and on the horror of his and his comrades' bodily degeneration. One thing we don't get, unfortunately, is too much insight into Mawdryn's background. Where was he from? How did he manage to steal Gallifreyan equipment in the first place? Why was he hoping to achieve immortality? For as many scenes as Grimwade narrates from Mawdryn's POV, there are some clear gaps in the record that one wishes had been filled in. But at least Mawdryn's death scene is lovingly written ("his unfettered spirit soared... beyond the realms of time and space").

What Grimwade does, though, is put an interesting spin on Turlough. Turlough was left ambiguous in his first three TV serials -- did he really want to murder the Doctor? -- and remained shifty and cowardly in most of his follow-up TV stories. But Grimwade was one of the few freelance show writers who got to both introduce and write out the same companion (imagine if Chris Boucher had been able to write Leela's swansong), and he clearly had a story arc in mind for the boy from the beginning. So Grimwade plays down the evident villainy that, for example, Steve Gallagher would dwell on at length in the novelization of the next story, Terminus. Instead, Grimwade tell us repeatedly that Turlough is taken with the Doctor instantly, realizes that the Doctor is good to the Black Guardian's evil, realizes that the Black Guardian is going to kill him even if he succeeds in his mission and lastly realizes that he wants to be on the Doctor's side. On the one hand, this takes some of the tension and ambiguity out of the book; on the other hand, it's good to know early on that Turlough's going to come out OK.

I love Doctor Who stories where the title villains aren't necessarily evil, and I like reading novelizations that add humor (funny descriptions, biting satire) or that hint at the private, off-screen lives of their characters. Mawdryn Undead checks off all those boxes. It's not a top-five Target book for me, but it's easily top 20, if not better. There's something here to enjoy for all Doctor Who fans... except for Dutch uncles.