No lie -- after two weeks of holiday vacation time, this morning came very early. But I successfully bounced out of bed and hit the treadmill, and got my workout completed before 7:30am for the first time in weeks. So that felt pretty good. I am still getting used to the treadmill in its new location with my whole new command center setup, and I am definitely loving it. Just this evening I finished the last two detail bits, so I am rocking and rolling in the new year. Good times.

This morning's viewing had a couple of big landmarks, so let's talk about that.

Mawdryn Undead - Parts 1 & 2

(TARDIS Data Core recap)

The story opens in the courtyard of a British boarding school in 1983, and features some truly awful incidental music. I liked Paddy Kingsland's work in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy just fine, it suited the material. Some of those themes bled through into his earliest Doctor Who scores, but since then his work had been pretty solidly unobtrusive. And honestly, most of the score for this story so far has been just fine. But holy cow, in the school scenes he trots out a "playful" motif that is just grating as hell. It doesn't fit the tone or history of the show at all, it stands out like nails on a chalk board, and it makes those scenes feel like a bad sitcom instead of a thrilling science fiction program. Once the characters and setting were established that particular motif and style stopped barging in so much, but I really could have done with exactly none of it.

Anyway, back to the plot. At the school a student named Turlough (who totally isn't an alien stuck on Earth pretending to be human) goads a classmate into going on a joyride with him in a classic automobile that turns out to be owned by none other that Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart himself. The Brigadier has retired from UNIT and become a Maths professor, of all things. Turlough manages to promptly wreck the Brig's beautiful car, and  as the smarmy little punk is lying on the ground unconscious he has an out-of-body experience in which he is convinced by the Black Guardian to kill the Doctor (who will be arriving shortly).

Meanwhile out in space the TARDIS narrowly avoids a collision with an apparently-deserted space liner. The TARDIS gets stuck there because of an active transmat unit, in which the Black Guardian sends Turlough to meet the Doctor. Since the TARDIS can't dematerialize, the Doctor sets a pre-programmed flight path to go where the transmat sphere goes, and then he and Turlough return to Earth via the sphere while the TARDIS follows with Tegan and Nyssa.

Unfortunately, the TARDIS materializes in the right place but six years too early, and from there we have two parallel plot lines with the Doctor and Turlough running around the school in 1983 with one version of the Brigadier, and with Tegan and Nyssa running around the same school in 1977 with an earlier version of the Brig. Oh, and Turlough is actively trying to murder the Doctor, so there's that.

There's a pretty nifty scene between the Doctor and the Brig, where Lethbridge-Stewart has amnesia about their shared history, but the Doctor draws him out of it by name-dropping previous companions like Liz Shaw, Jo Grant, and Sarah Jane Smith. 

Apparently the story was originally written with Ian Chesterton instead of the Brig, but William Russel wound up not being available so the Brigadier was swapped in. I can see how that would have worked well, but I'm kind of glad it turned out this way. It's just so nice to see Nicholas Courtney again, and he has such a long history with so many incarnations of the Doctor that it just feels right to have him back for a story.

The other thing going on is that when the TARDIS materializes in 1977, the titular Mawdryn is found by Tegan and Nyssa in the nearby transmat pod and he is mistaken as a badly-burned and newly-regenerated Doctor. There is a jump-scare cliffhanger with Mawdryn standing in the TARDIS console room looking ghastly with the top of his skull flayed open and his brain pulsing underneath. For a silly children's program it really is pretty gruesome.

Annoying music aside, I am fully enjoying this story so far. Turlough makes for an interesting addition to the cast. For the first time the Doctor has a companion who is also a villain, if under duress. This being the first part of the Black Guardian trilogy, we will get twelve full episodes of Turlough being all skulky and reluctantly evil, before the Doctor finally does a Very Clever Thing and resolves the conflict. It's nice to have some real drama inside the TARDIS with all of the uncertainty and deceit. It really feels like something fresh and new, and twenty years in the show can definitely use some switching up.

STATS:

Doctor(s): Fifth
Companion(s): Tegan, Nyssa, Turlough
Episode(s): Mawdryn Undead - Parts 1 & 2
Steps Walked: 7,468 today, 2,062,799 total
Distance Walked: 4.02 miles today, 1,054.23 miles total
Weight: 245.74 lbs (five day moving average), net change -61.56 lbs