Mawdryn Undead

125[1]Mawdryn Undead
Doctor Who serial
Cast
Others
Production
Directed byPeter Moffatt
Written byPeter Grimwade
Script editorEric Saward
Produced byJohn Nathan-Turner
Executive producer(s)None
Music byPaddy Kingsland
Production code6F
SeriesSeason 20
Running time4 episodes, 25 minutes each
First broadcast1–9 February 1983
Chronology
← Preceded by
Snakedance
Followed by →
Terminus
List of episodes (1963–1989)

Mawdryn Undead is the third serial of the 20th season of the British science fiction television series Doctor Who. It was originally broadcast in four twice weekly parts on BBC1 from 1 to 9 February 1983.

The serial is set in an English boarding school and a spaceship above the Earth in 1977 and 1983. In the serial, the scientist Mawdryn (David Collings), whose people on board the ship have been afflicted by a mutation that constantly causes their bodies to renew themselves, seeks to die using the regenerative abilities of the alien time traveller the Fifth Doctor (Peter Davison) to stop this process and allow them to die.

Mawdryn Undead is the first of three loosely connected serials in which the Black Guardian (Valentine Dyall) attempts to compel the alien Vislor Turlough (Mark Strickson) to kill the Doctor, and it introduces Turlough as a regular character. Nicholas Courtney is reintroduced as Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, who was last seen in the series in the 1975 serial Terror of the Zygons.

  1. ^ From the Doctor Who Magazine series overview, in issue 407 (pp26-29). The Discontinuity Guide, which counts the unbroadcast serial Shada, lists this as story number 126. Region 1 DVD releases follow The Discontinuity Guide numbering system.