So far for the 20th Anniversary we have seen the return of Omega and of the Mara, and this time it's the Black Guardian - last seen only in the closing minutes of The Armageddon Factor. It was also decided to bring back an old companion and, as the main setting was a school, Ian Chesterton - who goes right back to the very first episode - was the natural choice. However, William Russell was otherwise engaged, so second choice was Harry Sullivan - part of the classic Season 12 line-up. It was conceivable that he might now be in the teaching profession. However, Ian Marter was also otherwise engaged.
Third choice proved not to be busy elsewhere - Nicholas Courtney, reprising his role as the Brigadier.
The Brig might tell the Doctor that he knows how many beans make five - but I'm afraid the notion of the Brigadier as a mathematics teacher just does not seem right at all.
Unfortunately, writer Peter Grimwade opted to pick the Queen's Silver Jubilee in 1977 as a historic event upon which to anchor his tale - as the characters separated in time needed to know that this had happened and when they where.
There had always been debate about just when the UNIT stories were set, and it was generally believed to be in the near future (despite the on-screen car registration plates, calendars and pre-decimal currency notices arguing against this).
The usual timeline began with The Web of Fear, which was said to be 40 years after The Abominable Snowmen, which has a 1935 setting. (Ironically, now that we can see The Web of Fear we can note that the Tube map is all wrong for any near future dating). The Invasion was then said to be a couple of years after Lethbridge Stewart first met the Doctor, with Spearhead from Space another year at least after that.
This took us into the late 1970's - and then Sarah came along and claimed that she came from 1980.
Mawdryn Undead then tells us that by 1977 the Brigadier had already retired...
The dates were impossible to reconcile, and the great "UNIT Dating Controversy" really took to flight.
It's all sorted now, thanks to Sarah Jane Smith - the very person who helped create the headache. The Sarah Jane Adventures clearly give Sarah's birthdate, making all of the UNIT stories contemporary with the dates they were broadcast.
As mentioned, we see the return of the Black Guardian, out for revenge on the Doctor for denying him the Key to Time. For some reason he claims that he cannot be seen to be involved in his actions against the Doctor - but we are never told why this should be the case. If it's to stop the White Guardian noticing then he doesn't do a very good job as he's waiting in the wings just 8 episodes later.
Unable to act himself, what does the Black Guardian do? Well. he gets himself an agent to act on his behalf. And who he chooses is a public schoolboy. Yes, Turlough is an alien, keen to flee Earth, but he has no special powers or abilities. He lacks any real ruthlessness, or homicidal tendencies that could be exploited. He's just an untrustworthy, cowardly bully. Hardly the right person to recruit to assassinate the Doctor - whom the Guardian knows for a fact to be hard to defeat.
As a weapon, Turlough is about as threatening as a chicken vol-au-vent.
Mawdryn and his friends want to die, but keep regenerating. But we know that Time Lords can be killed under certain circumstances - quite a lot actually. The mutants could simply destroy their bodies in such a way that they couldn't regenerate - scattering their atoms through space for instance. They could simply climb into the reactor of their spaceship.
They know that the interaction of two of the same person from different time zones is highly dangerous, so why try to avoid it when it's the very thing that will allow them to die?
Oddly, the 1983 Brigadier is able to own the same TARDIS homing device already given to him back in 1977 - the same object from two time zones. If he puts them together in the same drawer will there be a massive temporal bang?
The 1983 Brigadier has forgotten everything about his time at UNIT which overlapped with the Doctor - which is just about all of it. That's a very big gap in his memory yet he gets a top job with children.
Has not one single old friend or colleague from UNIT been in touch with him since retiring? Not Sarah, not Jo, not Liz, not Mike Yates, not Benton, not Corporal Bell... Clearly not, or his memories would have been triggered sooner.
Some of these memories, when they do come back, involve things which he never actually witnessed personally.
Mawdryn's ship comes into contact with other planets on a fixed timetable, yet we know that the distances between habitable planets is variable. You can't have one exactly every 70 years unless the ship slows right down at some points then goes very, very fast at others.
There's a transmat gizmo on Earth at the school. Who put it there, if Mawdryn's first trip in the capsule burns him up? To get to the planet you have to set up a beacon on the planet to get you to the planet...?
It can't have been dropped down or teleported to Earth, as it's disguised inside an antique bit of statuary.
The Doctor clearly knows that Turlough's a wrong 'un - but Davison doesn't play it this way, which makes the Doctor look a bit gullible.
Last, but by no mean's least as far as I'm concerned, there's that appalling music in the first episode when Turlough takes the Brigadier's car for a spin. Makes the Terry & June theme sound like it was composed by Schoenberg.
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