Masque Of Mandragora
(Season 14, Dr 4 with Sarah Jane, 4-25/9/1976, producer: Phillip Hinchcliffe, script editor: Robert Holmes, writer: Louis Marks, director: Rodney Bennett)
Rank: 234
‘I thought these streets looked familiar. I am not a number I am a timelord. Wait no actually I’m a number and a timelord. Dr 4 pleased to meet you! Although I’m certainly not a brainwashed acolyte for the Mandragora Helix. Now down Rover, you big stupid sentient ball, how I wish I had k9 so he could play fetch…
Ah, The Renaissance. What a perfect era for the Tardis to visit, Men of learning with open minds standing about in weird costumes having deep debates on a quest for the truth and a fight against a stagnant, backward society. And that's just the 4th Doctor. He belongs in this era, quietly and sometimes not so quietly dropping hints about all the wonderful things to come while trying to help a planet in stagnation move forward from their superstitions, even while to the locals his scientific explanations sound wilder than any of their tales of demons, devils and astrological placements. So much so it’s a shame that this is his only historical story where he gets to see more than a single building (given that he’s trapped in a lighthouse for ‘The Horror Of Fang Rock’, a priory in ‘The Pyramids Of Mars’ and only gets to call in on Leonardo Da Vinci briefly in ‘City Of Death’). For a series all about the inevitability of change and the hope that somehow someday we’ll learn to finally progress and become a better planet the Renaissance might just be the single biggest backdrop for a Dr Who historical adventure out the entire series. And yet, unusually for this era of Dr Who when it wrought every last drop out of its starting material - and even more so for writer Louis Marks who usually wrung more out of basic ideas than most – ‘The Masque Of Mandragora’ never quite comes to life and ends up just another runaround in dark corridors (albeit prettier corridors than normal), a story that feels as if it’s hiding its true nature behind a mask the whole way. The end result is a story that’s undeniably clever but which is oddly low on both thrills and frills, ending up a surprisingly basic tale of good versus evil, without the fun factor you might be hoping for.
You can tell, I think,
that script editor Bob Holmes’ heart just isn’t in this story. One of the
reasons so many fans are so fond of this era and consider it the finest is
that, even in its flimsier stories like ‘The Android Invasion’ or ‘Revenge Of
The Cybermen’ he’s able to add a sparkling bit of pixie dust, so that even if
boring characters are doing boring things they fit in a few odd quips in
between that keeps you watching. Not so this story: Holmes is more bored than a
Lumerian watching a miniscope of drashigs and fought tooth and nail not to work
on any more historical stories (not least the extra research needed for
them),without his customary twinkle. He was particularly adamant that past
historicals about meeting famous people were stupid because it wasn’t as if the
Doctor ever went around meeting famous celebrities in future stories and why
should the past be any better? (The reason, of course, is that our history
books only tend to write about famous people because the ordinary person in the
street couldn’t write – though Holmes also knew that enough people have written
down something for specialist scholars to write in and tell him he’d got
something wrong). Historicals were too much work: the future was where it was
at, baby! Instead ‘Masque’ is very much its producer’s baby, with Phillip
Hinchcliffe for once not in agreement. He’d very much enjoyed the 1920s period
detail of ‘Pyramids’ and the different feel he felt it gave to the series, in
between more serials about mad professors and robots, and wanted more of the
same. In particular, during some of the brief downtime Dr Who gave him, he’d
been reading a book on medieval history in general and Machiavelli in
particular and found it fascinating. So he came to an agreement with Holmes: if
they could find the right writer who knew their stuff and made sure it wasn’t
‘the Doctor saying hi to Marco Polo’, would he go ahead and commission it
anyway?
By chance a perfect
candidate was waiting in the wings. Louis Marks had written three Dr Who
scripts already, each of them wildly different and all of them set either in
the present day or the near future (or both): the miniaturisation of ‘Planet Of
Giants’, the timeline hopping of ‘Day Of The Daleks’ or the Jekyll and Hyde of
‘Planet Of Evil’. He was, however, a history student first and foremost, much
like the series’ main character becoming a ‘doctor’ of philosophy following a
history degree (though at Balliol College, Oxford rather than the Prydonian
Academy on Gallifrey). His thesis, on
the ‘development of the institutions of public finance in Florence during the
past 60 years’ was exactly the sort of thing a script editor like Bob Holmes
would normally have to look up, so having someone who knew this era inside out
and could avoid any glaring errors was perfect. Marks, for his part, was
thrilled to be able to write about a time period (the script doesn’t give a
date, but Hinchcliffe’s novelisation specifies 1492, which sounds about right) he knew as well if not better than the age he
lived in, throwing in some ‘in-jokes’ such as the character Hieronymus, loosely
based on the nom de plume of the story’s only ‘real person’, Girolamo
Savonarola, who was famous in Renaissance times for being a soothsayer and
fortune-teller, scaring people with the accuracy of some of his predictions and
scaring them silly with premonitions that the end of the world was nigh
(someone from the past scaring people in the present about visions of the
future: that’s very Dr Who that is, a neat inversion on the usual formula of
historical stories where a timelord from the sort-of future trying to save
people in our present because of someone meddling in the past).
It still feels a bit…‘odd’
though, with ‘Masque’the historical story that’s the odd one out in a few big
ways that never quite comes together, with everyone so keen to avoid what they
saw as the issues of stories about the past from the series’ past that they
ignore all the good stuff. For a start the Doctor causes this story – by
accident naturally, but even so it’s a big sea change from the olden days when
the 1st Doctor used to lecture his companions about not altering
history ‘not even one line’. The moment at the start when the Tardis is invaded
without the Doctor realising by the Mandragora helix, a sort of sentient
firework (the second half of that sentence meant literally: that’s an
industrial sparkler someone’s waving that’s been CSOd into the picture) and
letting loose in Renaissance Italy, ought to be one of the single biggest shocks
of the series, the timelord for whose kind the biggest crime is to interfere
(and something he’s already been exiled to Earth for once, after all) can
commit, never mind his own moral code about trying to do good and never cause
harm. We’re so used to seeing the Doctor as a fixer that finding out he’s
caused a problem is like a gas engineer called to a bomb explosion and
realising he unwittingly caused it. He should be more horrified than we’ve seen
him since the death of Katarina and Sara Kingdom in ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’.
Instead the Doctor’s response is more a case of ‘oops, I guess I’d better do
something about fixing this hadn’t I?’ He doesn’t even say sorry.
The other problem is that
we’re so accustomed by now to real people turning up in Dr Who stories that you
remain convinced until the end that, in a Machiavellian plot about scheming Machiavellian
characters, Machiavelli is sure to turn up sooner or later – probably as the
person the Helix has infected. That goes double because, like so much of the
Hinchcliffe era, the entire plot is heavily influenced (i.e. stolen) from a
number of period texts, many of them by Machiavelli himself (and its
traditional in Dr Who by now for the Doctor to accidentally ‘inspire’ famous works by his travels so the
fact that the plot is just like a Machiavellian work and yet turns out to be
pure coincidence sticks out like a sore thumb on a Rani-created sentient tree).
It’s not like it’s hidden in any way either: one of Machiavelli’s books is
actually called ‘The Mandragora’ in the original Italian, which translates as
‘The Mandrake’. It’s not strictly a piece about alien invasions (given that
science fiction won’t be invented for another four hundred years and all those odd ufo lights spotted in the skies
were believed to be ‘demons’) but it is about a stranger from outtatown who
arrives in court and starts pitting people against each other, some of whom end
up dead and some of whom end up swapping partners, rather like a 15th
century version of ‘Desperate Housewives’ (especially the ones John Barrowman
turned up in). No, seriously: the plot revolves around the main character’s
suspicion his wife is sleeping with someone and aiming to catch them out with a
curse and poison that will work on the first man who sleeps with her. Only he’s
got it wrong and forgets so ends up dead himself. It was scandalous at the time
if rather quaint now (again a bit like ‘Desperate Housewives’) leading Sir
Francis Bacon to pillory Machiavelli for writing against God’s wishes by
‘showing man for what they are – rather than who they ought to be’**. As for his part Hinchcliffe enthusiastically
told Marks about a film he’d enjoyed ‘The Masque Of The Red Death’ by Edgar Allen
Poe which, considering it was written in 1842 about half a century before H G Wells’
‘War Of The Worlds’ the generally regarded birth of science fiction, is
remarkably close to a Dr Who story: Prince Prospero tries to avoid a plague
like, well, the plague and decides he can best hide by shielding his face and inviting
his friends to a masked ball, until discovering that one of his guests has sign
s of the plague, ripping his mask off to reveal…nothing there! This, surely, is
the inspiration or the ball that ends the story (unusual in itself that: what
other Dr Who story ends with a dance?) and the bad pun of the title in that the
Mandragora is hiding ‘masked’ behind people’s faces, rather than using a mask
in front of their faces as was the custom of the time. The plot of ‘Mandragora’
is also, as a few people have pointed out, similar to 'Hamlet', which makes you
wonder if there's a scene we didn't get to see during 'The Shakespeare Code'
when the bard asks the Doctor to tell him about one of his travels somewhere in
Europe involving anything weird like a ball of light. Though not even that
interesting (truly, Shakespeare was far from England most gifted writer when
you read his contemporaries and wasn’t even that popular in his lifetime, he
just had the best p.r. man in Christendom). My favourite anecdote of the making
of this story: Holmes dryly commenting to Marks that given all the source material
he’d nicked from maybe he ought to share
his writer’s fee! (he can talk though, what with ‘The Brain Of Morbius’
cribbing Frankenstein and ‘The Ark In Space’ ripping off any number of Hammer
Horror favourites involving insects…)
A third problem is the
rather odd stance the series takes towards astrology versus astronomy, the two
signifiers of the ‘superstitious’ old world and the ‘enlightened ‘ new one. There
is, you see, a theory common amongst fans (and half-believed by the writer
himself, though only I notice after people started asking him about it) that
the Mandragora is an extended metaphor for ‘superstition’ and scientific ignorance.
It certainly makes the locals assume its the work of the ‘devil’, while the
Doctor makes an impassioned speech about how its wrong because it robs the
people of free will, of the ability to start thinking for themselves and how
under its influences the Western world will end up ‘like sheep’, no longer
curious about how the world around them works (which is itself key to the
series: a lot of stories are about fate
and karma, debating whether our path towards alien invasion and spreading out
towards to the stars is pre-destined and whether the Doctor is an active participant
in our fate or not. In which case having a ‘devil’ out to intervene and doom us
despite the destiny God laid out for us makes it the worst kind of baddy, an
idea that’s touched on but never really dealt with fully here). The thought
being that the Mandragora has to be defeated by the Doctor because its
association with astrology means it’s out of touch with at a time of
enlightenment and that, by defeating
it, the Doctor helps usher in a time of scientific rational thinking. Except
that’s hokum. Surely the Mandrogora is based in science given that it, y’know,
exists (I mean to us it looks like a dodgy post production effect that plainly isn’t
rther,e but in terms of the plot it really exists). Like so many other stories
Dr Who sides firmly on the side of the scientists, the people with rational but
open minds who are busy discovering things about the world, even against the
backdrop of Christianity that thinks science is made by the devil and that only
God should know how the world works. A slam dunk you’d think, especially given
all the speeches given by the Doctor celebrating the invention of the telescope
(he’s sad to be there fifty years before Galileo but still praises the
primitive version he ‘borrows’) and the new breed of rational thinking.
Except…This is being made in what, in so many ways, is a similarly
unenlightened time, at least in terms of television. There was an unwritten law
in the BBC that drama programmes could not offend the Church in any way in case
its viewers accused it of broadcasting blasphemy, so to be on the safe side
nobody mentions religion at all. So we get a debate about science and, y’know,
those other guys who wear masks in a cult. That makes rather a mockery of the
argument of science being the start of a ‘golden age’ of defeating censorship
too, given that the Church still can’t be named readily in works of fiction
even in 1976!
The other related issue is
that, as much as the Doctor talks about the importance of scientists, we never
actually meet any. Instead he’s doing all the science bits and, frankly, to
those around him he’s the one talking superstitious blasphemous mumbo jumbo
about things like Mandragora helixes and space and time travel. Because they
don’t understand what he’s talking about but they do understand that the Devil
comes in many forms and a long list of bewildering names everyone the Doctor
talks to about the alien invasion simply accepts it as the work of the Devil
and start talking about superstitions (I mean, what is the difference from a
viewer’s point of view between a made up gobbledegook sentence like ‘the helix
shoots ‘subthermal recombinations of ionised plasma’ and ‘a shadowy
supernatural being I don’t understand shot thunderbolts at me?’) There’s a
problem, too, in that the setting of 1492 means that what the locals refer to
as ‘science’ really means astrology, the belief that the best means of plotting
the future is to chart the stars and watch out for patterns. What’s more,
they’re right: the Mandragora is repelled, for whatever unexplained reason, by
the light of Earth’s moon in the sky and has timed it’s arrival on Earth for a
lunar eclipse, arriving every 500 years or so. This is, in astrological terms,
a hugely potent time of possible disaster (you’d be amazed how many dictators
were born under lunar eclipses or how many significant devastating events took
place during them: the second battle of Syracuse, the fall of
Constantinople, the arrival of Columbus
in Jamaica – well it was devastating if you were a native anyway, Shackleton’s
doomed Trans-Antarctic expedition where the Endurance ended up trapped in the
ice and the births, so some say, of both Napoleon and Hitler). Guess what?
They’re right: The Mandragora does try to arrive at a time of lunar eclipse and
take over the world while the Doctor’s faffing around wearing lion’s heads and
trying to help his companion escape from the Mandragora cult trying to kill
her. So are The Mandragora, then, responsible for man’s obsessions with
plotting the stars? No. It’s all a load of nonsense apparently. Marks falls
into the trap of most scientists in presuming that the people of this age were
backward for thinking astrology was a ‘science’ the way its viewed now, but it
wasn’t: it was half an art form, half a form of mathematics, about predictions
and cycles and the way mankind keeps repeating the same mistakes (you know,
like the moral of pretty much every other Dr Who historical ever made).
Astrology was a blessing to these people that helped them in their lives and allowed them to work out other equations, not a curse everyone secretly wanted to be free of as per her. It was the Georgians and Victorians who insisted on separating astrology and astronomy and saw them as in any way contradictory rather than complementary; for everyone in Renaissance Italy checking the stars on a chart was normal for every scientists who also checked on the stars in the sky scientifically. After all, everyone believed (at least out loud) that the stars were created by God and that astrology was the easiest means of getting in touch with ‘him’, far more so than trying to replicate his experiments for yourself, which was still blasphemous (as well as pointless, because you could never fully know what God was thinking). Astrology was a form of enlightenment itself at the time, a means for the locals to get closer to God rather than just parrot his parables in sermons every Sunday a step towards independent thought not one away from it as Marks seems to think. Beside, this is the Renaissance: the reason its so important is because people tries to learn about everything, together, seeing every art and science as a form of holistic whole with God’s plan so tangled up in various genres that to understand any bit of it you had to have a working knowledge of it all. Trying to divide the two in this of all stories is just plain wrong. And yet the Doctor doesn’t exactly defeat the Mandragora with science either, as you’d expect: the only scientific thing the Doctor does to repel it in the end is wear a metal chest plate, which acts as a ‘conductor’ for the Helix energy. And yet there’s no scene where he goes ‘blimey, maybe some of the old superstitions were right after all then and the lunar eclipse has symbolised evil because the Mandragora helix has been waiting throughout history to attack The Earth. Funny that. I must look into astrology and look up my horoscope some time. Did I ever tell you mine was the signed of crossed computers, which means I’m a Sagittarius in your version…’
I tell you my real
problem with ‘Masque’ though: it has all that time period to dive into, that
fascinating time when the Western world was on the cusp of turning out more
like the present day and the story…ignores it. For the most part this is a
runaround chasing a fuzzy light on a stick before it does too much damage and
that’s the sort of thing Dr Who does every week. For all of Marks’ obvious love
of the period and his sheer range of knowledge about the props and the way the
court system of Renaissance Italy behaved back then, we never really get to
know this timezone or understand these people as people. What Hinchcliffe and
Holmes missed, in their undying hatred for how historical stories worked in the
black and white era of Dr Who, was their brilliance in making the past come to
life and showing a generation of sceptical children, bored to teeth during
their school history lessons, that the past was a time just like our own, only
the people there had slightly different priorities and wore weird looking
costumes. There’s something both humbling and awe-inspiring about the fact
that, if you pick up any history book about any time period with Humans in, you
will find them doing more or less the same things they’ve always done:
scheming, manipulating, loving, hating, ignoring, mistreating, invading,
frightening, protecting. Humans are always humans, whatever planet they’re on
and whatever century it is and, in Sarah Jane, they have a popular companion
ready to go whose born for historical stories: an audience identification
that’s loved by so many viewers because she’s ‘just like us’, a little bit
scared, a little bit brave, a little bit curious and a whole lotta likeable.
Instead she never really gets to interact with anyone from this world except
the people in masks trying to kill her, so we never get to see how this world
works. Which is not to say there aren’t enough supporting characters or that they don’t get their own screentime,
but their whole shtick is a ‘court intrigue’ tale, of social climbing and
worming your way up through court, to get nearer to the noblemen who are
nearest to the Royals. Frankly, it’s boring seeing people fight over a small part
in a Royal court that we all know will be forgotten as soon as the next one
comes along and which only the writer knows or cares about, these people and
their motivations about as far removed from the viewers’ lives as any
characters we ever meet in any historical Who story. Say what you will about
the chances of the Doctor stumbling across Marco Polo but at least he turned
out to be a ‘real’ person with motivations we could identify and had a crew of
weird and wonderful but highly relatable characters travelling with him. Though
set a hundred years after that story the events in ‘Mandragora’ seem far more
removed from the modern world and everything that the script editor hated.
This wouldn’t be the
first Dr Who historical where the events of the past were shoved to the
background because of an alien playing around with established history –
indeed, as early as the start of the third series ‘The Meddling Monk’ was doing
just that, with a Viking invasion of Britain merely a backdrop to his
relationship with The Doctor. But usually that happens because the alien is
either really really interesting or happens to be unwittingly playing out the
events of the past on a grander cosmic scale (think Lynx in ‘The Time Warrior’
who scores highly in a story written by Holmes himself). The Mandragora helix
is neither. It’s one of those annoying Dr Who monsters who never speaks except
when it’s taken over humans and leaves them brainwashed, while even when it
talks it never really explains it’s motivations (which seem to amount to ‘The Humans
become a competitor later in life so I ought to kill them off now and keep them
thick, even though I’m still convinced I’m amazing and unstoppable’. Which sounds
more like a plan by The Master than anything else). For all that it looks different
to usual it just acts the way all tyrants do in Dr Who, taking over the Earth
because it can. It’s hard to work out what a sentient ball of energy even wants
with Earth or the Humans it possesses: I mean, sure, it can use the Humans to
do things with hands it can’t do, but why them? The Whoniverse is littered with
species who have more dexterity than Humans do. I mean, it’s a being made up of
‘psionic energy’ that causes black holes and has the power to pull even the Tardis
into its void. It seems to be doing pretty well for itself on the intergalactic
stage, so why does it need Humans at all? The helix, funnily enough, only
really makes sense in all its many appearances in spin-off media when it has a
right and proper cause (revenge against either the Doctor or Sarah for
thwarting its plans in this story) but that’s no good as motivation for a first
appearance. And it looks awful, as if
the show has just run out of money (which it hasn’t, well not quite yet: this
is the first story of the year after all, the one that traditionally looks best
before budgets get tight).
If this was a truly awful
story from beginning to end then I wouldn’t be that fussed, but the frustration
with ‘masque’ is that it has so many things going for it. One thing that is
like other historicals of the past is that it looks amazing, the BBC always
being on safer ground with past settings the designers can research rather than
imaginative future ones. For once, rather than write a script and then work out
where they can possibly film it, this story has a ‘ready made’ set waiting for
them too: the village of Portmerion in Gwynedd, North Wales. Back in his
student days, around a decade or so before becoming Who producer, Phillip
Hinchliffe made money in his holidays working as a freelance travel rep and one
of the places he went to and fell in love with was this Medieval folly, actually
built in the 1920s (and modified right up until the 1970s). It was the dream of
rich architect Sir Clough William-Ellis
who was always happy to loan his village out for TV filming (‘The Prisoner’
series making it famous to this day as a bright and colourful place that’s not ‘quite
right’) and, maybe because his name sounded like the writer of an actual Who
story (William Emms, author of ‘Galaxy 4’) was eager to have the Dr Who tea
arrive. He turned up to watch pretty much all the filming, praising the props
team for the additions they made like period gates and polystyrene rocks and
offering to leave them up for good (perhaps not realising that, being made of polystyrene
and so wouldn’t last past the first rainstorm), while he’s said to have got
along famously with Tom Baker, eccentrics both. If you had never been (or never
seen ‘The Prisoner’) you would never believe that we weren’t in Renaissance
Italy, so close are the designs and so accurate the period detail and it’s so
much more interesting to look at than another studio set, with director Rodney
Bennett making good use of the streets (the only sad thing is that we don’t see
more of them: they barely appear past the first episode though you do see them
a lot in that one). It’s also fun to see Dr Who film in its current home of
Wales for only the second time, even if its pretending to be something else (just
as it was pretending to be Tibet in ‘The Abominable Snowman’. Well, it makes a
change from pretending to be London anyway): it’s a surprise, actually, that we
haven’t been back despite the production team having seemingly used every other
Welsh location multiple times over by now.
The acting, too, is
excellent with a guest cast featuring many actors on the verge of stardom (that's
Tim Pigott-Smith in pantaloons, unbelievably). Tom Baker' particularly is having
a whale of a time before things begin to get silly, throwing in all sorts of ad
libs and suggestions that really add to the story and his character, who is
simultaneously (and often in the same scene) as serious and as flippant as we’ve
ever seen him. Marks really understands this Doctor and Sarah both, more so
than most writers, and most of the best moments of dialogue in the story that
you remember long after the DVD has finished playing are the quiet moments
between them. Take the scene where the Doctor is running around cracking puns
in a lion’s mask and Sarah interrupts the giggling to comment ‘the worst the
situation is the worse your jokes get’ before pausing to add ‘it’s really bad
isn’t it?’ Anyone who says the humour in Dr Who detracts from the seriousness
of the storylines have surely never seen this scene, because this is exactly
what the Doctor does – laugh at the things that scare him. Up to this point we’ve
just been running around an Italian villa playing hide-and-seek with faceless
men in purple robes but suddenly we’re as terrified as our heroes are, the
stakes suddenly seeming skyhigh. Equally there’s a moment when the Doctor
playfully teases Sarah that his calculations better work because if he gets it
wrong they’ll all be blown sky high before cheerfully running off proclaiming ‘but
when am I ever wrong?’ The camera doesn’t follow him running madly on, though,
it pauses on Sarah who sighs and speaks in a soft voice ‘lots of times’. It’s a
brilliant bit of characterisation that, once again, really ups the ante and
reveals just how high the stakes are in a way running from a ball of light or a
man without a mask ever could. All that said the costume designer James Acheson
comes up trumps with the brethren costumes: the sight of them riding on horseback,
their purple robes flying in the wind and a grotesque mask pinned to their face
(revealed in the cliffhanger that ends part three to be literally ‘faceless’,
with a void behind the mask) is terrifying in all the right ways, ironically
enough making them seem more than the rather faceless presence they’ve been for
the rest of the story. You can never say that this historical is one where
people just stand around talking either: everyone seems to carry a sword
(except the Doctor and Sarah, of course) and they’re not slow to use them, with
lots of well choreographed action scenes to break up the plot (although the
Doctor never gets to have a swordfight – Tom Baker will have to wait till ‘The Androids Of Tara’. I’m still not sure if
that’s because of Hinchcliffe’s decree that the Doctor himself should never be
violent, even in one of the most violent eras of the show, or because he didn’t
trust Tom with a sword!) Oh and how come the impossibly scary and dangerous
world inside the helix is just literally an empty set? Isn’t that a bit…cheap?
In other words, I can see
why so many fans love this story and why it made such an impression, with some
even seeing it as a ‘Renaissance’ of sorts after the rather repetitive stories
of series thirteen. It was certainly a popular story amongst the cast who have
happy memories of the filming, with Elisabeth Sladen so keen to work on it that
she even negotiated a seven month contract on her contract, ignoring all other
job offers so she could do it and leave mid-season )in the next story ‘The Hand Of Fear’). For me, though, it’s
just Dr Who by numbers with some really good bits sprinkled across it, a plot
that’s all about escaping and being captured and brainwashing (you actively
groan when Sarah becomes possessed again, for the fourth story out of six) not
to mention running down corridors, however wonderful a lot of those corridors
might look, just another ‘base under siege’ story that seems to forget sometimes
that this base is Renaissance Italy and the future of Western civilisation as we know it is at stake. Which is a shame
given that a story about Renaissance Italy promised so much more (after all we
don’t even get to see anyone paint; there is a mention of ‘Leonardo’ that the
Doctor assumes to be Da Vinci and starts pontificating about with one of his
anecdotes but either he’s wrong and it’s a different Leonardo or the writer is,
because Da Vinci wasn’t a famous star but a forty-year old relative newbie we
know was still living in Florence. Besides, the town of San Martino is
fictional: he can’t have visited here for real because it didn’t exist!) For
all of Marks’ love of the time period most of his characters are just
caricatures saying things people always say in any period drama, like ‘death to
Giluiano!’ and Sire let me punish this insolent dog!’ When you come to this
from a story written by a real master of period dialogue, like David Whittaker,
the gulf is especially striking. Hieronymus particularly, a superstitious man
living in age when people like him are dying out in this new age of reason, is
just Bosch, a shouty man in a world of other shouty men. Too much of this story
is men standing around talking, while the thewme of people playing someone off
another person gets wearying, like the worst of ‘Frontier In Space’ but in
cloaks (this is another of those Dr Who stories where everyone plays chess, as an
extended metaphor for what they’re doing in the plot itself). The moves are all
so predictable though: the only parts that' are unexpected come right at the
start when instead of the usual 'we got to them' or 'they come to us' the Tardis
accidentally brings the Mandragora helix with him in the first place (a wonder
that doesn't happen more often really) and the end when things are tidied up
with a quick galliard (my guess as to the ‘Renaissance’ style moves the extras
are doing). Marks himself when asked what this story was ‘about, just said he
wanted to write an engrossing Dr Who story and nothing more than that. Which is
the problem: it’s no more than that and sometimes it’s not even particularly
engrossing. Even I agree, though, that this is a highly watchable story if you
don’t try and think about the plot too much. It is, after all, a story that
really successfully captured a fascinating and colourful world in every way but
the script. And even then sometimes. Far from being Who’s ‘Renaissance’ story,
working on all levels at once with a sense of new enlightenment, it’s one of
the most one-dimensional stories of the Hinchcliffe era.
POSITIVES + It was an
entire coincidence that it was this story that saw the creation of a hwole new
secondary console room, known forever to fans as the ‘wooden’ one. The old one
had been biffed and bashed around so much since it was re-fitted in Pertwee’s
day that it was on its last legs already before it finally got damaged one too
many times in storage during the off-season and Hinchcliffe was faced with the
task of paying to have a new one. Rather than simply re-create it the way it
used to look, however, he figured that the Tardis was bound to have a second
console room somewhere for safety’s sake and figured it might look completely
different, the Doctor temporarily inheriting his own love of all things gothic.
In the end this set, mostly made out of wood, warped badly under the studio
lights and started deteriorating quicker than you can say ‘subthermal
recombinations of ionised plasma’, abandoned before the end of the season when
we get a near-enough re-creation of the old one. I’m not sure I would have
liked the series to switch to this room permanently but it looks great and very
Doctory, a place where the arts and sciences sit together side by side. Which
is perfect for a story about the Renaissance, when men figured that the best
way to understand the universe was to understand everything, all together, at
once (especially the stained glass windows, a neat touch). I also love the
small touches borrowed from the prop room: one of the 3rd Doctor’s
frilly shirts (which the Doctor uses to mop up dust. Which, erm, really shouldn’t
exist in somewhere like The Tardis, plus the 2nd Doctor’s recorder
and is that supposed to be the 1st Doctor’s chair in the corner? It
really sells the idea that the tardis is the Doctor’s ‘home’). You just have to
hope that the Doctor never needs to do repairs to it with his sonic screwdriver
though given that, y'know, it doesn't do wood.
A more direct
sequel is ‘Fatal Consequences’ and ‘Dreamland’ (2006), the big finale to series
two of Big Finish’s under-rated ‘Sarah Jane Smith’ adventures, recorded just
before her big comeback on telly and pitched for a much older audience than
either the CBBC series or ‘K9 and Company’. Sarah’s a proper journalist,
investigating all sorts of shady goings on in government, which starts off
small but becomes truly X Filesy by the end, with a shocking twist on a par
with Mike Yates in ‘Invasion Of The Dinosaurs’ when Sarah’s team of helpers
infiltrated by the bad guys (spoilers: that nice Will Sullivan, claiming to be
Harry’s son! Genuinely I didn’t see that coming) and she’s left for dead at the
South Pole! Who are these people? It all becomes clear in the last part:
they’re the brethren of the Mandragora Helix, the guys in masks seen in
‘Masque’, who were re-established by Giuliano after the Tardis left and rebranded
themselves as ‘The Crimson Chapter’. Remember the ending when the Doctor all but
promised an inevitable sequel by saying the Mandragora helix hadn’t really died
out and would come back to Earth in around 400 years’ time? Well they’re a few
years out but this is it – and the believers have been waiting all that time.
They very nearly get Sarah too in a tense finale where she has to stop them using a genocide machine and blowing up
The Earth. And even when Sarah manages to defeat them by the skin of her teeth
and become involved in a space programme, figuring that she’d be out of trouble
in orbit, they still somehow get to her, with associates everywhere. Where’s
the Doctor when you need him eh?! Superb, once the series got going at any
rate: good as they are it’s almost a shame the TV adventures had to come along,
putting an end to this series. Incidentally the ‘Sarah Jane Adventures’ story
‘Search For The Stars’ was originally written to feature the Mandragora Helix,
but Russell T realised that it would have to do things it couldn’t do in
‘Masque’ and the continuity with the Big Finish range was just too confusing so
it got changed at the last minute.
The Mandragora made a
surprising return in the 10th Doctor novel ‘Beautiful Chaos’ (2008),
a highly popular book by regular Who writer and Big Finish co-founder Gary
Russell that’s one of the most emotional and hard-hitting in the range. It’s
one of the best in the range, a moving story that’s particularly strong for
Wilf and gives him an all-too-short romance with a lady named Netty (a
character Russell T Davies loved so much he gave her a namecheck in ‘The End Of
Time’, while Bernard Cribbins
thought this was so close to Russell’s style of writing it was him using
another Russell-related pseudonym until pretty late on in reading the audiobook
version!) She’s everything he ever dreamed of and he can’t wait to tell Donna
all about her during her brief trip home in the Tardis (rather sweetly she got
a star named after him and wants him to see it in the sky). There’s just one
tiny medical problem she suffers from that makes her forget where she is, with
a diagnosis of alzheimers. Which is a problem when the Mandragora turns up and
starts taking people over. The Doctor doesn’t like interfering in personal
relationships and hates all talk of human frailty (like most Doctors his
bedside manner’s not the best) but the more he hears the more he knows that
there’s something not quite right. His method of defeating the Helix is both
clever and awful, with much moral debate about the right thing to do.
Interspersed with this is Donna still coping with her own feelings of mortality
(this story is set right after ‘Silence In The Library/Forest Of Dead’) and
realising that it’s the year anniversary of her dad’s death, while the prologue
and epilogue are both set post ‘Stolen Earth/Journey’s End’ with her memory
wiped and her mum and gramps both missing the ‘old’ her terribly. Even The
Doctor is feeling his age these days, while perhaps the biggest shock of all is
that Gary somehow finds a way to make Sylvia likeable, all that cruelty and
those cutting remarks coming from a place of worry and concern, misguided love.
It’s a beautiful book, chaotic in places yes (it all gets a bit muddled
two-thirds in) but this is at least a candidate for one of the top five Who
novels of the 21st century so far, like the TV stories around it
heartbreaking in all the best sorts of ways.
Previous ‘The Seeds Of Doom’ next ‘The Hand Of Fear’
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