Snakedance: Ranking - 26

 

Snakedance

(Season 20, Dr 5 with Nyssa and Tegan, 18-26/1/1983, producer: John Nathan-Turner, script editor: Eric Saward, writer: Christopher Bailey, director: Fiona Cumming)

Rank: 26

   'How other monsters might have re-acted to being inside Tegan's mind:

 'Nyssa, could you turn up the heating? I'm turning into an ice warrior here!' 

'Stop being so emotional Dr! And you seem to have a bit of wobbly leg, would you like me to provide a cyber-replacement for you?!' 

'My name's Tegan Lopez and I'm an air stewardess for Chameleon Tours' 

'Let's play a game Dr - no not the trilogic game this time, how about pink snakes and ladders?!' 

'Highlanders? Braveheart Tegan - literally. I'm played by Mel Gibson in this one!' 

'It takes all-sorts to make a world, Dr. Mmm, I just fancy some sweets right now'. 

 'You dare insult my Aunty Vanessa?! Exterminate!' 

 
‘Snakedance’ is kinda like ‘Kinda’ continued a year on, a story which plays with the concepts of our inner psyche and the fragmented illusions of the self, only this time it feels less like an experiment that comes out of nowhere and much more like your usual Dr Who tale of invasion, brainwashing and quest for power. If that sounds like a dilution of everything that made Christopher Bailey’s first story so good then, well, actually it isn’t: all the big concepts that made the first stand out so much above the rest of the era are still there and the only thing that’s really missing is the giant pink bouncy castle snake (and while Dr Who fans famously disagree on absolutely everything this is one change we can agree, to a fan, is a big improvement). There really aren’t that many direct sequels in Dr Who for such a long running series and those that do (‘The Web Of Fear’ ‘The Monster Of Peladon’ ‘New Earth’, even ‘The Dalek Invasion Of Earth’ a little bit) tend to recycle the same elements in a slightly tweaked setting without really adding anything new, forgetting that the thing that made the first story so strong in the first place was the brave way it did something no other Dr Who story had done before; having two unique episodes sitting in a back catalogue often takes away the thing that made the first one stand out the most.

Not so ‘Snakedance’ though, which feels more like a continuation and extension rather than a repeat. If ‘Kinda’ was more about ‘inner space’ being interrupted by ‘outer space’ and the arrivals of outsiders, then ‘Snakedance’ is more the other way round, of how ‘inner space’ can heal invaders from ‘outer space’. It’s not quite a prequel, not quite a sequel, as a still-possessed Tegan has The Tardis return to Manussa, the Mara’s home planet and seek revenge for being banished centuries ago. By doing this Bailey cleverly flips the idea of Tegan being ‘invaded’ by having Tegan become the ‘invader’, lashing out at other people instead of self-sabotaging herself. It’s hard to say what’s more frightening: seeing brave courageous feisty Tegan reduced to tears of helplessness in ‘Kinda’ or laughing mercilessly like your worst school bully as she takes over a whole new world. Manussa, too, is a very different planet to Kinda; that was a spiritual paradise where the natives had learned to live with the snake by staying within their own mind, content to live in the present moment and having made peace with their shadow side so the Mara had nothing to fix on until the colonisers came. Here we’re in a much more physical material world that’s forgotten how to go deep and spiritual, one with plenty of natives to taunt. The people here are going through the motions to make a buck and have forgotten who they really are, from the timid ruler and her spoilt son who looks down on his job to the showman taking tourists round the caves of the past who’s much more comfortable studying their history, even though not enough paying customers want to read it. Only Dojjen the mystic is entirely at peace with himself even though he’s a hermit with nothing that everyone ignores. ‘Kinda’ impressed because it featured people like ‘us’ trying to cope on a planet where our ‘normal’ rules didn’t apply, but ‘Snakedance’ is much more like the Mara being unleashed on our world. Manussa is an empire in decay in all sorts of subtle ways, one that has all the same spiritual knowledge Deva Loka once had but which has forgotten it all and let it rust away in history books. This time the Mara snake is less about insecurity and more about jealousy, of wanting what other people have, of being greedy and dreaming of a future where you have more than you could possibly need. When the Mara arrives it’s no longer afraid to look at itself in the mirror without having a breakdown the way it was in ‘Kinda’ – here it’s almost proud of itself, part of an empire that’s been encouraged to feed off all those capitalist subconscious urges and give in to petty jealous thoughts. It now has the power to distort mirrors, to change how we see ourselves, even though it can’t hide the truth. Everything about ‘Kinda’ was designed to seem strange and alien, but everything about ‘Snakedance’ is designed to feel eerily familiar. For the Mara isn’t just let loose on a world that’s clearly distantly descended from Earth (if the ‘Beast Below’ idea of countries from Earth taking a ship each is to be believed Manussa seems to be the Indian ship with a specialist who lived by the English seaside, with a specialist in Punch and Judy on board) it’s specifically the present, in 1983, in Thatcherist Britain (with just a dash of the British Empire in India, bored rulers who don’t mix with the locals). We’re in a world that idolises the idle rich, a place that that had moved from a 1960s plea for tolerance and peace that was the natural time period to birth Dr Who to a survival of the fittest world where money is the only thing that matters and where kind imaginative shows like Dr Who are an anomaly.

As much as the writer deserves praise for this sequel story it’s also Eric Saward’s finest hour as a scriptwriter. He’d inherited most of the stories for season nineteen when Christopher H Bidmead left a bit last minute and while he’d tinkered with all of them (‘Kinda’ especially, much to Bailey’s unhappiness) it was only with season twenty he commissioned stories himself. Saward, a natural action writer by trade, seems like the last person who would commission a second cerebral story that left fans scratching their heads and especially when the re-writing of ‘Kinda’ was not a happy experience. But Saward was clever enough to realise that Bailey’s writing gave him variety, that he needed stories outside his comfort zone to appeal to as wide a range of fans as possible. He also figured he could work on what had made ‘Kinda’ go ‘wrong’ in the eyes of a few: he worked much closer with Bailey, encouraging the writer to come up with a tighter structure, nominating the more everyday settings that work so well, while promising the writer that if he kept to the plan there would be no changes this time and ‘every word will be yours’ (unlike most script editors/showrunners he kept 99% of his promise too: only the start, following on from ‘Arc Of Infinity’ is his). He also made sure that the production team really could do a proper rubber snake this time, allowing Bailey to poke fun at Kinda’s worst effect by turning it into a snake at a pageant.

Most of all, though, Saward commissioned this story because Tegan was the companion he liked writing for the most: though a Bidmead creation his predecessor in the chair was more like Nyssa, refined educated and quiet, but Saward saw a lot of himself in the bolshie Tegan and thought she worked well against Bidmead’s gentler, more passive Doctor. He’d also seen, in ‘Kinda’, just how good Janet Fielding was at acting possessed, giving a bravado performance that was the talk of the fanbase even amongst the fans who didn’t quite get Kinda’. Tegan’s not just the same person fighting the same fight though. Either Saward or Bailey actually took the time to do something rare in 1980s Who too: they looked at how a companion would have changed since we last met her. Tegan has spent an unspecified time since ‘Timeflight’ getting more and more upset at being back on Earth and trying to live a normal life after everything she’d seen. She’s lost her job and travelled the world but still feels empty and hollow, as if her life doesn’t matter. When the Tardis magically re-appears in her life she doesn’t need a second chance and leaps right back in. However Tegan’s done what a lot of us do when we’ve left a scary part of our lives behind for something more boring: she’s forgotten how unsettling and scary it is. Tegan thinks she’ll be running away from Terrileptils and Urbankan frog kings again; she’s forgotten just how awful it was being possessed by The Mara and how close she came to death. She’s also grown jealous in the interim, envious of Nyssa carrying on with The Doctor and having the life she feels she should have had, with a large dollop of guilt over Adric’s death by dinosaurs on a spaceship in ‘Earthshock’ and watching the 5th Dr suffer a similar invasion-by-unlikely-entity in ‘The Arc Of Infinity’, a story driven in part by what her cousin discovers in Amsterdam. It’s a perfect mix for The Mara: a mind that’s forgotten all the lessons of power and confidence Tegan learned last time and which has a whole new green eye jealousy soup to grow on.     

While the locals of Manussa are much more like your everyday Dr Who fictional world than the people we saw in Kinda (they can all talk this time, for starters) the thrill comes from seeing a world that in other Dr Who stories would be unremarkable sent running in horror not because of some invading psychopathic villain or race of monsters or the latest cold war parable or even a fictional demon turned real, but because of one of our heroes we’ve come to know and love. And not in the usual ‘alien brainwashing’ way either, but because the Mara has distorted Tegan’s sense of self and exaggerated feelings that were lurking within her mind all along. There’s no particular reason for The Mara to manifest itself back in Tegan’s life here, except that a cave that once housed snakes triggers painful memories in her subconscious: it’s a shame that the plot isn’t more random than that for once and that the story had been more about how you can escape all sorts of things in life but never your sub-conscious. It would be interesting to debate what might have happened if the pink snake had started controlling Tegan on another planet, causing the Great Fire Of London more directly (‘The Visitation’) for instance, or when following Concorde to prehistoric Heathrow (‘Time-Flight’) and especially if it had attacked Tegan during her ‘gap year’ back on Earth (Tegan would have been wanted for a spree of murders and probably never be able to return home again). However it would be in keeping with The Mara’s backstory that arrives now, at a point when she gets all she wants, to be back on the Tardis again, and discovers that she ought to be careful what she wishes for. We’ve seen in the run of stories since ‘Kinda’ just how emotional Tegan really is and how all that shouting is really a front to protect her big heart, the events of that story having broken through Tegan’s surface level character and turned her into someone who cares far more than she did when we first met her in ‘Logopolis’ (perhaps breaking through the trauma of just what The Master puts her though in that story killing her aunt and very nearly her planet; like Nyssa losing Traken in that same story she’s been suffering a form of PTSD ever since). It makes sense that, deep down, she’s resentful of the people around her for what they’ve put her through and guilty for her part in similar life changing events for strangers because she’s grown close to the 5th Dr and Nyssa by now and know how they feel. While it might have been more fun to see The Mara take over prim and proper Nyssa (it would have explained why she went to sleep in The Tardis last time so suddenly too) neither Bailey nor Saward done with Tegan yet: they want to see how someone as fragile yet courageous as Tegan has handled the knowledge that she has a primal beast lurking within her waiting and the idea that you’re never really done confronting your inner pink snake, that the job of ‘shadow work’ making peace with your faults and weaknesses, is a lifelong battle that changes as we grow and learn.  

So it is that ‘Snakedance’ is more than just a pale sequel and cleverly turns the usual Dr Who clichés on its head: it’s the companion people need to be saved from not the other way round and the Tardis – that symbol of hope and rescue – ends up being the source of the problem by taking Tegan to this planet. ‘Snakedance’ is, like ‘Kinda’, driven by Tegan’s fear and self-loathing, but the difference this time is that it’s not an inward journey anymore but an outer one, as Tegan can’t handle all the inner agony that’s built up and lashes out at other people to avoid lashing out at herself. In ‘Kinda’ the Mara represented the parts of the self that the infected people hated most about themselves, but in ‘Snakedance’ the Mara is more what people crave most, the red herring that people think will lead to quick fulfilment without doing the spiritual growth to deserve it (‘it doesn’t matter who you are or what steps you take, the story’s in the journey not destination or pink snake’). It’s kick-the-cat syndrome, or perhaps a side effect from living in a dog-eat-dog world back home where she’s penniless and unemployed, only for Tegan it’s still a pink snake that’s inside her and makes her want to control and hurt other people so that they don’t hurt her first. Tegan’s journey from victim to bully is in keeping with everything we learnt about her in the earlier story and Janet Fielding is, if anything, even better at playing bitchy than she is playing broken. Especially with the really good use of vocoder on Tegan’s possessed voice that makes her sound like Peter Frampton. If even someone as brave and feisty as Tegan can’t shrug off all the trauma she carries the rather wet people of Manussa don’t stand a chance and it isn’t long before the strangely dressed locals are feeding off each other’s negative energy and possessing everyone they meet with the same ugly vibes.

The first one is future national treasure Martin Clunes in his first non-spear carrying extra TV role at the tender age of twenty-two and this time he’s the one with the spears, sticking them in people when Tegan over-powers him and even this early on, dressed up like a camp androgynous gypsy. He’s superb, the equal of any guest part in the series (check out the lipstick!; clip shows love to embarrass Clunes with how he looks in this story and every other year one will think it’s the first time the clip has ever been discovered even though its on every sodding time on those ‘Before They Were Famous’ type progs). Even in the thankless role as a Manussian Behaving Badly, he out-acts everyone else off the screen except for Janet, despite almost no experience. As the local spoilt brat with power he’s a good choice for the Mara to infect: he’s basically Prince William, bored out of his mind, resentful of all the nonsensical traditions he has to carry out and secretly thinking the locals are simpletons inferior to his magisterial presence, but enjoying the money and fame it brings him too much to truly step away. He’s not bad though and not usually cruel just bored; the Mara doesn’t need much though and finds more than enough wickedness in him to exploit. People have spent his whole life nattering in Lom’s ear about how big and important he is and how his ancestors once faced down a snake just like this one so it’s bound to give him a dodgy ego problem. Though having both he and Jonathan Morris (star of ‘Bread’) as ‘Chela’ in this story looks like more typical JNT casting, at the time ‘Snakedance’ made a welcome respite from the usual run-of-the-mill, with director Fiona Cumming casting largely unknown actors (she hired Clunes, for instance, straight from drama school after seeing his face in ‘Spotlight’ – no one expected him to be as good as he was. The actor had been out of work despite being the son of famous stage actor Alec Clunes and the second cousin and protégé of Jeremy Sherlock’ Brett but his career took off after people saw him in ‘Snakedance’, at a time when Dr Who was still just about popular that a lot of influential persons watched it). 

Martin Clunes is the standout this week, but The Manussians are a good bunch of supporting actors and actresses all round: Elisabeth ‘Sarah Jane’ Sladen’s hubby Brian Miller is very good too as cave-pedlar Dugden, playing the theatrical showman right on a knife-edge between being showy and being ‘real’, recognising that he’s not a natural carnival barker and slightly putting it on (it could so easily have been another hammy part, like Garron in ‘The Ribos Operation’ but Miller is too smart for that; the role gave him an excuse to turn up to conventions and sit at the bar with fans buying him drinks while his wife talked to everyone). Though he’d been in the series before this is the only time he’s recognisable’ not in an alien suit or heavy makeup or playing a disembodied voice (though he does keep a beard he grew for another part and doesn’t usually wear). You can see why a still unknown Jonathan Challis (as Chela) became a big hit a few years later in Scouse soap opera ‘Bread’ as he makes the usual character trait of ‘the one person who believes The Doctor’ more interesting than other similar roles too (like Andred in ‘The Invasion Of Time’). John Carson does a decent job as Ambril the sort of patient calm soul who would normally be a boon in most Dr Who stories but not here when he understandably thinks The Doctor has lost the plot (that’s the BBC set design planner he’s poring over when the timelord turns up, as an injoke for BBC employees!) Colette O’Neil is terrific as Lady Tanha, whose kind of Queen Lizzy II, partly struck by the importance of all these local traditions and the privilege bestowed upon her and partly secretly agreeing with her son that it’s all just a little bit silly. Then there’s Dojjen: I still can’t work out if this worldly-wise hermit is brilliantly underplayed by Preston Lockwood, who perfectly understands the unfolding symbolism and subtext behind the story about staying zen and calm in the face of disaster, or whether he just didn’t get it at all and acted the part the way he would in an everyday soap opera; either way its note of realism, right at the point where its least expected as the Doctor has travelled so far for spiritual guidance, is striking (for the record Lockwood made a career out of playing ‘elder’ roles in middle age like this – he’s a magician in the 1980s BBC ‘Chronicles Of Narnia’ for instance and plays him more like a businessman – but I still can’t tell if that’s because directors recognised he was perfect at injecting a little earthiness into impractical roles or whether because those were the only jobs the actor could get).

As with ‘Kinda’ Bailey used Busshism to name his planet and characters and give them hidden meanings relating to the plot. In ‘Pali’, the ancient language in which the concepts of Buddishm were first written down, ‘Manussa’ means ‘the everyday’, the ‘human physical materialist realm’. ‘Dugdale’ was, n the first draft of the script, ‘Dugatti’, meaning ‘an unhappy existence’ perfect for a character forced into something he doesn’t want to be, who knows everything he does is a ‘distortion’ of the truth. ‘Chela’ means ‘apprentice’. ‘Tanha’, meanwhile, is Aramaic for ‘a feeling or craving’, but one that blinds to all the things you have, which sort of fits the way mum ignores the worship of her people in desperation of getting love and attention from her son. Dojjen is the odd one out – the one character Bailey names for a ‘real’ person, a 13^th century Buddhist monk Dogen, who brought Buddhism to Japan and taught his followers that a successful happy life came from the balancing act of ‘zazen’ (‘sitting meditation’) and ‘being time’ (living life with other people as part of a society in the material world). Notably, though, ‘Snakedance’ is less of a Buddhist parable than ‘Kinda’ was, with elements borrowed from other religions too: the central theme of life being a ‘dance’ is pure Hindu from the tales of the God Shiva (with the added detail that it’s a dance between the moments when the snakes and fears ‘bite’ us), while the idea of a ‘Federator’ ruler ‘over three worlds’ is the description given to Krishna. The starting point, though, was Christianity and an article Bailey read about a sect in the Appalachian desert who still handled snakes as part of their rituals. As with ‘Kinda’ (and a little bit ‘Planet Of The Spiders’, another story with a creature that harnesses evil using a blue crystal) religion is no longer treated as a con or a form of control or brainwashing, the way it is in most Dr Who stories, but as an idea half-remembered from something much older, a once real living thing turned into a parable.

It’s a good story for the other two regulars too, both of whom suffer from their own personal ‘Maras’ (if not quite to the extent that poor Tegan does). Poor Nyssa is clearly suffering PTSD of her own as her best friend suddenly turns nasty out of nowhere when they were having fun together and she feels helpless stopping her running off into trouble and won’t listen to her, just like her father and step-mother in ‘The Keeper Of Traken’. The shock and hurt makes her return briefly to her haughty, prim and proper self. She even – shock horror- stops being nice and is a bit snappy with The Doctor, telling him ‘I can look after myself thankyou’ when he tried to help her down from a height, as if covering up her heart from any more hurt. As for The Doctor the story exaggerates all his worst faults: he barges into this society and makes demands, oblivious to how he might come across and taking charge without having ‘earned’ it. Rather than being the one who’s naturally in charge in any situation he suddenly looks like a blithering idiot as he tries to warn this planet about an imminent local alien invasion: for once they don’t believe him not because this sort of thing is beyond their comprehension but because he’s basically repeating the plot of all their fairy stories they were told when they were children and they’ve spent their whole life thinking The Mara was made up. It’s our equivalent of waking up to find someone telling us St George is real and about to battle a dragon or Snow White is visiting with seven Sontaron dwarves: like the locals here we’d be more confused than scared. The Doctor always seemed in control during events on ‘Kinda’, embracing this mysterious world through a combination of deep thought and acceptance of Deva Loka on its own terms, but he’s notably out of his depth for much of this story: he’s not around when Tegan runs off and spends much of the story catching up to what the viewer already knows for a change (I wonder, too, given the date it was commissioned if ‘Kinda’ was written with Tom Baker’s more confident 4th Dr in mind, without a chance to see how Peter Davison would play him – but now Bailey has he’s used the 5th Dr’s traits of innocence and naivety against him, making him more than a little insecure himself). 

What ‘Snakedance’ lacks compares to ‘Kinda’ is the same sense of mystery and foreboding, that experimental air that broke all the rules and made us wonder what was happening next  - mostly, you suspect, from Saward’s influence ‘Snakedance’ is a much more ‘normal’ story and as such is less brave all round. However it looks far better on screen: sensibly Bailey turns the one thing that never quite worked in ‘Kinda’ on screen - the giant pink snake, which looked cuddly rather than demonic – and replaces it with a snake tattoo that passes between the hands of the possessed instead; to this day I wince when I see people with one in real life just in case they’re about to unleash their inner Mara on me (you’d be surprised how many there are) and the effects are, especially by 1983 standards but even for nowadays, frighteningly convincing. The sets are really good, despite being cobbled together from leftovers (a lot of the furniture, particularly the staircase, was taken from the annual ‘Song For Europe’ hunt to find the UK’s next Eurovision entry – which in 1983 was ‘Sweet Dreams’ singing their song ‘I’m Never Giving Up’ which came third back in the days when that was actually a bit of a disappointment; incidentally this is one of those planets where everyone dresses as if they’re in the Eurovision Song Contest in everyday garb as it is). There is a giant pink snake here too but cleverly it’s a joke: my favourites scenes in this story are the carnival parade that takes place, a sort of folk memory of a time the Mara visited Manussa and infected people before, which looks like an even low budget version of ‘Kinda’ of the sort that a local village would put on for a carnival; it may well be the writer’s gentle pith(helmet) take on how ‘Kinda’ turned out on screen with a BBC budget and Bailey’s own inner demons getting the better of him as he tries to distance himself and say ‘that rubber snake had nothing to do with me guv’, yet also serves the story beyond the bitchiness, making Manussa feel like a real planet with a real story long before the Tardis shows up. There are great details added too, like the tenth celebratory dances and the locals dressed up as demons, poking people with sticks until they ‘forfeit’ their spare change (I proposed doing this at my local carnival once and was turned down in favour of yet another look round a fire engine and a bric-a-brac stall that looked like someone had emptied the chest in the Tardis and the wardrobe randomly on a table). Where ‘Kinda’ often looked like a studio set dressed up to look ‘weird’, ‘Manussa is far more believable as a real world complete with extras, market stall and Punch and Judy show complete with miniature snake (Barry Smith, a genuine seaside puppeteer, was hired and asked to improvise right up to the final moment when the snake ‘eats’ Punch in the exact same way the Mara takes Tegan over later). It all helps sell this world as a living breathing entity that’s been around for centuries before the Tardis arrived, long enough to have a distantly remembered past.

The one thing both stories have in common is that the ending is the weakest aspect: it’s hard to make a concrete finale in a ‘real’ world against a subconscious monster, though ‘Snakedance’ does better than ‘Kinda’ in two ways. One is that, after twenty years of defeating evil by rushing down corridors, The Doctor defeats The Mara not with mirrors and a bouncy castle snake but by staying still and meditating, the quiet centre in a room full of panic which is a wonderfully different way of doing things. To defeat the darkness, first The Doctor has to make peace with himself, something he can only do with quiet, not noise. The Doctor refuses to back down from his own darkest fears, while refusing to accept the ‘evilness’ of the Mara (because he can also see Tegan in a way she can’t, for her kindness, empathy and courage and knows that no one is all bad). It might have been better still had Tegan herself shouted down the Mara lurking inside her and accepted that she’s just a human with frailties like any other, but it still works as an ending: sometimes all it takes to quieten down the primal fears within you is to have the people around you who care for you tell you how great you are and give you a hug. Then there’s the rubber snake itself, replaced here by three separate things: a hydraulic latex snake that ‘grows’ with CSO that works really well, model snake ‘jaws’ that are matched to Tegan’s face in post-production that work tremendously and three real snakes, which work kinda of okay (not poisonous ones you’ll be pleased to know but a harmless pair of garter snakes and a tree snake, hired from specialist company ‘Janimals’ who trained their creatures to feel comfortable in a TV studio environment; though they didn’t have a phobia of snakes exactly both Davison and actor Preston Lockwood were understandably reluctant to touch them so to prove it was safe the director draped them all over her. Even so, she’s been in a cold studio gallery and the snakes were docile – they woke up when the actors in the hot TV lights touched them so their response of horror and flinching is not just acting! The one that ‘actually’ bites is a studio model. As if you hadn’t already guessed. Though even this model isn’t bad by 1980s Who standards). It’s still a rushed ending though: there’s   no reason at all why The Doctor has to wait until the Mara is ‘mid transformation’ before defeating it. We’ve invested  a lot in this world but we never get to see it return to ‘normal’ (is there a future ceremony where a local dresses up in cricketting gear wearing a vegetable in its lapel making everyone shush for a few minutes?)  or see that Tegan is alright (a scene doing just that was moved to the start of ‘Mawdryn Undead’ as this story was over-running and that one was under-running, but it doesn’t really fit: we need to know Tegan’s alright in the here and now!) A lot of fans commented that they glanced away for a second and suddenly they were in another programme: we really needed even a thirty second bit at the end when things are back to normal. Although after a run of stories that spend the last ten minutes filling in time because the story’s run out, even this makes a nice change.

Overall, then, it’s a draw: there are no scenes in ‘Snakedance’ quite as deliciously surreal as the ones in ‘Kinda’ of the colonialists hiding from a box of their own darkest fears. Manussa itself isn’t quite as invitingly strange and other-wordly as Deva Loka. The idea of the Mara bringing out someone’s outer lust and recklessness as well as their inner doubts isn’t as fully explored as before. Poor Nyssa gets almost as rum a deal as she did in ‘Kinda’ where she fell asleep for four episodes, mostly running around yelling ‘Tegan!’, without the subplots Adric got last time out. However ‘Snakedance’ just wins out a smidgeon over its predecessor by courtesy of being a lot scarier (the first episode cliffhanger, where Tegan is getting her fortune told, and a crystal ball explodes with an image of a skeleton snake while she laughs uncontrollably, now fully in the grip of the Mara, is my candidate as not only one of the best cliffhangers but hands down the single best Dr Who ‘possession’ scene of them all - and kudos for making the snake a skeleton this time, with the perfectly-lined up shot of Tegan being ‘swallowed’ by the snake not far behind – that one shot alone must have taken hours to set-up just right with 1983 technology!) Cumming understands this story and these ideas from the first and is the perfect fit (she asked JNT for the most ‘character’ driven story and boy did she get it) – Peter Grimwade got ‘Kinda’ in the end too, but it felt as if he was catching up; here everything fits. ‘Snakedance’ also ‘wins’ by having this strange and unlikely threat invade a world that feels a lot more like our own (while Deva Loka was designed to feel like darkest Africa ‘Snakedance’ feels a lot more like Britain, with its divide between rich and poor who are terribly polite eccentrics, bored Royals who are clearly unfit for their job and full of daft customs people have forgotten the real meaning of over time but carry on doing anyway. Indeed, it’s easy to imagine King Charles turning up to a St George pageant and killing everyone with a dragon turned real while laughing and smashing the crown jewels as ‘just baubles’. Or is that just me?) ‘Kinda’ felt like a gripping piece of telly as we could get lost in another fictional world, but ‘Snakedance’ feels like a better bit of Dr Who and more of a morality tale than pure escapism, as if the Mara is lurking inside all of us not just an alien planet.

They’re both pretty incredible stories in their own ways though, a brave daring step from a series that was playing it a little too safe for most of seasons 19 and 20 suddenly becoming the courageous anything-goes series Dr Who had been when it first started where you didn’t quite know what was going to happen next. It’s a real shame we haven’t seen a repeat of The Mara somewhere in Dr Who by now (on screen anyway; poor Tegan gets a third takeover in ‘The Cradle Of the Snake’, one of the better 5th Dr Big Finish audios, while a third Bailey script was submitted ‘The Children Of Seth’ which would have seen how the Mara affected the guilty conscious of the Doctor – and the egotistical, brash, insecure 6th Dr at that. Now that would have been interesting! It’s a real shame that we never found out how the Mara got to Deva Loka in the first place too, something ‘Snakedance’ leaves unexplained). ‘New Who’ needs one story this downright baffling and weird and The Mara is one of those timeless ‘monsters’ that would work just as well then and now (I mean, if they’re even bringing the Celestial Toymaker back then surely anything goes?!) It’s even more of a shame that Christopher Bailey retired from writing for good after this story: his is one of the most unique and imaginative writing voices Dr Who ever had and he put a lot of love and hard work into this story, even drawing the cave designs in minute detail and submitting them with his script rather than leaving things up to the production team. Admittedly mostly by courtesy of only having two stories, he sits neck and neck with Douglas Adams and Malcolm Hulke as, statistically speaking, my favourite multi-story Dr Who author. The result is another highly impressive story that no other series would ever have even considered, never mind done half as well as this and a triumph for all concerned, from writer to director to script editor to cast to set designers and post production crew (who have more effects to juggle with, yet less staff as every VT technician spare was ‘borrowed’ for news coverage of the ‘Falklands War’. Ironically exactly the sort of unnecessary jingoistic greedy nonsense the Mara fed on). It was a story that, with its more Dr Whoy feel, went down better with the fandom than ‘Kinda’ had done too and was far more universally loved (the only people who seemed to hate it were the BBC highups, who in a twist from the Sydney Newman days, hated it because it didn’t have a ‘monster’ and considered it too ‘thoughtful’. Bear this in mind when ‘Trial Of A Timelord’ tries to deliver on what the heads of department want and then find out the fandom don’t want it). A proper intellectual feast in an era of snacks and finger food, this is what Dr Who does better than any other scifi series, making outer – and indeed inner – space weird again. Superb.

POSITIVES + If you want people to imagine a whole world without being able to build many sets then build a town square or a market: it’s amazing how much of a bigger feel for a world you get when you have random extras mingling at large, each one seemingly with their own stories going on separately to the plot. Manussa feels like one of Dr Who’s most believable planets partly from the strength of the writing and the history that’s mentioned, but also because the people we meet aren’t all from one class, one gender or a bunch of soldiers: they’re families, bachelors, children, people passing through on their way to work, others enjoying a day off, all of them united in an anniversary pageant of an ancient tale of invasion by the Mara, utterly oblivious to the fact that the modern-day repeat is going on just out of shot.

NEGATIVES - Well, I say this looks like our world...Only even in the 1980s nobody was wearing clothes like this. Costume-wise Manussa is more of a ragbag than the usual Dr Who planets, which ought to mean a fascinating world of cliques and classes, where everyone’s identity is driven by their lot in life and reinforced by the restricting nature of how they’re forced to dress. In practice it means every last bit of outlandish clothing leftover in the costume box when other programmes have had their pick, whether they fit together or not. I mean, just look at those over-size earrings (which seem more like something an Aztec would wear) draped over some togas (which appear to be secondhand from ‘I Claudius’ – well they do both have snakes I suppose), gloves taken from a documentary on falconry and Martin Clunes additionally dressed in some painting overalls at one stage, complete with drips of paint over the front and one (of many) of the silliest hats ever seen in the series. Even the regulars look a bit weird: Tegan’s had a killer haircut, the fault of both Janet herself (who made a comment about how the actress wasn’t kept on a ‘retainer’ but rehired when Tegan rejoins, as a money saving gesture) and tweaked by producer John Nathan-Turner (who had images of ‘Tegan’ cuts being the latest fashion!); Nyssa meanwhile gets a whole new wardrobe, which she only wore once after a visiting Sandra Dickinson (still married to Peter Davison in this period) told Sarah Sutton she looked like a frumpy deckchair. Weirdly, hermit Dojjen is the most normally dressed of the lot (albeit made up to look a century older than actor Preston Lockwood was in real life).   

BEST QUOTE: Dr: ‘What is the snakedance?’ Dojjen: ‘This is. Here and now. The dance goes on. It is all the dance. Everywhere and always. So. Find the still point. Only then can the Mara be defeated’. Dr: ‘The still point. The point of safety. But it's in the chamber somewhere. Where?’ Dojjen: ‘No. The still point is within yourself, nowhere else. To destroy the Mara you must find the still point’.

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: Obviously this story goes as a pair with its TV prequel ‘Kinda’, under which we’ve also reviewed to date the only appearance by the Mara in any extra-curricular format, Big Finish’s ‘Cradle Of The Snake’.

A mention here, though, for ‘The Passenger’, the official name for the latest specially commissioned trailer for the latest Dr Who blu-ray collection, in this case season twenty (though it also ties in nicely with the just-broadcast ‘Power Of The Doctor’). Tegan is in her (very modern) kitchen when she gets a text from an anonymous number about a ‘blue box’ in the local funfair spotted ‘tonight’. It turns out that she meets…(huge spoilers….) not The Doctor but Nyssa, who greets her old friend with a hug and the words ‘it’s been a long time’. Nyssa comments that she ‘hitched a ride’ to see her old friend and The Tardis appears right on cue, almost like a dream. Tegan wants to know which regeneration it is (‘scarf or celery or woman?!’) and comments that as she got her own pilot’s license in 1993 ‘I could probably teach him a thing or two about landing’. The pair get nostalgic, Tegan sighing ‘those were the days – I wish I realised how lucky I was’ before Nyssa offers a ‘second chance – if you’re interested’. Only things aren’t all they seem and when poor Tegan steps through the Tardis she’s really in the darkest recesses of her mind, meeting herself (with Janet Fielding dressed more as her natural self and talking with her more naturalised English accent rather than the one she ‘exaggerates’ for Tegan). ‘Waking or dreaming you cannot escape me’ The Mara intones, ‘submit and I will grant you the reunion you crave!’ before offering her the snake. Tegan is swayed for a second, tempted to give in to her darkest desires, but she hears the real Nyssa’s voice in her head, saying that she isn’t really as alone as she feels and her friends are coming for her. Fake-Tegan hen turns into a snake (in a rather better effect than they could manage in the 1980s) which devours her as the screen fades to black. Tegan then wakes up – it really has all been a dream – remembers everything she has become and is thankful for her very human life, then stands before the mirror and denounces her subconscious. with the words ‘back in your box!’ A surprisingly scary trailer written by Peter McTighe which features a stunning double performance from Janet Fielding at the top of her game and offers some closure at last for Tegan that’s nevertheless fully in keeping with the spirit of Christopher Bailey’s original stories, with The Mara always there but Tegan now confident and secure enough to control it. Arguably the best of the blu-ray trails so far.  

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