Enlightenment: Ranking - 21

 

Enlightenment

(Season 20, Dr 5 with Tegan and Turlough, 1-9/3/1983, producer: John Nathan-Turner, script editor: Eric Saward, writer: Barbara Clegg, director: Fiona Cumming)

Rank: 21  

   'It was the schooner Buccaneer 

That sailed the wintry stars 

Tacking from the Earth to eternity 

Via a stop off on Mars 

The skipper was a pirate 

With a fleet for company 

Of outlaws she's kidnapped 

From one of the Earth's seven seas 

Her rival was a gentleman 

Striking in nature and in name 

They both risked their crew across the blue 

All for a little game 

The treasure was Enlightenment 

Understanding was the prize 

With neither side deserving 

If you looked into their eyes 

No 'twas the timelord from Gallifrey 

Who saw through the reserve and hate 

And his cabin boy who claimed the prize 

Worth so much more than pieces of eight 

The eternals tried to claim their prize

Enlightenment to set them free

But they miss that the story’s in the journey

And not what’s out to sea

Such is the woeful tale of the Buccaneer 

The big loser in the race 

But such is the fate of all mankind 

To be left dangling in space, arr!' 

If you ask me Humans have got it all wrong. There we are living most of our lives in ‘space’, trying to fill up the world around us with things like overflowing bank accounts, status symbols and online followers, when really we should be living in ‘time’, making the most of our all-too-short lifespan because none of those things we spend our life chasing will matter in the slightest when we’re dead. The only real way anyone comes out of life a winner is if they filled their lives with meaning and purpose that create ripples so that we can be remembered after we’re gone, but only a few people are ever lucky enough to get to do that: it’s a sad sobering fact that, unless you’re involved in as timeless a series as Dr Who, you probably won’t be remembered at all once your great-grandchildren are dead. Dr Who knows that agonising truth of existential despair that gnaws away at the heart of human existence better than most series: the Doctor has been granted multiple lifetimes to explore the universe and make the most of every minute (even if those minute’s aren’t necessarily spent in chronological order and some of those minutes end up ‘undoing’ the work of other minutes) and yet you still feel if he lived forever it would never ever be quite enough to do all the things he wants to do. And if the Doctor struggles to make the most out of life when what chance do us mere mortals, stuck in one time and space, have? 

 Writer Barbara Clegg knew this better than maybe any other Dr Who writer and came up with The Eternals, one of my favourite alien species in all of Who, beings who get the ultimate blessing of being able to live forever, but unlike the Dr they can’t think what to do with their empty lives so fritter them away instead because without that rigid deadline to work to life has even less meaning or purpose, with days just a vacuum to be filled. Like Captain Jack and Ashildr to come, eternity is a curse not a blessing, with the removal of death effectively removing all sense of life because nothing matters anymore. The irony of ‘Enlightenment’ is that they gleefully waste the lives of the ‘Ephemerals’ (basically ‘us’, or any species with a shortened lifespan) in their own silly trivial quests, games and competitions, that none of them will ever remember in a few centuries’ time, because they think our lives are too short to be of any value or consequence – but are their lives any better or more important for being so long and yet so empty? The Eternals are one of the most casually cruel and detached races in all of Dr Who, but they have a motivation that’s more believable than most alien species who want to take over the Earth or destroy us all: sheer boredom. There’s something particularly chilling about a species that wants to kill you not because they hate you or because they want to convert you to be like them but because, well, it passes the time doesn’t it? And you were only going to die in what, forty, sixty, eighty years anyway? It’s not like you were going to do anything useful in such a short time. A lot of alien races look down on humanity for various reasons but tp the Eternals, especially, we’re insects with such an impossibly short lifespan our lives look like a complete waste of time. 

 Clegg was a radio writer who lost her job when Radio 2 dropped all their long running radio dramas including her pet project ‘Waggoner’s Walk’ (a sort of more plausible version of ‘The Archers’). A scifi fan, she won a gig adapting ‘The Chrysalids’ for Radio 4, John Wyndham’s seminal 1950s tale of prejudice and mutation that, of all his books, most feels like a Dr Who story. We follow David, the son of a family who have survived a nuclear war and are racially pure and like all others who resemble them convinced that they’re somehow special. David becomes close to a little girl from another family he treats like a little sister but is horrified to find out she has an extra toe and ‘isn’t like them’, that she’s ‘ephemeral’ with a life that doesn’t matter in the same way theirs do. He’s caught between going to the authorities and reporting her or helping her and eventually helps her and her family escape, while finding out he has super powers of telepathy himself so he can ‘talk’ to her from a distance and join with others like them, his entire world view overturned by actually getting to know one of the people he’s been taught to be so prejudiced about. Radio 4 Extra still repeat her version most years somewhere in their schedule it’s so good. Having got a taste for scifi Barbara then contacted Eric Saward, script editor of Who in this era, who she’d worked with in the past, asking for a job. 

 Being the ‘junior’ writer in season twenty Clegg was given the ‘difficult’ slot wrapping up the ‘Black Guardian trilogy’ (not part of her original script) and dutifully sat down to write it with plenty of time, but to her horror found that the time she’d put aside to write the first draft was when some distant relatives had ‘booked’ themselves into her house. They were from a far posher background than Clegg with no work to rush back to and she found them ultra-demanding and draining, as they insisted on being ‘entertained’ at all times and if they weren’t they got passive-aggressive in the way only posh people looking down on poor people can (sample line: ‘We don’t punish ephemerals, we just use them…kindly’. Yeah right!), adamant that she was wasting her time with a writing career when she could be doing something important. Like marrying for money and hoarding it. As the writer started waiting on her family hand and foot and re-acting in a dazed sort of way to their demands she began to think about the story she should have been writing and came up with a race that had imposed themselves on humanity in much the same way, expecting to be entertained but distant and removed from the people entertaining them, as if they didn’t really care. The Eternals are a great creation because they’re the opposite of what the Doctor stands for, his antithesis even more than a Master or a Dalek. The Doctor left Gallifrey partly because he has a passion to see the universe and has two hearts big enough to care for all the people he meets and the opposite of love and passion isn’t a Dalek-like hate, its disinterest. Gerry Davis and Kit Pedler had already gone down this route creating the Cybermen but they were more of a robotic-style distant caused by removing emotion chips. Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke, too, had created the timelords to be the Doctor’s detached opposites but in Robert Homes’ hands they’d changed into a race that had all the same passionate feelings like jealousy and anger but that these were all kept hidden. The eternals however have lost the ability to feel because, after living so long, they’ve become numb to feelings. For the Doctor life is beautiful and to be lived to the maximum however long you’ve got; to The Eternals life is something to suffer and waste on petty things. 

 The eternals are also the antithesis of mankind in many ways: our journeys into space have been all about furthering our species and trying to get a foothold on another planet or solar system before we accidentally snuff ourselves out, going to great lengths and through harsh difficulties so that our offspring might get to live that little bit longer, but the Eternals live long enough to master space travel almost by accident and have long ago turned it into a silly parlour game, the explorers of our world replaced by pirates who live for the treasure not the quest. Because Eternals have lived so long most times are the same to them, their lives a random grab-bag of images borrowed from other cultures including ours, having made no impact on the world instead of the people they take out of it. And so, almost by accident (Clegg almost certainly wouldn’t have seen it, not being a Who fan as such) we end up with the scenario for ‘The War Games’ all over again fourteen years on, only with naval personnel instead of soldiers, a clash of different eras and countries all racing against each other, hypnotised into not thinking anything is wrong, all for the amusement of a powerful race who holds power over life and death. 

 There’s a longstanding tradition in scifi and even in real space travel of having spaceships being just like the ships of the sea – we call them space ‘ships’ for starters – because it’s the obvious next stage we go to after exploring our oceans. ‘Star Trek’ for one was pitched as a series about being like the sea films of old but in space and have the same ranking system as well as a ‘naval whistle’ as their communications call. For the astronauts who set off into space, exploring it for the first time, are ‘our’ eras equivalent of the sailors of old who travelled the seven seas not knowing what they might find and still half-convinced they might fall off the edge of the world or meet dragons. Usually, though, writers have spaceships that are just treated like ships – in this story the space shuttles really do look like ships in space, racing around planets as ‘marker buoys’ and driven by ‘solar winds’ (a real scientific discovery still kind of new in the 1980s where all suns are thought to emit a stream of protons and electrons that can be detected in the atmosphere of a planet like Earth’s magnetic fields). The shot at the end of episode one, when we think we’re in a historical only to see, as the Doctor does, that we’re really in an Edwardian sailing vessel tacking through the vast emptiness of space and racing a Greek galley (with a motor to make the oars move in and out), a Chinese junk and a river boat from the early Americas is fabulously Dr Who, something semi-ordinary clashing head on with something extraordinary. The Edwardian setting is the perfect choice, a time when mankind was as removed from his fellow man as he ever was in our history, living to a rigid system of manmade codes of class and status and when a lot of posh humans were behaving like The Eternals on a much smaller scale, oblivious to the fact that, to an eternal, they’re all small fry too. The sailors taken in this story about how distant the officers are but how this is kind of normal – to them very little is different to how it would be in their real lives anyway, while the actors playing eternals are all coached to give deliberately vague, under-played performances, director Fiona Cumming hiring actors that were naturally blank-faced and were able to go without blinking for long periods of time. The brainwashed Ephemerals stolen from their own time (and surely answering a few maritime mysteries of missing men along the way) have no idea what they’re really doing of course and they’re in a daze and if they fall to their deaths into space from the rigging then, no problem, they weren’t going to live much longer anyway and there are plenty more humans to be plucked out of the sea. 

 Of course the Doctor’s going to be outraged when he finds this out and the story gives Peter Davison lots of room to be cross and emotional, while making the most of the contrasts between Dr 5’s youthful vigour and the Eternals’ aged blankness. We’re used to seeing the Doctor as a natural mediator between two factions at war but never quite like this, where he’s too long-lived to be an ephemeral and too short-lived to be an eternal (this story’s second best line: A lord of time? Are there lords in such a small domain?) JNT and Saward had decided between them to make the 5th Doctor more passive, in contrast to Tom Baker, but here the Doctor is back to being multiple steps ahead of everyone else, working the solution out just a little head of the audience as a good regeneration always should. 

 This is a great story for the two companions too though and this is a rare Dr Who story that could only have worked as well with these two aboard the Tardis. One of the richest sub-plots is when an eternal named Marriner becomes fascinated by Tegan’s rich but ‘tiny’ mind, so full of emotion and rage and confusion and life, so different to his own. It’s one of Dr Who’s weirdest yet most plausible love stories as he tries to woo her in the way he would any eternal, only to keep putting his foot in it by not quite understanding how her world or her mind works: he can’t see why she’s upset when he rummages through her memories and re-creates the bedroom she’ll never see again onboard his sailing ship for instance or her misery when she thinks Turlough has fallen overboard and she’ll never see him again. After all, her life is short too so why become so detached to things and people she’s going to lose anyway? He’s used to bending every mortal to his will, so finding someone this feisty and used to having to stand up for themselves, creating boundaries that she won’t let him cross, fascinates him. Janet Fielding is parked off to the side in too many of her stories, despite the richness and potential in Tegan, but she finally gets a non-Mara story to get her teeth into and really makes the most of it, playing up Tegan’s confusion and conflicting emotions – sometimes her emotions can get in the way but here they’re the whole story round which the plot pivots. It’s a clever idea that’s somehow both sweet and creepy all at the same time: we’re removed enough to see that mariner doesn’t want to cause upset but also involved enough to see why, to Tegan, it feels like stalking, invading her personal privacy even when she says ‘no’. The fact that the background is the Edwardian age and she’s wearing a very elegant Edwardian dress rather than her usual stewardess outfit (or her ‘boob tube’, one of the most contemporary bits of clothing in the series – the Doctor continues to be oblivious to human clothing by ignoring her when she’s all ‘tah-dah, didn’t I scrub up well?’), only underlines how very different this world is to Tegan’s and how far she is out her comfort zone. You feel sorry for Marriner, who is getting his first glimpse into how the other half live and how love and passion makes life worth living and sees his own as mere ‘existence’, confused but fascinated by someone so unlike himself. However you also really cheer for Tegan like never before as she basically tells Marriner where to get off, even as he looks at her with blank confusion and it’s pitched as being the age-old story of a ‘forbidden’ romance between upstairs and downstairs and a man with all the privilege trying to take advantage of it. Only the scifi twist means that, rather than being a fumbling awkward teen. Unused to feeling emotions, Marriner is impossibly old (being only the second story written by a woman in Dr Who – and the first, ‘The Ark’ is debatable whatever the credits say – you can also see ‘Enlightenment’ as a feminist statement, about the gulf between the impulses and standards of men and women). However Tegan copes with this better than most companions (she’s a trained air-stewardess after all, used to looking after haughty passengers who waste the equivalent of her year’s salary on ‘extras’ during their flights). There’s a particularly poignant moment when she sees the photograph of her Aunty Vanessa, who died in Tegan’s first Dr Who story ‘Logopolis’ and Marriner won’t understand why she’s upset to be reminded of someone she loved and who died before her time, because that’s going to happen to her one day soon too isn’t it? 

Death, specifically the Doctor’s, is the key theme of the ‘Black Guardian’ aspect of the plot too and after being sidelined in ‘Terminus’ we see the proper conclusion to the story of Turlough and the Black Guardian’s plot to kill our favourite timelord, in revenge for having been outwitted by him back in the days when he looked like Tom Baker. Like The Eternals Turlough found it much easier to try to kill the Doctor in his first two stories when he was a stranger who probably wasn’t going to live very long anyway (as the Black Guardian was surely going to kill him some way or another) – but now he’s no longer a stranger but a friend whose saved his own scrawny neck so many times already Turlough can’t be emotionless about his mission any longer, even if it means his own death. Knowing the Doctor personally really shouldn’t have made a difference of course – the Doctor was always like that (give or take the opening few stories where the 1st Dr’s a cantankerous old git!) and all life is precious, but then to the Black Guardian too all life is ephemeral and limited, even a timelord’s. In his first two stories Turlough is a pain, a coward whose afraid of what the Black Guardian will do to him if he fails, even though he’s the worst assassin ever, too scared to go through with the plan but too scared to tell the Black Guardian the deal’s off so caught in a sort of limbo. He’s mostly there to make the Doctor look more gullible than we’ve ever seen him (Tegan, by contrast, is far less naive than the 5th Dr for all her younger years and has been suspicious of him from the start, a rare case of a companion having one up on the Doctor). Clegg though has more sympathies for Turlough than his other two writers and re-writes more subtly, as a man in a job he hates and would do anything to get out of, but who doesn’t know how to ask for help to get out of it. 

 Turlough spends most of this story tormented by his big decision and the moment when he decides a better option than letting the Dr live or die is to kill himself by leaping overboard is another of the all-time great DW cliffhangers (the only time a companion’s dared throw their lies away without rescuing someone or being possessed) and in contrast to the Eternals Turlough is a survivor first and foremost who’ll do anything to live, which is why it’s so shocking: we know how much turmoil he must be in to end his life when he begged the Black Guardian to save it not so long ago. Mark Strickson gives his best performance in a script that gives him a lot to do, despite being in pain for a lot of it (the stunt with Turlough’s suicidal leap went wrong when the kirby wire he was on snapped, giving him a limp for several weeks afterwards). Turlough is a survivor even in death though and after being rescued, rather than go through with it again, he throws his lot in with the rival pirates to see if that does any good. Wrack is a fascinating character: she’s an Eternal too but whereas Marriner and his captain Striker drift in and out of life she’s living it to the max for all the wrong reasons, getting fully into character in this odd human world of the past, reckless because she can’t be hurt. She’s much more like the Doctor in that regard, but still can’t see the bigger picture that life is for more than fun and luxury, wasting lives in her quest for an ‘enlightenment’ she’s too blind to see. Who’s first(ish) female writer enjoys making Wrack one of the strongest (and indeed strangest) female characters seen in the series, a lady whose not very ladylike and living in a men’s world that ends up with her being more manly than any of the men, a force of nature to be reckoned with. She’s a far more convincing women pirate than Madam Ching from ‘Legend Of The Sea Devils’ (at least as depicted on screen), someone whose working for The Black Guardian too and far more natural at it than Turlough is (what with a female director too ‘Enlightenment’ is arguably the most ‘equal opportunities’ story of the entire original run of Dr Who – it won’t be until ‘The Witchfinders’ thirty-five years later it happens again). 

Producer John Nathan-Turner deliberately picked Cumming to work on this story, figuring it was right up her street (a character-driven scifi with no aliens or other planets) and he’s quite right: Cumming clearly ‘gets’ this story whereas too often in the Peter Davison era directors are just doing a job. She’s excellent at casting: Lynda Baron makes the most of the middle of her three Who roles (so very different to the lounge singer of ‘The Gunfighters’ and the shop assistant of ‘Closing Time’) just the right side of hammy (mostly!) and Christopher Brown deserved a much bigger career after playing the part of Marriner (sadly it doesn’t look as if he did much TV after this). Credit too to two of the actors who were only cast at the last minute as replacements, following yet another industrial strike at the BBC (this time for electricians) that delayed the filming and meant the originally cast actors were pre-booked and couldn’t appear. I’d love to have seen what Peter Sallis would have done with the part of Captain Striker, returning to the series fifteen years after ‘The Ice Warriors’ had he not had commitments riding a tin bath down a Yorskhire hill in ‘Last Of The Summer Wine’ - don’t ask - but Keith Barron is a more than capable replacement and while Leee John (that’s really how he spells it) gets a lot of stick from fans but isn’t that bad. He did the part was a favour: he wasn’t an actor at all but a singer with pop band ‘Imagination’ and a big Whovian, who was on a break from Top Of The Pops when he heard someone from the Dr Who production team drowning their sorrows in the BBC bar about the need to re-cast immediately and said he’d love to be in the series whenever they needed him; he’s a lot better than he’s usually given credit for considering he’d had almost no rehearsal time and no acting experience and besides he’s a pirate’s mate – he’s meant to be over the top. The script gives the characters nautical names for extra sailor-spotter points: ‘Striker’ isn’t, as some fans think, a reference to the union strike that scuppered this story but a steam-boating term for an engineer’s apprentice, ‘Marriner’ is from the word ‘mariner’, ‘Wrack’ was originally ‘Wreck’ as in ‘Shipwreck’ and Captain Davey took his name from ‘Davy Jones’ locker’. While Wrack’s ship was always ‘The Buccaneer’ it was realised very late in the day that Striker’s shipdidin’t have a name and they needed it to build the lifeboat props: Clegg’s on-the-spot solution ‘The Shadow’ is perfect for a crew that’s halfway between the Black and White Guardians (though on first viewing many fans assumed it was a clue to the Black Guardian’s ‘Shadow’ assistant from ‘The Armageddon Factor’). 

 There are lots of lovely moments that stay in the memory long after the story has finished, full of very Dr Who juxtapositions of the ordinary and extraordinary banging up against each other, while there are lots of great twists and turns in the script that’s forever keeping you guessing what will happen right up until the last showdown. If there’s a problem then it is (spoilers) that last showdown (allegedly added by script writer Eric Saward and not by Clegg at all, though to be fair to him some of the scenes between the sailors making everyday conversation, added to pad out a story that was under-running at rehearsals, are his too and they’re some of the best he ever wrote): most fans can see the real prize of ‘enlightenment’ coming a mile off and it’s a bit of a cheat that the Doctor refuses it and gives it to Turlough, who uses it to rid himself of the influence of the Black Guardian, not to mention the unnecessary maguffin of the red crystal Wrack smuggles into Tegan’s tiara that ends up being the ‘focal point’ of the weapon Wrack has trained on Striker and Marriner’s ship (it really is amazing how many special properties crystals have in the Dr Who universe, though at least this one doesn’t come with lots of overgrown spiders attached). Enlightenment, you see, is not the tangible treasure everyone thought they were racing for, it’s knowledge...Yeah great, I’ve won non-prizes like that in raffles too. It doesn’t match a new fangled solar toaster or a holiday on the Moons of Poosh now does it?! In Clegg’s original draft it was made clearer that ‘enlightenment’ or knowledge was a very different thing to ‘wisdom’ being more the experience of what to do with that knowledge, with all those extra years the Eternals spent idly drifting through space failing to help them to see the right thing to do, which is a lot more in keeping with the overall mood of this story (and an idea she took from the Book of Genesis and the tale of how humanity was kicked out of the garden of Eden for apple scrumping from the ‘tree of knowledge’ without knowing what it was they were taking). It’s a bit of a mess when you think about it though: if the Guardians are all powerful they must know that the Doctor can see through this, The White Guardian’s cryptic messages of warning are no help at all and the Black Guardian has no reason to side with Wrack (she’s clearly going to double-cross him the first chance she gets). And why doesn’t The Black Guardian simply kill Turlough anyway out of pettiness? We’ve seen how he can cause physical harm to the boy and rejecting a crystal shouldn’t change that. To be fair I don’t know what else they could have done with Turlough’s story, which was a bit of a non-starter to begin with given that he was never going to kill the Doctor for real so was always going to have to learn to be ‘nice’, but it all feels too easy a way to defeat someone whose supposedly the root of all evil in the universe and whose story we’ve been following for twelve whole episodes (as long as ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’). It’s unfortunate too that we see both guardians on screen in this story for the first time: I rather liked the fan idea that they were really one and the same person in a different mood following their original appearances in ‘The Key To Time’ (because you can’t have good without evil, which would have been much more in keeping with the usual Dr Who ethos). The ending becomes even more stupid when the Doctor ends up in the middle of another similar quest, this time for ‘eternity’, at the end of ‘The Five Doctors’ in two stories’ time without apparently noticing. Asking Peter Davison to smash a pretty substantially built crystal prop first time, against a rug and some rubber flooring standing in for decking, is also asking for trouble. 

Still, that doesn’t get in the way of a story that’s much bigger and more important than just what’s going on in this particular era of Dr Who: it’s a dark and complex mood piece high on atmosphere asking bigger questions about what it really means to be alive and making the most out of the short time we have. The result is a story that feels as if a lot of love and thought has been devoted to it, from the script to how its shown on screen, with the usual high standards of a BBC historical costume drama, even if we aren’t strictly back in time at all but in the future. All the more impressive, really, given how making this story about sailing was the opposite of plain sailing in so many ways. It’s funny how a lot of the best stories in the Dr Who run were hit by strikes (see ‘Shada’ and ’The Greatest Show In The Galaxy’) while others turned out to be the worst (such as last week’s ‘Terminus’): that extra pressure, of everyone having their backs up against the wall to make this (before Peter Davison has to rush off to appear in JNT’s regular Christmas pantomime, which this year was ‘Cinderella’), seems to have inspired the best out of everyone and you can’t see any signs of the rush with which this story was made on screen. There are no flimsy scenes, no hammy acting, no mundane direction – even the scenes added at the last second because it was under-running (the sailors chatting to Turlough) feel as if they belong and are necessary (although I’m still confused by the sailor joke that a pig can’t be a sailor because it can’t look upwards: surely there are bigger reasons, such as its tiny hooves and the fact it can’t keep a hat on. Not to mention the fact it can’t take orders and would probably eat all the ship’s biscuits). Everyone is trying their very hardest to make this work and for once they’re doing it from a rock solid ground with the original script which is a thing of beauty with more opportunities to be still and breathe (despite the constantly ticking clock) and properly get to know these characters and this strange world instead of just rushing off to follow the plot again. Legend has it that JNT, who never quite understood this story, considered scuppering it altogether to make the planned season finale (which became ‘Resurrection Of The Daleks’) despite the fact that all the models had been made and location filming done, before Saward pointed out that they couldn’t afford to leave the ‘Black Guardian’ trilogy hanging. To me there’s no contest: we would have lost precisely nothing is that hodgepodge of recycled ideas had been lost forever, but this one? It’s genius. Thank goodness ‘Enlightenment’ prevailed, in all senses of the word. 

 The Eternals alone are a strong enough concept to deserve a return to the series (what happened to them in the time war between the timelords and Daleks for instance if they cannot be killed in the usual way?): I can also see why the idea of an upper class who cared so little for the lives of the underclass would have made such an impact at the time Margaret Thatcher was prime minister and the same ideas would work just as well now sadly, in a 21st century when we all seem to have been left behind by the rich people in power looking after themselves (I can totally believe our government is made up of Eternals, even more than I can believe they’re all Slitheen or Autons). This is a story with so much cope we barely scrape the surface inside four episodes and of all the writers who only ever given one shot at writing for Dr Who Barbara Clegg is one of the most deserving of a second go, with an ability to write believable characters in unbelievable but magical surroundings and worlds I’d love to see more of. The story goes that a lot of people making this story were disappointed with it: despite being friends Saward was very dismissive of the script (which he thought had nowhere to go past the first cliffhanger), JNT thought it a filler episode between the bigger action tales he wanted to make and even Peter Davison said it’s the script that confused him the most from his three years working on the series (quite the statement given his run also includes the two Mara stories and ‘Castrovalva’!) They’re all wrong: from the first fans ‘got’ that this story is exactly what Dr Who is meant to be for, putting things together from other series that normally wouldn’t go and weaving an emotional, moral tale around them. In any era the imagination seen in ‘Enlightenment’ (and no I don’t just mean Leee John!) would stand out as something special, but in an era when Dr Who was playing things so safe and as consistently ordinary as it had been across 1983 it stands out even more, a story to make eternity bearable, that lives on in your memory eternally long after more ephemeral stories have been forgotten. 

 POSITIVES + The model sailing ships are gorgeous. The revelation at the end of part one that we’re not in an actual Edwardian sailing ship but out in space is arguably the most memorable part of the entire story but would have fallen flat if the model shots hadn’t matched up to the glitz and glamour of the set. Thankfully, they’re superb: it really does feel as if we’re gliding out into space and that the infinite cosmos really is just the other side of the rigging. Or at least they are on the ‘original’ version of this story – they’ve been ‘updated’ for the 2009 ‘special edition’ omnibus released on DVD and overseen by director Fiona Cumming where – despite the higher budget and computer graphics – look far more dated, with that peculiar unreal computer style that was all the rage back then. Most of them were borrowed from the National Maritime Museum and are bigger than you might think, coming up to the height of most modellers’ waists judging by production photographs, apart from the Greek galley which is a specially built prop complete with mechanical oars that went in and out. For all ships the sails billowed thanks to tiny fans that were hidden in the set.

 NEGATIVES - By the end the Doctor knows, as we at home do, that the ship he’s on is an illusion, a figment of the imagination held together by the sheer willpower of the Eternals. The same goes for everything that exists inside the ships. So why does he choose this moment to stick a second whacking great stick of celery in his lapels to replace the first one? And why doesn’t it disappear the minute the Tardis leaves the ship? (For that matter why didn’t the first one, picked up in similar circumstances in ‘Castrovalva’?) While I wouldn’t fancy touching celery on a spaceship full of terminally ill lepers either (so previous story ‘terminus’ is out) if the Doctor’s that desperate to be warned about praxis gasses that might kill him (by making his celery turn purple) wouldn’t it have been easier to ask the Brigadier for some in ‘Mawdryn Undead’? Or during recent stop offs at Heathrow or Amsterdam?! 

BEST QUOTE: Marriner: ‘I am empty. You give me being. I look into your mind and see life, energy, excitement. I want them. I want you. Your thought shall be my thoughts, your feelings, my feelings’. Tegan: ‘Wait a minute. Are you trying to tell me you're in love?’ Marriner: ‘Love! What is love? I want existence’. 

 PREQUELS/SEQUELS: ‘Professor Bernice Summerfield And The Heart’s Desire’ (2005) is, as the title suggests, part of the series of Big Finish spin-offs starring ‘New Adventures’ companion Benny which have by 205 reached as far as series six, a sort of cross between Ace and River Song with just a dash of Rory. In this story Benny is investigating a pulsar that beats in Morse Code when she discovers a shard of ‘Enlightenment’ and meets eternals named ‘Hardy’ and ‘Barron’ (presumably a gag about Keith Barron and Lynda Baron both acting in this story, as well s a pun on their ‘barren’ empty lives!) It all gets a bit complicated, given the revelations about previous stories and places Benny has been to within the series that all turn out to be illusions made by the eternals, but ends up following much the same plot as the TV story, albeit without the Black and White Guardians and with Benny hurling enlightenment out an airlock, something which causes the eternals to end up mortal because of the tie they’d spent in the human world. Or something like that anyway. This story makes the Black Guardian trilogy seem ‘normal’ and easy to follow. Still good though! 

We’ve mentioned it before, but the comic strip ‘Time and Time Again’, made for the 30th anniversary of the show in Doctor Who Magazine and features all sorts of changes made to the Doctor’s storyline. It’s all caused by The Black Guardian seeking revenge for what went wrong in this story and he’s not a happy bunny, unravelling the Doctor’s timelines bit by bit from his 7th incarnation backwards until he never leaves Gallifrey to travel. The White Guardian puts it all right by the end, though the Doctor loses his Tardis instruction manual in his haste to leave, causing no end of problems later on! It’s a sweet indulgent nod made for a fanbase starved of reasons to celebrate in 1993 and feels a lot more like ‘proper’ Dr Who than ‘Dimensions In Time’ does! 

 Previous ‘Terminus’ next ‘The King’s Demons’

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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