5.9: Snakedance

In which the Mara is back, and Martin Clunes makes his contribution to “Before They Were Famous”.

Broadcast: January 1983

Watched: December 2020

Snakedance, Part One

“I’d forgotten how impressive it was.”

Unusual structure, this one. It starts with a guy sat in an apparent trance (he feels like a sort of conscious inversion of Panna from Kinda: short-haired woman who talks a lot, long haired silent man), then doesn’t go back there for ages. Tegan being asleep is odd, too (seriously, what is it with this era and companion’s bedrooms?).

But there’s a real sense of dread pervading the Manusa scenes with louche young Martin Clunes. It slightly feels like they’re assuming you’ve already watched Kinda: they recap bits of it through the Manusan myth and Tegan’s dream (a scene in which she’s utterly rubbish), but they dive straight into “OOOH IS THE MARA BACK” as if we know what the Mara is.

There’s a bit where the Doctor manhandles Nyssa and she gives him a really black look. She gets annoyed with him for being mean to Tegan too. Because of his youth, I think we sometimes forget that, despite what Timecrash says, Davison is one of the grumpiest Doctors of the lot.

Love the Mara-based fairground attraction and the guy selling toy snakes. Also the fact that the thing that allows the Mara to take Tegan over is a fake fortune teller trying to be nice and taking her weird dictation machine thing off.

I also like that Manusa has had two empires: that’s kind of unusual in genre fiction, but not in real history (the Persians etc), it oddly helps it feel like a more developed society than you’d normally get.

The Doctor sounds like a total lunatic when bursts into a room (well, a cave) to warn the authorities about the Mara – so much so that I can only assume it’s deliberate commentary on how he’d actually appear.

The cliffhanger, of the snake skull appearing in the crystal ball, is terrific

Snakedance, Part Two

“One more question – who are the snake dancers?” [Embarrassed pause] Okay, the Doctor looking like a nutjob and being greeted as such is definitely deliberate. The sequence when he gatecrashes a posh dinner to yell about the Mara is hilarious.

Nyssa is extremely slow to connect Tegan’s odd behaviour with the disappearance of the device intended to prevent her from being possessed.

I love the hall of mirrors sequence. And the six faces of delusion headdress, though Andril is very slow not to have spotted that. But it’s a bit weird how Tegan spends a third of the episode struggling against what seemed to happen at the last cliffhanger?

When Tegan and Lon converse when both possessed... surely they’re both the Mara? Is it talking to itself, or are they still in some way themselves? The sequence when he starts speaking with her voice is terrifying

Snakedance, Part Three

“I do not want any more blankets, I want to get out of here.”

Whatever happened to the weird old man sat on his own in the desert? Oh literally as I was typing that we cut to him and he’s Ambril’s predecessor of course. The way we keep cutting back to him without him doing anything for *several episodes* is quite unusual for Who.

The Doctor’s rant about how the lock to his cell is too primitive for him to break is basically “It doesn’t do wood??”, 1983 edition.

The “I trust you’re not disappointed” scene does a nice job of reminding us the Mara is meant to be seductive, not just terrifying. I like the idea it was born from the collective unconscious of a society, it’s not some external evil. The Punch and Judy show where the Mara eats Punch and everyone cheers is amazing but strange

Chela’s look of dread during Tanha’s “The young don’t like to wait” speech makes me wonder if he thinks she’s gone Mrs Robinson on him.

The snake sticker on Tegan’s arm is rubbish, but the rubber snake model is an improvement on Kinda.

Disappointing cliffhanger. Someone points a sword, Nyssa – forgetting she’s a psychopath now – screams. Rubbish.

Snakedance, Part Four

“Is it to be a surprise?”

The carnival version of the Mara and demon demanding a coin are great. All the ceremonial scenes are really – the *pride* on Tanha’s face as she watches her son take part in the ceremony; the description of fear, despair and greed as “temptations”, which is strange in exactly the right way.

The ending is weak, though. The Mara isn’t real because the Doctor doesn’t believe in it? Is it a sort of anti-fairy? On balance I think I prefer Kinda, which has a sort of shock-of-new quality to it and some really interesting direction. But Snakedance has a lot of cool ideas in it and isn’t a story, or a type of society, or even a genre we’ve seen a dozen times before, so on balance, woohoo.

Nyssa is almost interesting when she’s pissed off with the Doctor. Weird how they do the “Tegan is leaving” fake out, and then she’s barely conscious in the next two stories. The Doctor’s “I must save Tegan, it was my fault” freakout feels like it should have thematic resonance with the fact he quite recently got Adric killed, but they don’t play that note explicitly.

I wonder whether Martin Clunes benefited from looking like Anthony Andrews and beginning his career in the early 80s.