"Snakedance" features one of the more curious of Doctor Who's adversaries, the Mara, an entity which normally only exists in the minds of its victims but which can also manifest itself in the physical world in the form of a snake-like creature. The action takes place on the planet Manussa which, it would appear, was once dominated by the Mara in its snake form, but the creature was banished from the planet five hundred years earlier. As the Doctor and his companions Nyssa and Tegan arrive on Manussa preparations are underway for a festival in celebration of the anniversary of this event. There is, however, a prophecy that the Mara will return five hundred years after its banishment, and the evil entity is indeed attempting a comeback, starting by taking possession of Tegan's mind.
Peter Davidson's Fifth Doctor continued the tradition of eccentric dress started by his predecessors, especially Tom Baker's Fourth Doctor, wearing a long fawn coat, a cricket sweater and what looks like a stick of celery in his buttonhole. In other respects, however, he represented a break with the past. All four previous Doctors had been elderly or middle-aged men who projected an air of authority, even omniscience. The Fifth Doctor, by contrast, is youthful, seemingly little older than his companions. (Davidson was, indeed, only two years older than Janet Fielding who played Tegan). He is energetic and enthusiastic, but not afraid to admit to his fallibility and weaknesses.
The Doctor's companion Nyssa is supposedly from an alien planet, but Sarah Sutton tends to play her more as a "pretty-girl-on-the-Clapham- omnibus" type, quite different from her more feisty predecessors Leela and Romana. Nyssa, however, tends to show markedly less emotion than most Clapham omnibus girls, although she does scream at one point. Martin Clunes, later to become a familiar figure on British television, makes an early appearance as Lon, a bored, idle member of the Manussan Royal Family, although this is unlikely ever to be counted as one of his greatest roles. There are, however, some decent acting contributions, from Davidson and from John Carson as the archaeologist Ambril. Ambril, who dismisses all talk of the Mara's return as superstitious nonsense, is that stock figure from horror films, the contemptuous sceptic whose scepticism is invariably proved wrong by events. It is a nice touch that when the villains want Ambril to cooperate with them they influence him not by direct bribes or threats but by holding out the prospect of academic kudos; he is shown a hoard of archaeological treasures and promised that he will be allowed to pose as their discoverer.
I liked Davidson's interpretation of the role of the Doctor, but it must be admitted that some of the serials in which he appeared were not the greatest in the history of the series, "Snakedance" being a case in point. It has two main drawbacks. The first is one identified by another reviewer, namely the inability to create a convincing alien culture. Manussan culture would appear from what we see here to be a hodge-podge of various terrestrial cultures- Indian, Chinese, Middle Eastern, Russian- with a dash of 1920s Art Deco. It is difficult to accept the authenticity of an alien civilisation whose principal recreations include watching Punch-and-Judy shows. The series' limited budget didn't really help in this respect; one would have expected the anniversary celebrations, a major festival organised by the ruling family of a powerful Empire, to be rather more elaborate and grandiose than the tuppeny-ha'penny effort depicted here.
The second main drawback is that the Mara is really too nebulous an entity to seem threatening. Those who have not previously seen "Kinda", the first serial in which the Mara appeared, may well find the first two episodes difficult to follow. As others have pointed out, there is a subtext of Hindu and Buddhist philosophy lurking below the surface, indicated by some of the language "Mara", for example, is the personification of evil in Buddhism, equivalent to the Christian Satan, and one character has the name "Tanha", literally "thirst" in Pali, but also used to mean a sinful attachment to earthly desires.
Unfortunately, the scriptwriters seem to have allowed their philosophical enthusiasms to get the better of them. The concept of a being which only exists in the minds of others, and yet is not imaginary, is a difficult one to express in dramatic form, and the problem is never really overcome here, especially as the Mara is supposedly the embodiment of negative human emotions and can only be overcome by a meditation-type mental exercise which the Doctor learns from a wise old guru-figure. When the Mara eventually does take on corporeal existence the resulting snake-creature more closely resembles a child's toy than a fearsome monster. Give me some good old-fashioned enemies like the Daleks or the Cybermen who could be fought using more physical methods!
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