Snakedance

 

Chapter The 169th, which features snakes on an astral plane.

Plot:

Tegan is having a recurring nightmare, evidence that the Mara creature is still living in her subconscious mind. The Mara takes brief control and sets the TARDIS destination coordinates to arrive at Manussa, its home world. Celebrations are ongoing as it is the 500th anniversary of the destruction of the Mara by someone who went on to found 'the federation'. This federation doesn't seem to be the Star Trek one, nor the Blake's 7 one, including as it does an inherited power structure, with the current federator being a descendent of that founder. His wife Tanha and son Lon are in town for the closing ceremony of the celebrations. The Doctor and Nyssa lose Tegan who falls more and more under the Mara's control. Investigating, the Doctor finds out that there is a legend of the return of the Mara, being brought back through a dream, which suggests that Tegan will make that legend come true. He tries to persuade people of this, including Ambril, the director of the Mara research institute, but everyone thinks he's a ranting conspiracy freak.

Tegan meets with Lon, and the Mara takes him over too. Lon plays on Ambril's greed to persuade him to include the great crystal in the imminent ceremony, something that's strictly forbidden. The crystal, the great mind's eye, was built by the advanced civilisation that previously inhabited the planet, and which was destroyed and lost during the Mara's reign. It can turn thoughts into energy and matter, and it was this that created the Mara in the first place, when it absorbed all the negative energy of the populace. The Doctor, helped by Nyssa and Ambril's assistant Chela, locate the previous director, Dojjen, who has gone to live in the wilds of the planet with a tribe called the Snake Dancers. The rituals of this tribe involve meditation while under the influence of a snake's poisonous bite, as mental preparation for the Mara's return. Dojjen gives the Doctor the clue to how to defeat the Mara, finding the 'still point' in himself. At the ceremony, Lon puts the crystal back in its socket in a cave, and the Mara starts to become a corporeal reality again. The Doctor and friends arrive as everyone is falling under the Mara's control, but the Doctor resists, and this resistance destroys the Mara.

Context:

As is becoming the current style when viewing classic series multi-part stories, this was watched from the DVD, one episode at a time, spread out over a week or so. This seems to go down better with those accompanying me on the watch (the three children, boys aged 14 and 11, girl aged 8) than doing it all in one go. The Better Half is still not partaking, which is a shame in this instance, as I know she watched and was scared by a moment in this story (the dead snake vomiting pink goo) as a nipper; she watched it with me a long time ago, though, probably when the DVD first came out, and discovered that it was no longer scary to her at all. The children didn't seem scared by anything in the story either, though the youngest thought that some of the early scenes were creepy. The eldest kept asking why one of the main characters was named after a car, until I clarified that it's Nyssa not Nissan.

First time round:

I first watched this story on its debut BBC1 broadcast in January 1983. I'd very much enjoyed the story Kinda the previous year, for which Snakedance was the sequel, so was very excited by another story featuring the Mara. I think, despite the giveaway in the title, that I came to the story unaware that it included said psychogenic python, or mental mamba. I could have been spoilered, though as by this time I was regularly buying and reading Doctor Who Magazine. I remember reading an article on Tegan and Nyssa's new frocks around the time of watching this story, but I don't remember it giving away any details of the plot. On the subject of magazines, as I mentioned in my post about the preceding story of the season Arc of Infinity (the very first story covered by this blog), my family only got the Radio Times at Christmas, so I normally would not have seen the listings for Snakedance. I did, though, see the first episode's write-up while round at a friend's house whose folks took the magazine throughout the whole year. I was intrigued by the odd story title WhoSnakedance, until I realised that the words had just been printed too close together.

Reaction:

The Doctor Who Discontinuity Guide, one of my favourite publications about classic Who, says of Snakedance that it is "Not quite as gorgeous as 'Kinda', since it almost tries to be a normal Doctor Who". I have to take exception to this. Both the Mara stories, writer Christopher Bailey's only contributions to Doctor Who, are great, and both stand out as attempting to transcend the usual format of the show. Of the two, though, I think Snakedance breaks the mould more. Kinda has a few action scenes, some of which involve the moving robot armour box thingy, the TSS, which is very in-keeping with the action-adventure style brought in by Eric Saward as script editor, working with John Nathan-Turner as producer. Bailey, having had trouble making Kinda's scripts work in the editing process, has now learnt the formula, and this helps him subvert it more effectively. He delivers something superficially more acceptable, but which is fundamentally different from the stories around it. Snakedance has barely more than a couple of scuffles with guards, which Bailey implies on Snakedance DVD's Making-of documentary were bits that Saward insisted he add. The remainder of the action of the story takes place entirely within the minds of the key characters.

Why doesn't this produce something static and dull? First, those mental battles are visualised with some striking imagery and special sound. This is sometimes big stuff, like the repeated images of snakes or snake skulls, but the story succeeds in the more subtle stuff too. For example, the intermittent dialogue-free cutaways to the at first unnamed shaman, who we gradually realise is Dojjen, waiting in the barren hills, wild-looking but silent and still. These are jarring, unexplained and deliberately disrupting to the texture as they are filmed rather than on video, though still in a studio. Magic. For any Who that is studio-bound without location filming there is a risk that it will feel stagey, but here that's embraced. Manussa is a bit threadbare, having reduced its rich history down to a tawdry sideshow, so the less realistic and more theatrical feel (of "shoddy little booths" as Lon has it in the script) is fitting. The production has learnt lessons from Kinda, and nothing is as unconvincing as the final snake manifestation in that story; the various depictions are still not perfect, but as good as could be expected of the skills and technology available at the time, with clever use of real snakes towards the end, and the final large rearing snake model convincing well.

The second factor keeping up the energy in Snakedance is the world-beating world-building. The story of Snakedance is essentially the backstory of Kinda, explaining how the Mara came to be. Exposition is so cleverly distributed through the narrative, as the Doctor uncovers the history, and its played with such conviction, that it never feels that way. An example of this is the quiet, but nonetheless devastating moment when Nyssa and the Doctor realise that the blue Manussan crystals are man-made, and what this implies. The Mara was not an invading evil from another world or reality. It's something that the people created themselves, the embodiment of their darkest desires. This scene is played out while the two TARDIS travellers are imprisoned in a cell, another superficially archetypal Doctor Who moment; but, instead of being padding or allowing for exciting escape attempts, it instead is just an opportunity to allow them to think and to talk. Bailey is smuggling in the mystical in these more ordinary clothes. Beyond the moments driving the narrative, he also litters his story with brief moments highlighting the character of this world, making it real: the six faces of delusion, the Surprise, the Punch and Judy show with a snake in place of a crocodile, and many more.

 

The characters all form part of this tapestry of forgotten tradition too. Each one of the local characters we meet - with the exception of the enlightened Dojjen - has lost track of what's important about the history they are nominally celebrating, and all for different reasons. Ambril intellectualises away any possibility that the civilisations before could have been wiser than him, convinced of his superiority; Lon is too indulged and bored to consider anything more important than his own pleasure; Tanha is blinded by her aristocratic life, and a bit too easily led by her spoilt son, to listen to anyone else; Dugdale just wants money, and the fortune teller just wants to please her audience. Even Chela, a character with more curiosity than the rest of them put together, is still too meek to challenge his boss. At the end of the story - a rare one for Doctor Who in which everybody lives - you get the feeling that everyone's going to feel very embarrassed now that they've woken from the Mara's spell. Without the intervention of the Doctor, they would have turned their world to hell not by being evil, but just by being a bit inept. Somehow, that's even more devastating. 

The director Fiona Cumming is a perfect match for a more mystical and lyrical script, and she gets great performances out of everyone. None of these is quite as flashy as the performances of Kinda, but they are just as high quality. Particular praise should go to Martin Clunes as Lon, in one of his earliest roles in a long TV career. He often ended up represented by Snakedance in those "Before They Were Famous"-style clip compilations, for wearing dodgy 80s clobber and eye make-up. It's terribly unfair, as he does everything that could be expected of him and more, nailing the part and having great chemistry with Colette O'Neil as his mother. She in turn is doing a right-royal job of channeling a certain UK family of inherited influence, but it goes beyond an impression and allows for some subtle moments. There is just a flash of wistful regret as she talks about her absent husband that speaks volumes about the life she's had after marrying into this life, and instantly explains her character, and her indulgence of her son. The regular cast shouldn't be forgotten either; Janet Fielding is having a ball playing both a scared Tegan, and the commanding Mara, often switching between the two in a single scene. Peter Davison too gives a great performance; his Doctor is ineffectual here only because of the granite-like stubbornness of everyone's imagination on Manussa; he plays off that with an increasing desperation which powers the narrative to the end.  

  

Connectivity: 

Snakedance and Image of the Fendahl have a very similar structure: an ancient evil, which had previously been thought destroyed but was merely dormant, influences people unconsciously to help recreate itself. It gains power through a glowing object (skull, crystal) takes over and physically alters a woman, then starts to take over more people, who cannot look away. Similarly,the evil's defeated in both instances as at least one person is able to resist, leaving it incomplete. In both stories, age-old legends are thought to be codified warnings or tips for defeating the evil.

Deeper Thoughts:

A big Bailey-Who! The speed that the world wide web and social media allows for the dissemination of false information is rightly a current concern, but the times before the web had their share of rumours, myths and hoaxes too. Doctor Who was particularly beset in those days. In fact, because it has since attracted a vast band of online know-it-alls who've investigated the series in every detail over the years, a hoax would be quickly quashed now; but, when the series was less well researched, and when information travelled at a much slower rate around the globe, certain stories did endure. One such tale was created when Doctor Who's organised fandom and tie-in journalism (both of which being in their relative infancy at the time) lost track of Christopher Bailey. After the two Mara stories, he was commissioned for Doctor Who a couple more times in 1982 and 83, but both stories did not progress to production. After that, Bailey "disappeared" for a couple of decades, until his "elusive" self was tracked down by Benjamin Cook of Doctor Who Magazine, and interviewed for a feature published in 2002. In truth, he hadn't disappeared and wasn't being elusive, he was just getting on with his life, and hadn't factored his couple of Who scripts as being that important in the scheme of things.

The interview was a great piece of work, and Cook was rightly congratulated for it at the time. It revealed not an antipathy for the show from one of its cleverest contributors, but an unaggressive perspective of its relative unimportance, intelligently presented without prejudice. It was refreshing, but possibly made for hard reading amongst a readership that set a great deal more store by the show than Bailey did. The interview had a positive impact, though, on Robert Shearman, Doctor Who fan and writer. Shortly before he was commissioned to write Dalek, the 2005 episode of the relaunched show, he wrote an audio play loosely inspired by Bailey and Cook's interactions. It's well worth a listen. Shearman has gone on record of his admiration of Bailey as a writer, and said that Snakedance is his favourite Doctor Who story. The imaginative breadth of all his work, for Who and elsewhere, is at least partially inspired by Bailey's scripts for Doctor Who, and the play - called Deadline, and starring Derek Jacobi - is a nice celebration of that. It takes place in a counterfactual universe where the TV show Doctor Who did not develop in the same way, and in which there is an official Juliet Bravo Magazine. But even Shearman's big brain could not have scripted the story that arose between Bailey's last contribution and Cook's interview in 2002. According to that rumour, Christopher Bailey didn't exist at all.

The story was that the two Mara stories had been written under a pseudonym by none other than saucy-cerebral rock chanteuse Kate Bush. How such rumours get started is beyond me; the evidence for the prosecution seemed to boil down to the same initials (Catherine Bush = Christopher Bailey) and that Bush's work had included the odd trippy element, as do Kinda and Snakedance. With the greater access one now has to information, as I mentioned earlier, it's easy to look back and see that Bush was recording and then promoting her very first solely self-produced album during the period of 1980 to 1982, when the work on the scripts for both Mara stories was done. It does seem unlikely that she would have squeezed in lots of meetings at the BBC with Eric Saward and the writing of multiple drafts of two screenplays as well. Additionally, Christopher Bailey was interviewed for and featured in a Doctor Who book - The Unfolding Text - around the time of Kinda's production. Did the authors talk with Kate Bush and just forget to mention it? Okay, it might have been a bit more difficult to know these points prior to the internet age, but it easily would have been possible to know one other thing that would surely have made the whole rumour seem implausible: Kate Bush has never before nor since the period in question showed any tendency toward TV screenwriting. Did this not occur to anyone?

It's not the most preposterous rumour in Doctor Who's history (that would the theory that Harold Pinter temporarily put aside his stellar writing career to take on a minor acting role for six weeks in a Patrick Troughton story), but it's up there. I suppose it's apt in one way; Christopher Bailey's scripts heavily feature the importance of myth and legend; it's fitting that they gave rise to a myth, however silly, of their own.

In Summary:

Magnificent, mould-breaking, truly Mara-llous!