Day 298 — October 25th 2021
Snakedance Parts One and Two
Snakedance — Part One
I always think of Snakedance as the slightly less impressive younger sibling of Kinda — very much in the same vein but not as good. In recent years though general opinion seems to have sifted a bit in Snakedance’s favour, with people deciding that it’s the better of the two Mara tales. Watching today I can certainly find a lot more to love than I was expecting.
The key thing is that you can tell Christopher Bailey is back on writing duties. The world of Manussa is every bit as rich as the culture he gave the Kinda, and as with that story you get a sense that the world extends off past the edges of the TV screen. It’s perhaps more obvious in this one because we get to see different sides of the planet. There’s the lofty palace in which we first meet Lon, but also the Middle Eastern inspired market streets outside in the city.
As we saw last season, Bailey’s major strength is in the way he writes characters, and therefore the streets are populated with real people. The man running the hall of mirrors, the fortune teller, even small parts like the man selling little toy snakes feel as though they’re people with actual lives of their own, imbued with far more depth than you might otherwise expect these characters to have.
All of these characters are used to help with the other strong thing in this episode — the way it builds tension and then plays with our expectations by dashing them and deliberately undercutting the moment with a well-timed joke. It feels like the cliffhanger to Kinda Part Two expanded out to a whole world. There, the tension of the box being opened is dissipated by the reveal of a Jack-in-the-Box. Here we get lots of scenes in which characters set the mood by telling stories of the Mara and the prophesised return and then bring you right back down to Earth.
Stallholder: ‘How about you, sir? Madame, step this way, if you’d be so kind. I invite you to take the most exciting journey of all. The voyage inside. The journey to meet yourself. I address you in the silence of your own hearts. I offer my personal challenge. Dare you bare witness to what the Mara shows? Will you gaze upon the unspeakable? Dare you come face to face with the finally unfaceable? Children half price.’
I think my favourite example of this technique might be the fortune teller. Hilary Sesta puts in a brilliant performance both when she’s doing her spiel to tempt Tegan into her tent and when she’s being honest about making the whole act up. And between her costume and performance she reminds me of Una O’Connor from The Bride of Frankenstein, which is always welcome.
Even the more ‘senior’ characters are used to further the technique of setting the mood and then throwing in a joke, and I’m especially fond of Tanha, and the way she tells her story of the Mara’s return;
Tanha: ‘He thought the only people who knew the truth about the Mara
were the Snake Dancers. Once he even took us to visit them. It was miles
from anywhere, way up in the hills. It was all wildly unofficial. We had to
go in disguise. Can you imagine your father in disguise? Even then.’
Lon: ‘And did they?’
Tanha: ‘What?’
Lon: ‘Know the truth about the Mara.’
Tanha: ‘It was so dark and they were so dirty, it was difficult to tell.’
It helps that these characters have all been dropped into a richly realised world. The street market always looks like it’s in a studio, of course, but it’s got a scale and texture to it which isn’t always the case with sets for Doctor Who. I think if you were to shoot this on film you’d get away with the set even today — it’s been very well put together, and I get a real sense of this world from looking at it. Fiona Cumming, making her directorial debut on the programme with this story, makes the most of the set by playing with the way it’s used. I love the TARDIS materialising hidden away behind a rug stall rather than just out in the open, for example.
It’s a strong start which I hope will bode well for the rest of the story. 7/10.
Snakedance — Part Two
Martin Clunes has been pretty negative towards his appearance in Doctor Who over the years — often as a result of having to wear a silly costume in the final episode, which I think has caused him some embarrassment since his career took off. It’s a real shame because actually he’s brilliant in this episode, and considering it’s one of his earliest roles in anything I think that’s quite the achievement. And it could be worse, he could have been in either of the previous stories! At least here he’s been given some proper material to work with, and the part of Lon feels just as fleshed out as any of the other characters in a Christopher Bailey script.
What I love especially is the way his performance changes depending on what’s required of him. Until about half way through this episode he’s been aloof and dismissive; bored by his position and the world he’s trapped in. He has no time for other people, and even less for the history he’s being forced to learn. That continues right up to and including the moment the Stallholder fetches him and takes him off to the house of mirrors, where he comes into contact with Tegan.
Clunes’ performance changes massively. Suddenly he’s lost the front we’ve seen everywhere else and he’s reduced to being a bit shy in the presence of a woman who’s not his mother. He plays it as though he doesn’t really know how to talk to girls and it a bit shy. It’s the kind of performance you don’t get to see a lot of in this show, and it probably looks all the more impressive because it’s following two of the worst performances ever in the last story. This is how you do it!
Clunes isn’t the only one on top form here — this is Janet Fielding’s best performance in the series so far, and she’s being given the material needed to really show off how good she is. She manages to make the battle between her human mind and the Mara feel totally believable, and when she speaks with the voice of the snake it’s genuinely unsettling. One of the issues I’ve had with the Davison era so far is that the regulars feel, for the first time, not quite up to the job. This episode proves that it’s not the acting which is the issue; it’s the material they’ve been given. Cutting down to two companions gives both Tegan and Nyssa room to shine for a change.
It’s also telling that it’s unsettling to see Tegan having a laugh and a joke in the marketplace. I know she’s under the control of the Mara at that point and is playing it suitably creepy, but it stands out because I’m not used to seeing the character have so much fun — I wish the series had this atmosphere a bit more often these days.
8/10
