An English Gentleman: I liked the conceit of the Doctor
under the Mara’s thrall stirring up the differences between his friends rather
than trying to placate them as usual although the way in which that is so
effortlessly achieved does rather highlight how surface level the relationships
are during this period of the show. I was amused by the idea of the Doctor and
Turlough have a lads night out and of the Mara/Doctor revelling in the fact
that he is not his usual ‘goody goody’ self. However I was quite disappointed
that the Doctor’s possession was so easy and that it wasn’t the psychological
tussle that I imagined it to be. Envision how much more interesting this would
be if the Doctor fought back sooner and wrestled the Mara for supremacy of his
mind. As presented here it is even easier for the Mara to dominate his mind
than it was for it to take over Tegan’s in Kinda and you’re not telling me that
his mental defences are weaker than hers.
Alien Orphan (the Older): ‘Nyssa? Oh yes the tedious
little nun!’ Its far more interesting to have Tegan questioning Nyssa’s
intentions and allegiance to the Doctor as the Mara than it was as herself in
Cobwebs. One comes across as an insidious attack on her morality and goodness
and the other was a spiteful and meaningless attack in a fraught moment.
Unfortunately just under halfway through the story Tegan is back in control of
herself and is nastier than ever to the daughter of Traken. I honestly don’t
know why she puts up with it. I’d love to hear Nyssa (as herself) go at Tegan
in the same way, I bet that would be a really nasty scene.
Mouth on Legs: Tegan, understandably, is very shaken by the
news (and experience) that the Mara is still lingering on inside of her. Especially
since the Doctor told her that her experiences on Manussa were going to be the
last. Considering she was practically mind-raped by this creature when she
states that Nyssa can’t even begin to know what she went through, for once she
is right. One of her fondest memories is flying over the farm with her father.
Her initial characterisation under the thrall of the Mara is very good but
halfway through episode one things go awry with the character suddenly becoming
very accepting of the situation, appreciative of the help she is going to
receive and enjoying a rather sunny disposition. Since this is about as far
from the usual abrasive Tegan that we normally have to suffer it seems to
indicate that the Mara is still in the driving seat and so it comes as
something as a shock to learn that she is in full control of her faculties. I’m
sorry but that simply isn’t the Tegan I know (that was the one from
Cobwebs, even if that was taken to extremes). The Doctor promised her that the
Mara was gone forever in Snakedance which this story proves was either an ill
educated guess or a blatant lie to calm her down, either way the Tegan I
recognise would never simply smile and accept the situation, she would be
furious at being cheated and probably stamp her feet and threaten to leave
again. The poor wretch really can’t win with me…because then she turns on Nyssa
(with a little stirring up of feelings from the Doctor/Mara) and really bitches
at her and somehow I hated her even more than ever. ‘You know Nyssa
I’ve had it up to here with your superior attitude! You didn’t think I’d get
better, did you? Little Miss Perfect, aren’t you? Poor little Tegan suffers
from a weak constitution, isn’t that what you said?’ If I were Nyssa I
would slap Tegan so hard around the face for that speech she’d still be feeling
the burn after a week. How can she blame Nyssa and not the Doctor for
her condition? Bizarrely after this tirade she then asks Nyssa to protect her
from the encroaching snakes. Her characterisation is all over the place, but
then it always was. A case in point, come episode four Tegan is trying to
remind Nyssa of all the positive aspects of her personality when just two
episodes earlier she was lambasting her for them.
Alien Orphan (the Younger): Poor Turlough, he’s been
thoroughly wasted throughout this trilogy. Shunted off to the shadows in
Cobwebs (its not as if anybody could be heard over Tegan’s voice in that
story), left circumnavigating a forest for three episodes in the last story and
now the only person not getting in on the fun of being possessed in Cradle, its
quite a waste of Mark Strickson’s talents. Of the three companion actors I
would say that he is probably the most assured (or maybe he was just given the
most interesting character on screen?) so it seems bizarre to ignore such a
valuable asset. He doesn’t like it on Manussa because it is too nice (sometimes
they can overemphasise how shifty he is supposed to be). Turlough is so thick
that he cannot work that the Doctor has been taken over even when he addresses
a carnival crowd and declares ‘You’ll soon learn – all of you! Just you wait
until tomorrow night!’ Hardly sharpest pencil in the case, is he?
Standout Performance: Cradle of the Snake feels like a good
time to look at the performances of the regular cast considering most of them
(Turlough is the one left in the lurch this time round) get to play evil in
this story. Janet Fielding is rather effective in the early scenes, capturing
that childlike menace that worked so well in Snakedance and really emphasising
the snake like aspects of the Mara. Davison’s take on the Mara is more
conventional villainy but he’s having so much fun breaking free of the Doctor’s
shackles of decency its best to just go with it. Whilst I have problems with
the Doctor’s and the Mara’s characterisation when they are united in his head,
Davison has never been quite this frenzied before and its rather entertaining.
Sarah Sutton’s turn at playing evil is less fun than Davison’s but far more
convincing. She’s only a few steps away from the Nyssa that we know and love
which makes her interpretation the most chilling (and irritatingly the one
which gets the least exposure).
Sparkling Dialogue: As always with a Marc Platt script, you
can expect some gems to pop up…
‘The Mara’s withdrawn into Tegan’s psyche and it wants me to
go in after it…’
‘Surely an Empire suggests order? How can that exist under
the Mara? The Mara is a spirit of mockery, of chaos and evil.’
‘The was a young lady from Traken,
Who picked the wrong doorway to darken,
But due to her blunder,
She’s now lying under,
A place for the TARDIS to park on…’
‘Paradise was never so ripe for the plucking!’
Great Ideas: The Doctor describes the Mara as being inside
all of us, deep in our darkest thoughts.
Audio Landscape: A plane roaring through the skies, the
plane descending, the Doctor flying and landing in muck, sheep baa-ing,
birdsong, hissing snakes, carnival atmosphere, smashing a mirror, bells
tolling, a giant snake roaring and chomping down on its victims.
Musical Cues: Now here’s a turn up…if you had asked me after
listening to the story what I thought of the musical score I would have said it
was one of the least effective I have heard for a while. However listening to
the isolated score on the bonus track I was confronted with some dazzlingly
effective music that was so good I skipped back and listened to it again. My
only conclusion is that either I wasn’t paying enough attention to it during
the story of that the director didn’t spotlight it well enough. Bizarrely I
found the attempts to recapture the Mara sting from Kinda and Snakedance to be
utterly ineffective here. What sounded like a bloodcurdling scream in the TV
series comes across as little more than a synthesised sound effect here.
Isn’t it Odd: Snakedance revolved around the Doctor having
to find something quite special within himself (‘the still point’) to defeat
the Mara, to not try and engage with the creature until he had prepared himself
for the mental battle. It feels churlish to have him mention the still point so
offhandedly at the beginning of this adventure as though it is like his sonic
screwdriver, something he can whip out and deploy whenever it is needed. In the
same way Dojjen was a fantastic character because he never once got involved in
the story (it had to come to him because he wanted no part of the society that
the Doctor was visiting) and yet the Doctor suggests popping in on him now to
get a check up on Tegan as though it was just like visiting the Bi-Al
Foundation. It hastily re-interprets the events of Snakedance as something far
more mundane than they actually were. The talking sheep were a good idea in
theory (it’s a nice audio-only way to suggest the weirdness of a dreamscape)
but in its execution it sounds faintly ridiculous and overly comical. I’m not
sure that was the best approach when the story is trying so hard to be
psychologically hard-hitting. The cliffhanger to the last story and the first
ten minutes of Cradle suggest that this is going to be a tense, psychological
horror but as soon as we hit Manussa the Doctor is talking about parties and
Tegan and Nyssa are having a gay old time soaking in the atmosphere of the
planet. Bizarrely they all seem to have forgotten the very real horror that has
brought them here. The twist that the Doctor has been infected by the Mara
might not come as a great surprise considering the story goes to lengths to
point out the transference fifteen minutes in. By pretending that hasn’t
happened for a further fifteen minutes doesn’t mean we will have forgotten. The
Mara is not so much an insidious horror that grows out of your own fears and
doubts anymore, Cradle promotes the entity as a super villain that attacks a
city culturally and politically, that laughs uncontrollably at its own fiendishness
and that calls its minions ‘insolent wretches!’ It has lost any
(practically all) of its nuances (I never imagined the creature saying anything
as mundane as ‘how’s my list of intellectuals going?’). Toby Sawyer’s
performance as Baalaka is just odd. I can’t decide if he is channelling
a hippy blissed out on crack or an Australian bush farmer that has indulged in
one too many beers. Its an amiable turn (due to the nature of the character)
but its also very, very odd and quite unconvincing (when he starts
groaning uncontrollably he sounds like an old man that hasn’t experienced an
orgasm for a while and has suddenly become reacquainted with the experience).
Apparently evil cannot be defeated until it is name…are we in Rumplestiltskin
territory now? Rather than focusing on the more interesting part of the story
(the Mara gaining dominance over Manussa) the third episode concentrates almost
solely on locking the Doctor in the TARDIS and his friends running round in
circles panicking on how to deal with an evil version of him. The plot grinds
to a halt here as we listen to them panic for half an hour. Combining the
superficial nature of the media with the emergence of the Mara somehow
trivialises it. After pointing out so many things that didn’t work for me in
this story it might feel like kicking a man when he’s down to say that Platt’s
original characters in this story never engage or feel like they are worth
investing any time or energy into. Johana is especially annoying, a mock-Peru
character that stresses everything she says without any of Nicola Bryant’s
charm to make the character bearable. I thought there would have been something
rather more furtive and sagacious to the Mara’s takeover of Manussa than
embodying a giant snake and threatening to gobble people up if they don’t do
want it wants. Surely if Tegan is free of the Mara for the majority of this
story then this should really have been a personal struggle for her to face up
to the creature that has invaded her dreams and a vendetta to defeat it
forever. Instead this potentially interesting use of her character is
completely squandered.
Result: I wasn’t sure what to expect from Cradle of the
Snake. Looking at opinions online (something I rarely do before listening to
something) seems to find this tale caught in a state of marmite flux, some love
it and others loathe it. I’m not so enamoured with the Mara tales on television
as everybody else seems to be (Snakedance is very good but I could pick many
holes in Kinda) and if anybody was going to be brave enough to step into
Christopher Bailey’s shoes then I too would have suggested Marc Platt. One of
the things that made the best parts of Kinda and Snakedance so special was that
they handled their themes and ideas subtly but that seems to be entirely absent
here. The Mara is less of a conceptual horror and more of a tenapenny villain
that can hop from one mind to another (dream imagery aside, its no different
from Cassandra in New Earth) and the melodramatic performances from the
regulars merely support the idea that this is a bog standard nasty that revels
in carnage but has little depth beyond that. Big Finish have been known to
innovate elements from the TV series (the Daleks, Davros, the Master) and
they’ve occasionally taken something that did work and fudge it (the Metebelies
Spiders, the Krynoid, the Kraals). Platt seems to have fundamentally
misunderstood what that Mara is all about and as such perhaps this was one
sacred element (that might sound like hyperbole but this villain really is revered)
of the show that should have been left alone. What I really took from this
adventure was that Revenge of the Sith feeling of all the elements
dovetailing together, the story of the Mara’s emergence and Empire building as
spoken of in Snakedance is recounted here and there is something quite
stimulating about having the foreknowledge that things aren’t going to turn out
well for this civilisation. Its unfortunate that the early promise devolves
into what is little more than turbulent shouting in the last episode – it
really does feel that Marc Platt and Barnaby Edwards (two of the most competent
staffers at Big Finish) have bought into the Eastenders school of thought that
histrionics equals drama when it so often has the reverse effect. I wanted to like
this a lot more than I did, there are some elements that are worth highlighting
(particularly the performances of the regulars, especially Davison) but taken
as a whole this fails to live up its potential and squanders an opportunity and
I’m not sure which is more disappointing. Marc Platt is one of the most
involving and intelligent writers to have ever worked on Doctor Who but he
seems to have lost his way with this script, plumping for standard action
adventure rather than engaging with the (potentially interesting) ideas in a
penetrating fashion. I don’t want to say that this trilogy has been entirely
without merit because that would be disingenuous (Cobwebs paints an ugly
picture of the future, The Whispering Forest eventually gets Tegan right
and Snake plays about with some weighty ideas) but each story has been weighed
down by some pretty hefty flaws. I sometimes feel that when a character/actor
returns to the fold the audience gets so wrapped up in the excitement and
freshness of that and that is blinds people from the deficiencies inherent in
their opening stories. The first season of fourth Doctor adventures was given a
reprieve in that regard and this trilogy is another example. Tegan and Turlough
are back and it is refreshing to have the fifth Doctor stories re-animated
because of this but this isn’t the strongest run of tales to greet their
return: 4/10
3 comments:
This is the second Fifth Doctor trilogy in a row that you've been burned by! Are you going to switch gears and review a trilogy with another Doctor?
I didn't really enjoy this story but then again "Snakedance" is the only and one televised Fifth Doctor story that I've never seen so that's probably part of it.
Trouble is I've reviewed everything else in the main range except the next two Davison theologies and a couple of 8th Doctor ones! So I'm going to see these through (I'm nearly through Rat Trap) first before I polish off Mary Shelley. Despite the last two trilogies being such a disappointment I'm still optimistic about The Emerald Tiger. Anything written and directed by Barnaby Edwards has got to be worth a listen!
Yeah, particularly following on the heels of the brilliant Sixth Doctor trilogy with Jamie in the Land of Fiction, this was something of a letdown.
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