By Roy Mathur, on 2023-03-10, at 23:13:40--23:56:13 GMT, for Captain Roy's Rusty Rocket Radio Show, Listen
I am sorry I was away for more than a month. I was sulking in my Vimana. TARDIS? Pah!
I hate letting the side down, but listener interaction plummeted and so correspondingly did my motivation. I also had other finance and health that made me tired and stressed and combined to gum up the works.
My triumphant return to podcasting was supposed to be taped yesterday, but the fates, right bastards that they are, conspired to add to the fun by giving Mum a nasty abscess and make her sciatica play up. I had to take and then collect her, many many hours later, from the hospital's hilariously unironically named Urgent Care Centre.
And the studio... is pure chaos. It was dirty, so I cleaned it, but I need everything; a new computer and mixer, an interface, and I'm back on the Shure SM58 because the SM7B was too sibilant.
Phew.
If you enjoy this podcast, or other podcasts, or YouTube channels, or creative output of any kind, don't take that for granted. Keep us creators motivated by getting in touch, commenting, rating, reviewing, and supporting us.
Fifth Doctor: Peter Davison
Companion(s): Adric: Matthew Waterhouse, Nyssa: Sarah Sutton, Tegan: Janet Fielding
Notable Cast: Todd: Nerys Hughes (see below).
Director: Peter Grimwade
Writer: Christopher Bailey
Producer: John Nathan-Turner
Locations: BBC Television Centre, Shepherd's Bush (1981).
Broadcast: Season 19, serial 3, story 118, following Four to Doomsday covered in 475, 4 x c. 25 minute episodes, and first broadcast 1--9 February 1982.
Media: Target novelisation by Terrance Dicks (1983), BBC Audiobook read by Davison (1997), VHS (1994), DVD Mara Tales: Kinda, Snakedance (2011), Doctor Who DVD Files Issue 93 (2012), and The Collection Season 19 Blu-ray (2018).
Number one in the UK was The Model by Kraftwerk.
Some members of a human expedition go missing on Deva Loka.
The TARDIS lands and Nyssa is left for "48 hours of induced D sleep" using the delta wave augmenter, while the others go off to explore. They find a musical glass mobile in the forest. Tegan is given a garland by some natives, which seem to release a drug and she falls into a stupor. The Doctor and Adric find an empty armoured suit which forces them to human base.
There they find the leader, an uptight martinet called Sanders, an unstable younger man, Hindle, a female scientist, Todd, and two native Kinda hostages. The humans are there to scout for the colonisation potential of the planet. Sanders goes into the jungle to explore, leaving a crazed Hindle in charge. Using a mirror, Hindle inadvertently becomes telepathically linked to the hostages, who become his lackeys and hold the Doctor and Todd prisoner.
In a dream world, Tegan agrees to be possessed by one of the malevolent Mara entities dwelling there. Later, the Mara jumps bodies into Aris, a Kinda, whose brother is one of the hostages. He goes on the warpath.
An uncharacteristically placid Sanders appears back at the base with a mysterious box. Hindle places explosives all around the base.
The Doctor and Tood escape into the jungle, meet and elder female, who tells the Doctor and Todd about the evil Mara. She later dies, but appears reborn in the body of her young protege.
The Doctor and Todd find Tegan, then stop Adric running amuck in the mind-controlled armour.
Back at the base, Todd tricks Hindle into opening the box, restoring his mind. The hostages are freed when the mirror trapping them shatters. The explosives set by Hindle are disarmed.
The Doctor leads the Kinda in erecting a wall of mirrored solar generator panels around Aris. The Mara tattoo departs his arm becoming a giant serpent. In distress from confronting its evil reflection, it vanishes.
The crew decide to declare the planet unsuitable for colonisation, and the Doctor and his companions return to the TARDIS where they find a recuperated Nyssa.
I only dimly recall only the forearm snake tattoos Kinda and Snakedance.
This is another of those stories about colonial exploitation. The chap with the moustache is a prime exhibit A British Empire type; a martinet with his staff, who despises the primitive Kinda.
This Doctor is still annoyingly patronising. He tells Tegan, "There you are, Tegan. There's always something to look at if you open your eyes."
Adric remains fantastically irritating. He is affectionate to a weakened Nyssa, but also very condescending. He also clangs the Kind's forest glass mobile, then activates an armoured carrier. I can't remember a time when Adric wasn't a giant pain in the posterior.
Tegan didn't get to Heathrow last week and now she has bad trip. Janet Fielding, red toothed and snake tattooed, also does a fine job of acting possessed by the Mara. Laying against a tree, surrounded by fallen apples, then possessed by a demonic snake, we are smacked over the head repeatedly with the metaphor of Tegan going bad bad girl as Eve. This only occurred to me while I was searching for a suitable image for this post, so I'm only smart after the fact. What can I say? It's been a tiring day.
It was great to see Nerys Hughs of the 1970s sitcom The Liver Birds as Todd. I remember thinking that exact same thing when I saw this the first time.
The possessed Kinda is called Aris. Stop laughing, Londoners. I briefly read that it might be a variation of Ares, the Greek war god, which makes much more sense.
While held prisoner, the Doctor is charmed by Adric's disappearing coin close up magic, and learns the trick himself later. I'm glad to see Adric can be at least occasionally pleasant.
Insane Hindle keeps shouting, "Silence!" and a possessed Aris does too at some stage. Tegan twice says, "There's nothing we can do but wait." The repetitious dialogue sounds unintentional and a result of a badly edited script.
The Doctor is repeatedly called an idiot by the elder Kinda woman. This would have been funnier in one of his more pompous regenerations.
The creature design of the full size Mara in hideous serpentine form is a mixed bag. The glistening scales and wet mouth parts are effective, but the eyes looked fake and the size was more pantomime than monstrous. John Milius's Conan the Barbarian was released a couple months later, of course, and that had a much better giant snake, but also a much bigger budget than the Beeb.
The idea that evil can be destroyed by confronting itself is nonsense, but a nice thought if you're an optimist.
I'm not sure whether the young woman who replaces the dead elder is speaking in metaphor when she says she is the same person, or means that literally.
Final thought: although this is straight sci-fi, the exotic locale, the dream world, hallucinatory graphics, snake tattoos, and the giant serpent give the story a very mystical style. It reminded me of the brilliant Blake's 7 episode, Sarcophagus by Tanith Lee.
There appears to be a dead spider or fly at the bottom of the last page of the Programme as Broadcast documents (PasBs) for this story. Don't believe me? See the scan.
I thought there was something familiar about the name Deva Loka. After recording this episode I looked it up and sure enough, Devaloka is our home of the gods.
A podcast thrives of interaction. Any interaction, even death threats, help. Get in contact, support the show with a small tip or, costing nothing but your time, a nice rating and review.
Am I getting the message across? Do you remember when I was a lot more relaxed, even lackadaisical about these calls to action? That time has long gone.