(586) Snakedance - Part 3

I know that I haven’t been too keen on this story but there is a small part of me that hopes this will change. Before I started to watch todays episode I watched two episode of Doctor Who and the Silurians on the Horror Channel and I was reminded just how close to perfect the show was and I remember how I loved this debut season of Jon Pertwee and then though of just how much I have disliked Snakedance. I had completely forgotten about the previous episode’s cliffhanger (which shows how poor the episode worked for me) so I was reminded and thought that it was ok.

The episode starts off in such a way that I thought that this would be where the episode picks up a lot and to be fair this is by far the most interesting episode of the serial. It’s the one where the plot actually seems to be working towards something and certain scenes are superbly performed. Janet Fielding is again the best thing in the entire episode. She totally steals the episode despite popping up at the beginning of the episode and disappearing for a large chunk of it. When she does return then it comes with one of the best scenes in the entire story. It features Tegan, Lan and Dugdale and the drama that is created during this short few mintues is highly enjoyable. It is intercut with scenes between Nyssa and the Doctor. These two work very well together and after a short amount of time I was convinced that this story had picked up.

I had struggled to understand just what the Mara wanted in this story. It seemed that the Mara had just be bought back for the sake of it whereas in this episode its main perfectly clear that the Mara is after a crystal. Why its taken until now for me to be able to pick up on this shows the flaws with this story.

Ok so this story is starting to work on me but I still don’t think that its as good as Kinda and it’s a shame that Christopher Bailey didn’t write another story for Big Finish because I think that he would have done well with whatever he came up with. Fiona Cumming has done well with what is in effect a very pedestrian story. The cliffhanger is an issue for me because whilst it’s the best one of the serial it does feature Nyssa crying which makes two stories running and with that and the new costume means that the decontrsuction of the character is pretty much done. With just one more episode of this story remaining, I find myself not dreading the final episode as much as I did when I finished watching the previous episode.